Mind Is a Form of Animal Life: The Essential Embodiment Theory Now

In this chapter, I do four things. First, I briefly and compactly re-present and re-motivate what Michelle Maiese and I, in (Hanna R, Maiese M, Embodied minds in action. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009), call the essential embodiment theory of the mind-body relation and mental causation (Sect. 2.2). Second, I equally briefly and compactly present and motivate three later significant elaborations and extensions of the essential embodiment theory: (i) an original and paradigm-shifting theory of free agency that I call natural libertarianism, (ii) a correspondingly original and paradigm-shifting conception of nature and the formal and natural sciences that I call the neo-organicist worldview, and, as directly entailed by the neo-organicist worldview, (iii) the metaphysical doctrine of liberal naturalism (Sect. 2.3). Third, I even more briefly and compactly critically compare-&-contrast the essential embodiment theory with an increasingly popular contemporary theory of the mind-body relation that’s commonly known as Analytic panpsychism (Sect. 2.4). And fourth and finally, I conclude the chapter with something I call a semi-autobiographical quasi-Whiteheadian postscript (Sect. 2.5).