The Primacy of Movement: Expanded second edition(82 Advances in Consciousness Research)

This expanded second edition carries forward the initial insights into the biological and existential significances of animation by taking contemporary research findings in cognitive science and philosophy and in neuroscience into critical and constructive account. It first takes affectivity as its focal point, elucidating it within both an enactive and qualitative affective-kinetic dynamic. It follows through with a thoroughgoing interdisciplinary inquiry into movement from three perspectives: mind, brain, and the conceptually reciprocal realities of receptivity and responsivity as set forth in phenomenology and evolutionary biology, respectively. It ends with a substantive afterword on kinesthesia, pointing up the incontrovertible significance of the faculty to cognition and affectivity. Series A

Table of Contents:
1. Preface to the expanded second edition, pxiii-xiv; 2. Acknowledgments, pxv-xvi; 3. Introduction, pxvii-xxxii; 4. Section I. Foundations chapter; 5. 1. Neandertals, p1-36; 6. 2 - Part I. Consciousness: A natural history, p37-76; 7. 2 - Part II. Consciousness: An Aristotelian account, p77-112; 8. 3. The primacy of movement, p113-152; 9. Section II. Methodology; 10. 4. Husserl and Von Helmholtz - and the possibility of a trans disciplinary communal task, p153-192; 11. 5. On learning to move oneself: A constructive phenomenology, p193-236; 12. 6. Merleau-Ponty: A man in search of a method, p237-278; 13. 7. Does philosophy begin (and end) in wonder? or what is the nature of a philosophic act?: A methodological postscript, p279-296; 14. Section III. Applications; 15. 8. On the significance of animate form, p297-320; 16. 9. Human speech perception and an evolutionary semantics, p321-346; 17. 10. Why a mind is not a brain and a brain is not a body, p347-390; 18. 11. What is it like to be a brain?, p391-418; 19. 12. Thinking in movement, p419-450; 20. Section IV. Twenty-first century reflections on human nature: Foundational concepts and realities; 21. 13. Animation: the fundamental, essential, and properly descriptive concept, p451-476; 22. 14. Embodied minds or mindful bodies?: A core twenty-first century challenge, p477-524; 23. References, p525-548; 24. Name index, p549-554

Review :
It shouldn’t, but it does take a dancer and philosopher to tell neuroscientists what they ought to have known but have consistently ignored. As Maxine Sheets-Johnstone makes so clear, brains/minds did not evolve to solve the toy problems beloved of cognitive neuroscience or to be the passive recipients of sense data, but to provide their owners with kinaesthetic awareness of their place and space in their dynamic environment and to devise action plans to engage with that environment. While many contemporary philosophers and cognitive scientists have recognized the epistemic significance of the body, very few have traveled the “corporeal turn” toward the deeper problem of movement. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s groundbreaking work, The Primacy of Movement, does just this by rigorously exploring the fundamental role that movement plays in becoming human. Returning to the self-evidence of first-person experience, Sheets-Johnstone systematically and effectively gives voice to the constitutive centrality of movement often overlooked in philosophies of knowledge and embodiment. This is a marvelous, creative undertaking that yields a much needed clarification of our critical investigations into the reality of life itself. In The Primacy of Movement, Sheets-Johnstone gives us a comprehensive trans-disciplinary examination of human movement and the long withstanding mind-body debate. A philosopher herself, Sheets-Johnstone uses her analytic ability to tackle the question in a deeply critical and precise manner Although Sheets-Johnstone writes for a philosophically erudite audience, the rest of us, whether in neuroscience, psychology, or anthropology, will find in The Primacy of Movement a magnificent choreography through description, theory, methodology and analysis of the body-in-motion. She vividly shows how our kinetic bodies, always interacting with the world, provide scaffolds and templates for human minds, and ground the elaboration of consciousness and culture in evolution, ontogeny and daily life. Hers is a far richer understanding of human evolutionary studies than ever promised by Neo-Darwinism or imagined by Darwin himself.