Overview

Our own body seems to be the object that we know the best for we constantly receive a flow of internal information about it. Yet bodily awareness has attracted little attention in the literature. Mind the Body is the first comprehensive treatment of bodily awareness. Frédérique de Vignemont seeks to answer questions such as: how do I perceive my body? How do I perceive other people's bodies? Can I really feel your pain? What makes me feel this specific body is my own? Why do I care about it? To what extent can I feel an avatar's body as my own? To answer these questions, we need a better understanding of the various aspects of bodily self-awareness, including the spatiality of bodily sensations, their multimodality, their role in social cognition, their relation to action, and to self-defence. This volume combines philosophical analysis with recent experimental results from cognitive science, leading us to question some of our most basic intuitions.

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9780198858027

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Reviews

The body is always there in William James's famous phrase ... but this pervasiveness makes it harder, rather than easier, to understand the relation between body and self. This book extends the current focus on the importance of the body in philosophy of mind, using the recent surge in experimental studies of bodily awareness. In doing so, it provides the first cognitively-informed account of how, and perhaps even why, we are aware of our body as our own. It is a rare and compelling example of how combining conceptual analysis and experimental data can advance cognitive theory. * Patrick Haggard, University College London * Frederique de Vignemont has written a superb book on the body and the sense of body ownership: what its function is and how it is grounded in spatial experience and affective phenomenology. It combines incisive philosophical argumentation with total command of the psychology and neuroscience of bodily experience. It is the best philosophical book ever on the body and a model of how to do empirically informed philosophy of mind. * Ned Block, New York University * [an] extremely well-researched and thought-provoking book, which certainly adds substantially to the interdisciplinary study of bodily awareness and bodily experience. * Jose Luis Bermudez, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *

[an] extremely well-researched and thought-provoking book, which certainly adds substantially to the interdisciplinary study of bodily awareness and bodily experience. * José Luis Bermúdez, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews * Frédérique de Vignemont has written a superb book on the body and the sense of body ownership: what its function is and how it is grounded in spatial experience and affective phenomenology. It combines incisive philosophical argumentation with total command of the psychology and neuroscience of bodily experience. It is the best philosophical book ever on the body and a model of how to do empirically informed philosophy of mind. * Ned Block, New York University * The body is ""always there"" in William James's famous phrase ... but this pervasiveness makes it harder, rather than easier, to understand the relation between body and self. This book extends the current focus on the importance of the body in philosophy of mind, using the recent surge in experimental studies of bodily awareness. In doing so, it provides the first cognitively-informed account of how, and perhaps even why, we are aware of our body as our own. It is a rare and compelling example of how combining conceptual analysis and experimental data can advance cognitive theory. * Patrick Haggard, University College London *

[an] extremely well-researched and thought-provoking book, which certainly adds substantially to the interdisciplinary study of bodily awareness and bodily experience. * Jose Luis Bermudez, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews * Frederique de Vignemont has written a superb book on the body and the sense of body ownership: what its function is and how it is grounded in spatial experience and affective phenomenology. It combines incisive philosophical argumentation with total command of the psychology and neuroscience of bodily experience. It is the best philosophical book ever on the body and a model of how to do empirically informed philosophy of mind. * Ned Block, New York University * The body is always there in William James's famous phrase ... but this pervasiveness makes it harder, rather than easier, to understand the relation between body and self. This book extends the current focus on the importance of the body in philosophy of mind, using the recent surge in experimental studies of bodily awareness. In doing so, it provides the first cognitively-informed account of how, and perhaps even why, we are aware of our body as our own. It is a rare and compelling example of how combining conceptual analysis and experimental data can advance cognitive theory. * Patrick Haggard, University College London *

Author Information

Frédérique de Vignemont is a CNRS research director at the Jean Nicod Institute in Paris. Her research is at the intersection of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Her major current works focus on bodily awareness, self-consciousness, and social cognition. Her new project investigates the perceptual peculiarities of peripersonal space, which can be conceived of as the territory of the self. She has published widely in philosophy and psychology journals on the first-person, body schema, agency, empathy, and more recently on pain. She is the recipient of the 2015 Young Mind & Brain prize. She is also one of the executive editors of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology.

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