The predominant model of the body in modern western medicine is the machine. Practitioners of the biomechanical model reduce the patient to separate, individual body parts in order to diagnose and treat disease. Utilization of this model has led, in part, to a quality of care crisis in medicine, in which patients perceive physicians as not sufficiently compassionate or empathic towards their suffering. Alternative models of the body, such as the phenomenological model, have been proposed to (...) address this crisis. According to the phenomenological model, the patient is viewed as an embodied person within a lived context and through this view the physician comes to understand the disruption illness causes in the patient’s everyday world of meaning. In this paper, I explore the impact these two models of the patient’s body have had on modern medical practice. To that end I first examine briefly the historical origins of the biomechanical and phenomenological models, providing a historical context for the discussion of each model’s main features in terms of machine-world and life-world. Next, I discuss the impact each model has had on the patient–physician relationship, and then I examine briefly the future development of each model. The meaning of illness vis-à-vis each model of the patient’s body is finally examined, especially in terms of how these two models affect the patient’s interpretation of illness. The paper concludes with a discussion of the biomechanical and phenomenological models, in terms of the quality of care crisis in modern western medicine. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, (...) and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The phenomenology of the self includes the sense of control over one’s body and mind, of being bounded in body and mind, of having perspective from within one’s body and mind and of being extended in time. I argue that this phenomenology is to be accounted for by a set of five dissociable cognitive capacities that compose the self. The focus of this paper is on the four capacities that compose the synchronic self: the agentiveB self, which (...) underlies the sense of control over one’s body; the boundaryB self, which underlies the sense of being bounded within one’s body; the agentiveM self which underlies the sense of control over one’s thoughts; and the boundaryM self which underlies the sense of being bounded within one’s mind. I model the agentiveB and agentiveM selves as parts of the motor control system and the boundaryB self as the capacity to form and integrated map of the body. I point to the delusion of thought broadcast as a possible source of evidence for future research on the boundaryM self. (shrink)

Research on natural and artificial brains is proceeding at a rapid pace. However, the understanding of the essence of consciousness has changed slightly over the millennia, and only the last decade has brought some progress to the area. Scientific ideas emerged that the soul could be a product of the material body and that calculating machines could imitate brain processes. However, the authors of this book reject the previously common dualism—the view that the material and spiritual-psychic processes are separate (...) and require a completely different substance as their foundation. -/- Reductive Model of the Conscious Mind is a forward-thinking book wherein the authors identify processes that are the essence of conscious thinking and place them in the imagined, simplified structure of cells able to memorize and transmit information in the form of impulses, which they call neurons. The purpose of the study is to explain the essence of consciousness to the degree of development of natural sciences, because only the latter can find a way to embed the concept of the conscious mind in material brains. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 works to convince readers that the emergence of consciousness does not require detailed knowledge of the structure and morphology of the brain, with the exception of some specific properties of the neural network structure that the authors attempt to point out. Part 2 proves that the biological structure of many natural brains fulfills the necessary conditions for consciousness and intelligent thinking. Similarly, Part 3 shows the ways in which artificial creatures imitating natural brains can meet these conditions, which gives great hopes for building artificially intelligent beings endowed with consciousness. Covering topics that include cognitive architecture, the embodied mind, and machine learning, this book is ideal for cognitive scientists, philosophers of mind, neuroscientists, psychologists, researchers, academicians, and advanced-level students. The book can also help to focus the research of linguists, neurologists, and biophysicists on the biophysical basis of postulated information processing into knowledge structures. (shrink)

Human tissue samples are essential to biomedical research, but recent controversies reveal disagreement over how to relate these fragments to donors. Deidentification has become impossible, a property model contravenes legal and religious traditions, and there is conflict over procedures for informed consent. While Michael Banner draws on Augustine and ethnographies to emphasize the role of fragments of the body in mourning, ethnographies actually suggest that many people believe that tissues and organs retain an ongoing connection to their donors. The (...) Christian practice of the veneration of relics and the doctrine of the resurrection of the body support the idea of an ongoing tie between the person and the dead body, a connection affirmed by theologians such as Gregory of Nyssa even when it is unnecessary for their anthropology. This relationship of the donor to tissue supports the ongoing participation of the donor or her family in decisions on research. (shrink)

