A widespread Western conception about the sanctity of the human body and its parts prevents from any morally acceptable disposition of these objects. However, this entails nothing but a dualistic conception of the human being as a composite of detachable parts — namely, body and mind. Understood as the antechamber of legal rights, moral rights perform an important — yet frequently overlooked — justifying function that permeates the political discourse. Although the connection among moral, political and legal discourses should be (...) properly acknowledged, certain boundaries are to mediate among each scope for the sake of certainty and accuracy. Intermediate realities, as the so-called human rights, serve to connect the moral and legal domains, still they also blur the lines along which the discourse is deployed. Moral entities are essentially inalienable, to the extent that they demarcate the moral status of the subject. By contrast, legal rights are essentially negotiable and, thus, alienable. The controversial instance of bodily rights will serve to test the assertions above. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between the bodily presence of other humans in the lived urban world and the experience of everyday architecture. We suggest, from the perspectives of phenomenology and architecture, that being in the company of others changes the way the built environment appears to subjects, and that this enables us to perform simple daily tasks while still attending to the built environment. Our analysis shows that in mundane urban settings attending to the environment involves a unique (...) attentional mode, which does not rely on concentrating on, or appreciating the architectural objects, but rather on social attention and on the subject’s kinesthesis in relation to the built environment. (shrink)

Despite all controversies that might otherwise divide them, most phenomenologists agree that consciousness entails some form of self-consciousness. In fact, they go even further, as they virtually all agree on the necessity of fleshing out this insight in bodily terms: from the phenomenological point of view, self-consciousness is primarily experienced as a form of bodily self-consciousness (or self-awareness). Following Edmund Husserl's insight that the lived body (Leib), i.e. the body as it is subjectively felt or experienced, must necessarily (...) be presupposed by all object consciousness, including the thematic consciousness of me as a body, there is a long-standing discussion within the phenomenological movement on how to conceive of this self-relation. This entry focuses on the French reception of Husserl and highlights the distinctive ways in which French phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Henry, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida have elaborated on and disputed this key insight. It will be shown that discussions on this question have open onto two further debates: one revolves around the paradigmatic role Husserl grants to touch in the analysis of consciousness, while the other concerns the differences between the experience of one's own body and the experience of the body of others. Finally, we point to the fact that one's body can be experienced and evaluated as other, as is shown in the critical analyses of Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and recent critical phenomenology. Here, it becomes clear that the bodily self-awareness of concrete subjects is shaped by the material conditions, norms, and discourses of their respective situation. (shrink)

According to proponents of the sensorimotor contingency theory of perception (Hurley & Noë 2003, Noë 2004, O’Regan 2011), active control of camera movement is necessary for the emergence of distal attribution in tactile-visual sensory substitution (TVSS) because it enables the subject to acquire knowledge of the way stimulation in the substituting modality varies as a function of self-initiated, bodily action. This chapter, by contrast, approaches distal attribution as a solution to a causal inference problem faced by the subject’s perceptual (...) systems. Given all of the available endogenous and exogenous evidence available to those systems, what is the most probable source of stimulation in the substituting modality? From this perspective, active control over the camera’s movements matters for rather different reasons. Most importantly, it generates proprioceptive and efference-copy based information about the camera’s body-relative position necessary to make use of the spatial cues present in the stimulation that the subject receives for purposes of egocentric object localization. (shrink)

This paper presents a view on bodily IEM by describing, first, the structure that grounds need to have in order to yield IEM judgments, and then arguing that somatosensation has this structure. I make my case by presenting an analysis of the sense of bodily ownership. According to this analysis, there is a substantive explanatory relationship between bodily self-consciousness and psychological self-consciousness. I argue that one central virtue of this approach to bodily self-consciousness is that, not (...) only does it help explain bodily IEM, but it also sheds some light on the fact that both psychological and bodily self-ascriptions are subject to analysis in IEM terms, despite their differences. (shrink)

Although Descartes and Malebranche argue that we are immaterial thinking things, they also maintain that each of us stands in a unique experiential relation to a single human body, such that we feel as though this body belongs to us and is part of ourselves. This paper examines Descartes’s and Malebranche’s accounts of this feeling. They hold that our experience of being embodied is grounded in affective bodily sensations that feel good or bad: namely, sensations of pleasure and pain, (...) hunger and thirst, and so on. These bodily sensations ground our experiential identification with the body because they represent the body’s needs and interests as though they were own, such that we experience an important aspect of our well-being as consisting in the preservation of the body. According to these Cartesians, then, we feel embodied in part because we experience ourselves as having a bodily good. (shrink)

This paper challenges the philosophical assumption that bodily sensations are free from normative constraints. It examines the normative status of bodily sensations through two studies: a corpus-linguistic analysis and an experimental investigation. The corpus analysis shows that while emotions are frequently subject to normative judgments concerning their appropriateness, similar attitudes are less evident towards bodily sensations like feelings of pain, hunger and cold. In contrast, however, the experimental study reveals notable differences in conceptions of bodily sensations. (...) It finds that sensations of hunger and cold are occasionally subject to normative assessment, with about half of the participants considering it reasonable to assess these sensations normatively. (shrink)

What forms of consciousness can the subject have of her body in action? This is a recurrent issue in contemporary research on skilled movement and expertise, and according to a widespread view, the body makes itself inconspicuous in performance in favour of the object or goal that the activity is directed to. However, this attitude to consciousness in bodily performance seems unsatisfying for an understanding of skilled action, and the work of several researchers can be seen as responding to (...) this view: Montero, Legrand, Ravn and others in the philosophy of expertise and of dance have developed various notions of consciousness and cognition to account for the mindful processes at play in performance. Two related questions can be distinguished here: 1. Is there an inherent conflict between skilled action and at least more than marginal awareness of that action, or is it possible – and even desirable – to reflect on our own performance without considerably impeding on it? 2. What forms of consciousness pertaining to the body in action must we distinguish in order to answer the first question? This paper gives an overview of this discussion, focusing on the second issue, although the first will come into play in so far as it is linked with the latter question. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of bodily reflection and on dancers’ descriptions, I show that there is, in phenomenological terms, a bodily level of reflection: a fully conscious and exploratory activity that is led by the skilled body, and that is explicitly aimed at by many performers. (shrink)

