According to proponents of the sensorimotor contingency theory of perception (Hurley & Noë 2003, Noë 2004, O’Regan 2011), active control of camera movement is necessary for the emergence of distal attribution in tactile-visual sensory substitution (TVSS) because it enables the subject to acquire knowledge of the way stimulation in the substituting modality varies as a function of self-initiated, bodily action. This chapter, by contrast, approaches distal attribution as a solution to a causal inference problem faced by the subject’s (...) perceptual systems. Given all of the available endogenous and exogenous evidence available to those systems, what is the most probable source of stimulation in the substituting modality? From this perspective, active control over the camera’s movements matters for rather different reasons. Most importantly, it generates proprioceptive and efference-copy based information about the camera’s body-relative position necessary to make use of the spatial cues present in the stimulation that the subject receives for purposes of egocentric object localization. (shrink)

One of the boldest claims one finds in the enactivist and embodied cognition literature is that perceiving is bodily action. Research on the role of eye movements in vision have been thought to support PBA, whereas research on paralysis has been thought to pose no challenge to PBA. The present paper, however, will argue just the opposite. Eye movement research does not support PBA, whereas paralysis research presents a strong challenge that seems not to have been fully appreciated.

This chapter contains sections titled: References Further reading.

Recent philosophical work on the relation between reasoning and bodily action is dominated by two views. It is orthodox to have it that bodily actions can be at most causally involved in reasoning. Others have it that reasoning can constitutively involve bodily actions, where this is understood as a matter of non‐mental bodily events featuring as constituents of practical reasoning. Reflection on cases of reasoning out‐loud suggests a neglected alternative on which both practical and theoretical (...) reasoning can have bodily actions as constituents, where such bodily actions themselves amount to contentful mental events. Furthermore, the natural lines of resistance to this view trade on type‐token errors, or on a questionable common‐factor assumption. (shrink)

Subjects suffering from extreme peripheral deafferentation can recruit vision to perform a significant range of basic physical actions with limbs they can’t proprioceptively feel. Self-ascriptions of deafferented action – just as deafferented action itself – fundamentally depend, therefore, on visual information of limb position and movement. But what’s the significance of this result for the concept of self patently at work in these self-ascriptions? In this paper, I argue that these cases show that bodily awareness grounding employment (...) of the self-concept in self-ascriptions of action can be fundamentally third-personal and concern a body that is not presented as one’s own, but as an object among others. (shrink)

What is the significance of bodily awareness for bodily action? The orthodox philosophical account from O'Shaughnessy claims that bodily awareness is necessary for bodily action. Whilst O'Shaughnessy's account appears to be consonant with the phenomenology of ordinary agency, it falls afoul to empirical counterexamples. The failure of O'Shaughnessy's account and its cousins might suggest that bodily action does not depend on bodily awareness. On the contrary, I argue that the contrast between (...) the character of afferented and deafferented agency shows that bodily awareness is crucial to explaining the distinctive character of bodily action in neurologically normal agents. In particular, the capacity to feel one's body ‘from the inside’ appears to be a condition on the capacity to act with one's body in a way that is not like remote control. This dependency of capacities is at once empirically adequate and in tune with the phenomenology of ordinary agency. (shrink)

The aim of our paper is to show that there is a sense of body that is enactive in nature and that enables to capture the most primitive sense of self. We will argue that the body is primarily given to us as source or power for action, i.e., as the variety of motor potentialities that define the horizon of the world in which we live, by populating it with things at hand to which we can be directed and (...) with other bodies we can interact with. We will show that this sense of body as bodily self is, on the one hand, antecedent the distinction between sense of agency and sense of ownership, and, on the other, it enables and refines such distinction, providing a conceptual framework for the coherent interpretation of a variety of behavioral and neuropsychological data. We will conclude by positing that the basic experiences we entertain of our selves as bodily selves are from the very beginning driven by our interactions with other bodies as they are underpinned by the mirror mechanism. (shrink)

