ABSTRACT
Embodiment has become one of the fashionable terms in the educational literature. A problem that this literature presents is that it lacks the provision of mechanisms that make plausible the fact that the living/lived body—or, rather, the flesh—is always involved in “cognition,” not merely a stepping-stone to abstract intellectualism. As Sheets-Johnstone (2009) suggests while citing the likes of Lakoff, Johnson, and Varela, the embodiment and enactivist literatures continue to evoke “the possibility of a disembodied relationship” and, with it, “the spectre of Cartesianism” (p. 215). In this book, based on close, phenomenological analyses of mathematics lessons in a second-grade classroom, I not only describe the incarnate, sensuous labor of doing geometry but also articulate an epistemology that differs from those that currently dominate the discourse in mathematics education, mathematical cognition, and philosophy of mathematics.
