Juan Diego Bogotá

Department: Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology
Discipline: Sociology and Philosophy
Research Centre/Unit: Egenis

Project Summary

My research revolves around how integrating the enactive approach and the so-called Free Energy Principle (and its related process theories such as active inference and predictive processing) could help us to understand some essential aspects of cognition. Namely, its intrinsic embodied, temporal, and affective aspects. Crucially, I understand cognition as a sense-making dynamic process that involves an organism's perspective over the world. That is the reason why I believe that our understanding of cognition must be phenomenologically grounded.

Overall, my research can be seen within the framework of proposals that try to naturalise phenomenology (i.e., the philosophical discipline founded by Edmund Husserl). However, I suggest that, in order to naturalise phenomenology, we must 'phenomenologise' our understanding of nature itself. This claim means that our conception of nature (from which the idea of 'naturalisation' derives) must be informed by phenomenology, mainly transcendental phenomenology.

In my thesis, I argue that, on the one hand, despite what some theorists argue, the Free Energy Principle does not say much about cognition by itself and, therefore, it must be complemented by a theory of what cognition is. Such a theory should do justice to the phenomenological aspects of cognition, meaning that any theory of cognition should take into account the perspective of cognitive agents. I argue that the enactive approach is the kind of theory of cognition that takes the phenomenology of cognition seriously, and therefore, it is the perfect complement for the Free Energy Principle. On the other hand, by interpreting the Free Energy Principle instrumentally (i.e., as nothing but a modeller's tool), I argue that it is suited for approaching an aspect that is essential to cognition that has been underdeveloped within the enactive literature, namely, its endogenous temporality. Therefore, enactivism should be complemented with the Free Energy Principle. Interestingly, such a temporality is both embodied and intrinsically related to affectivity.

Supervisory Team

Giovanna Colombetti and Sam Wilkinson.

Wider Research Interests

In general, I am interested in the history of Phenomenology ever since its origins in the writings of Husserl and the possibility of applying it to different areas such as Cognitive Science, Anthropology, etc. I am particularly interested in how Phenomenology approaches embodiment, affectivity, and time-consciousness.

Within the Philosophy of Cognitive Science, I am mainly interested in 4E cognition approaches and how they invite us to rethink the concept of the mind apart from traditional metaphysical and epistemological assumptions.

Authored Publications/Reports

Juan Diego Bogotá & Giovanna Colombetti (2022) Can There Be a Unified 5E Theory of Pain?, Constructivist Foundations, 17(2), 150-152

Juan Diego Bogotá (2019) Cognición como comprender. Una aproximación heideggeriana y enactiva al fenómeno cognitivo, Cuerpo, mundo y vida: Heidegger en perspectiva, TeseoPress, 157-171

Juan Diego Bogotá (2021) ¿Debemos preocuparnos por la verdad?, Imágenes de la mente, el lenguaje y el conocimiento, Universidad Nacional de Colombia

Juan Diego Bogotá (2022) Why not Both (but also, Neither)? Markov Blankets and the Idea of Enactive-Extended Cognition, Constructivist Foundations, 17(3), 233-235

Juan Diego Bogotá & Giuseppe Flavio Artese (2022) A Husserlian Approach to Affectivity and Temporality in Affordance Perception, Affordances in Everyday Life, Springer, 181-190

Juan Diego Bogotá (2023) Can the predictive mind represent time? A critical evaluation of predictive processing attempts to address Husserlian time-consciousness, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences

Juan Diego Bogotá & Zakaria Djebbara (2023) Time-consciousness in computational phenomenology: a temporal analysis of active inference, Neuroscience of Consciousness, Volume 2023(1), 1-12

Juan Diego Bogotá (2024) What could come before time? Intertwining affectivity and temporality at the basis of intentionality, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences