Lived body

Abstract: Written over a span of more than two decades, the essays by Iris Marion Young collected in this volume describe diverse aspects of women's lived body experience in modern Western societies. Drawing on the ideas of several twentieth century continental philosophers-including Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty-Young constructs rigorous analytic categories for interpreting embodied subjectivity. The essays combine theoretical description of experience with normative evaluation of the unjust constraints on their freedom and opportunity that continue to burden many women. The lead essay rethinks the purpose of the category of "gender" for feminist theory, after important debates have questioned its usefulness. Young's classic essay, "Throwing Like a Girl," is reprinted here, along with a comment of the impact of that essay twenty years later. Newer essays include reflection on the meaning of being at home, and the need for privacy in old age residences. Other essays analyze aspects of the experience of women and girls that have received little attention even in feminist theory-such as the sexuality of breasts, or menstruation as punctuation in a woman's life story. Young describes the phenomenology of moving in a pregnant body and the tactile pleasures of clothing. While academically rigorous, the essays are also written with engaging style, incorporating vivid imagery and autobiographical narrative. On Female Body Experience raises issues and takes positions that speak to scholars and students in philosophy, sociology, geography, medicine, nursing, and education.

Abstract: The same neural structures involved in the unconscious modeling of our acting body in space also contribute to our awareness of the lived body and of the objects that the world contains. Neuroscientific research also shows that there are neural mechanisms mediating between the multi-level personal experience we entertain of our lived body, and the implicit certainties we simultaneously hold about others. Such personal and body-related experiential knowledge enables us to understand the actions performed by others, and to directly decode the emotions and sensations they experience. A common functional mechanism is at the basis of both body awareness and basic forms of social understanding: embodied simulation. It will be shown that the present proposal is consistent with some of the perspectives offered by phenomenology.

Abstract: Introduction: A Phenomenological Approach. One: The Separate Worlds of Physician and Patient. 1. Own World. 2. Common World. 3. Different Perspectives of Physician and Patient. 4. Implications for Medical Practice. Two: Illness. 1. Levels of Constitution of Meaning. 2. The Patient's Apprehension of Illness. 3. The Physician's Apprehension of the Patient's Illness. 4. Implications for Medical Practice. Three: The Body. 1. The Lived Body. 2. Body as Object. 3. Lived Body in Illness. 4. Body as Object in Illness. 5. The Body-as-Scientific-Object. 6. Implications for Medical Practice. Four: The Healing Relationship. 1. Illness-as-Lived. 2. Empathic Understanding. 3. Clinical Narrative. 4. The Healing Relationship. Bibliography. Index.

Abstract: A proposal that extends the enactive approach developed in cognitive science and philosophy of mind to issues in affective science. In The Feeling Body, Giovanna Colombetti takes ideas from the enactive approach developed over the last twenty years in cognitive science and philosophy of mind and applies them for the first time to affective science -- the study of emotions, moods, and feelings. She argues that enactivism entails a view of cognition as not just embodied but also intrinsically affective, and she elaborates on the implications of this claim for the study of emotion in psychology and neuroscience. In the course of her discussion, Colombetti focuses on long-debated issues in affective science, including the notion of basic emotions, the nature of appraisal and its relationship to bodily arousal, the place of bodily feelings in emotion experience, the neurophysiological study of emotion experience, and the bodily nature of our encounters with others. Drawing on enactivist tools such as dynamical systems theory, the notion of the lived body, neurophenomenology, and phenomenological accounts of empathy, Colombetti advances a novel approach to these traditional issues that does justice to their complexity. Doing so, she also expands the enactive approach into a further domain of inquiry, one that has more generally been neglected by the embodied-embedded approach in the philosophy of cognitive science.