ABSTRACT

“You can’t do much carpentry with your bare hands and you can’t do much thinking with your bare brain.” Dennett’s (2000, 17) insightful adage reminds us that just as we do well to use a hammer, a saw and clamps when building a log cabin, we are well advised not to bank on our internal neuronal machinery when dealing with the obstacles we encounter day after day. Rather, we ought to exploit ‘tools for thinking’ whenever possible. The philosophical literature on the so-called ‘situated’ (e.g., Walter 2014) or ‘4E’ approaches to cognition (e.g., Newen et al. 2018) that has proliferated over the past decade or two has detailed many ways in which the integration of neuronal resources with extracranial ‘tools’—including the morphological and physiological characteristics of our body as well as our embodied interaction with our appropriately structured natural, technological or social environment—can simplify our cognitive life. Recently, the ensuing debate has spilled over into the affective sciences and the philosophy of emotions, with some daring pioneers arguing that the same holds for our affective life. As they see it, ‘tools for feeling’ are just as characteristic of the human condition as tools for carpentry or thinking (Griffiths and Scarantino 2009; Colombetti 2014; Krueger 2014; Slaby 2014; Stephan et al. 2014; Colombetti and Krueger 2015; Colombetti and Roberts 2015; Wilutzky 2015; Carter et al. 2016; Krueger and Szanto 2016).