This book explains, in simple but accurate terms, how orthodox quantum mechanics works. The author, a distinguished theoretical physicist, shows how this theory, realistically interpreted, assigns an important role to our conscious free choices. Stapp claims that mainstream biology and neuroscience, despite nearly a century of quantum physics, still stick essentially to failed classical precepts in which mental intentions have no effect upon our bodily actions. He shows how quantum mechanics provides a rational basis for a better understanding of (...) this connection, even allowing an explanation of certain phenomena currently held to be "paranormal". These ideas have major implications for our understanding of ourselves and our mental processes, and thus also for the meaningfulness of our lives. (shrink)

I offer a new metacognitive account of the feeling of agency over bodily actions. On this model the feeling of agency is the metacognitive monitoring of two cues: i) smoothness of action: done via monitoring the output of the comparison between actual and predicted sensory consequences of action and ii) action outcome: done via monitoring the outcome of action and its success relative to a prior intention. Previous research has shown that the comparator model offers (...) a powerful explanation of the feeling of agency. However, within the literature there is a growing sense of unease with the model; a consensus seems to be building that the model is not up to the task of explaining all of the new discoveries made regarding the feeling of agency since its inception. Most problematically there are paradigms which deeply challenge the comparator model by suggesting that a weak feeling of agency can be elicited even when no motor prediction is formed. The new account offered here inherits the explanatory power of the comparator model whilst avoiding this problem. (shrink)

The view that actions are bodily movements, also known as corporealism, was much discussed in the latter half of the twentieth century, but now commands fewer adherents. The present paper argues th...

Although we usually identify our abilities to reason, to adapt to situations, and to solve problems with the mind, recent research has shown that we should not, in fact, detach these abilities from the body. This work provides an integrative framework for understanding how these abilities are affected by visceral reactions. Schulkin presents provocative neuroscientific research demonstrating that thought is not on one side and bodily sensibility on the other; from a biological point of view, they are integrated. Schulkin (...) further argues that this integration has important implications for judgements about art and music, moral sensibilities, attraction and revulsion, and our perpetual inclination to explain ourselves and our surroundings. (shrink)

We investigated the interface between biomedia and humans by inviting participants to interact with biometric devices that measured and visualized their body data. At first, they struggled with the alienating and disembodying nature of the devices and the constrained, reductionist representation of data. Through their bodily interactions with these devices, however, participants reframed the data and inserted their bodies into the process of data collection. Drawing on the ideas of Bergson, Grosz, Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard, we argue that by working (...) with their subjectivity in a mediated process of becoming, participants ‘filled in the intervals’ of the visual representations of their bodies to interpret them in ways that marked the duration and meaning of their selves. We conclude that even when presented with artificial representations, individuals convert the representation of the data into narratives inspired by their embodied experience, and the ‘virtual’ pasts of their own lives. (shrink)

This paper is a semantic analysis of ‘experienced action’ constructions in Umpithamu, a Paman language from Cape York Peninsula (Australia). The basic argument is that these constructions are related to the better-attested category of experiencer object constructions (e.g. Evans, Non-nominative subjects 1: 69–192, 2004), which in Umpithamu describe involuntary experience of bodily processes. Experienced action constructions extend the feature of ‘involuntary experience’ from processes within the body to actions originating outside the body, and thus provide a semantically (...) marked alternative for standard transitive clauses. The constructions are typologically interesting because they show the need to identify different loci of experiential semantics in a construction, and they help to clarify the status of control for human Undergoers within semantic typologies of reduced transitivity. (shrink)

In this paper, completed only months before his death, the author studies a number of concepts of importance for the analysis of intentional action. Four themes in particular are discussed: the intentionality of action, the practical syllogism, what the author terms the practical causality of practical thinking, and the proximate cause of action. (K. S.).

