Communication is not just about the transfer of verbal information. Gestures, facial expressions, intonation and body language are all major sources of information during conversation. This book presents a new perspective on communication, one that will help us to better understand humans, and also to build machines that can communicate.

Every human person is a cultural being. Each culture has incomplete knowledge of reality, and the sharing of viewpoints makes for mutual enrichment, hence the need for intercultural perspectives. Even in a human being, body and spirit, emotion and reason reciprocally influence on each other. Life is dialogical. Action gives flesh to theory, and the abstract reason is exemplified in real things, which is what embodiment of reason is all about. Principles govern all things and public reason, as a causal (...) principle, regulates the affairs of embodied homogeneous communities. African embodiment of reason is self-evident in names and allegories wherein rational thoughts and ideas are personified the way sentient robots embody or personify Artificial Intelligence. In this treatise, we shall use allegory, nomenclature, traditional songs, apophthegms, etc., to show how Africans wisely incarnate ideas in things. As it is analogous to modern-day AI, we shall not only highlight the African approach to public reason and embodied community but also tangentially discuss the effect of AI on the global community, of which Africa is a subunit. In conclusion, we shall caution against the empowering of robots with logical reasoning, and the disempowering and denaturalizing of humans. Keywords: Reason, Embodiment, Philosophy, Principle and Community. (shrink)

In the 4th and 5th centuries B.C. the most significant paradigm change in Western intellectual culture occurred, later affecting Christianity and subsequently science. In the interest of personal empowerment over spontaneous stirrings, a private inner sphere, a so-called soul was ascribed to every conscious subject which was taken to contain their whole experience, like a house, conceived of as an inner world in which reason was to be the master of spontaneous impulses; the empirical external world between these inner spheres (...) was cleansed of all gripping forces and, for this purpose, ground down to a few elegantly selected types of features and their carriers : the remainder of this grindingdown was deposited in the souls or overlooked to nonetheless be found in the souls in changed form. Man was dissected into body and soul. In the transposition into the soul’s huge amounts of life experience were forgotten. Among them can be counted the felt body which disappeared between body and soul as in a crevasse, even though it is the closest thing to human experience. (shrink)

In this musing we consider how social distancing, the primary public health measure introduced to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 virus, is creating social encounters characterized by a self-and-other-consciousness and an atmosphere of suspicion, leading to what we call “alienated embodied communication.” Whilst interaction rituals dominated by avoidance, fear and distrust are novel for many individuals who occupy positions of social privilege, Black and ethnic minority writers have demonstrated that the alienated bodily communication of COVID-19 social (...) distancing is “nothing new” for people who routinely experience marginalization as a result of racism. Our aim in this musing, then, is to reflect on how on-going experiences of stigma, shame, and marginalization can shape how social distancing is registered on an embodied and existential level, and therefore how social distancing may differentially impact individuals with lived experiences of racism. (shrink)

As a distortion of God's created designs, sexual abuse carries a unique devastation-factor. Abuse that is sexual in nature damages a spectrum of internal and external aspects of personhood. In particular, the core realities of: self-identity, community, and spiritual communion with God can be deeply fractured through SA. In light of the significance of the image of God, movement toward healing includes strengthening personal agency, processing profound boundary ruptures, and managing disillusionment with God. Due to the multi-faceted trauma of sexual (...) abuse spiritual formation programs must not only plan for the unique profile of abuse victims, but also need to incorporate a fuller understanding and praxis of the realities of embodiment, ritual, and theocentric metaphor into their transformational goals. Analysis includes first-person experience, anthropological science, and theological reflection. (shrink)

Using the perspective of phenomenological-enactive embodied cognition, this paper examines the role of the body in constituting specific social interactions via specific media ecologies (war imagery) during the times of (refugee) crisis. Such media ecologies give affordances that can amplify social beliefs and turn subjective judgments into an intersubjective action. We consider the human body in relation to war media as playing an important role in sustaining social experiences and relations. To that end, the article explores the fundamental experience (...) of empathy, combining the theoretical perspectives of phenomenology and enactivism with the examples from war imagery and refugee embodiment. It is shown that the classical phenomenological tradition offers different yet useful conceptualisations of empathy. We also argue that war images and/or messages should be viewed as means/tools for, rather than representations of, the enaction of certain important experiences. Hence, the article connects the analysis of the affection by war imagery with the subsequent social interactions in the context of refugee crisis. (shrink)

Integrates the perspectives of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Lacanian psychoanalysis to distinguish communication theory from the philosophy of communication"--Provided by publisher.

