This essay argues that a course in philosophy of the body can be used to introduce students to philosophical investigation. The course includes a theoretical component that draws on classical and contemporary readings in philosophy of the body. It also includes a practical component that allows students to learn how concepts drawn from the literature are embodied in studio practice and in everyday life. Learning basic movement strategies of tai chi and body -mind centering allows (...) students to enact their own phenomenological investigation and encourages them to consider the manner in which the medical sciences and cultural values shape their appreciation and performance of movement. Further, engaging in these practices raises philosophical issues including the relationship between the body and the self, freedom and determinism, and the correspondence and pragmatic conceptions of truth. (shrink)

Of the nature and origin of the mind, by B. de Spinoza.--Spinoza and the theory of organism, by H. Jonas.--Man a machine, and The natural history of the soul, by J. O. de la Mettrie.--On the first ground of the distinction of regions in space, and What is orientation in thinking? by I. Kant.--Soul and body, by J. Dewey.--The philosophical concept of a human body, by D. C. Long.--Are persons bodies? By B. A. O. Williams.--Lived body, environment, (...) and ego, by M. Scheler.--Metaphysical journal, and A metaphysical diary, by G. Marcel.--The body, by J.-P. Sartre.--The spatiality of the lived body and motility, by M. Merleau-Ponty.--Anthropodology: man a-foot, by R. M. Griffith.--Man and his body, by H. Plügge.--The nobility of sight: a study in the phenomenology of the senses, by H. Jonas.--Born to see, bound to behold: reflections on the function of upright posture in the esthetic attitude, by E. W. Straus.--Selected reading (p. [363]-367). (shrink)

Nourishment is a rich and ambitious text that situates human existence in its ecological materiality to broaden our ethical and political responsibilities beyond currently living individuals. With food procurement and nourishment as her focus, Pelluchon asks what do we owe our ancestors, what are our duties to future generations, and how are we to relate to nonhuman beings with whom we share the world.The objective of the book is “to propose a philosophy of existence that integrates what ecology teaches (...) us about ‘living form,’ and to deduce from this a political organization connected to the elaboration of a new social pact”. The book is structured in two parts. The first part outlines “what ecology teaches us... (shrink)

There is no corporal philosophy at the level of other philosophical subdisciplines. A research line has begun whose ultimate goal is to determine whether a somatic philosophy can be built. From a pragmatist and biopolitical approach, the present study investigated why it has not been possible to develop grounded somatic philosophy. As an answer, the “idealist–dualist episteme” is described, which encompasses invariants in the history of idealist philosophy at the ontological, gnoseological, ethical–political, and pedagogical levels. These (...) constants reflect somatophobia, as well as an ontological and gnoseological disregard of the body, which has led to the irrelevance of the body and corporeality in philosophy until the arrival of the “bodily turn”. The critique of this prevailing idealism and dualism will enable a review of current approaches based on these positions, such as embodiment, enactivism, embodied cognition, or embodied artificial intelligence. It opens up a new philosophical line with a universalis scope that is open to the eclectic construction of a pragmatic corporal philosophy that takes into account Chinese, Japanese, or African philosophies. (shrink)

Subtitled "Rejections of Cartesian Dualism" this collection of essays traces through western Philosophy the strong but often overlooked idea that the body and the mind are not two different kinds of entity somehow reconciled in man, but rather a unity that is man. The editor's introduction sets forth Aristotle's ideas, concentrating on the dictum that it is the same man that thinks and runs. Spicker also treats Descartes' view, and the view of the Cartesians, ably separating the two (...) when necessary. The rest of the book is basically arranged chronologically, starting with extracts from Spinoza's Ethics, an essay on these extracts by Hans Jonas, and then moving through Julien de la Mettrie and two short essays by Kant. The second part of the book contains interesting essays on the human body by John Dewey, Douglas Long, and B. A. O. Williams, all defending the essential unity of body and soul. The third and last section of the book is itself divided into two parts, the first of which, entitled "Philosophy of Embodiment" contains four extracts from the works of prominent phenomenologists, Max Scheler, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. These essays all center around the necessity of a concept of the "lived body" to the understanding of man's being-in-the-world. In the last section, the quality of the essays drops, although it is delightfully leavened by a witty essay by Richard Griffith on the foot. This section contains essays on particular parts of the human body, such as sight and the upright posture, by Herbert Plügge, Hans Jonas, and Erwin W. Straus. There is a selected bibliography for those who are captured by this basic thread of western thought.--W. A. de V. (shrink)

