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Ecological psychology (EP) and the enactive approach (EA) may benefit from a more focused view of lived temporality and the underlying temporal multiscalar nature of human living. We propose multiscalar temporality (MT) as a framework that complements EP and EA, and moves beyond their current conceptualisation of timescales and inter-scale relationships in organism-environment dynamical systems. MT brings into focus the wide ranging and meshwork-like interdependencies at play in human living and the questions concerning how agents are intimately entangled in such meshworks, utilising them as resources for skilful living. We develop a conceptual toolkit that highlights temporality: Firstly, we address lived temporality. We use a case study from psychotherapy to show how a person’s skilful engagement with the world is best described as adaptive harnessing of interdependencies of constraints residing across a wide range of timescales. We call this skill time-ranging. Secondly, the case study provides a proof of concept of the integration of an idiographic approach to human conversing and a more general theory of emergent organisation rooted in theoretical biology. We introduce the existing concept of constraint closure from theoretical biology and scale it up to human interactivity. The detailed conceptualisation of constraint interdependencies constitutes the backbone of the proposal. Thirdly, we present a heuristic mapping of what we call organising frames. The mapping guides the conceptualisation of the emergence of inter-scale relationships and serves as an epistemic tool that brings together nomothetic and idiographic approaches. Finally, we combine new ideas with re-interpretations of existing EP and EA concepts and elaborate on the need of a fresh new look at the implicit and sometimes missing conceptualisations of temporality in the EP and EA literature.

This article proposes the convergence between enactivism, an anthropological view of social life, and a philosophy of ethic of care. The main conceptual proposal is the extension of the notion of concern, present in the enactive philosophy, into the domain of social participation. The proposal introduces the notion that care in social life corresponds to a richer version of the basic living concern of the organism. In the enactive philosophy of the organism, concern appears as a link between the dynamical precariousness of the living system and the emerging properties of lived experience. Social participation, informed by an anthropology of social practice, is characterised as a multi-scale process of construction and maintenance of group and multi-individual identities. This article presents a caring practice perspective in order to capture the richness of life's concern in social life. In this way, it stretches the life and mind continuity towards social dynamics. The construction and maintenance of group and individual identities in social life is a process that requires a form of concern that is best defined as care. The proposal characterises caring practices as both explicitly ethical and implicitly ecologically emerging. Finally, this article points towards an envisioned enactive anthropology of caring that unpacks the dynamics and phenomenology of social life.

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