Ideal Embodiment

Angelica Nuzzo offers a comprehensive reconstruction of Kant's theory of sensibility in his three Critiques. By introducing the notion of "transcendental embodiment," Nuzzo proposes a new understanding of Kant's views on science, nature, morality, and art. She shows that the issue of human embodiment is coherently addressed and key to comprehending vexing issues in Kant's work as a whole. In this penetrating book, Nuzzo enters new terrain and takes on questions Kant struggled with: How does a body that feels pleasure and pain, desire, anger, and fear understand and experience reason and strive toward knowledge? What grounds the body's experience of art and beauty? What kind of feeling is the feeling of being alive? As she comes to grips with answers, Nuzzo goes beyond Kant to revise our view of embodiment and the essential conditions that make human experience possible.

In Nietzsche and Embodiment Kristen Brown reveals the smartness of bodies, challenging the traditional view in the West that bodies are separate from and morally inferior to minds. Drawing inspiration from Nietzsche, Brown vividly describes why the interdependence of mind and body matters, both in Nietzsche's writings and for contemporary debates (non-dualism theory, Merleau-Ponty criticism, and metaphor studies), activities (spinal cord research and fasting), and specific human experiences (menses, trauma, and guilt). Brown's theories about the dynamic relationship between body and mind provide new possibilities for self-understanding and experience.

This book offers an innovative conceptual and methodological approach to one of the most significant health and wellbeing challenges for contemporary youth: body image. The social and cultural dimensions shaping body ideals and young people’s body image concerns have not been adequately explored in the current landscape of social media and youth body cultures. The author provides a sociological reframing of body image, foregrounding the social and cultural dimensions which are critical in shaping young people’s everyday bodily experiences. Chapters explore the significance of ‘gender’ and ‘wellbeing’ norms and the ways that circumstances of hardship and inequality are significant in mediating body concerns. In this, the book complicates simplistic understandings of body image, instead showing the complex processes by which body concerns are formed through the circumstances of embodied experience. The book advocates for the non-individual dimensions of body concerns—the social and cultural conditions of young people’s lives—to be foregrounded in strategies aimed at addressing this complex youth wellbeing issue. This text will be of interest to scholars in gender studies, youth studies, and feminist sociology.

Arguing that art can bridge the gap between philosophy's traditional striving for generality and completeness, and the concreteness and contingency of humanity's basic relation to the world, Crowther proposes an ecological definition of art.

This book explores Chinese young men’s views of manhood and develops a new concept of ‘elastic masculinity’ which can be stretched and forged differently in response to personal relationships and local realities. Drawing from empirical research, the author uses the term shenti (body-self) as a central concept to investigate the Chinese male body and explores intimacy and kinship within masculinity. She showcases how Chinese masculinities reflect the resilience of Confucian notions as well as transnational ideas of modern manhood. This is a unique dialogue with ‘western’ discourse on masculinity, and an invaluable resource for understanding the profound social changes that transformed gendered arrangements in urban China.

The 'obese' female body has often been portrayed as the 'other' to the slender body. However, this process of 'othering', or viewing as different, has created a repressive discourse, where 'excess' has increasingly come to be studied as a 'physical abnormality' or a signifier of a 'personality defect' in contemporary Western society. This book engages with the multifarious re-imaginings of the 'excessive' embodiment in contemporary women's writing, drawing specifically on the construction of this form of embodiment in the works of Fay Weldon, Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, Claude Tardat, and Judith Moore, whose texts offer a distinct literary response to the rigidly homogeneous and limiting representations of fatness, while prompting heterogeneous approaches to reading the 'excessive' female embodiment.

How does knowledge of phenomena and events we have no direct experiences of emerge? Having a brain that learns from being in the world, how can we conceive of prehistoric dinosaurs, Atlantis, unicorns or even ‘desire’? This book is about how abstract knowledge becomes anchored in direct experiences through well-formed conversations. Within the framework of evolutionary biology and through the lens of contemporary studies in cognitive science, the neurosciences, sociology and anthropology, this book traces topics such as our inborn sensitivity to the environment, bottom-up and top-down processes in knowledge formation and the importance of language when we learn to categorise the world. A major objective of this monograph is to identify the key determinants of the specific interactivity mechanisms that control the cognitive processes while we are linguistically immersed. The emphasis is on real-life interactions in conversations. While the concrete word-object paradigm depends relatively more on direct experiences, the successful acquisition of abstract knowledge depends on the emphatic skills of the interlocutor. He or she must remain sensitive to the level and quality of the imagination of the child while making mental tableaus that are believed to elicit images to which the child associates the concept. Derived embodiment in abstract thought is a landmark synthesis that operationalizes contemporary neuroscience studies of acquisition of knowledge in the real life conversational context. The result is an exciting biology-based contribution to theories of knowledge acquisition and thinking in sociology, cognitive robotics, anthropology and not at least, pedagogy.

This book examines a number of landmark shifts in our account of the relationship between human and divine existence, as reflected through the perception of time and corporeal experience. Drawing together some of the best scholars in the field, this book provides a representative cross-section of influential trends in the philosophy of religion (e.g. phenomenology, existential thought, Biblical hermeneutics, deconstruction) that have shaped our understanding of the body in its profane and sacred dimensions as site of conflicting discourses on presence and absence, subjectivity and the death of the subject, mortality, resurrection and eternal life.