Mental capacities, philosophers of mind and cognition have recently argued, are not exclusively realised in brain, but depend upon the rest of the body and the local environment. In this context, the concept of ‘scaffolding’ has been employed to specify the relationship between embodied organisms and their local environment. The core idea is that at least some cognitive and affective capacities are causally dependent upon environmental resources. However, in-depth examinations of specific examples of scaffolding as test cases for current theorising (...) about scaffolding have remained scarce. The aim of the current paper is to help close this gap. To this end, I will offer a characterisation of key aspects of ‘scaffolding’ that can help specify scaffolding relations. In a second step, I will analyse fictional textual narrative as a test case for accounts of cognitive and affective scaffolding. The key claim of this paper will be that fictional textual narrative can be considered as a scaffold that transforms our capacities in social understanding and empathising in the course of ontogeny. (shrink)

Recently, research on grief has gained momentum in phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Grief, it is often assumed, is a temporally extended emotional experience of the irreversible, bereavement-induced loss of a significant person. On one interpretation, philosophical accounts frequently quote grief memoirs as if they were phenomenological evidence for the tenability of assumptions about the occurrence, structure, and unfolding of grief experiences. In this article, I argue that this observed research strategy is problematic. The reason is that it overlooks the (...) epistemic status and artefactual configuration of grief memoirs. They are not phenomenological evidence of lived experiences, but carefully crafted and curated literary artefacts. As such, they explore and challenge the possibilities and limitations of autobiographical remembering, acts of remembrance, master narratives, and genre expectations. For this reason, grief memoirs are best understood as exemplars of literary griefworld technologies. The positive proposal is that the interdisciplinary investigation of grief memoirs could lead to new insights into the role of literary self-narrative practices for navigating and negotiating processes of grief. (shrink)