Philosophy Of Embodiment Research Articles

Sayings and Doings in Practices: Enhancing practice-driven institutionalism with insights from the philosophy of embodiment

The practice-driven perspective in organizational institutionalism has proposed that what actors say and do is decisive for the enactment of practices in everyday situations. However, this perspective has predominantly considered the role of doings and has disregarded the distinct role of sayings used in everyday situations. Our theoretical argument proposes the co-constitutive coexistence of sayings and doings in the enactment of practices that explains why and when doings inform specific sayings and why and when sayings prefigure specific doings. Theorizing this coexistence reveals when it is that sayings bolster the reproduction and stabilization of doings, when they contribute to change, and when sayings cannot coordinate doings because actors literally cannot understand one another. We argue that the consideration of the coexistence of sayings and doings is relevant for practice-driven institutionalism, as it enables the differentiation of the situated impact of doings and sayings on the development of practices. To develop this argument, we build on insights from the embodiment perspective within the philosophy of mind (i.e. philosophy of embodiment), which suggests that the body and its sensorimotor states in practices play an instrumental role in cognition and language use.

Embodied world construction: a phenomenology of ritual

AbstractThis article presents a new approach to understanding ritual: embodied world construction. Informed by phenomenology and a philosophy of embodiment, this approach argues that rituals can (re)shape the structure of an individual's perceptual world. Ritual participation transforms how the world appears for an individual through the inculcation of new perceptual habits, enabling the perception of objects and properties which could not previously be apprehended. This theory is then applied to two case studies from an existing ethnographic study of North American evangelicalism, indicating how the theory of embodied world construction can shed new light on how individuals are shaped by ritual practice.

Documentary Cinema, Plastic Waste Problem, and Environmental Sustainability: the Case of Pulau Plastik

Cinema, particularly documentary, can be a powerful vehicle for raising awareness of environmental sustainability. In the paper, the documentary film Pulau Plastik (Dandhy Laksono and Rahung Nasution 2021) is the subject of analysis. The film has its premiere at the end of April 2021 in the cinema theatre in Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Surabaya and Denpasar and shows the plastic waste and its environmental damage. The documentary uses mise-en-scéne in its plot to evoke certain experience and emotion of the audience which we will examine its role and its psychological impact with the texts of the French philosopher Maurice Marleau-Ponty in the Philosophy of Embodiment, American experimental psychologist James Gibsons in Ecological Perception and American philosopher Sue Cataldi in Feelings, Depth and Flesh. The directors also use Cinéma Vérité Approach to strengthen the effect towards audience.

Reflection in motion: an embodied approach to reflection on practice

ABSTRACT Body Phenomenology is introduced as a framework for deepening critical reflection on practice by attending to the active engagement between the practitioner and their world. Fook’s Critical Reflection on Practice is outlined as an established model of critical reflection that misses the role of the body in reflection. This is followed by an introduction to body phenomenology through Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodiment, motility and experience. Conceptions of embodiment are examined to highlight the dynamics of human experience through body-world relations. It is argued that using the body to reflect on life and experience can offer enhanced critical insight on practice and support deeper consciousness regarding one’s manner of knowing, relating, and moving through situations. The paper ends with a call for practitioners and students to consider incorporating body phenomenology into their reflective processes to gain rich personal and practice insights through embodied reflection in movement.

The Embodiment of Aerial Practice: Body, Mind, Emotion

ABSTRACT The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the embodied qualities of aerial practice among 13 US undergraduate students (M age = 20.46 years old). Drawing on the philosophy of embodiment, interview questions addressed bodily sensations, cognition, and the role of music and mirror viewing. The first emerging theme from the analysis was bodily sensations and cognition, including integrating cognitive and sensory bodily awareness (thinking and sensing the movements), bodily awareness and visual cues (e.g., emphasizing bodily sensations), and pain and the body. The second theme was music, mind, body, and emotion, including the embodiment of music and performance without music. In movement programs, cognitive and sensory bodily awareness are keys to all stages of skill acquisition. Overreliance on mirror viewing may diminish proprioception. Given that pain does not entirely disappear with continuous practice, it can affect movement execution. Bodily expressions with or without music can be embodied and artistic.