The article aims to explore the roots of Deleuzean body beyond the traditional arguments of the philosophy of the body. In this context, firstly, I discuss the attitude of Cartesian dualism toward the body, and its consequences, which form the beginning of early modern philosophy. At the same time, they reflect the old, traditional views on the body. Those visions describe the body as a corpse in itself. With Spinoza and later Nietzsche the (...) body, and soul/mind dualism is replaced with monism and perspectivism. It is from this perspective that the question of “what can a body do?” is posed. Drawing on the philosophies of Spinoza and Nietzsche, Deleuze describes the body as a vast principle of potentiality. Such a body constantly appears as the dimension of the multiplicity that is self-constructing. Therefore, in this article, while discussing how the attitude toward the concept of the body changed from Descartes to Deleuze on the ontological level, I simultaneously try to demonstrate the capabilities of such a new understanding of the body. (shrink)

Ancient Chinese philosophers were inclined to preserve the doctrine of a unified body and mind rather than to engage in a discussion on the separation of the two. In addition, most traditional Chinese philosophers stressing in particular the function of mind. Based on the tradition of believing in the concept of qi, they traced the cause of their spiritual activities to the natural effect of the qi. The modalities display a phenomenological characteristic that looks at mental activities lightly, and (...) examines language and action as a natural revelation of material force, qi. (shrink)

A ideia de beleza - e sua consequente fruição estética - variou conforme as transformações das sociedades humanas, no tempo. Durante a Idade Média, coexistiram diversas concepções de qual era o papel do corpo na hierarquia dos valores estéticos, tanto na Filosofia quanto na Arte. Nossa proposta é apresentar a estética do corpo medieval que alguns filósofos desenvolveram em seus tratados (particularmente Isidoro de Sevilha, Hildegarda de Bingen, João de Salisbury, Bernardo de Claraval e Tomás de Aquino), além de algumas (...) representações corporais nas imagens medievais (iluminuras e esculturas), e assim analisar o tema em três vertentes: a) o corpo como cárcere da alma, b) o corpo como instrumento, e c) o corpo como desregramento. The concept of beauty, and its consequent aesthetic enjoyment, has varied according the transformations of human societies over time. During the Middle Ages there were different conceptions, in both philosophy and art, of what the role of the body is in the hierarchy of aesthetic values. Our purpose is to present the aesthetic of the body that some medieval philosophers developed in their treatises (especially Isidore of Seville, Hildegard of Bingen, John of Salisbury, Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas), as well as some bodily representations of medieval images (illuminations and sculptures). We thus examine the issue in three ways: a) the body as a prison of the soul, b) the body as an instrument, and c) the body as degradation. (shrink)

The aim of this book is to understand what Deleuze and Guattari mean by "art." Stephen Zepke argues that art, in their account, is an ontological term and an ontological practice that results in a new understanding of aesthetics. For Deleuze and Guattari understanding what art "is" means understanding how it works, what it does, how it "becomes," and finally, how it lives. This book illuminates these philosophers' discussion of ontology from the viewpoint of art-and vice versa-in a thorough questioning (...) of aesthetic criteria as they are normally understood. (shrink)

Dialogial inquiry is proposed to second grade students in this project, and dialogue, that examines the philosophy of the human body.

