In recent years, the interest in embodied and enactive theories of cognition has been growing. Both in cognitive science and in the philosophy of mind, the dominant representational paradigm has been challenged by putting forward embodied and enactive explanations for various cognitive capacities such as perception, memory and imagination.

However, while there is some consensus that embodied and enactive non-representational approaches to basic cognitive capacities are a viable option, there is more skepticism about the capacity of embodied and enactive theories to account for more advanced cognitive capacities.

This workshop will focus on embodied and enactive approaches to symbolic activities, in particular language and mathematics. The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers working on linguistic and mathematical cognition in different traditions that are consonant or in explicit contrast with the enactive and embodied approaches to cognition.

This workshop is organised within the collaborative FWO-NWO project ‘Getting real about words and numbers. An enactive approach to language and mathematics’ involving the philosophy departments at the University of Antwerp (E. Myin and K. Zahidi) and the Erasmus University Rotterdam (F.A. Muller and J. van den Herik).