The Philosophy of Body

The body has often been neglected in favour of the mind by philosophers. But interest is growing in the philosophical consequences of human embodiedness. This timely collection brings together new discussions of the body from seven leading contributors with a wide variety of philosophical outlooks. The papers deal with the role of the body in the concept of the self, in perceptions, intention and action, in Artificial Intelligence, in thinking about sex and gender, and in psychoanalytical thinking. There are also discussions of treatment of the body in the pioneering works of the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau–Ponty and the American Philosopher Samual Todes. The authors are Quassim Cassam, Max de Gaynesford, Alison Adam, Sean Kelly, Hubert Dreyfus, Iris Marion Young and the former England cricket captain, Michael Brearley, now a practising psychotherapist.

1. Representing Bodies: Quassim Cassam (University of Oxford). 2. Corporeal Objects and the Independence of Perception and Action: Maximilian de Gaynesford, (The College of William and Mary, Virginia). 3. Gender/Body/Machine: Alison Adam (University of Salford). 4. Merleau–Ponty on the Body: Sean D. Kelly (Princeton University). 5. Samual Todes′s Account of Non–conceptual Perceptual Knowledge and its Relation to Thought: Hubert L. Dreyfus (University of California, Berkeley). 6. Lived Body vs Gender: Reflections on Social Structure and Subjectivity: Iris Marion Young (University of Chicago). 7. Psychoanalysis and the Body–Mind Problem: Michael Brearley.

Michael Proudfoot is head of the Philosophy Department and the School of Humanities at Reading University. He is a graduate of Cambridge University and was a lecturer at Glasgow University. He has been Visiting Professor in the Philosophy Department of Miami University, Ohio several times. In addition to the philosophy of body, he has published on aesthetics, Wittgenstein and moral philosophy. He was manager of the Great Britain team that won the gold medal in Modern Pentathlon in the 1976 Olympics.