Mind the Body: An Exploration of Bodily Self-Awareness

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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Part I: Body Snatchers 1: The phenomenology of bodily ownership 2: Whose body? 3: The immunity of the sense of ownership Part II: Body Builder 4: Bodily space 5: The body map theory 6: A multimodal account of bodily experience 7: My body among other bodies 8: Taxonomies of body representations Part III: Bodyguard 9: The Bodyguard hypothesis 10: The narcissistic body Appendix 1 - Bodily illusions Appendix 2 - Neurological and psychiatric bodily disorders Appendix 3 - Somatoparaphrenia

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.

Review :
A valuable contribution to the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science, de Vignemont's book is best suited for specialists in this field. [an] extremely well-researched and thought-provoking book, which certainly adds substantially to the interdisciplinary study of bodily awareness and bodily experience. Frédérique de Vignemont has written a superb book on the body and the sense of body ownership: what its function is and how it is grounded in spatial experience and affective phenomenology. It combines incisive philosophical argumentation with total command of the psychology and neuroscience of bodily experience. It is the best philosophical book ever on the body and a model of how to do empirically informed philosophy of mind. The body is "always there" in William James's famous phrase ... but this pervasiveness makes it harder, rather than easier, to understand the relation between body and self. This book extends the current focus on the importance of the body in philosophy of mind, using the recent surge in experimental studies of bodily awareness. In doing so, it provides the first cognitively-informed account of how, and perhaps even why, we are aware of our body as our own. It is a rare and compelling example of how combining conceptual analysis and experimental data can advance cognitive theory.