Bodily sensations are mental states typically suitable to be reported in judgments in which a first-person indexical is used to qualify the felt body. In other words, subjects typically have a sense of bodily ownership for the body that they feel in bodily sensations. This paper puts forward, firstly, three desiderata that theories on the sense of bodily ownership should meet. Secondly, it assesses two views that account for the sense of bodily ownership in terms (...) of the spatial content of bodily sensations, appealing to a notion of a sense of boundedness, and argues that they do not meet the goals defined. (shrink)

The concept of the subject relies on humanist presuppositions. Regardless of whether purported to be decentred and posthumanist, the subject conceived in poststructuralist and philosophical terms remains anthropocentric and anthropomorphic. There is something irrecuperably Cartesian in the poststructuralist idea of the subject. Physicality, both bodily and that of the materiality of the machinic prosthesis, is barred from the constitution of the Self, as the real is barred but also foreclosed to it. The subject, therefore, is yet another philosophical phantasm, (...) which in its material actuality is determined as an instance of the signifying automaton. I argue that the “posthumanist” self, if conceived in Marxian and non-philosophical terms, ought to be viewed as the radical dyad of the signifying automaton and the real. It renders Haraway’s notion of the Cyborg more radical and unravels its inhumanity rather than posthumanity. (shrink)

Pregnant women and persons engaging in homosexual practices compose two groups that have been and still are amongst those most severely subjected to coercive restrictions regarding their own bodies. From an historical point of view, it is a recent and rare phenomenon that a woman’s right to abortion and a person’s right to engage in homosexual interactions are recognized. Although most Western liberal states currently do recognize these rights, they are under continuous assault from various political and religious movements. Moreover, (...) though liberal theories of justice typically defend women’s rights to abortion and people’s rights to homosexual activity, these theories often struggle to capture the fundamental ground for these rights. For example, it appears hard for the liberal to say why and when only the woman and not the embryo/fetus has rights and why the right to certain sexual practices is not on par with rights to other preferences. Contemporary liberal theories of justice, therefore, have a hard time identifying what distinguishes questions of abortion and sexual activities from other questions of right and thereby also have difficulty capturing the gravity of the wrongdoing involved in coercively restricting homosexual interactions and abortion as such. I argue that Kant’s theory of justice succeeds on both counts, because it can locate the fundamental ground for these rights in an understanding of the bodily integrity of the person. Just states will neither permit nor outlaw all abortions or sexual interactions, but rather will require all such laws to be reconcilable with the protection of each person’s right to freedom. (shrink)

This study clarifies the need for a renewed account of the body in physiotherapy to fill sizable gaps between physiotherapeutical theory and practice. Physiotherapists are trained to approach bodily functioning from an objectivist perspective; however, their therapeutic interactions with patients are not limited to the provision of natural-scientific explanations. Physiotherapists’ practice corresponds well to theorisation of the body as the bearer of original bodily intentionality, as outlined by Merleau-Ponty and elaborated upon by enactivists. We clarify how physiotherapeutical practice (...) corroborates Merleau-Ponty’s critical arguments against objectivist interpretations of the body; particularly, his analyses demonstrate that norms of optimal corporeal functioning are highly individual and variable in time and thus do not directly depend on generic physiological structures. In practice, objectively measurable physical deviations rarely correspond to specific subjective difficulties and, similarly, patients’ reflective insights into their own motor deficiencies do not necessarily produce meaningful motor improvements. Physiotherapeutical procedures can be understood neither as mechanical manipulations of patients’ machine-like bodies by experts nor as a process of such manipulation by way of instructing patients’ explicit conscious awareness. Rather, physiotherapeutical practice and theory can benefit from the philosophical interpretation of motor disorders as modifications of bodily intentionality. Consequently, motor performances addressed in physiotherapy are interpreted as relational features of a living organism coupled with its environment, and motor disorders are approached as failures to optimally manage the motor requirements of a given situation owing to a relative loss of the capacity to structure one’s relation with their environment through motor action. Building on this, we argue that the process of physiotherapy is most effective when understood as a bodily interaction to guide patients towards discovering better ways of grasping a situation as meaningful through bodily postures and movements. (shrink)

While it is commonly observed that visual experiences have an egocentric character, it is less clear how to properly characterize it. This manuscript presents a new argument in favor of a thesis that (a) visual experiences represent a subject-element, i.e., an element to which the perceived objects stand in egocentric relations, and (b) the subject-element is represented as a complex bodily structure. More specifically, it is argued that there are two plausible interpretations of directional perceptual qualities such as ‘being (...) to the left’: (a) representing directional qualities consists in representing objects as having intrinsic properties, or (b) representing directional qualities consists in representing objects as related to parts of the bodily structure. Relying on this observation, it is shown that only the second option can explain the role of directional qualities in action selection based on visual experiences. Consequently, the most plausible interpretation of directional qualities is that, in representing objects as being to the left or right, visual experiences represent objects as being related to parts of the bodily structure. (shrink)

Recent advances in the cognitive sciences suggest that cognition is grounded in our embodied experience. This article supports this claim by analyzing the way we conceptualize our emotions metaphorically in terms of bodily processes. Our emotions are not merely matters of subjective feeling. Rather, emotions have stable conceptual structures that have emerged from our embodied activity through metaphorical projections, structures that are shared in a culture and can be disclosed by empirical inquiry. This article explores the metaphorical structuring of (...) anxiety in terms of our experience of breathing. The correlation in our experience between mental functioning and bodily functioning, which leads to the emergence of metaphorical understanding, is of special concern. The article elaborates on how features of our experience of inhibited breathing map onto our experience of mental disquietude. The analysis draws primarily from Johnson (1987), Lakoff (1987), Lakoff and Johnson (1980), and Reddy (1979) and borrows insight from James and Perls. (shrink)