The aim of this paper is threefold. In the first place, I should like to show that Adorno’s philosophy is dependent, to a degree perhaps not always directly recognized in the literature, on a deeply contentious view on the relationship between the mind and the body. In order to show this, I explore and bring out the epistemic and ethical stakes for Adorno’s theory of the relationship between mind and body. Secondly, I move to better articulate precisely (...) what Adorno’s view on the nature of this relationship is. I hold that his position revolves around positing a porous boundary between the domains of the somatic and the cognitive. In closing, I show that Adorno’s account relies on this domain boundary being unidirectionally porous, in that determination of somatic impulses by cognitive content does not seem a live option for Adorno. I go on to note that this smuggles in a dubious position which does a lot of unearned work. The stakes which his implicit account of the body and mind relationship serv.. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION THE SEEMING CONTINGENCY OF THE QUESTION CONCERNING THE BODY AND THE NECESSITY FOR AN ONTOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE BODY When we disclose and..

Purpose. The signification of the theoretical grounds for the conceptual reconstruction of the dichotomy "spirit-body" in the field of postmodern notions in philosophy and culture, the identification of the location of the given dichotomy in the processes of the transition of philosophy from being classical to the postclassical one, simultaneously, culture – to the cultural forms of postmodernity. Theoretical basis. The changing systems of post paradigm relations, radically transforming human life in the postmodern world, represent the obvious (...) transformations of the fundamental conceptual schemes. For postmodern philosophers, the dichotomy "spirit-body" does not mean better interpretation of separate substances any more, but the development of the relationship between mental and physical properties. Feminist philosophers assert that the "spirit-body" opposition occupies the special place among classical dichotomies, as it acquires the key meaning in the patriarchal concepts of masculinity and femininity. In the post modernity, the body and corporality become dominant themes not only in the philosophy and "high" culture, but also in mass culture; at the same time, the emphasis on their common narratives and intertexts testifies to the fundamental transformations that reflect the "condition" of postmodernity. Originality of this research lies in the expose of the specific transformation features of the dichotomy "spirit-body" as a philosophic opposition closely connected with postmodernism and realized in the practices of mass culture. This research is reflectedof the idea of the absoluteness and invariabilityof this duality as thebasicdichotomy of the classical philosophy in its correlation with cultural logic of the postmodernity at the end of the 20 – the beginning of the 21st centuries. Conclusions. With the reinterpretation of the "spirit-body" dichotomy, the body is theorized as a cognitive agent with desires independent of the mind. In postmodernism, the body is the source of charm, and aversion and destruction, and restoration. At the same time, with the growth of the visualization factor and the change in the status of "high" culture, the "turn" in the status of mass culture is created: today both the former and the letter have many common discourses, narratives and intertexts. (shrink)

Book Information Philosophy and the Maternal Body: Reading Silence. By Michelle Boulous Walker. Routledge. London and New York. 1998. Pp. x + 235.

_Philosophy and the Maternal Body_ gives a new voice to the mother and the maternal body which have often been viewed as silent within philosophy. Michelle Boulous Walker clearly shows how some male theorists have appropriated maternity, and suggests new ways of articulating the maternal body and women's experience of pregnancy and motherhood.

DEFINING THE LIMITS OF THE FIELD. Because 'consciousness and the body' is central to so many philosophical endeavors, I cannot provide a comprehensive survey of recent work. So we must begin by limiting the scope of our inquiry. First, we will concentrate on work done in English or translated into English, simply to ensure ease of access to the texts under examination. Second, we will concentrate on work done in the last 15 years or so, since the early 1990s. (...) Third, we will concentrate on those philosophers who treat both consciousness and the body together. Thus we will not treat philosophers who look at body representations in culture, nor philosophers who examine socio-political bodily practices with minimal or no reference to consciousness. Finally, even with the philosophers we choose to treat, we cannot be comprehensive and will instead make representative choices among their works. With that being said, we will have a fairly liberal definition of continental philosophy, operationally defined as that which makes (non-exclusive) reference to the classic phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Thus we will include the radical.. (shrink)

