Profile

My name is Henrique Mendes Gonçalves. I obtained my PhD in Philosophy from Central European University, Austria, and my BA and MA in the same discipline from the University of São Paulo, 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).