In this book, Alison Stone develops a feminist approach to maternal subjectivity. Stone argues that in the West the self has often been understood in opposition to the maternal body, so that one must separate oneself from the mother and maternal care-givers on whom one depended in childhood to become a self or, in modernity, an autonomous subject. These assumptions make it difficult to be a mother and a subject, an autonomous creator of meaning. Insofar as mothers nonetheless strive (...) to regain their subjectivity when their motherhood seems to have compromised it, theirs cannot be the usual kind of subjectivity premised on separation from the maternal body. Mothers are subjects of a new kind, who generate meanings and acquire agency from their position of re-immersion in the realm of maternal body relations, of bodily intimacy and dependency. Thus Stone interprets maternal subjectivity as a specific form of subjectivity that is continuous with the maternal body. Stone analyzes this form of subjectivity in terms of how the mother typically reproduces with her child her history of bodily relations with her own mother, leading to a distinctive maternal and cyclical form of lived time. (shrink)

Recently, following the social and subjective consequences of the neoliberal wave, there seems to be a renewed interest in work as occupying a central place in social and subjective life. For the first time in decades, both sociologists and critical theorists once more again regard work as a major constituent of the subject’s identity and thus as an appropriate object of analysis for those engaged in critique of the social pathologies. The aim of this article is to present a succinct (...) analysis of Axel Honneth’s thoughts on the concept of work and to propose an approach granting it a more substantial role in social theory. To this end, this article will embark upon a reappraisal of the importance of the material and psychological dimensions of the subject’s interactions in the world of work. It aims to demonstrate that the normative demands associated with these dimensions are, like the normative demands of recognition, immanent and universal. In other words, it will argue that the normative ideals related to individuals’ bodily and psychic life (in the workplace and beyond) are not necessarily utopian in the negative sense (abstract and unrealistic). If this is indeed the case, theorists could take these normative demands for emancipation as a guide to analyzing the sociological, political and moral implications of the transition from the ‘Fordist’ to the ‘post-Fordist’ organization of labor. (shrink)

This essay addresses the question of virtual church, particularly on whether or not liturgy can be done virtually. We will approach our subject from a somewhat unusual perspective by looking to types of aesthetic experiences which we have been doing “virtually” for a long time. By exploring how we experience art in virtual and physical contexts, we gain insight into the corresponding experiences in liturgical practices. Drawing on Mikel Dufrenne, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gabriel Marcel, I first examine the importance of (...) the body when we experience “presence” in aesthetic environments. Next, I consider the weight of the body in experiences of presence in liturgical practices, both in person and virtual, guided again by Gabriel Marcel as well as Bruce Ellis Benson, Emmanuel Falque, Christina Gschwandtner and Éric Palazzo. Through these reflections, I argue that what art teaches us about the significance of the physical closeness of the human applies to the practice of liturgy and that, while unexpected benefits will surface in virtual settings, nothing replaces the powerful experiences that arise when the body is physically present. (shrink)

Philosophers investigating the experiences of the dancing subject (Sheets-Johnstone 1980, 2009, 2011, 2012; Parviainen 1998; Legrand 2007, 2013; Legrand & Ravn 2009; Montero 2013; Foultier & Roos 2013) unearth vast variations of embodied consciousness and cognition in performing body experts. The traditional phenomenological literature provides us with descriptions and definitions of reflective self-consciousness as well as of pre-reflective bodily absorption, but when it comes to the states of self-consciousness dance philosophers refer to as thinking in movement and a form (...) of reflective consciousness at a bodily level – as well as to dancers’ re- ported experiences of being in a trance and yet hyper-aware – we are challenged in terms of terminology and precise descriptions. After empirical research on dancers’ experiences and studies of the above-mentioned philosophies of dance, aligning this material with Husserl, Zahavi and other phenomenologists’ descriptions of reflection and embodied self-consciousness, I find it plausible to acknowledge the existence of a third form of self- consciousness: embodied reflection, a reflective process experienced through and with the embodied and/or emotional self. In this article I aspire to capture the characteristics of this transcendence of the bodily self. (shrink)

I argue that we find the articulation of a problem concerning bodily agency in the early works of the Merleau-Ponty which he explicates as analogous to what he explicitly calls the problem of perception. The problem of perception is the problem of seeing how we can have the object given in person through it perspectival appearances. The problem concerning bodily agency is the problem of seeing how our bodily movements can be the direct manifestation of a person’s (...) intentions in the world. In both cases what, according to Merleau-Ponty, obscures a recognition of the phenomenon in question is a conception of our bodily capacities, i.e. our sensibility and our motility, which reduces these to the workings of mechanisms that are blind to meaning. I argue that both the problem concerning perception and the problem concerning bodily agency can be properly called transcendental. The problem of perception is transcendental because it concerns the very intelligibility of appearances and judgements with empirical content. The problem of bodily agency is transcendental in the sense that it concerns the very intelligibility of our bodily capacity to carry out intentions and by implication the intelligibility of our intentions as such. (shrink)

In this existential reading of Kim Kardashian-West's International Women's Day selfie of 2016, I focus on the rise of selfie culture and public discourse around emerging digital representations of women's bodies. The selfie is a relatively new phenomenon, and is particularly curious because of the subject/object paradox it creates; in taking a selfie, a person asserts control over their own image, but at the same time, becomes object in their own gaze. My argument is that selfies, like other assertions of (...) bodily subjectivity in digital spaces, are a threat to patriarchal structures that paint women as immanent, object, as reflected in public discourse around Kardashian-West's International Women's Day selfie. I draw on both Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's work on subjectivity in existentialism and phenomenology, as well as Amy Shields Dobson's work on post-feminism and young women's projections of self, in order to delineate what it is about the selfie that creates this paradox. I also make reference to the work of Elisabeth Grosz and Frantz Fanon in relation to a colonial hierarchy that prioritises body over mind, as well as Laura Mulvey's work on the male gaze. (shrink)

