The Early History Of Embodied Cognition 1740 1920

It explores for the first time the life-force (Lebenskraft) debate in Germany, which was manifest in philosophical reflection, medical treatise, scientific experimentation, theoretical physics, aesthetic theory, and literary practice esp.1740-1920. The history of vitalism is considered in the context of contemporary discourses on radical reality (or deep naturalism).

This handbook provides an important overview of corporeality, embodiment and learning in education from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Situating the body at the centre of educational practice, the editors and contributors introduce the concept of ‘tact’ as a practical corporeal language. The chapters provide a spectrum of historical, conceptual, empirical and practical educational approaches for embodied pedagogical engagement. Tact and embodied knowledge form a significant component of a teacher’s capability and professionalism: interacting with students, a pedagogue responds to them tactfully, emotionally, sensitively, and reflectively searching for the right thing to do, the right words to say, improvising in aural, linguistic, spatial, and visual way that are as restrained as they are enabled by the body. This handbook questions the familiar and established essentialist and naturalist view of the body to allow new perspectives on how corporeality affects learners. It will be of interest to scholars in education and philosophy as well as those researching in across social sciences.

Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism is a major reference work on the paradigm emerging from the challenges to humanism, humanity, and the human posed by the erosion of the traditional demarcations between the human and nonhuman. This handbook surveys and speculates on the ways in which the posthumanist paradigm emerged, transformed, and might further develop across the humanities. With its focus on the posthuman as a figure, on posthumanism as a social discourse, and on posthumanisation as an on-going historical and ontological process, the volume highlights the relationship between the humanities and sciences. The essays engage with posthumanism in connection with subfields like the environmental humanities, health humanities, animal studies, and disability studies. The book also traces the historical representations and understanding of posthumanism across time. Additionally, the contributions address genre and forms such as autobiography, games, art, film, museums, and topics such as climate change, speciesism, anthropocentrism, and biopolitics to name a few. This handbook considers posthumanism’s impact across disciplines and areas of study.

Revitalising our reading of 18th century works specifically in the fields of the history of the book, literary studies, material culture, art history, philosophy, technology, science and medicine, this volume brings recent insights in cognitive science and philosophy of mind to bear on the distributed nature of cognition. Collectively, the essays show how the particular range of sociocultural and technological contexts of the time fostered and reflected particular notions of distributed cognition.

The literary and scientific renaissance that struck Germany around 1800 is usually taken to be the cradle of contemporary humanism. Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism shows how figures like Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang Goethe as well as scientists specializing in the emerging modern life and cognitive sciences not only established but also transgressed the boundaries of the “human.” This period so broadly painted as humanist by proponents and detractors alike also grappled with ways of challenging some of humanism's most cherished assumptions: the dualisms, for example, between freedom and nature, science and art, matter and spirit, mind and body, and thereby also between the human and the nonhuman. Posthumanism is older than we think, and the so-called “humanists” of the late Enlightenment have much to offer our contemporary re-thinking of the human.

In her study, Carol-Ann Galego applies Michel Foucault's genealogical method to modern medicine's protracted war on pathogens. She excavates the early struggles that bacteriology generally, and in particular its articulation of germ theory, encountered before achieving widespread acceptance. The focus of her analysis is the responses of homeopaths in Germany and England to developments in bacteriology between 1880 and 1895 - fifteen eventful years of the "bacteriological revolution" that overlap with the fifth cholera epidemic of the nineteenth century. During these formative years, the convergence of bacteriologists' isolation and cultivation of microbes with medical efforts to quell the ravages of cholera gave rise to the now predominant understanding of infectious disease as an invasion of pathogens. At the time, however, such an antagonistic response to the threat of infectious disease was anything but unanimous. As Galego demonstrates, the nuanced understandings of disease etiology that homeopaths developed during these years, alongside their efforts to confront cholera, construct a different narrative, one that provides a fascinating counterhistory to the development of modern bacteriology and its alienating relations to microbial life.

An authoritative and comprehensive survey of the major themes, thinkers, and movements in modern European intellectual history.

An authoritative and comprehensive survey of the major themes, thinkers, and movements in modern European intellectual history.