ABSTRACT
Questions of embodiment are central in feminist philosophy for several reasons. The sexed body is one of the chief themes of feminist politics, but the body is also a historical-philosophical concept that feminist scholars have problematized and scrutinized, and ultimately it is a metaphysical issue the relevance of which is a feminist philosophical controversy. In the early modern period, with the development of the new natural sciences, the task of rethinking the relation between the body and the soul or mind became acute. The previously dominant Platonic and Aristotelian theories were challenged and abandoned. Rene Descartes devised a partial solution to the problem of the mind-body interaction by introducing a theory of the "animal spirits", very small hypothetical movements of matter, "very fine air or wind". Phenomenology is a philosophy of experience. When human and animal bodies are studied by the experimental and mathematical methods of modern natural sciences, they are thematized as complicated mechanisms.
