phainomena

POVZETKI/ABSTRACTS
Sebastjan Vörös , Peter Gaitsch (eds.)
The Horizons of Embodiment: Corporeality in Humans,
Animals, and Beyond
In the past two decades, the notion of embodiment has been quickly gaining
currency in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Although virtually
unknown at the beginning of the 1990’s, it has now become, in the guise of
embodied and enactive cognitive science, a serious contender against the
classical (cognitivist) conceptions of mind, cognition, and consciousness. By
drawing on the thematizations of the body found in Husserl and Merleau-
Ponty, especially on the distinction between body as lived body (Leib) – a prereflective
bodily awareness that shapes our experiential landscape –, and body
as physical body (Körper) – a thematic experience of the body as an object –,
it is maintained that mind and cognition are embodied in a twofold sense:
(i) structurally, i.e., in the sense of being constituted by extracranial (neural,
bodily, environmental, and social) processes, and (ii) phenomenologically, i.e.,
in the sense of including the experience of oneself as a bodily agent situated in
the world. It is contended that this Janus-faced nature of corporeality, divided
between “being a body” (Leibsein) and “having a body” (Körperhaben),
may help undermine some of the age-old dualities (mind-body, interiorityexteriority,
etc.) and thereby help anchor experience in materiality and
materiality in experience.
The main focus of the volume at hand is to analyze, evaluate, and
critically reflect upon, what might be termed “horizons of embodiment”.
First, it purports to examine the scope and applicability of the notion of
embodiment in relation to not only human, but also animal, vegetative, and
perhaps even artificial life. Specifically, it aims to investigate to what extent,
if at all, different construals of embodiment might contribute to a better
understanding of different life forms – of their unique, if tentative, modes
of being, cognizing, and experiencing. Second, it purports to examine, from
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