The Eucharist is at the heart of Christian worship and at the heart of the Eucharist are the curious phrases, 'This is my body' and 'This is my blood'. James M. Arcadi offers a constructive proposal for understanding Christ's presence in the Eucharist that draws on contemporary conceptual resources and is faithful to the history of interpretation. He locates his proposal along a spectrum of Eucharistic theories. Arcadi explores the motif of God's presence related to divine omnipresence and special (...) presence in holy places, which undergirds a biblical-theological proposal concerning Christ's presence. Utilizing recent work in speech-act theory, Arcadi probes the acts of consecration and renaming in their biblical and liturgical contexts. A thorough examination of recent work in Christology leads to an action model of the Incarnation that borrows the notion of enabling externalism from philosophy of mind. These threads undergird a model of Christ's presence in the Eucharist. (shrink)

De Vignemont argues that the sense of ownership comes from the localization of bodily sensation on a map of the body that is part of the body schema. This model should be taken as a model of the sense of embodiment. I argue that the body schema lacks the theoretical resources needed to explain this phenomenology. Furthermore, there is some reason to think that a deficient sense of embodiment is not associated with a deficient body schema. (...) The data de Vignemont uses to argue that the body image does not underlie the sense of embodiment does not rule out the possibility that part of the body image I call 'offline representations' underlies the sense of embodiment. An alternative model of the sense of embodiment in terms of offline representations of the body is presented. (shrink)

Can we describe certain sonic experiences as “homely,” even when they take place outside of a traditional home-space? While phenomenological accounts of home abound, with writers detailing a rich spectrum of the felt characteristics of the homely including safety, familiarity, and affective “warmth,” there is a scarcity of research into sonic experience that engages with such literatures. With specific interest in the experience of embodied space, I account here for what might be termed feelings of “sonic homeliness” as they emerge (...) during headphone listening. After forming a conceptual model of homeliness that draws from phenomenological philosophy, I investigate its applicability to experiences of headphone listening. Through analysis of primary interview data, I consider how headphones may be said to territorialize space for listeners, analyzing how sonic “boundaries” are experienced in relation to the body, as well as how some listeners describe their experiences as interiorized, comforting, and “wombic.”. (shrink)

Abstract.As an undergraduate at Cambridge, Newton entered into his ‘Waste Book’ an assumption that we have named the Equivalence Assumption (The Younger): ‘‘ If a body move progressively in some crooked line [about a center of motion]..., [then this] crooked line may bee conceived to consist of an infinite number of streight lines. Or else in any point of the croked line the motion may bee conceived to be on in the tangent.’’ In this assumption, Newton somewhat imprecisely describes (...) two mathematical models, a ‘‘polygonal limit model’’ and a ‘‘tangent deflected model,’’ for ‘‘one-body motion,’’ that is, for the motion of a ‘‘body in orbit about a fixed center,’’ and then claims that these two models are equivalent. In the first part of this paper, we study the Principia to determine how the elder Newton would more carefully describe the polygonal limit and tangent deflected models. From these more careful descriptions, we then create Equivalence Assumption (The Elder), a precise interpretation of Equivalence Assumption (The Younger) as it might have been restated by Newton, after say 1687. We then review certain portions of the Waste Book and the Principia to make the case that, although Newton never restates nor even alludes to the Equivalence Assumption after his youthful Waste Book entry, still the polygonal limit and tangent deflected models, as well as an unspoken belief in their equivalence, infuse Newton’s work on orbital motion. In particular, we show that the persuasiveness of the argument for the Area Property in Proposition 1 of the Principia depends crucially on the validity of Equivalence Assumption (The Elder). After this case is made, we present the mathematical analysis required to establish the validity of the Equivalence Assumption (The Elder). Finally, to illustrate the fundamental nature of the resulting theorem, the Equivalence Theorem as we call it, we present three significant applications: we use the Equivalence Theorem first to clarify and resolve questions related to Leibniz’s ‘‘polygonal model’’ of one-body motion; then to repair Newton’s argument for the Area Property in Proposition 1; and finally to clarify and resolve questions related to the transition from impulsive to continuous forces in ‘‘De motu’’ and the Principia. (shrink)

