The Body and Embodiment
A Philosophical Guide
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published:21st Apr '21
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Perfect for use at advanced undergraduate and graduate level, this is the first text to offer students a unified narrative regarding the place of the body in Western thinking. The book investigates the ways in which the fact of human embodiment makes the notion of ambiguity central to all major areas of philosophy. The body is both active and passive, powerful and vulnerable, and it provides both access through perception and limitation through localisation. As such, it fundamentally informs ontological, political, ethical and epistemological issues.
The book takes as its starting point the devaluation of the body by philosophers from Plato to Descartes and then focuses on several dimensions of the body as investigated by post-Kantian philosophy through a discussion of the intentional body, embodied cognition and the politicization of the body. The book engages with both the ‘Continental’ and ‘Anglo-American’ philosophical traditions and includes a broad range of sources and texts. The unified approach and clear writing make this lively text accessible to those working in other disciplines such as Anthropology, Cultural Studies and Gender Studies.
A lively, engaging and expansive analysis of embodiment and the philosophies that have helped us to understand the complexities of lived bodies in their cultural, racial and gendered forms. Bodies and their powers and capacities constitute both cultural and power relations and are still not well understood. The Body and Embodiment serves as an excellent introduction to and overview of this most productive concept. -- Elizabeth Grosz, Jean Fox O'Barr Women's Studies Professor, Duke University
Chouraqui has a grand and powerful vision of his subject matter and his guidance is opinionated. I am not aware of any book quite like it. The combination of a detailed exposition of key ideas, together with a user-friendly guide to primary sources, makes this book invaluable. It is an important, beautifully conceived and exciting book, and the author is an entirely reliable guide. -- Alva Noë, Professor of Philosophy, University of California Berkeley
Chouraqui’s The Body and Embodiment: A Philosophical Guide is both historical and thematic. His presentation is extremely clear and well written. It deals with both the Continental and the Analytic traditions. Chouraqui addresses different trends in the current field of philosophy. It is sufficiently clear for an Introduction and adequately nuanced for a more sophisticated audience. Unlike most works of this level of seriousness, The Body and Embodiment was written with an eye to use in courses, readings from primary sources appear in each chapter. -- Bernard Flynn, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Empire State College, State University of New York
ISBN: 9781786609748
Dimensions: 237mm x 163mm x 25mm
Weight: 576g
268 pages