ABSTRACT
This chapter revisits the influential debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell on absorbed coping, focusing particularly on the agential concern at stake in the debate. While Dreyfus correctly captures the phenomenology of skilled, unreflective action, his account risks conflating genuine autonomy with automatic, environmentally driven behavior. This conflation obscures critical distinctions—such as the one between expert engagement and mindless habits like compulsive scrolling—that bear directly on our understanding of agency. Building on insights from enactivism (as a family within the broader tradition of e-cognition), this chapter argues for a refined view of skilled absorption that preserves agency without having to rely on pervasive conceptual articulation Through the example of immersion in digital environments, it will be argued that this framework offers the conceptual resources to disentangle skill from induced automatism, reframing themes within the Dreyfus-McDowell debate in a way that is both phenomenologically grounded and normatively robust.