Both the slasher movie and its more recent counterpart the "torture porn" film centralize graphic depictions of violence. This article inspects the nature of these portrayals by examining a motif commonly found in the cinema of homicide, dubbed here the "pure moment of murder": that is, the moment in which two characters’ bodies adjoin onscreen in an instance of graphic violence. By exploring a number of these incidents (and their various modes of representation) in American horror films ranging from Psycho (...) (1960) to Saw VI (2009), the article aims to expound how these images of slaughter demonstrate (albeit in an augmented, hyperbolic manner) a number of long-standing problems surrounding selfhood that continue to fuel philosophical discussion. The article argues that the visual adjoining of victim and killer onscreen echoes the conundrum that in order to attain identity, the individual requires and yet simultaneously repudiates the Other that constitutes unique subjectivity. (shrink)

Cartesian and Western religious and philosophical traditions distinguish the body from the mind, viewing the former as a prison or a burden. The mind (spirit, soul, rationality) is identified as good, while the body is devalued and associated with evil. Some philosophers restored the body's value: humans are not imprisoned spirits, but they are their bodies. Husserl, for example, claims that human beings are not an immaterial substance in a Körper, a physical body, but Leib, a living body that solves (...) within itself the two Cartesian res. Although the Cartesian legacy survives in the Existentialism in the distinction between In-itself (the passive Being) and For-itself (the human, transcendental freedom), the second does not use the object-body as the res cogitans did: "the very nature of the For-itself demands that it be body." Nevertheless, the body plays an ambivalent role, suspended between Körper's passivity and Leib's transcendence. The chapter's focus on Arkham's female characters is not random. Leder notices that "women have consistently been associated with the bodily sphere. They have been linked with nature, sexuality, and the passions, whereas men have been identified with the rational mind. This equation implicitly legitimizes structures of domination." By associating human categories like "lunatics," "savages," or women with the immanence of the body and nature, their transcendentality is denied, and, simultaneously, men's control and domination over them is justified. (shrink)

In my article "Controlling the noise," I present a phenomenological investigation of bodily experience in anorexia nervosa. Turning to descriptions of those who have suffered from AN, which repeatedly detail the experience of finding their bodies threatening, out of control and noisy, I suggest that the phenomenological conceptions of body-as-object, body-as-subject and visceral body can help us unpack the complex bodily experience of AN throughout its various stages. My claim is that self-starvation is enacted by a bodily-subject (...) who wishes to quell or reassert authority over a visceral body whose demands and needs she finds threatening to her autonomy.The relationship between body-as-object and... (shrink)

In this paper I investigate Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological theory of intersubjectivity. It turns out that any such theory requires a conceptualisation of the relation between the bodily subject and the objective reality that takes historicity seriously.

Deafferented subjects, while lacking proprioceptive awareness of much of their bodies, are nevertheless able to use their bodies in basic action. Sustained visual contact with the body parts of which they are no longer proprioceptively aware enables them to move these parts in a controlled way. This might be taken to straightforwardly show that proprioceptive awareness is inessential to bodily action. I, however, argue that this is not the case. Proprioceptive awareness figures essentially in our self-conscious unity as practical (...) subjects. Recognizing this allows us to better understand the nature of the impairment with which deafferented subjects live. (shrink)

In this paper, I will explore a concept of person in Kant based on two features: the unity of consciousness and the consciousness of the numerical identity of one’s body in time. The reason for choosing these features is that I take as my starting point the notion of personhood from rational psychology that appears in the major premise of the third paralogism (A361). I will focus on the second feature in order to show that since Kant it is possible (...) to think of the body not merely as an object, but as a subject, i.e., that bodily awareness is self-awareness. I will explain this on the basis of what I will denominate the thesis of corporeality. To develop this thesis, I will draw on passages from Kant’s work and contemporary considerations of bodily awareness, specifically the immunity to error through misidentification. (shrink)

Experientialism about the sense of bodily ownership is the view that there is something it is like to feel a body as one’s own. In this paper I argue for a particular experientialist thesis. I first present a puzzle about the relation between bodily awareness and self-consciousness, and introduce a somewhat underappreciated view on the sense of bodily ownership, Implicit Reflexivity, that points us in the right direction as to how to address this puzzle. I argue that (...) Implicit Reflexivity, however, does not provide a full solution to the puzzle. I then introduce a novel view on the sense of bodily ownership that inherits a central tenet, Reflexivity, from the above view, without having its flaws. According to Reflexivity, the sense of bodily ownership consists in the reflexive character of bodily sensations, namely in the fact that bodily sensations have experience-dependent properties as part of their content. Cashed out this way, Reflexivity is an attractive way of explicating the notion that bodily sensations are experiences of the body as subject. Reflexivity also highlights a central, but so far neglected, connection between the sense of bodily ownership and the sense of experience ownership. (shrink)

The usual visual experiences possess a perspectival phenomenology as they seem to present objects from a certain perspective. Nevertheless, it is not obvious how to characterise experiential content determining such phenomenology. In particular, while there are many works investigating perspectival properties of experienced objects, a question regarding how subject is represented in visual perspectival experiences attracted less attention. In order to address this problem, I consider four popular phenomenal intuitions regarding perspectival experiences and argue that the major theories of perspectival (...) experiences do not account for all of them. Relying on these observations, I show how a theory which accommodates all these intuitions can be developed by (a) recognising that visual perspectival experiences are, in fact, multimodal visuo-bodily experiences and (b) distinguishing between egocentric and structural contents. (shrink)

