Frédérique de Vignemont - Böcker

Mind the Body provides the first comprehensive treatment of bodily awareness and of the sense of bodily ownership, combining philosophical analysis with recent experimental results from cognitive science. Our own body seems to be the object that we know the best for we constantly receive a flow of internal information about it. Yet bodily awareness has attracted little attention in the literature, possibly because it seems reducible to William James's description of a 'feeling of the same old body always there'. But it is not true that our body always feels so familiar. In particular, puzzling neurological disorders and new bodily illusions raise a wide range of questions about the relationship between the body and the self.Although most of the time we experience our body as our own, it is possible to report feeling parts of our body as alien. It is also possible to experience extraneous objects, such as prosthetic hands, as our own. Hence, what makes us feel this particular body as our own? The fact that we feel sensations there? The fact that we can voluntarily move it? Or the fact that we need to care about it to survive? De Vignemont argues that to answer these questions, we need a better understanding of the various aspects of bodily self-awareness, including the spatiality of bodily sensations, their multimodality, their role in social cognition, and their relation to action and self-defence.

What difference is there between the visual experience of watching the moon in the sky and the visual experience of seeing a snake slither by your foot?It is easy to believe our interpretation of the world is split into a binary mode, between the bodily self and everything outside it. There is, however, a buffer zone in the immediate surrounding of the body, known as peripersonal space, in which boundaries are blurred. The notion of peripersonal space calls into question not only our entrenched theories of perception, but also has major implications on the way we perceive personal and social awareness.Research has yielded a vast array of exciting discoveries on peripersonal space, across a variety of disciplines: ethology, social psychology, anthropology, neurology, psychiatry, and cognitive neuroscience. The World at Our Fingertips: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of Peripersonal Space brings these perspectives together for the first time, as well as introducing a philosophical dialogue to the questions.Edited by a team of leading psychologists and philosophers in the fields of peripersonal space and bodily awareness, this comprehensive volume presents the reader with a fresh, accessible dialogue between authorities from vastly different areas of thought.

Our own body seems to be the object that we know the best for we constantly receive a flow of internal information about it. Yet bodily awareness has attracted little attention in the literature. Mind the Body is the first comprehensive treatment of bodily awareness. Frédérique de Vignemont seeks to answer questions such as: how do I perceive my body? How do I perceive other people's bodies? Can I really feel your pain? What makes me feel this specific body is my own? Why do I care about it? To what extent can I feel an avatar's body as my own? To answer these questions, we need a better understanding of the various aspects of bodily self-awareness, including the spatiality of bodily sensations, their multimodality, their role in social cognition, their relation to action, and to self-defence. This volume combines philosophical analysis with recent experimental results from cognitive science, leading us to question some of our most basic intuitions.