ABSTRACT
The introduction opens by linking kinaesthesia and the feeling of being alive. Kinaesthesia is sensory awareness of posture and movement based on sensation from muscles and joints in the body. The book inter-relates psychological, philosophical and cultural perspectives on kinaesthesia for a non-specialist audience in the arts, performance and humanities, as well as for research psychologists on cognition and motor control, and for therapists practising with action and movement. The book's purpose is to explain, through knowledge of what is involved in embodied relations with the world, why people's movement, exemplified in dance and walking, matters. The book is not a scientific monograph on any one discipline of knowledge. The chapter thus explains the purposes and scope of the book as a whole.