The purpose of this project is to argue that we possess a minimal self. It will demonstrate that minimal selfhood arrives early in our development and continues to remain and influence us throughout our entire life. There are two areas of research which shape my understanding of the minimal self: phenomenology and enactivism. Phenomenology emphasizes the sense of givenness, ownership, or mineness that accompanies all of our experiences. Enactivism says there is a sensorimotor coupling that occurs between us and the (...) environment in a way which modulates the dynamic patterns of our self development; the laying down of these basic patterns helps make us who we are and gives rise to the phenomenological, experiential mineness. Drawing on these two core ideas, I will be arguing for a Phenomenological-Enactive Minimal Self. I will be emphasizing the role of the body and the role of affects as the most important components relevant to understanding minimal selfhood. Put more concretely, the set of conditions which constitute the PEMS view are: The minimal self is the experiential subject; the minimal sense of self is present whenever there is awareness. It is the subjectivity of experience, the sense of mineness, or givenness which our experiences contain. The phenomenological part of the PEMS view turns on the idea of a bodily and dynamic integration of sensorimotor coupling and affective experience. It is, ontologically speaking, the lived body in enactive engagement with the environment. It is this embodied subject which anchors and forms the foundation for the later ‘narrative’ self, which emerges from it and which is continually influenced by it. It is the subject enactively engaged with others, dependent on sensorimotor processes and affects. We have an identity, but it emerges from relational and dynamic processes. (shrink)

The right to withdraw from participation in research is recognized in virtually all national and international guidelines for research on human subjects. It is therefore surprising that there has been little justification for that right in the literature. We argue that the right to withdraw should protect research participants from information imbalance, inability to hedge, inherent uncertainty, and untoward bodily invasion, and it serves to bolster public trust in the research enterprise. Although this argument is not radical, it provides (...) a useful way to determine how the right should be applied in various cases. (shrink)

For agents like us, the feeling of effort is a very useful thing. It helps us sense how hard an action is, control its level of intensity, and decide whether to continue or stop performing it. While there has been progress in understanding the feeling of mental effort and the feeling of bodily effort, this has not translated into a unified account of the general feeling of effort. To advance in this direction, I defend the single-feeling view, which states (...) that the feeling of effort is one and the same for both mental and bodily actions. This feeling represents the subjective costs, both mental and physical, of performing a given action. Cost-based approaches have recently become influential for the feeling of mental effort. Here I focus on arguing that our sense of bodily effort does not simply represent physiological processes, but rather represents the subjective costs of a bodily action. Through this paper I discuss the role of the feeling of effort (and affective states more broadly) in action guidance and the sense of agency. I also define efforts themselves in terms of the feeling of effort. (shrink)

There is no unique and definitive definition of phenomenology. It is rather a method and an experience always open and always renewing itself. Phenomenology involves a change in the "sense of the world": everything acquires its sense and value only when it becomes the content of the lived experience of the subject correlated to his intentional acts. This is the main thesis of the phenomenological method aiming at overcoming the traditional opposition between rationalism and empiricism. Starting from Husserl, the father (...) of this approach, the history of phenomenology undertook different and unexpected developments which in some cases were rather far away from Husserl's original thought. In the U.K. attention has been given to an analytical-epistemological phenomenology focused on the relationship between intentionality and logical semantics. In France it is mainly an anthropological-existential phenomenology. In Germany an hermeneutic phenomenology was developed, mainly by Heidegger and Gadamer. Regardless of these raw distinctions, a big question is so far unresolved: how to reconcile the phenomenological/ existential stance claiming for the irreducibility of each lived experience and the scientific paradigm? Is it possible to imagine brain mechanisms and physiological systems explaining the endless mysteries and manifold paradoxes of the human being? Phenomenology claims that a human being can never be considered as an object, as if he was a natural thing; rather the task is to understand him as the focus of a relationship linking subjective attitudes to the objects showed by the experience. In this sense, an important contribution was Merleau-Ponty's view that man is not something psychic joined to an organism, but a sort of fluctuation of the existence that sometimes is a bodily one, sometimes refers to personal acts. Consequently, he proposes to reinstate in the existence both its "physiological" and "psychic" sides both being intentionally oriented towards a world. (shrink)

Contemporary theories of self-consciousness typically begin by dividing experiences of the self into types, each requiring separate explanation. The stereotypical case of an out of body experience may be seen to suggest a distinction between the sense of oneself as an experiencing subject, a mental entity, and a sense of oneself as an embodied person, a bodily entity. Point of view, in the sense of the place from which the subject seems to experience the world, in this case is (...) tied to the sense of oneself as a mental entity and seems to be the ‘real’ self. Closer reading of reports, however, suggests a substantially more complicated picture. For example, the ‘real’ self that is experienced as separate from the body in an OBE is not necessarily experienced as disembodied. Subjects may experience themselves as having two bodies. In cases classed as heautoscopy there is considerable confusion regarding the apparent location of the experiencing subject; is it the ‘real mind’ in the body I seem to be looking out from, or is it in the body that I see? This suggests that visual point of view can dissociate from the experience of one’s own “real mind” or experience of self-identification. I provide a tripartite distinction between the sense of ownership, the sense of embodiment and the sense of subjectivity to better describe these experiences. The phenomenology of OBEs suggests that there are three distinct forms of self-consciousness which need to be explained. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to relate the critical core of Jesus Conill’s last book, Bodily Intimacy and the Human Person. From Nietzsche to Ortega and Zubiri, with the problem of nihilism, as a structure that survives in our contemporary societies, especially in the context of neurosciences, technology and our way of relating to both. After outlining the key insights of the book, especially its innovative conception of bodily intimacy, I will retrieve some contributions from Nietzsche’s notes (...) regarding nihilism, to show that after the “death of God”, other instances take his place, the logics of nihilism remain intact and underly the majority approach of neurosciences. I will conclude that the elements presented by Conill for a strong intimacy and subjectivity will be necessary for the task, still pending, of overcoming nihilism. (shrink)

