Concept
6 readings
Embodiment
Concept · 6 readings
Embodiment concerns how bodily capacities shape experience and action. Perception involves practical access to things, with possibilities that can differ between people and situations.
All readings
6 readings · Title A–Z
Guided course · Module 11 · Lesson 64
Describe experience before explaining it away
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty describe experience through three ideas: intentionality, bracketing and embodiment. How does a whole object appear through changing bodily perspectives?
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 4 of 9
How can another person be given to me?
Husserl explains how another person is given through the lived body, pairing and appresentation. The lesson follows his account without treating another person’s experience as something one possesses or copies.
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 6 of 9
Learning a way of moving
Learning a skill, or adapting to a changed tool, can alter what a body is able to do. Following Merleau-Ponty on the body schema and habit, the lesson asks whether his account gives fluency too much authority.
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 8 of 9
Sharing a world without sharing one perspective
Merleau-Ponty describes meeting others in a shared bodily and cultural world, and the lesson compares his account with Husserl’s. Sharing an object or an exchange, it shows, is not the same as sharing access, agreement or justified belief.
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 5 of 9
The body through which a world appears
Merleau-Ponty criticizes the picture of a mechanical body supplemented by an inner observer, and describes the lived body as access to a world. The lesson keeps the value of physical description and asks what reflection from within a situation can establish.
Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 6 of 9
What do we encounter when we perceive?
Whitehead separates presentational immediacy, a thing’s clear appearance, from causal efficacy, its felt influence, and joins them through symbolic reference. How does that joining make perception useful, and how can it mislead?
Study this in sequence
Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world
An experience receives a world it did not make, yet becomes something that was not there before. How can both be true? Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality builds a philosophy around that difficulty, asking us to begin with occasions of becoming and to explain enduring things, perception, judgment and value through their relations.
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world
Follow Husserl and Merleau-Ponty from the appearance of a familiar thing to time, bodily skill, expression and other people. Test what their descriptions establish, where their methods differ and what still needs evidence or an ethical argument.