Body and World

by Samuel Todes, Hubert L. Dreyfus (Introduction), Piotr Hoffman (Introduction)

Overview

Body and World is the definitive edition of a book that should now take its place as a major contribution to contemporary existential phenomenology. Samuel Todes goes beyond Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his description of how independent physical nature and experience are united in our bodily action. His account allows him to preserve the authority of experience while avoiding the tendency towards idealism that threatens both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Todes emphasizes the complex structure of the human body; front/back asymmetry, the need to balance in a gravitational field, and so forth; and the role that structure plays in producing the spatiotemporal field of experience and in making possible objective knowledge of the objects in it. He shows that perception involves nonconceptual, but nonetheless objective forms of judgment. One can think of Body and World as fleshing out Merleau-Ponty's project while presciently relating it to the current interest in embodiment, not only in philosophy but also in psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and anthropology. Todes's work opens new ways of thinking about problems such as the relation of perception to thought and the possibility of knowing an independent reality; problems that have occupied philosophers since Kant and still concern analytic and continental philosophy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262700825
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	04/27/2001
Series:	The MIT Press
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	383
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Samuel Todes was Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University at the time of his death in 1994. Body and World is based on his dissertation, written in 1963 and published in 1990 in the series Harvard Dissertations in Philosophy under the title The Human Body as Material Subject of the World.

Hubert L. Dreyfus is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This remarkable book, originally prepared as Samuel Todes's dissertation, delves deeply into issues that have only now, forty years later, become central concerns in epistemology,philosophy of action, and philosophy of mind. These issues had been broached by Husserl in manuscripts and had been followed up by Heidegger and above all by Merleau-Ponty, but Todes carries the discussion further with careful analyses and original ideas. He discusses how the body has anticipations that can be satisfied or frustrated, and shows how these processes are of crucial importance for clarifying the nonconceptual elements in knowledge. He also throws much-needed light on the percipient as a bodily subject, on the unity of the person and the unity of the object experienced. The book is a classic in the sense that it remains as thought-provoking and illuminating today as when it was written."—Dagfinn Føllesdal, Clarence Irving Lewis Professor ofPhilosophy, Stanford UniversityPlease note: The first "o" of the endorser's last name has a slash through it.

Endorsement

This remarkable book, originally prepared as Samuel Todes's dissertation, delves deeply into issues that have only now, forty years later, become central concerns in epistemology, philosophy of action, and philosophy of mind. These issues had been broached by Husserl in manuscripts and had been followed up by Heidegger and above all by Merleau-Ponty, but Todes carries the discussion further with careful analyses and original ideas. He discusses how the body has anticipations that can be satisfied or frustrated, and shows how these processes are of crucial importance for clarifying the nonconceptual elements in knowledge. He also throws much-needed light on the percipient as a bodily subject, on the unity of the person and the unity of the object experienced. The book is a classic in the sense that it remains as thought-provoking and illuminating today as when it was written.

—Dagfinn Føllesdal, Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University

Charles Taylor

Todes's remarkable book takes us a step further in the striving of modern philosophy since Kant to show how our perceiving can be both constrained and free, situated and yet spontaneous and creative. Todes shows how we can resolve this age-old conundrum by understanding the crucial place in all perceiving and thinking of the active material body; this is the great repressed of modern philosophy, whose return, as Todes shows, has important consequences, not only for epistemology, but for ethics and social theory.

Editorial Reviews

A much needed and insightful account that stays with the phenomenological evidence, a rich phenomenological resource.—The Times Literary Supplement—

From the Publisher

A much needed and insightful account that stays with the phenomenological evidence, a rich phenomenological resource.—The Times Literary Supplement

Reviews

A much needed and insightful account that stays with the phenomenological evidence, a rich phenomenological resource.

The Times Literary Supplement

A much needed and insightful account that stays with the phenomenological evidence, a rich phenomenological resource.

The Times Literary (UK) - Shaun Gallagher

How did masturbation, arguably the safest sexual act, come to be seen as a moral aberration with ghastly physical effects? Laqueur is persuasive. An engaging writer.

The New Yorker Briefly Noted