The current thesis discusses how tools for analysing power are developed predominately for adults, and thus remain underdeveloped in terms of understanding injustices related to age, ethnicity/race and gender in childhoods. The overall aim of this dissertation is to inscribe a discourse of intersecting social injustices as relevant for childhoods and child welfare, and by interlinking postcolonial, feminist, and critical childhood studies. The dissertation is set empirically within the policy and practice of Swedish child welfare, here exemplified by the assessment (...) framework Barns Behov i Centrum. It aims to explore how Swedish child welfare, as a field of knowledge, modes of knowing and knowing subjects, constitutes an arena for claims and responses to intersecting social justice issues. The material consists of BBIC primers and selected samples from, a total of 283 case reports from a Swedish social service agency. The case reports address assessments of children. This dissertation is based on four qualitative studies using discourse analysis, as well as analysis inspired by thematic and case-study methodology. Two studies focus on child welfare discourses in BBIC documents involving social problems and violence, and two studies are based on child welfare case reports. Studies I­­-II address child welfare policy and practice by analysing the conditions required for children to participate, in terms of children’s moral status and in terms of status of ‘evidencing’ needs for protection. Studies III­­-IV explore this further from the perspective of intersecting and embodied social injustices in childhoods. Together, the studies interconnect child welfare as a field of knowledge, modes of knowing and knowers with child welfare as a moral arena for claims to rights, recognition, and social justice. The synthesised findings point to child biowelfare, in which justice discourses are largely absent. Biowelfare is informed by a mode of knowing and ‘evidencing’ risks to children’s health and development, which are confined to scientific predicting-believing, seeing-believing by professionals and a moral economy of care, all of which constrain the idea that injustices are structural and intersecting. Biowelfare primarily responds to children as ‘speaking’ biological bodies, rather than as voices of justice. In this sense, injustices of an epistemological nature are interconnected with social injustices. When issues of justice are mobilised in case reports and policy, they come across as rather ‘unjust’, primarily confined to the sphere of the family home of racialised children and not connected to ‘general’ children. In addition to intersections of age, ethnicity/race and gender, class and health are fundamental to recognition and protection in biowelfare. Finally, the dissertation indicates the need for a moral economy which responds to intersecting social injustices such as racial, gender-based and ageist violence in childhoods, and violations of children’s bodily integrity. (shrink)

I introduce a novel multidimensional framework tailored to investigate a set of phenomena that might appear intractable and render them amenable to scientific inquiry. In particular, I focus on examining altered states of consciousness that appear to the experiencing subject as “contentless” or “objectless” states in some form, either by having disrupted or reduced content of awareness, or content that appears as missing altogether. By drawing on empirical research, I propose a cluster of phenomenological dimensions aimed at enhancing our understanding (...) of this group of experiences of minimal awareness, including “Richness of the Content”, “Bodily-Awareness”, “Passage of Time”, “Attentional Focus”, and “Self-Revelation”. The result is a robust framework that provides precise scientific terminology, facilitating its operationalisation and adaptability for future empirical work. I show the explanatory power of this framework through a case study of the state of clear light sleep—a state widely reported by Indo-Tibetan Buddhist traditions as an instance of pure awareness during sleep, a state of consciousness-as-such. This rare phenomenon has gained increasing attention in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind for the study of the nature of consciousness. However, we still lack consensus on its characterisation and potential identity with other associated states. I end the paper by illustrating how the state of clear light sleep can be situated in relation to other associated states and more ordinary ones as regions of a multidimensional state space. (shrink)

Dancers and dance philosophers report on experiences of a certain form of sense making and bodily thinking through the dancing body. Yet, discussions on expertise and consciousness are often framed within canonical philosophical world-views that make it difficult to fully recognize, verbalize, and value the full variety of embodied and affective facets of subjectivity. Using qualitative interviews with five professional dancers and choreographers, I make an attempt to disclose the characteristics of what I consider to be a largely (...) overseen state of consciousness: embodied reflection. Dancers are familiar with this attentive bodily presence, which constitutes their work mode and heightens their abilities as experts. Detailed descriptions of their daily work at the theatre help us grasp the qualities and understand the enigmas of the absorbed state of bodily thinking. Husserl’s theories on reflection and Merleau-Ponty’s work on motoricity support our understanding of the structures behind embodied reflection. I believe it is a common human resource, and that whether we are experts or not, we all have the ability to reflect non-conceptually through bodily and/or affective activity. (shrink)

What are the most detailed descriptions under which subjects intend to perform bodily actions? According to Pacherie (2006), these descriptions may be found by looking into motor representations—action representations in the brain that determine the movements to be performed. Specifically, for any motor representation guiding an action, its subject has an M‐intention representing that action in as much detail. I show that some M‐intentions breach the constraints that intentions should meet. I then identify a set of intentions—motor intentions—that represent (...) actions in as much detail as some motor representations while meeting the constraints that intentions should meet. (shrink)

Anorexia Nervosa (AN) is a complex disorder characterised by self-starvation, an act of self-destruction. It is often described as a disorder marked by paradoxes and, despite extensive research attention, is still not well understood. Much AN research focuses upon the distorted body image that individuals with AN supposedly experience. However, based upon reports from individuals describing their own experience of AN, I argue that their bodily experience is much more complex than this focus might lead us to believe. Such (...) research often presents an overly cognitive understanding of bodily experience in AN, underplaying the affective, felt experience of individuals with AN, as well as descriptions of empowerment, strength and control reported in the early stages of AN. This paper seeks to enrich our understanding of bodily experience in AN as it progresses throughout the various stages of the disorder. I show how the classical phenomenological distinction between the body-as-subject and the body-as-object, as well as Leder’s conception of the visceral body, can inform our understanding of bodily experience in AN. I suggest that the project of self-starvation is an attempt to overcome the noisy demands of the visceral body, which are experienced as threatening the body-as-subject, through a process of objectifying the body-as-object. By cashing out AN as a project of radical bodily control that, tragically, comes to control the individual, we can capture important aspects of the bodily experience of AN and the temporal progression of the disorder. -/- . (shrink)

