Embodiment Learning: A Critique of Neurophilosophy Approach to Cognition and Learning

The main purpose of this paper is to explain Churchland's radical embodied approach to cognition and learning. This Research is conducted by using concept analysis and critical method. This paper illustrates that how the physicalists account of cognition and learning is problematic. As an alternative, the neurophenomenological approach of Varela and Mathurana is introduced. They reject physicalism on the bases of the enactive learning and introduce a situated embodied learning. Varela and Mathurana argue that the mind is not in the head and so learning should be considered as an embodied (more than brain), embedded (functioning in a related wider context), enactive (involving things organisms do) and extended (into the environment). Therefore organism and environment are intertwined in the circularity.