Music in (en)action. Sense-making and neurophenomenology of musical experience

The aim of this work is to lay the basis of a post-Cartesian cognitive science of music. Traditional psychology of music often adopts a theoretical framework in line with the dualistic stance characterising the Cartesian approach, which implies a separation between mind and matter or, in its materialistic version, a separation between brain and body. I criticize such a paradigm on the basis of theoretical and empirical evidence, showing that alternative models of human musicality offer more plausible explanations without any dichotomy between objective/subjective and internal/external. The thesis that I will defend throughout this work holds that musical cognition is not something that occurs in our head. Rather, it is a process that extends beyond the boundaries of skull and skin, being constituted by the dynamic interplay between embodied agents and the environment in which they are embedded. I will defend such a claim through an interdisciplinary approach that lies at the intersection of different fields of research (cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind, phenomenology) and by providing an original interpretation of the enactive paradigm that emerged during the last decade of the Twentieth Century in the realm of cognitive science.