Malafouris challenges psychology’s habitual division between an internal mental world and an external material world by asking what becomes visible when thinking is approached with things rather than merely about them. Material Engagement Theory rejects the assumption that objects are passive stimuli translated into inner representations; material forms, flows and techniques participate in cognitive becoming. The iconic operation is “thinging”: cognition unfolds through situated engagement in which minds and materials reciprocally constitute the conditions of thought. This does not anthropomorphise objects, nor does it simply extend an already completed mind outward. Instead, material participation changes what cognition is capable of becoming. Methodologically, cognitive archaeology supplies comparative evidence across changing material ecologies, making artefacts and techniques part of the explanatory unit. Malafouris bridges psychology, archaeology and philosophy of mind by replacing representational distance with constitutive interaction. Thought acquires exterior form, and materiality becomes not a carrier added after an idea but one of the processes through which ideas are generated.
