Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics

by Richard Shusterman

• ISBN13: 9780521675871
• ISBN10: 0521675871
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-01-07
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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 criticized 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.

Author Biography

Richard Shusterman is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Somaesthetics and Care of the Self: The Case of Foucault	p. 15
The Silent, Limping Body of Philosophy: Somatic Attention Deficit in Merleau-Ponty	p. 49
Somatic Subjectivities and Somatic Subjugation: Simone de Beauvoir on Gender and Aging	p. 77
Wittgenstein's Somaesthetics: Explanation and Melioration in Philosophy of Mind, Art, and Politics	p. 112
Deeper into the Storm Center: The Somatic Philosophy of William James	p. 135
Redeeming Somatic Reflection: John Dewey's Philosophy of Body-Mind	p. 180
Select Bibliography	p. 217
Index	p. 227
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