Abstract

There appears to be an intimate connexion between feeling our limbs ‘from the inside’ and our power to act directly with them. This essay attempts to evaluate the strongest understanding of the connexion between bodily awareness and bodily agency: that feeling a body part ‘from the inside’ is necessary for any instance of acting directly with that body part. The most influential defence of this claim is to be found in O’Shaughnessy’s work on action. I lay out O’Shaughnessy’s arguments and analyse them. It turns out that there are two different strands implicit in O’Shaughnessy’s account. I tease these strands apart and evaluate them separately. I then consider three counterexamples against his account: deafferented agents; direct brain control of physical apparatus made possible by brain-machine interface technologies; and the automatic character of the majority of our bodily actions. Each case presents different difficulties for O’Shaughnessy. I end by drawing the upshot of these counterexamples for O’Shaughnessy and explore to what extent he can respond to them