Challenging and rewarding in equal measure, _Phenomenology of Perception_ is Merleau-Ponty's most famous work. Impressive in both scope and imagination, it uses the example of perception to return the _body_ to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato. Drawing on case studies such as brain-damaged patients from the First World War, Merleau-Ponty brilliantly shows how the body plays a crucial role not only in perception but in speech, sexuality and our relation to others. Perhaps above all, Merleau-Ponty's (...) insights about the embodied mind are a bold and refreshing challenge to the new era of virtual reality and artificial intelligence, as scientists and psychologists discover the centrality of the body to mind and intelligence. (shrink)

Introduction: Over the past twenty-five years the sporting body has been studied in a myriad of ways including via a range of feminist frameworks (Hall 1996; Lowe 1998; Markula 2003; George 2005; Hargreaves 2007) and gender-sensitive lenses (e.g. McKay 1994; Aoki 1996; Woodward 2008). Despite this developing corpus, studies of sport only rarely engage in depth with the ‘flesh’ of the lived sporting and exercizing body (Wainwright and Turner 2003; Allen-Collinson 2009) at least from a phenomenological angle, and in relation (...) to female embodiment. It seems that a more corporeally-grounded, phenomenological perspective on women’s sporting embodiment would be a welcome addition to extant studies. In this chapter I suggest that employing a feminist phenomenological framework can provide a powerful lens through which to explore the subjective, richly-textured, lived-body experiences of sport and exercise. Phenomenology of course offers only one of a multiplicity of avenues to investigate the body in sport, and this chapter provides just a small glimpse of its possibilities. To-date studies of sporting experience employing a phenomenological theoretical framework remain surprisingly under-developed (Kerry and Armour 2000), as do those using its ethnomethodological offspring (Coates 1999; Burke et al. 2008). Further, as Fisher (2000) notes, the significance of the interaction between phenomenology and feminism has only relatively recently begun to be explored. It seems timely, therefore, to address this intriguing, potentially productive, but sometimes uneasy nexus, focusing upon female running embodiment in this case. (shrink)

What makes this work so important is that it returned the body to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato.

This article lays the ground for a sensuous appreciation of both the human body and the physical world. Drawing on the biographical account of the climber's embodied reflection of rock-climbing, the `climbing body' highlights our overwhelming tactile and kinaesthetic engagement with the phenomenal world. I Begin by emphasizing the need to consider the organic nature of human being, that we should understand how the awareness of death and our consequent sense of mutability provide a significant moment to remember the body. (...) I highlight how this might be achieved through the practice of adventure climbing. The increasing denial of the body's organicity, its mutability - perhaps a key impulse of modernity - is thereby usurped. This is followed by a structure of thought, based around the work of Georg Simmel, conveying the radical materiality of the phenomenal world. In doing so, I highlight the propensity of the environment to inscribe itself upon the human body. This idea is brought alive during the second half of the article, which focuses upon the climbing body and, in particular, the hands of the climber. As they navigate vertical ground climbers are guided by the sense of touch in order to `make sense' of the world. The climbing body orientates itself through tactile navigation: by feeling or grasp-ing its way through the world. To engage with the world tactually is to situate oneself consciously in that world and to have a potentially unmediated relationship with it. In doing so, the climber opens up the possibility for a corporeal reconceptualization of modernity. (shrink)

The demise of Cartesianism as an animating force in conceptualizing mind and body relations has opened up the field to a wider variety of perspectives, like the "embodiment" of phenomenological thinkers. However, because of Cartesianism's deeply rooted psychic legacy it still makes its presence felt in various places in everyday life. This paper will explore two facets of everyday life, sports and contemplation, which lend themselves to a mind‐body cognitive dissonance affected by latent Cartesian thinking. As an alternative, we will (...) propose a more phenomenologically oriented interpretation based on what has been revealed by historical precedents as well as our empirical investigations. Keywords: Flow, Contemplation, Phenomenofogy, Sports. (shrink)

Through a phenomenological study of horse-human relations, this article explores the ways in which, as embodied beings, we live relationally, rather than as separate human identities. Conceptually this challenges oppositional logic and humanist assumptions, but where poststructuralist treatments of these issues tend to remain abstract, this article is concerned with an embodied demonstration of the ways in which we experience a relational or in-between logic in our everyday lives.

This article looks at the discursive and practical construction of walking in a British context. It examines the ways in which notions and practices generated by conventions around the meaning of walking in the countryside apparently contradict prevailing ideas that walking is an escape from the restrictions of everyday urban life. Identifying particular, competing forms of walking and the techniques and identities that they espouse, it is suggested that such activities are suffused with disciplinary norms. Yet despite these conventions, walking (...) holds out the possibility of disruption, through confrontation with physical discomfort, unpredictable features and sensual experience that contrasts with much contemporary forms of movement. The work of artist Richard Long is used to explore these issues. (shrink)

We are even less aware of our internal organs and the physiological processes that keep us alive. In this fascinating work, Drew Leder examines all the ways in which the body is absent—forgotten, alien, uncontrollable, obscured.

"The location of the author’s investigations, the body itself rather than the sphere of subjective representations of self and of function in cultures, is wholly new.... I believe this work will be a landmark in future feminist thinking." —Alphonso Lingis "This is a text of rare erudition and intellectual force. It will not only introduce feminists to an enriching set of theoretical perspectives but sets a high critical standard for feminist dialogues on the status of the body." —Judith Butler Volatile (...) Bodies demonstrates that the sexually specific body is socially constructed: biology or nature is not opposed to or in conflict with culture. Human biology is inherently social and has no pure or natural "origin" outside of culture. Being the raw material of social and cultural organization, it is "incomplete" and thus subject to the endless rewriting and social inscription that constitute all sign systems. Examining the theories of Freud, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, etc. on the subject of the body, Elizabeth Grosz concludes that the body they theorize is male. These thinkers are not providing an account of "human" corporeality but of male corporeality. Grosz then turns to corporeal experiences unique to women—menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, menopause. Her examination of female experience lays the groundwork for developing theories of sexed corporeality rather than merely rectifying flawed models of male theorists. (shrink)