Steps Toward a Zoology of Mind

Over the past several decades there have been robust attempts at crafting descriptions of mind that overcome the legacy of Cartesianism. W. Teed Rockwell puts the body as a nexus of interlocking systems at the center of his account of cognition, effectively dissolving the tie of mind/brain and the problems that follow such an equation. Though Rockwell's project is promising, his phenomenological/Deweyan approach leads him to reject realism and, consequently, to reject an evolutionary role in cognition. On offer is a naturalistic account of mind that begins with the animal embedded in ecosystemic constitutional relations—a zoological account of mind.