Mindful Relations

Abstract Part I (Chapters 2 to 4) is an exploration of the nature of relations with an eye to integrating between philosophy and anthropology and across the fragile sciences—the cognitive, biological, and social sciences—in ways that strengthen the resistance to reductive visions and tendencies. Chapter 2 begins by recognizing the pervasiveness of relations across the fragile sciences and by showing how to move beyond predominant individualistic views. In articulating a post-individualistic account of mindful sociality, we will begin to create a toolkit of views and positions useful for downstream discussions of incest avoidance in Part II and of the study of kinship in Part III of Kin Matters. The resulting mindful sociality toolkit includes the rejection of individualism across the fragile sciences, the embrace of the ideas of extended and distributed cognition, and a softened appeal to innateness that supports a view that the author calls Modest Nativism.