Arithmetical cognition is the result of enculturation. On a personal level of analysis, enculturation is a process of structured cultural learning that leads to the acquisition of evolutionarily recent, socio-culturally shaped arithmetical practices. On a sub-personal level, enculturation is realized by learning driven plasticity and learning driven bodily adaptability, which leads to the emergence of new neural circuitry and bodily action patterns. While learning driven plasticity in the case of arithmetical practices is not consistent with modularist theories (...) of mental architecture, it can be enriched by the theory of neural reuse. According to neural reuse, cerebral regions are reused to contribute to multiple neural circuits in functionally constrained ways throughout ontogeny. By hypothesis, learning driven plasticity is complemented by learning driven bodily adaptability, which suggests that there is an interesting functional relationship between finger gnosis, finger counting, and arithmetical practices. The emerging perspective on enculturated arithmetical cognition will be complemented by considerations on associated developmental and acquired disorders, namely developmental dyscalculia and acquired acalculia. The upshot is that we need to take the cerebral, extra-cerebral bodily, and socio-cultural dimensions of enculturation into account in order to arrive at a better understanding of the phylogenetic and ontogenetic conditions of arithmetical cognition. (shrink)

There has been a resurgence of interest lately within philosophy of mind and action in the category of mental action. Against this background, the present paper aims to question the very possibility, or at least the theoretical significance, of teasing apart mental and bodily acts. After raising some doubts over the viability of various possible ways of drawing the mental act/bodily act distinction, the paper draws some lessons from debates over embodied cognition, which arguably further undermine (...) the credibility of the distinction. The insignificance of the distinction is demonstrated in part by showing how the focus on ‘inner’ acts hampers fruitful discussion of Galen Strawson’s skepticism of mental agency. Finally, the possibility is discussed that a distinction between covert and overt action should supplant the one between mental and bodily action. (shrink)

Just as bodily actions are things you do with your body, mental actions are things you do with your mind. Both are different from things that merely happen to you. Where does the idea of mental action come from? What are mental actions? And why do they matter in philosophy? These are the three main questions answered in this paper. Section 1 introduces mental action through a brief history of the topic in philosophy. Section 2 explains what (...) it is to be a mental action in terms of intentional action. Section 3 argues that the fact that we can perform mental actions has some striking consequences concerning mental content. Section 4 shows how mental action helps to explain some important facts about self-knowledge and the normativity of thought. The conclusion mentions two further fruitful avenues for philosophical research on mental action. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introductory The Epistemic Advantage The Ontological Advantage The Phenomenological Advantage References.

The article investigates the rhetorical means of mediating affective experience in occasioned storytelling. The completion of this article has been supported by The Emil Aaltonen Foundation and The Academy of Finland project (285144) The Literary in Life and The Academy of Finland project (326645) European Solidarities in Turmoil. We are interested in the forms and aspects of bodily action in signifying and communicating a “para-factual experience” that was triggered by a real-life incident, but in fact only took place (...) in a person’s imagination. We explore the case of a TV interview in which an American living in Finland narrates a personal, disturbing experience related to the news about 9/11. The story presents a visual scenario of the teller’s affective reaction towards two Muslim women in a grocery store. What is interesting in the story are its involuntary dimensions: the scenario portrays a picture of the teller that he finds unrecognizable and detached from his sense of self as a person. Even if the act was never actually realized, to the teller it felt real and compelling, as is manifest in the way he translates the scenario into a bodily performance. The teller not only uses his body to tell the story but momentarily turns the surrounding setting into a scene in the storyworld in which he plays the unidentified me. We call this physical performance of the imagined scene the embodied ekphrasis of experience. In Semiotica, the rhetorical device of ekphrasis has appeared before (see Frosh 2003; Hopkins 2015; Nesselroth 2016; Sarapik 2009) from such literary and linguistic perspectives, as well as through the lens of media research and cultural studies, to which our application will add from the viewpoint of ethnomethodology and the social sciences. Deploying research on multimodal interaction and intermediality, our empirical analysis explicates how the teller’s body, and not just words, build action, convey affective meaning, and resemiotize and mobilize a physical enactment of the past hypothetical scene. (shrink)