The Martial Arts, Culture, and the Body

This essay considers arguments that center on the relationship between eastern martial arts practice, ethics, self-cultivation, the philosophy of embodiment, as well as the relationship between the martial arts and other body disciplines. These points are advanced through engagement with Barry Allen's recent book on the subject as well as recent work in somaesthetics and dance theory.

Enactive subjectivity as flesh

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodiment has been widely adopted by enactivists seeking to provide an account of cognition that is both embodied and embedded. Yet very little attention has been paid to Merleau-Ponty’s later works. This is troubling given that in The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty revises his conception of embodied subjectivity because he came to the realization that understanding consciousness through the concepts of subject and object imposed a dualistic framework that he was trying to escape. To overcome this dichotomy Merleau-Ponty more fully develops the radically embodied ontology implicit in his earlier work by introducing the concept of flesh. I argue that the enactive account of subjectivity would be improved by “giving flesh” to the enactive subject, given that the enactive account of subjectivity as grounded in pre-reflective bodily self-consciousness is ultimately rooted in accounts of which the later Merleau-Ponty is critical. Incorporating flesh resolves the underlying problems with the enactive account of subjectivity and makes the account more consistent with the ontological commitments to embodiment and embeddedness.

Speaking Bodies: Listening for Mary Gove Nichols (1810–84)

Nineteenth-century American author, holistic health practitioner, and women’s rights advocate Mary Gove Nichols was well known in her own time, founding utopian communities, establishing and writing for health journals, giving lectures, and generally causing a stir by wearing pants and preaching Free Love. Yet, her work is largely unknown to twenty-first-century readers. This article argues that Gove Nichols’s fiction and nonfiction, including her autobiographical novel Mary Lyndon (1855), deserve renewed critical attention because of the significance of her philosophy of embodiment for twenty-first-century feminist scholarship. Although Gove Nichols argues that bodies are socially constructed, she does not dismiss bodies in her methods of liberating women from oppression. On the contrary, bodies form the basis of her activism: she argues that in order to reform society, one must look not only to intellectual and spiritual health, but also to the material health of those who live in it. In this way, her work heralds the twenty-first-century feminist theoretical turn toward a new materialism that argues for the resilient and creative potential of bodies in social justice movements. An analysis of Gove Nichols’s water-cure-inspired narrative strategies reveals how literature provides a way of thinking about bodies that is essential for theory.

Education for the Formation of Personal Relationships through Computer-Mediated Communication : Focused on the Philosophy of Embodiment and Emotion

Education for the Formation of Personal Relationships through Computer-Mediated Communication : Focused on the Philosophy of Embodiment and Emotion

Corps, cerveau et beauté la place de l'esthétique dans le domaine de l'esprit

This article represents a programmatic attempt to relate the subject of aesthetics to the wider scope of issues concerning the nature of the human mind. In addition to a criticism of the aesthetics’ isolationism, it provides an outline of orthodox cognitivism and also of the more recent philosophy of embodiment, and sees the latter as a natural context for aesthetic concerns. The author argues that not only may the results of brain research be instructive for a more profound understanding of beauty but also that the subtlety and richness of aesthetic studies can be insightful for empirical studies of the neural system. That beauty is not reducible to brain processes does not mean that a possible lesson from neuroscience has no explanatory value for aesthetics; at the same time the article affirms the stand that the aesthetic, being one of the most profound traits of the human mind, cannot be fully captured in empiricist terms. What is needed is a multidisciplinary exchange that requires a shift from the comfort of the traditional views and an opening that might prove potent for the aesthetics of the present times which should not deprive itself of an ambition to participate in deciphering the ‘mysteries’ the mind, cognition, and action.

Collins’s incorrect depiction of Dreyfus’s critique of artificial intelligence

Harry Collins interprets Hubert Dreyfus’s philosophy of embodiment as a criticism of all possible forms of artificial intelligence. I argue that this characterization is inaccurate and predicated upon a misunderstanding of the relevance of phenomenology for empirical scientific research.