El consentimiento informado del paciente se inserta en el ámbito de su autonomía decisoria. Aunque presenta un sustrato corporal, este aparece combinado con elementos de índole moral que presuponen una noción concreta de persona como libre y autónoma. Tanto de las definiciones doctrinales como del material normativo se desprende que se trata de una posición jurídica subjetiva del paciente, alternativamente calificada como una “pretensión” o “derecho subjetivo en sentido estricto”, en términos hohfeldianos; un “derecho negativo de defensa”, o una “inmunidad”. (...) En España, el Tribunal Constitucional ha vinculado el consentimiento informado del paciente al derecho fundamental a la integridad física y moral (15 CE), lo cual permite plantear el análisis en clave iusfundamental. Con todo, se advierten dudas e incompatibilidades entre la explicación habitual del consentimiento informado, su fundamento constitucional y su regulación jurídica. El objetivo del presente libro consiste en proporcionar una definición integral del consentimiento informado como derecho subjetivo del paciente y como manifestación de un derecho fundamental, a partir de una óptica poliédrica que aporta certeza en la práctica asistencial y jurídica. // The patient's right to informed consent is inserted within the scope of his decisional autonomy. Although it has a bodily background, it is combined with features of moral nature, which presupposes a concrete notion of the person as free and autonomous. Both, doctrinal approaches and normative legal material show that it is a subjective legal position of the patient, being alternatively qualified as a Hohfeldian “claim” or a “subjective right in a strict sense”; a "negative right" or an "immunity." The Spanish Constitutional Court has linked the informed consent of the patient to the fundamental right to physical and moral integrity (15 CE), which allows us to propose a fundamental rights-based analysis. Nonetheless, doubts and inconsistencies are perceived between the customary explanation of informed consent, its constitutional foundation and its legal regulation. The aim of this book is to provide a comprehensive definition of informed consent as subjective right of the patient and expression of a fundamental right, from a multi-fold perspective that provides certainty in both legal and health care practice. (shrink)

Evaluativism is best thought of as a way of enriching a perceptual view of pain to account for pain’s unpleasantness or painfulness. Once it was common for philosophers to contrast pains with perceptual experiences (McGinn 1982; Rorty 1980). It was thought that perceptual experiences were intentional (or content-bearing, or about something), whereas pains were representationally blank. But today many of us reject this contrast. For us, your having a pain in your toe is a matter not of your sensing “pain-ly” (...) or encountering a sense-datum, but of your having an interoceptive experience representing (accurately or inaccurately) that your toe is in a particular experience-independent condition, such as undergoing a certain “disturbance” or being damaged or in danger (Armstrong 1962; Tye 1995). But even if such representational content makes an experience a pain, a further ingredient seems required to make the pain unpleasant. According to evaluativism, the further ingredient is the experience’s possession of evaluative content: its representing the bodily condition as bad for the subject. In this chapter, I elaborate evaluativism, locate it among alternatives, and explain its attractions and challenges. (shrink)

Phenomenology has been adapted for use in qualitative health research, where it’s often used as a method for conducting interviews and analyzing interview data. But how can phenomenologists study subjects who cannot accurately reflect upon or report their own experiences, for instance, because of a psychiatric or neurological disorder? For conditions like these, qualitative researchers may gain more insight by conducting observational studies in lieu of, or in conjunction with, interviews. In this article, we introduce a phenomenological approach to conducting (...) this kind of observational research. The approach relies on conceptual grounding to focus a study on specific aspects of the participants’ experiences. Moreover, the approach maintains the openness to novel discoveries that qualitative research requires while also providing a structured framework for data collection and analysis. To illustrate its practical application, we use examples of hemispatial neglect—a neurologic disorder in which patients characteristically lack awareness of their own illness and bodily capacities. However, the approach that we describe can be applied more broadly to the study of complex illness experiences and other experiential alterations. (shrink)

In the Sāṁkhya, Puruṣa (self) is free, inactive and it is the nature of consciousness (cetanā). It is beyond time and space, and it has both merit and demerit, attachment and detachment. It is real form which is not bounded. All actions, pleasure and suffering, change and feeling, etc. are the distortions of the body. Puruṣa (self) is beyond the bodily and mental suffering (dukhaḥ). Puruṣa (self) is neither the cause nor the effect. Puruṣa (self) is not material, and (...) it is also not known by direct perception. Ācharya Śaṅkara critiques the Sāṁkhya view and says, If Puruṣa (self) is inactive then how can it possibly influence the others? Śaṅkara also questions the relation of the Puruṣa (self) with the Prakṛṭi (non-self). This paper elaborates the nature and the existence of Puruṣa (self), purpose of the inactive Puruṣa (self), the subjectivity of Puruṣa (self) from the text “Sāṁkhyakārikā”. A critical analysis of Śaṅkara‟s critique of the “Sāṁkhyakārikā” is made and by providing an analytical assessment of the self (Puruṣa) and its relation with the non-self (Prakṛṭi) the paper attempts at arguing against Śaṅkara‟s logic. (shrink)