RESUMEN Este artículo propone reinterpretar la noción de cuerpo en la filosofia de Nietzsche contrastada con dos perspectivas relevantes de los estudios nietzscheanos en habla hispana: primero, la idea de que el cuerpo es sinónimo de naturaleza; y segundo, la idea de que el cuerpo es causa del sujeto. Pasando la mirada sobre una parte de la obra -publicada e inédita- de Nietzsche posterior al año 1885, se observa que la noción de cuerpo funge el papel de una metodologia que (...) permite llevar a cabalidad una renovada tarea de su filosofia, a saber, la tarea de conocerse a si mismo. Asi, la noción de cuerpo en Nietzsche, más allá de ser un concepto innovador o reivindicado, es una herramienta interpretante que le permite al autor establecer nuevas dimensiones "entre" el conocer y la experimentación corporal. ABSTRACT This paper proposes a re-interpretation of the idea of Body in Nietzsche's philosophy to distinguish it from two important perspectives of Nietzsche-studies in Spanish: The first one maintains that the Body is comparable with Nature, and the second one, states that the Body is a cause of subjectivity. Analyzing part of Nietzsche's work after 1885 -published and unpublished- shows that the idea of the Body works as a methodology that allows Nietzsche to accomplish a new task of his philosophy, such as the task of self-knowledge. In this way, the Body in Nietzsche's philosophy, besides being an innovative and redeemable concept, is a performative tool that establishes new dimensions "in-between" human knowing and bodily experimentation. (shrink)

Veils -- Boxes -- Tables -- Visit -- Joy.

Philosophers sometimes hope that our discipline will be transformative for students, perhaps especially when we teach so-called philosophy of the body. To that end, this article describes an experimental upper-level undergraduate course cross-listed between Philosophy and Physical Education, entitled “Thinking Through the Body: Philosophy and Yoga.” Drawing on the perspectives of professor and students, we show how a somatic practice (here, hatha yoga) and reading texts (here, primarily contemporary phenomenology) can be integrated in teaching and (...) learning. We suggest that the course raised questions about the ethics of evaluation as well as about the split between theory and practice, which have larger pedagogical implications. (shrink)

There is a story about a distinguished mathematician who had been invited to deliver a course of advanced lectures to other high-powered students of mathematics on a subject about which he was known to have some original ideas. The course, however, got off to a slow start. He devoted three lectures to discussing whether a certain proposition P was or was not self evident. The proposition P was essential to the argument he wanted to develop. Happily, he was able to (...) announce at the opening of his fourth lecture that he had decided that P was self evident. There was an audible sigh of relief. It was now known, on the highest authority, that P was self evident. From that the argument proceeded briskly and with irresistible logic to the lecturer's surprising and devastating conclusions. (shrink)

According to Foucault, the human body is the targeted object of modern power systems. In his genealogical studies, Foucault describes the manner in which these power systems leave an imprint on the body and utilize knowledge of the body as an indirect means of exercising subtle forms of control. In recent years, several researchers have claimed that the status of the body, subsumed as it is by modern power networks, has become a means for conducting a (...) unique political critique in which the human being is viewed as an agent of oppression and freedom. This article takes a fresh look at Foucault’s notions of life and death that underpin the critical understanding the body–power relationship. While this approach recognizes the completeness of subjective structuring processes, it also enables the formulation of new insights regarding the status of the modern individual as the subject of separate and independent modes of speech and action. (shrink)

A critical outline is given of Rorty’s early, “eliminativist” attempt to formulate a materialist version of the mind-body identity theory that does not fall foul of the “irreducible properties objection” (the thought that if mental states are brain states then the latter must exhibit the same properties as the former). An explanation is offered of why Rorty continued to describe himself as a materialist/physicalist despite having come to reject any version of mind-body identity.

