Thinking Through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (TTB) is a collection of essays developing further the project of somaesthetics that the author has defended in other writings. Most of the essays have been published elsewhere and revised for this presentation. There are two objectives pursued throughout the essays. One is that of delineating the nature of somaesthetics so that its scope becomes clearer, and the other is that of defending the discipline against its critics.What is somaesthetics? Somaesthetics is offered as (...) a branch of aesthetics whose interdisciplinary nature attempts to reshape primarily aesthetics and philosophy, while it has application in a variety of educational, artistic, technological, etc., contexts. Its primary target is the neglect of the body’s importance in aesthetics and in philosophy in general. According to this view, aesthetics has ignored the body’s aesthetic significance for the sake of other projects such as the definition of art. In opposition to t .. (shrink)

There are researchers in cognitive science who use clinical and experimental evidence to draw some rather skeptical conclusions about a central feature of our conscious experience, its unity. They maintain that the examination of clinical phenomena reveals that human consciousness has a much more fragmentary character than the one we normally attribute to it. In the article, these claims are questioned by examining some of the clinical studies on the deficit of anosognosia. I try to show that these studies support (...) a moderate sense of the unity of reflexive consciousness. (shrink)

The concept of aesthetic experience has often been regarded as an elusive one. A defence of the concept is attempted via an examination of the phenomenal features of the synaesthetic experience of colour. Some of the affinities between the two types of experience are explored.

Dennett has maintained that a careful examination of our intuitive notion of qualia reveals that it is a confused notion, that it is advisable to accept that experience does not have the properties designated by it and that it is best to eliminate it. Because most scientists share this notion of qualia, the major line of attack of his project becomes that of raising objections against the ability of science to answer some basic questions about qualia. I try to show (...) that science appeals to qualia and that it in fact adheres to a notion of qualia different from the one that Dennett has attributed to it. It is argued that qualia are amenable to scientific investigation and that this is the reason why science contributes toward the clarification of the notion of qualia. I also try to show that Dennett's skepticism about the abilities of science in answering questions posited by one of his thought experiments is unwarranted. I conclude that we need not accept Dennett's eliminativism about qualia. (shrink)

The author attempts to show the relevance of Kosslyn's research on mental imagery to some aspects of Freud's theory of dreams. Some of the findings of this research, such as the properties of visual images, the processes involved in image generation, etc., are discussed and it is shown how they contribute to the various Freudian hypotheses concerning the properties of dream images, the processes constituting the dream work, and the activity of dream interpretation.

The concept of informational encapsulation has been important in promoting a view of the mind that has dominated cognitive science. Multisensory phenomena, such as synaesthesia, have been used as evidence for challenging this view. The main objective of this paper is to provide a more detailed understanding of the nature of such a challenge by examining the two types of grapheme–colour synaesthesia, projectors and associators. It is argued that the phenomena under consideration exemplify partial encapsulation failure and that it is (...) expressed in three forms: intramodal, intermodal, and top-down. Additional support for these claims is provided by considering some evidence on synaesthetic-like experiences in relation to the continuity thesis. (shrink)