It isn't clear to me exactly what sort of academic "topic" interests you the most. So, I'll consider several options. First, consider whether some academic disciplines are moredifficult than others. Given the sheer diversity of academic workwithin each of the various disciplines, I don't think there is anyprospect of ordering those disciplines by difficulty: each fieldaddresses a multitude of problems in a multitude of ways all the whileresponding to past work in more or less sophisticated ways and alsodeveloping methodological innovations, incorporating new content, etc.So, I think that professionals working within every field haveopportunities to perform extremely challenging academic work. Second, consider whether some academic courses are inherently more difficult than others. Itcertainly is the case that undergraduate students frequently considersome classes to be more difficult than others. In part, this may bereasonable: for example, many students find research methodology andstatistics...

It is true that many types of things are repond in systematically recognizable and conistent ways to changes in their environment: including people, other animals, other types of organisms like plants, other living things like cells, and indeed non-living things like thermometers. Philosophers have paid some attention to ways that things like these are sensitive to their environment. To consider the final example, on one epistemological line it is right to say that thermometers represent the temperature because they are sensitive in this manner to changes in temperature. I don't think this position is tantamount to saying that thermometers think, but I'll leave it to partisans of that perspective to say more. One idea that rings true to me comes from the great 20th Century American philosoher Wilfrid Sellars, who drew a distinction between being "senstitive" to one's environment and being "aware" of it. In particular, it seems right to me to conclude that sensitivity plants and cells and...

As my colleagues suggest, professional philosophers will have avaried responses to the various ideas and strands of argumentation thatarise in discussions of embidied minds, embodied cognition, embodiedepistemology, etc that arise in other disciplines. Despite theirdiffering assessments of those things, I suspect that most philosopherswould look askance at the the fairly common move to try to drawsubstantive philosophical conclusions from new scientific evidence ornovek literary critical argumentation or the like: most professionalphilosophers, I suspect, will conclude that those arguments are hastybecause their proponents don't have a sophisticated enoughunderstanding of the complicated underlying philosophical issues. So,this points to one reason why some philosophers are not at allsympathetic to discussions of embodied mind: they believe that thesediscussions are unlikely to bear any philosophical fruit because theyrest on an unsophisticated philosophical understanding. Thisreaction also...

An interesting question, and one that is important to those substnace dualists (i.e., those who believe there exist both material and immaterial substances) want to explain how immaterial souls can act on material bodies and how material bodies can act on immaterial souls. Here's one answer from the history of early modern philosophy: The eighteenth century German philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that impenetrability is the crucial concept for understanding spatial location: a substance is located in that region of space that it "fills" or "occupies" by exerting a repulsive force against other substances in space; a substance is located in that volume of space from which it repulses other substances (i.e., which other substances cannot penetrate). The early Kant was a substance dualist who believed that there were spiritual substances that possessed a repulsive force and occupied space in just this way. (A major difficulty with this answer is that it is difficult to understand why...