This article thinks the place of the body, agency and movement in politics through the body of the asylum-seeker. Asylum-seekers do not have ample space to politically voice their experiences, but their bodies and ways of taking agency are fluid. The Agambenian idea of exceptional space and bare life privileges the power of the sovereign, leaving little space for agency for its subjects. It leads to an impasse, as it offers no viable option of thinking the possibilities of (...) opposing sovereign rule. We have resorted to Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy in order to read to the contrary: to sketch the potential of the body to move beyond the reach of sovereign power and to communicate itself and its relations to others. The untenability of the sovereign subject pointed to by Nancy’s ontology of bodies allows seeing the asylum-seeker’s body as expressive and moving body that reorganizes its relations to others and turns it to an active agent from which events of the body politic emerge. With its focus on crisscrossing movement of the body and between bodies, the notion of choreography assists us in envisioning that the space for political agency and community do not pre-exist, but are articulated through bodies’ movements. We argue that either purely textual analysis or focus on administrative rationality is bound to leave possible expressions of political agency aside, and thus to ignore the challenge the bodily choreographies of asylum-seekers pose to political theory. We illustrate our argument with vignettes from Fernand Melgar’s 2008 documentary film The Fortress. (shrink)

This article aims to describe the mind/ body problem from an Eastern philosophy point of view addressing firstly Kyudo, the Japanese martial art of archery; and secondly the Western philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Ethics is, in Western philosophy, what deals with the way we take decisions and act upon them. Decisions and actions consider rationality and intuition but seldom the body’s own rationality and intuition —which Kyudo exercises. We can find in Deleuze’s philosophy important concepts to (...) better understand this: difference, repetition, chaos, identity, energy, force, stage and micro-perceptions. To what extent can the dominant Eastern thought approach on the mind/ body topic be effective to fulfill the Ancient Greek aphorism «Know yourself» (γνθι σεαυτν) inscribed in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi? (shrink)

_Challenges conventional understandings of Heidegger’s account of the body._.

The question of whether movies can deliver philosophical content is a leading topic in the cognitive and analytic debate on film. But instead of turning to the well-trodden terrain of narrative and emotional engagement, this is the first time fashion and costume choices are analyzed to demonstrate how movies can be said to be doing philosophy. -/- Considering how fashion and costumes can deliver the epistemic content of a film and act as a guidance to the interpretation of the (...) philosophical content of a film, Laura T. Di Summa examines fashion and costume choices in classical and contemporary films. She discusses a number of cinematic examples, and the costumes and fashion elements within them, illustrating the importance of issues such as the performative side of fashion, the alteration between novelty and repetition, the pivotal role of the body, and the relation between fashion, style, and individual as well as collective identity. -/- Featuring close examinations of 1950s melodramas, Hollywood blockbusters and documentaries such as All That Heaven Allows, Mad Max Fury Road, and McQueen, Di Summa uses an innovative new lens to provide fresh philosophical analysis of films. The result is not only an advancement of our understanding of the aesthetic means through which film can do philosophy, but the first insights into a philosophy of fashion. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article, presented in January 2020 to the North American Nietzsche Society at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting, is a commentary on Andrew Huddleston's 2019 monograph, Nietzsche on the Decadence and Flourishing of Culture. The focus is on Nietzsche's critical and positive arguments about the psychological and physiological nature of decadence, Nietzsche's conception of cultural health, and the role of art and artists in Nietzschean flourishing cultures.

Contemporary culture increasingly suffers from problems of attention, over-stimulation, and stress, and a variety of personal and social discontents generated by deceptive body images. This book argues that improved body consciousness can relieve these problems and enhance one's knowledge, performance, and pleasure. The body is our basic medium of perception and action, but focused attention to its feelings and movements has long been criticised as a damaging distraction that also ethically corrupts through self-absorption. In Body Consciousness, (...) Richard Shusterman refutes such charges by engaging the most influential twentieth-century somatic philosophers and incorporating insights from both Western and Asian disciplines of body-mind awareness. Rather than rehashing intractable ontological debates on the mind-body relation, Shusterman reorients study of this crucial nexus towards a more fruitful, pragmatic direction that reinforces important but neglected connections between philosophy of mind, ethics, politics, and the pervasive aesthetic dimensions of everyday life. (shrink)

In _The Meaning of the Body_, Mark Johnson continues his pioneering work on the exciting connections between cognitive science, language, and meaning first begun in the classic _Metaphors We Live By_. Johnson uses recent research into infant psychology to show how the body generates meaning even before self-consciousness has fully developed. From there he turns to cognitive neuroscience to further explore the bodily origins of meaning, thought, and language and examines the many dimensions of meaning—including images, qualities, emotions, and (...) metaphors—that are all rooted in the body’s physical encounters with the world. Drawing on the psychology of art and pragmatist philosophy, Johnson argues that all of these aspects of meaning-making are fundamentally aesthetic. He concludes that the arts are the culmination of human attempts to find meaning and that studying the aesthetic dimensions of our experience is crucial to unlocking meaning's bodily sources. Throughout, Johnson puts forth a bold new conception of the mind rooted in the understanding that philosophy will matter to nonphilosophers only if it is built on a visceral connection to the world. “Mark Johnson demonstrates that the aesthetic and emotional aspects of meaning are fundamental—central to conceptual meaning and reason, and that the arts show meaning-making in its fullest realization. If you were raised with the idea that art and emotion were external to ideas and reason, you must read this book. It grounds philosophy in our most visceral experience.”—George Lakoff, author of _Moral Politics_. (shrink)

In a wide-ranging argument moving from Sumerian demons to Lucian Freud, from Syriac prayer books to John Carpenter's film The Thing, this book explores the ways the body has been represented through time. A response to the vertiginous increase in writings on bodily representations, it attempts to form a single coherent account of the possible forms of representation of the body. This work brings together concerns, images, and concepts from a wide range of perspectives: art history and criticism, (...) the history and philosophy of medicine, the history of race, phenomenological and post-phenomenological thought, studies of feminism and pornography, and the new interest in visual studies. Yet it is less a philosopher's look at history or a historian's foray into philosophy than a practical and critical look at the current constellation of art practices. Above all, it is intended to be of immediate use in the conceptualization and production of visual art and its history. (shrink)

Thomas Kuhn’s book Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity has come to be seen as something like the odd man out among his oeuvre. In particular, while the book has undoubtedly made a significant impact on the historiography of the discovery of the quantum, reconstructive accounts of Kuhn’s philosophy of science have generally paid little attention to Black-Body Theory. This is a lacuna I will attempt to rectify in part in this article. I will argue that Black- (...) class='Hi'>Body Theory raises a number of interesting questions vis-à-vis Kuhn’s philosophy of science: specifically, that although Black-Body Theory can be said to partially mesh with the picture of science set forth in Structure, there are other parts of the account of the quantum revolution that fail to gel with the model of science set out in Structure. This leads to the question, Did Kuhn unwittingly undermine his philosophical account of science with the historical work undertaken in Black-Body Theory? (shrink)

The Expressiveness of the Body meditates on the contrasts between the human body described in classical Greek medicine and the body as envisaged by physicians in ancient China.

As study of knowledge, epistemology attempts at identifying its necessary and sufficient conditions and defining its sources, structure and limits. From this pointof view, until present, there are no applied approaches to the Romanian archaeology. Consequently, my present paper presents an attempt to explore the structural characteristics of the knowledge creation process through the analysis of the results of a series of interviews conducted on Romanian archaeologists. The interviews followed a qualitative approach built upon a semi-structured frame. Apparent data saturation (...) was reached after four interviews within initial target group (senior researchers with institutional authority). Under these conditions a decision was made to continue the interviews within a secondary control group (young doctoral or post-doc researchers guided by members of the initial target group) in order to both verify the observed data saturation and to assess the impact of the attitude of senior researchers towards scientific research on the younger generation. The preliminary results allow to assert that Romanian archaeology is still caught in a highly conservative and intradisciplinarian manner of knowledge production with a negative effect on both new knowledgeproduction and future specialists’ education. (shrink)

“In the beginning there was hunger.” This opening quote from Levinas sets the stage for Pelluchon’s ethico-political project that revamps classical phenomenology’s intentionality of the ego by focusing on the sensing and enjoyment of the “gourmet cogito” who “lives from” and finds nourishment in a world that cannot be reduced to a noeme. She critiques Heidegger’s existential analytic and focuses on an ontology where our love of life precedes our being-towards-death, before boldly mapping out a new social pact, founded on (...) the structures of existence that her phenomenology of nourishment reveals. (shrink)