Commentators on the work of Immanuel Kant have long held that his later "critical" writings are a radical rejection of his earlier, less celebrated efforts. In this pathbreaking book, Susan Shell demonstrates not only the developmental unity of Kant's individual writings, but also the unity of his work and life experience. Shell argues that the central animating issues of Kant's lifework concerned the perplexing relation of spirit to body. Through an exacting analysis of individual writings, Shell maps the philosophical contours (...) of Kant's early intellectual struggles and their relation to his more mature thought. The paradox of mind in matter and the tensions it generates—between freedom and determinacy, independence and community, ideal and real—are shown to inform the whole of his work. Shell's fresh, penetrating analysis of the precritical works will surely catapult them to new prominence in Kant studies. Shell's critique goes further to consider the context of contemporary intellectual life. She explores the fascinating realm of Kant's sexual and medical idiosyncracies, linking them to the primary concerns of his critical philosophy. She develops a sure-to-be controversial treatment of the connection between Kant's philosophy and his chronic hypochondria, and illuminates previously unforeseen connections in a remarkable convergence of life and thought, with important theoretical and practical implications for modern times. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that communication in partnering is a physical exchange of information on the basis of ethically-bound conditions. Simply put, partners can cause each other harm. Thus, the criteria of communication in partnering is always within an ethical domain, where action runs along a continuum ranging from the ethical to the unethical. To make this argument, I will first lay out the conditions to which the relevant norms of evaluation can adhere. These conditions include proximity, (...) orientation, and point(s) of contact. Rather than provide a how-to guide for communication, I will examine a critical vocabulary for practically approaching communication in partnering. Section I begins with the conditions of communication, followed by Section II which examines the norms of communicating well. (shrink)

During the Covid-19 pandemic we increasingly turned to technology to stay in touch with our family, friends, and colleagues. Even as lockdowns and restrictions ease many are encouraging us to embrace the replacement of face-to-face encounters with technologically mediated ones. Yet, as philosophers of technology have highlighted, technology can transform the situations we find ourselves in. Drawing insights from the phenomenology of sociality, we consider how digitally-enabled forms of communication and sociality impact our experience of one another. In particular, (...) we draw attention to the way in which our embodied experience of one another is altered when we meet in digital spaces, taking as our focus the themes of perceptual access, intercorporeality, shared space, transitional spaces, and self-presentation. In light of the way in which technological mediation alters various dimensions of our social encounters, we argue that digital encounters constitute their own forms of sociality requiring their own phenomenological analysis. We conclude our paper by raising some broader concerns about the very framework of thinking about digitally and non-digitally mediated social encounters simply in terms of replacement. (shrink)

Review of: Embodiment, Relation, Community: A Continental Philosophy of Communication, Garnet Butchart (2019) University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 199 pp., ISBN 978-0-27108-325-4, h/bk, $80.95.

Multiple dimensions and textures of transcendence are evoked not just by reflection on humans in their relationship with God and community but also by encounter with bonobos—primates that are very close genetic kin with humans. The promise for theological reflection is rooted in bonobo social adaptation as a highly cooperative species. Bonobo sexual behavior accompanies and expresses a high level of social intelligence. The point of my project is not a scientific one intended to argue persuasively for individual self-awareness or (...) self-transcendence in bonobos. Instead, it emphasizes connectedness, interdependence, and sociality as windows on transcendence. Such a view does not require consciousness or intellectual recognition of self-in-relation, but it certainly presumes embodiment of self-in-relation. Various textures of transcendence reflect multidirectional relationships among Pan paniscus (bonobos), Homo sapiens , and the Sacred. (shrink)

The primacy of practice in the development of knowledge is one of materialism’s fundamental tenets. Most arguments supporting it have been strictly philosophical. However, over the past thirty years cognitive science has provided mounting evidence supporting the primacy of practice. Particularly striking is its finding that thought is fundamentally metaphoric—that images emerging from everyday embodied activities not only make ordinary experiences intelligible, but also underpin our more abstract engagements with the world, elaborated in disciplines such as ethics and science. (...) Cognitive science’s implications must now be absorbed into critical realism. Cognitive science bolsters critical realism by providing a scientifically-grounded analysis of the passage from body to mind and the fundamental unity between them, while sustaining their distinctiveness. Its implications for critical realism ripple out in four waves: first, critical realism’s understanding of the mind/body relationship; second, its concepts of the process that connects theory and practice, and what that means for critical realism’s view of intellectual production, the place of metaphor in scientific theorization, and cultural development; its view of culture as a complexwhole; and finally, its theory of human agency as embodied and intentional. (shrink)

