Mind the Body: An Exploration of Bodily Self-Awareness

Frédérique de Vignemont

Jan 2018 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

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.

About the author

Frédérique de Vignemont is a CNRS research director at the Jean Nicod Institute in Paris. Her research is at the intersection of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Her major current works focus on bodily awareness, self-consciousness, and social cognition. Her new project investigates the perceptual peculiarities of peripersonal space, which can be conceived of as the territory of the self. She has published widely in philosophy and psychology journals on the first-person, body schema, agency, empathy, and more recently on pain. She is the recipient of the 2015 Young Mind & Brain prize. She is also one of the executive editors of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology.