This 2006 book explores how people's subjective, felt experiences of their bodies in action provide part of the fundamental grounding for human cognition and language. Cognition is what occurs when ...the body engages the physical and cultural world and must be studied in terms of the dynamical interactions between people and the environment. Human language and thought emerge from recurring patterns of embodied activity that constrain ongoing intelligent behavior. We must not assume cognition to be purely internal, symbolic, computational, and disembodied, but seek out the gross and detailed ways that language and thought are inextricably shaped by embodied action. Embodiment and Cognitive Science describes the abundance of empirical evidence from many disciplines, including work on perception, concepts, imagery and reasoning, language and communication, cognitive development, and emotions and consciousness, that support the idea that the mind is embodied.
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.
Drawing from the works of Dante, Catherine of Siena, Boccaccio, Aquinas, and Cavalcanti and other literary, philosophic, and scientific texts, Heather Webb studies medieval notions of the heart to ...explore the "lost circulations" of an era when individual lives and bodies were defined by their extensions into the world rather than as self-perpetuating, self-limited entities.
What role might the Devil have in health and illness? The
Devil is Disorder explores constructions of the body, health,
illness and wider misfortune in a Trinidadian village where
evangelical ...Christianity is growing in popularity. Based on
long-term ethnography and locating the village in historical and
global context, the book takes a nuanced cosmological approach to
situate evangelical Christian understandings as shaping and being
shaped by their context and, in the process, shaping individuals
themselves. As people move from local to global subjects, health
here stretches beyond being a matter of individual bodies and is
connected to worldwide flows and networks, spirit entities, and
expansive moral orders.
Contemporary discussions in philosophy of mind have largely been shaped by physicalism, the doctrine that all phenomena are ultimately physical. Here, Jaegwon Kim presents the most comprehensive and ...systematic presentation yet of his influential ideas on the mind-body problem. He seeks to determine, after half a century of debate: What kind of (or "how much") physicalism can we lay claim to? He begins by laying out mental causation and consciousness as the two principal challenges to contemporary physicalism. How can minds exercise their causal powers in a physical world? Is a physicalist account of consciousness possible?
The book aims to bring together these three themes - the world, the flesh and the subject - to resolve many of the puzzles that beset contemporary philosophy of mind.
A core philosophical project is the attempt to uncover the fundamental nature of reality, the limited set of facts upon which all other facts depend. Perhaps the most popular theory of fundamental ...reality in contemporary analytic philosophy is physicalism: the view that the world is fundamentally physical in nature. The first half of this book argues that physicalist views cannot account for the evident reality of conscious experience and hence that physicalism cannot be true. However, the book also tries to show that familiar arguments to this conclusion—Frank Jackson’s form of the knowledge argument and David Chalmers’ two-dimensional conceivability argument—are not wholly adequate. The second half of the book explores and defends a radical alternative to physicalism known as “Russellian monism.” Russellian monists believe that (i) physics tells us nothing about the concrete, categorical nature of material entities, and that (ii) it is this “hidden” nature of matter that explains human and animal consciousness. Throughout the second half of the book various forms of Russellian monism are surveyed, and the key challenges facing it are discussed. Ultimately the book defends a cosmopsychist form of Russellian monism, according to which all facts are grounded in facts about the conscious universe.
Radicalizing enactivism Hutto, Daniel D; Myin, Erik
2013, 20121214, 2012, 2013-06-26
eBook, Book
A book that promotes the thesis that basic forms of mentality—intentionally directed cognition and perceptual experience—are best understood as embodied yet contentless.
Most of what humans do and ...experience is best understood in terms of dynamically unfolding interactions with the environment. Many philosophers and cognitive scientists now acknowledge the critical importance of situated, environment-involving embodied engagements as a means of understanding basic minds—including basic forms of human mentality. Yet many of these same theorists hold fast to the view that basic minds are necessarily or essentially contentful—that they represent conditions the world might be in. In this book, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin promote the cause of a radically enactive, embodied approach to cognition that holds that some kinds of minds—basic minds—are neither best explained by processes involving the manipulation of contents nor inherently contentful. Hutto and Myin oppose the widely endorsed thesis that cognition always and everywhere involves content. They defend the counter-thesis that there can be intentionality and phenomenal experience without content, and demonstrate the advantages of their approach for thinking about scaffolded minds and consciousness.
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