The primacy of practice in the development of knowledge is one of materialism's fundamental tenets. Most arguments supporting it have been strictly philosophical. However, over the past thirty years cognitive science has provided mounting evidence supporting the primacy of practice. Particularly striking is its finding that thought is fundamentally metaphoric—that images emerging from everyday embodied activities not only make ordinary experiences intelligible, but also underpin our more abstract engagements with the world, elaborated in disciplines such as ethics and science. (...) Cognitive science's implications must now be absorbed into critical realism. Cognitive science bolsters critical realism by providing a scientifically-grounded analysis of the passage from body to mind and the fundamental unity between them, while sustaining their distinctiveness. Its implications for critical realism ripple out in four waves: first, critical realism's understanding of the mind/body relationship; second, its concepts of the process that connects theory and practice, and what that means for critical realism's view of intellectual production, the place of metaphor in scientific theorization, and cultural development; its view of culture as a complex whole; and finally, its theory of human agency as embodied and intentional. (shrink)

In this article I explore the place of movement, particularly dance, in understanding and communication of the lived experience. I look at the gap between corporeal sensation and the communication of that knowledge into wider social contexts. Drawing on narratives gathered from four case studies in British schools, I look at dance as a mode of language that can offer a methodological approach to understanding the lived experience. I take the pragmatist starting point of embodiment to argue that (...) the immediacy of empirical experience is limited by the use of verbal languages alone to organize meaning-making. I suggest that ideas are three-dimensional, having aspects that are revealed by the attributes of different languages but are not limited to the language through which they are communicated. Therefore a network of languages, including movement languages, can create a web of understanding that addresses the deficits of each single language within that web. I suggest that a focus on just one mode of language to communicate ideas could result in a loss of engagement with the full potential of an idea. I suggest that different languages have a rhizomatic relationship each having equal potential to add to the quality and ‘thickness’ of communication of the multi-layered experience of embodiment. (shrink)

Abstract Internet communication technology has been said to affect our sense of self by altering the way we construct “personal identity,” understood as identificatory valuative narratives about the self; in addition, some authors have warned that internet communication creates special conditions for moral agency that might gradually change our moral intuitions. Both of these effects are attributed to the fact that internet communication is “disembodied.” Our aim in this paper is to establish a link between this complex (...) of claims and past and ongoing research in phenomenology, empirical psychology and cognitive science, in order to formulate an empirical hypothesis that can assist development and evaluation of recent technology for embodied telecommunication. We first suggest that for the purposes of interdisciplinary exchange, personal identity is formally best represented by a selection function that (for temporal intervals of variable length) “bundles” capacity ascriptions into identificatory narratives. Based on this model, we discuss which cultural changes engendered by the internet affect the construction of personal identity in ways that diminish our ethical sensitivies. In a second step, working from phenomenological claims by Martin Buber, we argue that disembodied communication severs two modes of cognitive function, preconceptual and conceptual, which tie together moral motivation, self-experience, and identity construction. We translate Buber’s claims into the theoretical idiom of the “theory of cognitive orientation,” a psychological theory of motivation that links up with recent research in embodied cognition. In a third step, we investigate whether the embodiment of the internet with communication robots (e.g., telenoids) holds out the prospect of reverting this structural change at least partially. We conclude by formulating an empirical hypothesis (for researchers in cognitive science) that has direct import, we submit, on the question whether embodied telecommunication promises a new form of ethically sensitive self-constituting encounter. Content Type Journal Article Category Special Issue Pages 1-23 DOI 10.1007/s13347-012-0064-9 Authors Johanna Seibt, Department for Philosophy and the History of Ideas, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark Marco Nørskov, Department for Philosophy and the History of Ideas, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433. (shrink)

This is a book that should cause Kant scholars to miss their daily walks. It is remarkable on at least four counts. First, Shell displays the unity of Kant's thought through both his "critical" and "pre-critical" writings. Second, with a deft deployment of biographical data, she demonstrates the unity of Kant's life and thought. Third, Shell demonstrates the importance of Kantian texts that are ignored by most commentators: the pre-critical corpus, the correspondence, unpublished notes and reflections, book reviews, student notes, (...) biographical anecdotes, and so forth. Fourth, Shell argues that Kant's emphasis on both human finitude and human dignity moderates the progressivism of his philosophy of history, constituting a critique of, and alternative to, such totalizing historicisms as those of Marx and Heidegger and the sundry postmodernisms of their frustrated and disillusioned followers. In this way, she hopes to contribute to the ongoing revival of an older and nobler form of liberalism that treats human dignity as an absolute. (shrink)

