ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the body as a condition for the existence of the mind. An image of the mind is beginning to take shape: if the mind is not a thing, but a range of abilities and dispositions, then we cannot say that the mind is inside our heads. The French philosopher and psychologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty was the modern thinker who most explicitly attempted to overcome modernity's objectification of the body with his phenomenology of the body. It is perhaps not so difficult to accept the argument from phenomenological studies of the body that fundamental intentionality, our primary way of recognizing and acting in the world, is embodied. Understanding the body's role in the creation of meaningful experience through metaphors is essential for understanding the human mind, but the body has other, and in a sense even more basic, functions in our mental lives.
