ABSTRACT

Bodily awareness is one of the most interesting and enigmatic forms of experience. Our earliest and most pervasive form of conscious experience, it also arguably remains the most private. Bodily awareness has also long played a central role in the study of the mind and self-consciousness, and is fundamental to much current philosophical and psychological research.

The Routledge Handbook of Bodily Awareness is an outstanding reference source to this fascinating subject. Comprising over thirty chapters by an international team of contributors, the Handbook is divided into seven parts:

  • Epistemology and Metaphysics
  • Historical Issues
  • Body Representation
  • Sensing the Body
  • Dynamics
  • Pathology
  • Interaction

Within these sections specific topics covered include bodily ownership, personal identity, self-consciousness, body modelling in robot design, body illusions, touch, proprioception, phantom limb syndrome, pain, eating disorders, out-of-body experiences and virtual reality. The handbook features specially commissioned contributions from researchers in a wide array of disciplines, whilst being accessible to readers with any disciplinary background. It also includes an interdisciplinary introduction, written by the editors, tying together the central themes with particular attention to the interaction between conceptual, technological and empirical issues.

The Routledge Handbook of Bodily Awareness will be of great interest to those in a wide variety of philosophical subdisciplines as well as those in psychology, cognitive science, sociology and related subjects.

chapter |17 pages

Introduction

Bodily awareness and the body

part 1|51 pages

Epistemology and metaphysics

chapter 1|13 pages

Bodily self-reference 1

chapter 2|12 pages

Bodily awareness without the body

chapter 4|12 pages

Resisting phenomenalism

From bodily experience to mind-independence

part 2|64 pages

Historical issues

chapter 6|12 pages

Not a sailor in his ship

Descartes on bodily awareness

chapter 7|14 pages

Sense experience and differentiation

Husserl on bodily awareness

chapter 9|13 pages

Clinical disorders of body representations

A historical perspective

part 3|63 pages

Body representation

part 4|78 pages

Sensing the body

part 5|76 pages

Dynamics

chapter 21|12 pages

Bodily skill

chapter 22|17 pages

Tool use

part 7|117 pages

Interaction

chapter 30|19 pages

A plastic virtual self

How virtual reality can be transforming

chapter 33|20 pages

Social bodily self

Conceptual and psychopathological considerations