Amanda Corris

Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Wake Forest University

My research focuses on the relationship between mind, life, and environment. I am interested in how living beings, as embodied agents, both shape and are shaped by their environments, how certain traits develop over time as a result of this dynamic relationship, and how we should understand the idea of the environment with which living beings are coupled. I am currently working on stress, nature, and attention (or lack thereof).

Recent works

Affective Scaffolding in Nature

Philosophical Psychology, forthcoming

I suggest that natural environments scaffold our affective lives by enabling, enhancing, and promoting a specific bodily affective profile characterized by restorativeness and immersion attentiveness.

Learning in the Open Air

Public Philosophy Journal, 2022

This article investigates how natural environments might support successful learning in virtue of how such environments can restore our attentional capacities.

An enactive-developmental systems framing of cognizing systems

Biology & Philosophy, 2022

Through an enactive-developmental systems framing, this paper identifies the organizational features of cognizing systems in order to motivate a picture of how organism and environment co-determine and co-construct one another.

Defining the environment in organism–environment systems

Frontiers in Psychology, 2020

Defining the environment as an organism’s developmental niche makes it clearer how and why certain contingencies have arisen, in turn, strengthening a joint appeal to both enactivism and ecological psychology as theories asserting complementarity between organisms and their environments.