In this paper we attempt to advance the enactive discourse on perception by highlighting the role of bodily affects as prenoetic constraints on perceptual experience. Enactivists argue for an essential connection between perception and action, where action primarily means skillful bodily intervention in one’s surroundings. Analyses of sensory-motor contingencies (as in Noë 2004) are important contributions to the enactive account. Yet this is an incomplete story since sensory-motor contingencies are of no avail to the perceiving agent (...) without motivational pull in one direction or another or a sense of the pertinent affective contingencies. Before directly addressing the issue of affect in perception, we explain our peculiar, low-level conception of affect as a form of world-involving intentionality that modulates (minimally) bodily behavior without necessarily possessing informational value of any kind. We then address the deficiency concerning affect in enactive accounts of perception by examining some exemplary forms of bodily affect that constrain perception. We show that bodily affect significantly contributes to (either limiting or enabling) our contact with the world in our perceptually operative attentive outlook, in a kind of perceptual interest or investment, and in social perception. (shrink)

Detecting conscious awareness in a patient emerging from a coma state is problematic, because our standard attributions of conscious awareness rely on interpreting bodily movement as intentional action. Where there is an absence of intentional bodily action, as in the vegetative state, can we reliably assume that there is an absence of conscious awareness? Recent neuroimaging work suggests that we can attribute conscious awareness to some patients in a vegetative state by interpreting their brain activity as (...) intentional mental action. I suggest that this change of focus, from the interpretation of motor behaviour as intentional bodily action to the interpretation of neural activity as intentional mental action, raises philosophical issues that affect the interpretation of the neuroimaging data. (shrink)

The paper offers a critical examination of Jennifer Hornsby's view that actions are internal to the body. It focuses on three of Hornsby's central claims: (P) many actions are bodily movements (in a special sense of the word “movement”) (Q) all actions are tryings; and (R) all actions occur inside the body. It is argued, contra Hornsby, that we may accept (P) and (Q) without accepting also the implausible (R). Two arguments are first offered in favour of the thesis (...) (Contrary-R): that no actions occur inside the body. Three of Hornsby's arguments in favour of R are then examined. It is argued that we need to make a distinction between the causes and the causings of bodily movements (in the ordinary sense of the word “movement”) and that actions ought to be identified with the latter rather than the former. This distinction is then used to show how Hornsby's arguments for (R) may be resisted. (shrink)

The complexities of bodily experience are outlined; its spatial phenomenology is specified as the explanatory target. The mereological structure of body representation is discussed; it is claimed that global spatial representations of the body are not necessary, as structural features of the actual body can be exploited in partial internal representation. The spatial structure of bodily experience is discussed; a structural affordance theory is introduced; it is claimed that bodily experience and subpersonal representation have action-orientated content; (...) and that egocentric terms continue to make sense in application to bodily experience. (shrink)

To a first approximation, ‘bodily skill’ refers to the capacity to successfully utilize the body in the world to achieve goals. But the body is complex, and bodily skill manifests in many different ways. Further, work on bodily skill spans the philosophy of mind, action, and cognitive science, as well as the sciences of motor control and perception. This chapter aims to provide an overview of recent themes and key ideas. First, we review work on the (...) nature of skill as such. Second, we discuss ways theorists have discussed the implementation of skill in the human body, and a theoretical difficulty associated with explanations of implementation. Third, we discuss the importance of the idea of a hierarchical representational architecture for understanding skill’s implementation, and various ways this architecture can be made more sophisticated. Fourth, we discuss work that attempts to understand skill execution on-the-fly, and in particular, work that attempts to understand the connection between intentions and motor representations, and the connection between implicit sensorimotor adaptation and explicit planning and executive control. Fifth, we discuss work on the models that assist fine-grained skill execution, as well as the idea that even at rapid, fine-grained motoric levels, one finds intelligent systems and mechanisms supporting skill. Finally, we consider the place of bodily awareness in an account of bodily skill. (shrink)

The classic notion of an egocentric frame of reference cannot be easily applied to bodily space, given the difficulties in providing a centre of such frame as well as axes on which one could compute distances and directions . Yet, Smith tries to rehabilitate the egocentric account of bodily frame by switching from an anatomical definition of egocentricity to a more functional definition . Here I will review some empirical evidence that shows that one cannot ground bodily (...) experiences in action. There is more than one type of bodily spatial representations, and only one of them is linked to actions. How then to account for bodily spatial content? What is encoded in the spatial content and how? I will provide a tentative account based on two types of spatial content, namely, coordinate body space and categorical body space. (shrink)