In higher education, the conventional design of educational programs emphasises imparting knowledge and skills, in line with traditional Western epistemology. This emphasis is particularly evident in the design and implementation of many undergraduate programs in which bodies of knowledge and skills are decontextualised from the practices to which they belong. In contrast, the notion of knowledge as foundational and absolute has been extensively challenged. A transformation and pluralisation has occurred: knowledge has come to be seen as situated and localized into (...) various 'knowledges', and the status of the body has taken on renewed significance in epistemological debates. Rather than thinking of knowledge as transcending the body, the embodiment of knowledge has become a key factor in understanding the nature of knowledge and what it means to know. In this paper, we adopt a phenomenological perspective in exploring the notion of embodied knowing as it relates to higher education programs and, more specifically, the ways in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) are used in these programs. (shrink)

This book explores how people's subjective, felt experiences of their bodies in action provide part of the fundamental grounding for human cognition and language. Cognition is what occurs when the body engages the physical and cultural world and must be studied in terms of the dynamical interactions between people and the environment. Human language and thought emerge from recurring patterns of embodied activity that constrain ongoing intelligent behavior. We must not assume cognition to be purely internal, symbolic, computational, and (...) disembodied, but seek out the gross and detailed ways that language and thought are inextricably shaped by embodied action. Embodiment and Cognitive Science describes the abundance of empirical evidence from many disciplines, including work on perception, concepts, imagery and reasoning, language and communication, cognitive development, and emotions and consciousness, that support the idea that the mind is embodied. (shrink)

In the three published volumes of his History of Sexuality Foucault reflects on themes of anxiety situated in the Christian doctrine of the flesh that led to a pastoral ministry establishing the rules of a general social economy—rules that enabled, over time, a discourse on the flesh that took thrift, prudence, modesty, and suspicion as essential ethical premises in the emerging “art of the self.” Rather than sensing flesh as a charged, motile potentiality of attachment and intimacy, it came to (...) be seen as skin—as the limit of a sovereign body, embedding guilt and shame into the texture of its expression. This essay pursues the psychological and communication problematic of intimacy as a critical and developmental experience of the flesh. Foucault's concept of self-care and parrhesia, Merleau-Ponty's concept of flesh and embodiment, and Bataille's concept of glory and eroticism contribute to a phenomenology of human development that seeks to articulate an idea of a self diffierentiated from the unspoken binds of familial anxiety and emotionality. (shrink)

This paper considers the importance of the body for self-esteem, communication, and emotional expression and experience, through the reflections of those who live with various neurological impairments of movement and sensation; sensory deafferentation, spinal cord injury and Möbius Syndrome. People with severe sensory loss, who require conscious attention and visual feedback for movement, describe the imperative to use the same strategies to reacquire gesture, to appear normal and have embodied expression. Those paralysed after spinal cord injury struggle to (...) have others see them as people rather than as people in wheelchairs and have been active in the disability movement, distinguishing between their medical impairment and the social induced disability others project onto them. Lastly those with Möbius reveal the importance of the face for emotional expression and communication and indeed for emotional experience itself. All these examples explore the crucial role of the body as agent for social and personal expression and self-esteem. (shrink)

I present experimental and computational research, inspired by the perspective of Embodied Embedded Cognition, concerning various aspects of language as supporting Everett’s interactionist view of language. Based on earlier and ongo- ing work, I briefly illustrate the contribution of the environment to the syste- maticity displayed in linguistic performance, the importance of joint attention for the development of a shared vocabulary, the role of (limited) traveling for language diversification, the function of perspective taking in social communica- tion, and the (...) bodily nature of understanding of meaning. (shrink)

The way the brain, body, and mind interact with social structure to shape communication has so far not received the attention it deserves. This book addresses this gap by providing a novel account of communication as a social, biological and neurological force. Combining theories from communication studies and psycholinguistics, and drawing on biological and evolutionary perspectives, it shows how communication is inherently both biological and social, and that language and the neural systems that support it have (...) evolved in response to a complex social environment. It introduces a clear set of terms based on current research, and illustrates key concepts using real-life examples from everyday conversation - speaking to a number of current debates around the evolutionary and biological basis of language, and the relationship between language, cognition, and environment. Thought provoking and engaging, it will change the way we think about the relationship between communication and cognition. (shrink)