This is ongoing attempt to list
the best books and articles related to embodiment. Please send any suggestions
to the site manager, Adrian Harris.
The Research
on Place and Space site has a general bibliography and links to more
specialist bibliographies inlcuding Embodied,
Embedded Literature (Charlene Spretnak)
Books
Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature
and Culture
Edited by Honi Fern Haber
and Gail Weiss. Routledge 1999.
Explores different perspectives united in an attempt to break down the binary
opposition between nature/body and culture/consciousness. Discusses the
‘foundational role the phenomenon of embodiment can and must play
in future development of the human sciences’. Includes chapters by
Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus, Mark Johnson, Thomas
Csordas, Martin Jay, and David Hoy.
Philosophy in the Flesh
: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Harper Collins Publishers, 1999.
Building on recent cognitive science, this book refutes the commonly held
idea that reason is independent of the body. In fact our physical experience
of the world - our spatial awareness, our bodily movement, and the way
we manipulate objects - provide the pattern for how we reason about the
world.
The Bounds of Cognition
Frederick Adams and Kenneth Aizawa. Blackwell, 2008.
There are two broad theories of the role of the body in cognition. On
the more conservative view, the body makes a causal contribution to cognition.
On the more radical view, bodily (and indeed environmental) processes
are sometimes literally cognitive processes. The body in part constitutes
the cognitive. The Bounds of Cognition challenges
the arguments some philosophers have given in support of the more radical
view. In doing so, Bounds
sets out a research program for the radical embodiment of cognition.
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Journals and articles
Shaun Gallagher has a selection of papers
online.
Andy Clark has a large number of papers available
online
Tony Chemero - a philosopher of cognitive science - has numerous papers
available including:
Situated,
embodied realism, in Jose Burgos and Emilio Ribes (eds.), Knowledge,
Cognition and Behavior, forthcoming (2007).
Asking
What’s Inside the Head: Neurophilosophy meets the extended mind,
Minds and Machines, forthcoming (2006)
An
Outline of a Theory of Affordances, Ecological
Psychology, 15, 2, 181-195, 2003
Being
About
Elle Epp
A book site in progress
Abstract:
There are two projects interwoven here. The first is a revision of dualist
remnants in the ways we talk about mental function, and an effort to see
how we could understand perceiving, imagining and representing if we think
of them as embodied. The second is a description of the recent neuroscience
of spatial function.
The two projects are related in this way: the central notion in any philosophy
of mind has to be an account of aboutness or intentionality. This notion
has traditionally been thought by analogy with our use of representational
artifacts such as sentences or pictures. When we allow ourselves to be
impressed by the particulars of spatial function, it is evident that talk
of inner representations has delayed the transition between dualist/theist
beliefs about knowing and a new biological understanding of its means.
I argue instead that whole bodies are oriented and structurally responsive
to their environments, and that whole persons, and not isolated internal
parts of persons, refer and are about things in those environments.
A number of shifts in our present understanding of material systems together
support an alternative understanding of aboutness as relational structure.
A sequenced redescription that follows from two emphases, on cognition
as spatially engaged, and on neural response as complex integration, begins
with acting and perceiving seen as interdependent aspects of evolved competency
in the world. Both occur by means of structural changes in many parts
of an organism.
The various forms of simulational cognition - imagining, planning, remembering
- also occur by structural changes, but these changes are less closely
coupled to immediately present environments. Representing, by which I
mean our public use of representing artifacts and events, occurs by structural
changes that are usually a combination of perception/action and simulation.
Thinking often requires representational support; like representing, it
is understood as necessarily grounded in a prior aboutness of evolved,
located bodies able to perceive, act and simulate.
I illustrate the principles outlined above by describing remnants of
spatial engagement found in four high-cultural forms of representation-guided
cognition - signed and spoken language, electroacoustic music, pictorial
perspective, and mathematics. I conclude with a brief consideration of
implications of this redescription.
Body &
Society Journal
Concerned with debates in feminism, technology,
ecology, postmodernism, medicine, ethics and consumerism which take the
body as the central analytic issue in the questioning of established paradigms.
The Body
in Space: Embodiment, Experientialism and Linguistic Conceptualization
Tim Rohrer
In Body, Language and Mind, vol. 2. Zlatev, Jordan; Ziemke, Tom;
Frank, Roz; Dirven, René (eds.). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, forthcoming
2006.
Bodies of
Resistance: Ecopaganism in the protest movement
Adrian Harris
Abstract:
Foucault and Bourdieu present a telling analysis of the process of social
control though embodiment. This control is never complete, and several
thinkers (including Foucault) have explored models of resistance.
Eco-Paganism is a strand of Neo-Paganism, the fastest
growing of the New Religious Movements. Eco-Pagans partly express their
spirituality through environmental activism and rituals of resistance.
I propose that Eco-Pagan practice is way of constructing
'discourses of resistance' through embodiment. I explore this notion by
drawing on ritual theory, Bakhtin's Carnivalesque and recent theories
of embodiment. I conclude that Eco-Paganism can construct 'bodies' which
resist incorporation into mainstream ideology.
Embodiment:
Signs of Life in the Self
Richard L. Lanigan
A Paper Presented at the Symposium on "Musement
to Meaning: Body and Mind" at the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the
SEMIOTIC SOCIETY OF AMERICA. San Antonio, Texas, USA. 20 October 1995.
The
Extended Mind
Andy Clark and David Chalmers.
Published in Analysis 58:10-23, 1998. Reprinted
in (P. Grim, ed) The Philosopher's Annual,
vol XXI, 1998.
"Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question
invites two standard replies. Some accept the demarcations of skin and
skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others
are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words "just
ain't in the head", and hold that this externalism about meaning
carries over into an externalism about mind. We propose to pursue a third
position. We advocate a very different sort of externalism: an active
externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive
processes".
Andy Clark has many more papers available
online.
Feminism,
Phenomenology and Embodiment
Steven Connor
"As one might expect, feminist scholars have found much to disagree
with in Merleau-Ponty's and other phenomenologists' accounts of embodied
existence, finding them patriarchal in their universalisation of forms
of male embodiedness."
Mutual Interests, Different Lenses; Current
Neuroscience and Symbolic Interaction
David D. Franks, Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 26,
No 4 pages
613-630, 2003. (Not online).
Discusses convergences of findings from different fields on how the body
constructs reality for humans and how manipulative action (vis a vi
Lakoff and Johnson) is primary to thought etc. Concludes with a warning
that the important thing about ideas is not simply in their substance,
but the salience or importance they have for us through the way they are
embodied (via Somatic Markers). For Franks this has great importance for
social control and a general theory of mentality.
On
the relation between recent neurobiological data on perception (and action)
and the Husserlian theory of constitution
Jean-Luc Petit, Phenomenology and the Cognitive
Sciences
2 (4): 281-298, 2003, Kluwer Academic Publishers
E-mail: jean-luc.petit@college-de-france.fr
Abstract:
The phenomenological theory of constitution promises a solution for “the
problem of consciousness” insofar as it changes the traditional
terms of this problem by systematically correlating “subject and
” “object” in the unifying context of intentional acts.
I argue that embodied constitution must depend upon the role of kinesthesia
as a constitutive operator. In pursuing the path of intentionality in
its descent from an idealistic level of “pure” constitution
to this fully embodied kinesthetic constitution, we are able to gain access
to different ontological regions such as physical thing, owned body and
shared world. Neuroscience brings to light the somatological correlates
of noemata. Bridging the gap between incarnation and naturalisation represents
the best way of realizing the foundational program of transcendental phenomenology.
Phenomenology
and the Cognitive Sciences Journal
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences is an interdisciplinary,
international journal that serves as a forum to explore the intersections
between phenomenology, empirical science, and analytic philosophy of mind.
Some
proprioceptive observations of 'being-with'
Olu Taiwo & John Wood
A paper given at the Problem of Action and Observation Conference
Amsterdam, April 1997
The
Current Relevance of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Embodiment
Hubert L. Dreyfus
Defends, explains, and draws out implications of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology
of Perception statement the "the life of consciousness is subtended
by an 'intentional arc' which projects round about us our past our future,
our human setting, our physical, ideological, and moral situation."
We
Are Live Creatures: Embodiment, American Pragmatism, and the Cognitive
Organism
Mark Johnson and Tim Rohrer.
Forthcoming 2006. In Body, Language, and Mind,
vol. 1. Zlatev, Jordan; Ziemke, Tom; Frank, Roz; Dirven, René
(eds.). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
What
memory is for
Arthur M. Glenberg
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706.
E-mail: glenberg6facstaff.wisc.edu
Abstract:
Let’s start from scratch in thinking about what memory is for, and
consequently, how it works. Suppose that memory and conceptualization
work in the service of perception and action. In this case, conceptualization
is the encoding of patterns of possible physical interaction with a three-dimensional
world. These patterns are constrained by the structure of the environment,
the structure of our bodies, and memory. Thus, how we perceive and conceive
of the environment is determined by the types of bodies we have. Such
a memory would not have associations. Instead, how concepts become related
(and what it means to be related) is determined by how separate patterns
of actions can be combined given the constraints of our bodies. I call
this combination “mesh.” To avoid hallucination, conceptualization
would normally be driven by the environment, and patterns of action from
memory would play a supporting, but automatic, role. A significant human
skill is learning to suppress the overriding contribution of the environment
to conceptualization, thereby allowing memory to guide conceptualization.
The effort used in suppressing input from the environment pays off by
allowing prediction, recollective memory, and language comprehension.
I review theoretical work in cognitive science and empirical work in memory
and language comprehension that suggest that it may be possible to investigate
connections between topics as disparate as infantile amnesia and mental-model
theory.
McGuire, Meredith B., 2003. 'Why Bodies Matter: A Sociological Reflection
on Spirituality and Materiality'. Spiritus: A Journal of Christian
Spirituality, 3.1 (2003) 1-18. Johns Hopkins University Press.
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PhD Theses
Creativity
and embodied learning David George, University of Western Sydney,
1998
"Looks at the way in which drama education
constructs opportunities for learning ... Questions surrounding a consciousness
of participation bring the senses, the feelings, the emotions and other
physical experience to the fore. They require that the learning of the
body be experienced... Through bringing together constructivism, systems
theory, drama education and contemporary performance theory this thesis
argues for a greater recognition of the relationship between the body
and learning."
Performance,
Religious Imagination and the Play of the Land in the Study of Deep Ecology
and Its Practices
Craig Strobel, Graduate
Theological Union in Berkeley, California, 2001
Focused on the use of embodied imagination and performative practices
in the Deep Ecology movement.
The
Significance of the Body in Ethical Discourse: Julia Kristeva's Contribution
to Ethical Discourse (Abstract)
Christine Jamieson. PhD. (Ethics) Saint Paul University/University of
Ottawa.
The dissertation is concerned with the significance of embodiment for
moral theology. It enters into dialogue with Christian ethicists struggling
with issues relating to embodiment.
Love at Work: What
is my lived experience of love, and how may I become an instrument of
love's purpose? Eleanor Lohr, PhD., University of Bath, 2006. Eleanor's
chapter on embodied
knowing in the practice and teaching of yoga is especially relevant.
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