We argue that the main objections against two central tenets of a Jamesian account of the emotions, i.e. that (1) different types of emotions are associated with specific types of bodily feelings (Specificity), and that (2) emotions are constituted by patterns of bodily feeling (Constitution), do not succeed. In the first part, we argue that several reasons adduced against Specifity, including one inspired by Schachter and Singer’s work, are unconvincing. In the second part, we argue that Constitution, too, (...) can withstand most of the objections raised against it, including the objection that bodily feelings cannot account for the outward-looking and evaluative nature of emotions. In both sections, we argue that the kinds of felt bodily changes posited by a Jamesian account of emotions are best understood in terms of felt states of action-readiness. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with representational explanations of how one experiences and acts with one’s body as an integrated whole. On the standard view, accounts of bodily experience and action must posit a corresponding representational structure: a representation of the body as an integrated whole. The aim of this paper is to show why we should instead favour the minimal view: given the nature of the body, and representation of its parts, accounts of the structure of bodily (...) experience and action need not appeal to a representation of the body as an integrated whole. The argument proceeds by distinguishing two kinds of explanatory roles for representations: standing-in for absent targets and structuring ambiguous sensory information concerning a target. Representations of body-parts are suited to fulfil both kinds of explanatory role, whereas a representation of the body as an integrated whole is only suited to fulfil the latter, as a means of coordinating representations of body-parts. It is then argued that the structure of the body can itself serve as a means of coordinating body-part representations, rendering representation of the body as an integrated whole explanatorily superfluous. (shrink)

The study addresses some aspects of Suprematist theory of perception, allowing to investigate the structure of Suprematist phenomenon in the context of ontology, socio-political and religious-mystical works of K. Malevich. The aim of the paper is to present Malevich’s theory of perception in the framework of enactivism. Namely, the article focuses on the theory of social affordances, which today is widely used in design, game development and other everyday practices. The author refers to Malevich’s theoretical and sociopolitical essays, as well (...) as to the commentary literature. Although Suprematism represents a well-researched tradition in art theory, the author stress the need for a follow-up study of Malevich’s theoretical essays in the contemporary context of philosophy of consciousness. The author also emphasizes the relevance of Suprematist philosophy for today’s way of thinking. For the most authentic presentation of Malevich’s ideas I use the phenomenological and hermeneutical method on a par with elements of the ecological approach in psychology and enactivism in the philosophy of consciousness. Consequently, the theory of affordances an effective and natural unification of all the aspects discussed above. The study shows the affinity of Malevich’s ideas to this theory. The author focused on the thesis of feeling as the goal of the expressive act of art. As one could see, Kazemir Malevich always emphasized the bodily-affective dimension of art, and in this sense he participated in a global cultural-historical shift in our conception of the essence of art. Since then, art has ceased to be elitist, but has instead inherited everyday practices. Thus, Malevich speaks of a new art that suits the man of the new world, the Soviet citizen. In this context, I relate the idea of affordance, which means the creation of a feeling-opportunity for subjective action (agency), to the artistic act whose goal, according to Malevich, is the creation of an emotional body-affective feeling. I defend the theory of social affordances, explaining the mechanism of social interaction, as the most adequate model for explaining Suprematism. As a result, based on the already developed concept of bodily-affective dynamics, I show how visionary and creative Malevich was, and how his ideas contribute to the development of a theory of social, emotional affordances. (shrink)

Since 2008, in Flanders, we organize immersion sessions in a simulated context with the aim of stimulating student nurses and health professionals to learn virtuous caring. In this contribution, we first outline the purpose of this experiential learning: the cultivation of moral character. We come to the core of what we mean by moral character for care. We refer to Joan Tronto and Stan van Hooft to claim that caring is central to all aspects of nursing practice and is the (...) basis of its moral quality. We also stipulate that caring involves the integration of action with emotions, motivations, and knowledge. Second, we briefly explain how the immersion sessions in the care ethics lab take place and, in particular, reflect on what it yields in terms of experiences for the participants who take on the role of simulant patients in this experiential learning process. We focus on the significant role contrast experiences play in these experiences. Especially the negative contrast experiences do not wear off easily; care professionals remember even long after the immersion session and continue to carry them with them as a “corporeal built-in alarm.” Third, we discuss the role of contrast experiences in cultivating moral character for care. In particular, we explore the role of the body in the kind of knowing it cultivates and, by extension, its role in cultivating virtuous caring. By referring to specific philosophical ideas of Gabriël Marcel, Hans Jonas and Emmanuel Levinas, we try to understand how contrast experiences bring about an integration of virtuous action into knowledge, motivation, and emotion. We conclude that we need more space for contrast experiences in cultivating moral character. More attention should be paid to the role of the body in this learning process. (shrink)