This paper tries to show that the naturalistic view of addiction is mired in contradictions that stem from reducing the addict to a weak-willed subject who loses control over his or her body. From a phenomenological perspective, addiction reveals itself to be a habit which eventually becomes harmful, but has its primary sources in the embodied needs of a worldly subject. The aim of this paper is to uncover the dimensions of the lived addiction that are neglected in the contemporary (...) naturalistic discourse: the lived-body and the worldly context of the addict. Firstly, we try to do justice to the variety of addictions by underlying that their new and surprising forms are determined by the intersubjective tissue wherein the subject operates. Secondly, the loss of control in addiction, how the subject deals with the tendency to satisfy a need, is experienced as powerlessness, as expressed in the accounts of ecstasy addicts regarding altered states of mind. The last section of this paper will argue that this sense of powerlessness cannot be equated with a weakness of the will because a strong, forceful will engenders the same vertigo of being prey to strange powers. The embodied aspect of addiction and the spontaneous, bodily need it saturates will clarify further this claim. (shrink)

Discussions of sexual ethics often focus on the wrong of treating another as a mere object instead of as a person worthy of respect. On this view, the task of sexual ethics becomes putting the other’s subjectivity above their status as erotic object so as to avoid the harms of objectification. Ward and Anderson argue that such a view disregards the crucial, moral role that erotic objecthood plays in sexual encounters. Important moral features of intimacy are disclosed through the (...) experience of being an erotic object for another, as well as in perceiving another as an erotic object. Drawing on phenomenology, especially the insights of Simone de Beauvoir, Ward and Anderson argue that erotic encounters are shaped by the human condition of ambiguity, where being an object for others is intertwined with bodily agency. Because sexual agency is complex in this way, theories of sexual ethics and responsibility must widen their focus beyond transparent communication and authoritative expressions of will. (shrink)

We call our thoughts conscious, and we also say the same of our bodily sensations, perceptions and other sensory experiences. But thoughts and sensory experiences are very different phenomena, both from the point of view of their subject and in their functional or cognitive role. Does this mean, then, that there are very different kinds or varieties of consciousness? Philosophers do often talk about different kinds of consciousness: Christopher Hill, for example, claims that ‘it is customary to distinguish five (...) forms of consciousness’ (Hill 2009: 1). These are: agent consciousness, propositional consciousness, introspective consciousness, relational consciousness and phenomenal consciousness; to which Hill adds experiential consciousness, making six in total. (shrink)

Sydney Shoemaker, developing an idea of Wittgenstein’s, argues that we are immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun. Although we might be liable to error when “I” (or its cognates) is used as an object, we are immune to error when “I” is used as a subject (as when one says, “I have a toothache”). Shoemaker claims that the relationship between “I” as-subject and the mental states of which it is introspectively aware is tautological: when, say, we (...) judge that “I feel pain,” we are tautologically aware that feels pain is instantiated and that it is instantiated in oneself. Moreover, he contends that this relationship holds not just for bodily sensations, but also for the sense of agency and for visual perception. But we deny that this relationship is tautological; instead, we treat Shoemaker’s principle (IEM) as a hypothesis. We then proceed to show that certain pathological states and experimentally-induced illusions can be adduced to show that IEM describes not a necessary relationship but a contingent relationship, one that sometimes fails to obtain. That we are not immune to error in the way Shoemaker describes has grave consequences for many aspects of his ideas concerning the first-person perspective. In the course of arguing that these empirical phenomena count against IEM, we also show that not only can the content of conscious experience be misrepresented, so too can the subject: that is, not only can the what of conscious experience be misrepresented, so too can the who. (shrink)

Advancements in modern “post-classical narratology” have undergone unprecedented growth in the last two decades, giving rise to various directions of narratological research within the cognitive and diachronic domains. One such approach is biosemiotics, which appeared at the crossroads of semiotics and cultural biology and combines a set of definitions for meaning-making and agency construction in philosophy, linguistics, culture, and all complex systems. Agency here represents any kind of subject activity (e.g., epistemic, cognitive, etc.) that can be determined by the indices (...) and icons of subjectivity at the level of the storyline development and then compared at the level of the discourse. From the biosemiotic approach, the narrative discourse as a complex system is characterised by the meaning emergence and telic behavior of all its constituent parts striving at closure and a certain goal, i.e., having some agenda. Thus, the agency is supplementary to the acting of the self-reflecting subject in terms of intentionality, self-referentiality, and self-governing activity. Following the above definition of agency, this paper examines the possible ways of applying Peircian triadic sign theory to narrative agency construction in the contemporary novel “Asymmetry” (2018) by Lisa Halliday, operating with the notions of bodily and biosemiotic agency. Seeing subjectivity related to perspective-taking in the narrative discourse, it is important to trace the distribution of the icons and indexes of subjectivity on three levels: semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic. (shrink)

Why think that emotions are kinds of evaluations? This chapter puts forward an original account of emotions as evaluations apt to circumvent some of the chief difficulties with which alternative approaches find themselves confronted. We shall proceed by first introducing the idea that emotions are evaluations (sec. I). Next, two well-known approaches attempting to account for this idea in terms of attitudes that are in and of themselves unemotional but are alleged to become emotional when directed towards evaluative contents are (...) explored. According to the first approach, emotions are nothing but evaluative judgments. Sec. II reminds the reader of the problems associated with this idea: one of its consequences is to deprive creatures with limited cognitive capacities of any sort of partaking of emotional life. According to the second approach, which is often praised for its capacity to avoid the pitfalls facing an appeal to evaluative judgments, emotions are perception-like experiences of evaluative properties and are as such within the reach of creatures bereft of conceptual capacities. This perceptual theory is taken up in sect. III, in which we explain why it remains unsatisfactory insofar as it shares with the evaluative judgement theory the idea that what makes emotions evaluations is the specific contents that they have. On this basis, we proceed by outlining in sect. IV an alternative—the attitudinal theory of emotions. Its main point of departure from current theorizing about the emotions consists in elucidating the fact that emotions are evaluations not in terms of what they represent, but rather in terms of the sort of attitude subjects take towards what they represent. We explore here what sorts of attitudes emotions are and defend the idea that they are felt bodily attitudes. (shrink)