Body Consciousness

A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics

Richard Shusterman (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

256 Seiten

2008
Cambridge University Press (Verlag)
978-0-521-85890-8 (ISBN)

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Contemporary culture increasingly suffers from problems of attention, over-stimulation, and stress, and a variety of personal and social discontents generated by deceptive body images. This book argues that improved body consciousness can relieve these problems and enhance one's knowledge, performance, and pleasure. The body is our basic medium of perception and action, but focused attention to its feelings and movements has long been criticised as a damaging distraction that also ethically corrupts through self-absorption. In Body Consciousness, Richard Shusterman refutes such charges by engaging the most influential twentieth-century somatic philosophers and incorporating insights from both Western and Asian disciplines of body-mind awareness. Rather than rehashing intractable ontological debates on the mind-body relation, Shusterman reorients study of this crucial nexus towards a more fruitful, pragmatic direction that reinforces important but neglected connections between philosophy of mind, ethics, politics, and the pervasive aesthetic dimensions of everyday life.

Richard Shusterman is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton. Educated at Jerusalem and Oxford, he is internationally known for his contributions to philosophy and his pioneering work in somaesthetics, a field of theory and practice devoted to thinking through the body. A recipient of senior Fulbright and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, Dr Shusterman has held academic positions in Paris, Berlin, and Hiroshima, and is the author of several books, most recently Surface and Depth and Performing Live. His Pragmatist Aesthetics has been published in thirteen languages.

Introduction; 1. Somaesthetics and care of the self: the case of Foucault; 2. The silent, limping body of philosophy: somatic attention deficit in Merleau-Ponty; 3. Somatic subjectivities and somatic subjugation: Beauvoir on gender and ageing; 4. Wittgenstein's somaesthetics: explanation and melioration in philosophy of mind, art, and politics; 5. Deeper into the storm center: the somatic philosophy of William James; 6. Redeeming somatic reflection: John Dewey's philosophy of body-mind.

Verlagsort	Cambridge
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	550 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie
ISBN-10	0-521-85890-9 / 0521858909
ISBN-13	978-0-521-85890-8 / 9780521858908
Zustand	Neuware