Emerging evidence is now challenging the view that patients diagnosed with schizophrenia experience a selective deficit in their sense of agency. Additional disturbances seem to exist in their sense of body ownership. However, the factors underlying this disturbance in body ownership remain elusive. Knowledge of these factors, and increased understanding of how body ownership is related to other abnormalities seen in schizophrenia, could ultimately advance development of new treatments. Research on body ownership in schizophrenia has mainly been investigated with the (...) rubber hand illusion (RHI). Schizophrenia patients show higher susceptibility to the RHI, which may be explained by a stronger reliance on multisensory information over weaker stored body representations. This review shows that a coherent sense of body ownership arises from the integration of both bottom-up sensory processes and higher order, top-down bodily- and perceptual representations. Multisensory integration, temporal binding, anticipation, intention and efferent signals all partly modulate the complex experience of body ownership. Specifically, we propose that patients with schizophrenia have weaker stored body representations, and rely to a greater extent on external stimuli, such as visual information, due to imprecise or highly variable internal predictions on the consequences of action. Moreover, the reduced sense of agency in schizophrenia may additionally contribute to the disturbed sense of body ownership, as evidence from healthy participants suggests that agency and body ownership are interrelated. Vice versa, a reduced sense of body ownership may also contribute to a reduced sense of agency. Future studies should explicitly target the precise relation between the two in schizophrenia. (shrink)

Recent research on proprioception reveals that it relies on a systematically distorted model of bodily dimensions. This generates a puzzle about proprioception in action control: action requires accurate bodily parameters. Proprioception is crucial for ordinary action, but if it relies on a systematically distorted body model, then proprioception should contain systematic errors. But we cannot respond by discarding proprioception from motor control, since we know from the severe problems deafferented agents face in acting that ordinary (...) action requires proprioception. The solution is that the possibility of bodily action is provided for by multimodal body representations for action. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically assess the enactive account of visual perception recently defended by AlvaNoë (2004). I argueinter aliathat the enactive account falsely identifies an object’s apparent shape with its 2D perspectival shape; that it mistakenly assimilates visual shape perception and volumetric object recognition; and that it seriously misrepresents the constitutive role of bodily action in visual awareness. I argue further that noticing an object’s perspectival shape involves a hybrid experience combining both perceptual and imaginative elements—an act (...) of what I call ‘make‐perceive’. (shrink)

In bodily awareness body parts are felt to occupy locations relative to the rest of the body. Bodily sensations are felt to be, in Brian O’Shaughnessy’s terms ‘in-a-certain-body-part-at-a-position-in-body-relative-physical-space’. In this paper I put forward a dispositional account of the structure of the spatial content of bodily awareness, which takes inspiration from Gareth Evans’s account of egocentric spatial content in The Varieties of Reference. On the Dispositional View, bodily awareness experiences have spatial content in virtue of a (...) set of connections having been established between somatosensory and proprioceptive inputs on the one hand, and motor outputs on the other hand. This kind of account, according to which spatial content depends constitutively on bodily action, has been challenged by a set of neurological cases and behavioural studies on healthy subjects. The evidence has been used to motivate a functional distinction between two kinds of body representation: representations for perception and representations for action. I review and assess some of the main sources of evidence for this distinction, arguing that the evidence presents a challenge to the dispositional view only if we accept the unjustified assumption that differences in task performance can only be explained in terms of a difference in representation. I close by proposing, and offering some empirical support for, an alternative explanation of the empirical results. The availability of the alternative explanation means that further work is needed to establish whether or not there is any challenge to the Dispositional View. (shrink)

