On Tracing the Extended Mind

February 8, 2025 timothywstanley@me.com

In sum, Clark provides a cognitive science complement to the deliberative communication between people of differing religious and moral viewpoints. This, in the end, may be his most salient contribution to the study of religion. However, here again, clarity about Clark’s complementarity remains crucial. Language directly enhances our capacity to adjudicate moral and religious disagreements. However, in so doing, Clark presumes inherent openness to deliberation and willingness to exchange viewpoints. Moreover, in defending EM on this point, he suggests that the reasons for supporting this view could not be derived from cognitive science. My contention is that the trace opens EM to wider hermeneutic, political, and ethical justifications, some of which are already evident in Derrida’s various evaluations of religion’s multiple possibilities. Following Immanuel Kant, he understood 'two strata' or layers of religion, one cultic and the other moral (Derrida, [1998] 2002, p. 49, Cf.; Kant, [1792] 1934, Book I, scts 3–4). Derrida recognized that a notion of interiority was at work in both strata and was not interested in a naive return to the Enlightenment era after the horrors of the twentieth century (Derrida [1998] 2002, p. 89). Nonetheless, in their difference, Derrida again noted a potential 'trace' of religion that can only 'begin and begin again: quasi-automatically, mechanically, machine-like, spontaneously' (Derrida [1998] 2002, p. 57). As I have written elsewhere, this trace encompassed religion’s written materiality (Stanley 2022a, pp. 135–38). EM now presents another model to apply Derrida’s trace to the future of situated religious cognition.

Timothy Stanley, “Tracing the Extended Mind,” https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/16/2/189. This is the concluding paragraph to an article just published as part of a special issue on situated religious cognition for Religions. I concluded my last book on Printing Religion after the Enlightenment by noting the connection between Derrida and extended mind theory. The trace appears in both Clark and Derrida when considering the gap between brain and mind. This is a first foray into making that connection more explicit. I finally had a chance to write up what I’d first noticed some three years ago. Forthcoming essays will include more work on these interactions and present a fuller picture of EM’s contribution to philosophy of religion.