Profile

My name is Henrique Mendes Gonçalves. I obtained my PhD in Philosophy from the Central European University, Austria, and my BA and MA in the same discipline from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. I also have a master’s degree in Cognitive Science from the University of Málaga, Spain, as well as a BA in Social Communication from Faculdade Cásper Líbero, Brazil. My research has two main axes:

(1) 4E cognition and the theoretical and historical foundations of cognitive science. In my doctoral dissertation, “Enactivism and the cognitivist triad: Functional roles, representation, and computation,” I examine points of tension and potential compatibility between enactivism and three core commitments often associated with classical cognitive science: functionalism, representationalism, and the computational theory of mind. This work has also led me to a historical question I take to be underexplored: the shared cybernetic roots of both computationalism and enactivism in mid-20th-century research on mind and control.

(2) Prototype-driven fallacious inferences in philosophy. I study a specific cognitive mechanism that, I argue, has broad implications for philosophical argumentation: the tendency to project features from a category’s prototype (e.g., concrete physical objects in the category OBJECT) onto more peripheral cases (e.g., mental, mathematical, or social “objects”). Predicates such as “has parts,” “has a location,” or “is temporally extended” are often literal for prototypical cases, but become metaphorical when applied to peripheral cases (e.g., “the location of an idea,” “the parts of a number”). A recurring source of philosophical confusion, I suggest, is the failure to keep these literal and figurative uses distinct—especially when ambitious notions of truth are at stake.

Beyond these themes, I am also interested in the history of philosophy more broadly conceived, especially Enlightenment authors and 20th-century traditions (early analytic philosophy and phenomenology).