Our own body seems to be the object that we know the best for we constantly receive a flow of internal information about it. Yet bodily awareness has attracted little attention in the literature, possibly because it seems reducible to William James’s description of a “feeling of the same old body always there” (1890, p. 242). But it is not true that our body always feels so familiar. In particular, puzzling neurological disorders and new bodily illusions raise a (...) wide range of questions about the relationship between the body and the self. Although most of the time we experience our body as our own, it is possible to report feeling parts of our body as alien. It is also possible to experience extraneous objects, such as prosthetic hands, as our own. Hence, what makes us feel this particular body as our own? The fact that we feel sensations there? The fact that we can voluntarily move it? Or the fact that it needs protection for self-preservation? To answer these questions, we need a better understanding of the various aspects of bodily self-awareness, including the spatiality of bodily sensations, their multimodality, their role in social cognition, their relation to action, and to self-defence. Mind the Body thus provides a comprehensive treatment of bodily awareness and of the sense of bodily ownership, combining philosophical analysis with recent experimental results from cognitive science. (shrink)

What kind of interventions on the body of an innocent human being may be licitly intended? This question arises in relation to maternal–fetal conflicts such as ectopic pregnancy and obstructed labor, and to other cases such as organ harvesting and separation of conjoined twins. Many assume that harm must be intended for absolute moral prohibitions to apply; however, it is not always the case that foreseen harm is merely a factor to weigh against benefits we intend. On the contrary, foreseen (...) harm (and absence of benefit) for someone we affect can be morally conclusive when linked to an immedi­ate intention to affect the person’s body or invade the space it fills. (shrink)

Surgeries inevitably raise questions of bodily integrity: how the post-surgical body reframes (or does not reframe) its experiences of functionality to incorporate new features. Nevertheless, when we try to define or delimit the concept of bodily integrity, it becomes increasingly important to think about how the physical and social unease caused by some forms of surgeries sits alongside the more transformative potential of surgical bodily modification. This article focuses on aesthetic genital surgeries on infants with disorders of (...) sex development (DSD, previously termed ‘intersex’ conditions). Using the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Elizabeth Freeman on time, bodies and ‘chrononormativity’, this article excavates not only the temporalities that produce what I would term ‘chrono-abnormalities’ of sex development, but also the temporalized medical responses, including surgeries, which retrieve ‘abnormal’ bodies into more normative time-lines. My conclusion is that when DSD-affected individuals experience aesthetic genital surgeries as painful and full of social unease this is not necessarily because the pre-surgical body was the ‘natural’, ‘whole’ or ‘intact’ body prior to surgery. Instead, it is because these surgeries interrupt what Bourdieu would term a sense of corporeal ‘immersion into the forthcoming’; an immersion which, in his theory of time as social action, is intimately linked with social power and possibilities. (shrink)

This paper questions the view that knowledge must be articulable or at least experiential. It asserts that what distinguishes habitual yet intentional action from a mechanistic response is its grounding in a suitable claim to knowledge. However, it denies that a necessary condition for knowing how to perform an action is the ability of the subject to either articulate the particulars of that act, or experience it as appropriate.

The event analysis of action sentences seems to be at odds with plausible (Davidsonian) views about how to count actions. If Booth pulled a certain trigger, and thereby shot Lincoln, there is good reason for identifying Booths' action of pulling the trigger with his action of shooting Lincoln; but given truth conditions of certain sentences involving adjuncts, the event analysis requires that the pulling and the shooting be distinct events. So I propose that event sortals like 'shooting' (...) and 'pulling' are true of complex events that have actions (and various effects of actions) as parts. Combining this view with some facts about so-called causative verbs, I then argue that paradigmatic actions are best viewed as tryings, where tryings are taken to be intentionally characterized events that typically cause peripheral bodily motions. The proposal turns on a certain conception of what it is to be the Agent of an event; and I conclude by elaborating this conception in the context of some recent discussions about the relation of thematic roles to grammatical categories. (shrink)