Human Mind in Space and Time: Prolegomena to a Cognitive History

The last decades have seen a noticeable increase in cognitive science studies that have changed the understanding of human thinking. Its relevance for historical research cannot be overlooked any more. Cognitive history could be explained as the study of how humans in history used their cognitive abilities in order to understand the world around them and to orient themselves in it, but also how the world outside their bodies affected their way of thinking. In focus for this introductory chapter is the relationship between history and cognition, the human mind’s interaction with the environment in time and space. The chapter discusses certain cognitive abilities in interaction with the environment, which can be studied in historical sources, namely: embodied mind, situated cognition, perception, distributed cognition, conceptual metaphors, categorization, intersubjectivity, and communication. These cognitive theories can give deeper understanding of how - and not only what - humans thought, and about the interaction between the human mind and the surrounding world. The most ambitious aim of such a cognitive history could be to inform the research on the cognitive evolution of the human mind.