We continue the study of the theories of Baldwin–Shi hypergraphs from [5]. Restricting our attention to when the rank δ is rational valued, we show that each countable model of the theory of a given Baldwin–Shi hypergraph is isomorphic to a generic structure built from some suitable subclass of the original class used in the construction. We introduce a notion of dimension for a model and show that there is a an elementary chain $\left\{ {\mathfrak{M}_\beta :\beta \leqslant \omega } \right\}$ (...) of countable models of the theory of a fixed Baldwin–Shi hypergraph with $\mathfrak{M}_\beta \preccurlyeq \mathfrak{M}_\gamma $ if and only if the dimension of $\mathfrak{M}_\beta $ is at most the dimension of $\mathfrak{M}_\gamma $ and that each countable model is isomorphic to some $\mathfrak{M}_\beta $. We also study the regular types that appear in these theories and show that the dimension of a model is determined by a particular regular type. Further, drawing on a large body of work, we use these structures to give an example of a pseudofinite, ω-stable theory with a nonlocally modular regular type, answering a question of Pillay in [11]. (shrink)

The principal argument of the present paper is that the human body is as much a reflective formation of multiple discourses as it is an effect of natural and environmental processes. This paper examines the implications of this argument, and suggests that recognizing the body in this light can be illuminating, not only for our conception of the body, but also for our understanding of medicine. Since medicine is itself a discursive formation, a science with both a (...) history, and a future, it is argued that much can be learned by reflecting on the progression of models, or “paradigm-shifts,”, in terms of which modern medicine has articulated the human body that figures at the heart of its discourse. Four historical periods of medicine will be considered, each one governed by its own distinctive paradigm. It is argued, finally, that, with the emergence of behavioural medicine, and, more particularly, psychoneuroimmunology, a new discursive formation in medicine, one can see a new conceptualization of the human body beginning to take shape; and that this new figure of the body makes it possible for the very first time to conceive the construction of testable hypotheses regarding correlations between the objective body of science and the phenomenological body of experienced meaning. (shrink)

The rubber hand illusion (RHI) is the experience of an artificial body part as being a real body part and the experience of touch coming from that artificial body part. An explanation of this illusion would take significant steps towards explaining the experience of embodiment in one’s own body. I present a new cognitive model to explain the RHI. I argue that the sense of embodiment arises when an on-line representation of the candidate body part (...) is represented as matching an off-line prototype representation of what one’s body is usually like. The cause of the sense of embodiment in the model body part only partially overlaps with the causes of proprioceptive drift, which commonly accompanies the RHI, and so is compatible with observed dissociations between the illusion and proprioceptive drift. The distinguishing features of this model are the off-line body representation, and the process of matching an on-line model to an off-line model, both of which are to be understood in terms of a conceptual space. -/- Key Words: Rubber Hand Illusion; RHI; Sense of Embodiment; Self Consciousness; Body Experience. (shrink)

In the context of recent debate about whether “Reformed Catholics” and Protestants, more generally, should accept Augustine’s totus Christus Christological ecclesiology, I illustrate the notion of an asymmetric aligning union. This is a metaphysically real union, but not a substantial union. I suggest that Reformed catholic theology would be better served by deploying the notion of an asymmetric aligning union. It preserves the Reformation solas and is compatible with the notion of the mystical body of Christ, without the disadvantages (...) of the totus Christus notion, if that is taken to involve a substantial union. This form of union should be of wider ecumenical interest. (shrink)

Currently there are at least four sizeable projects going on to establish the gravitational acceleration of massive antiparticles on earth. While general relativity and modern quantum theories strictly forbid any repulsive gravity, it has not yet been established experimentally that gravity is attraction only. With that in mind, the Elementary Process Theory (EPT) is a rather abstract theory that has been developed from the hypothesis that massive antiparticles are repulsed by the gravitational field of a body of ordinary matter: (...) the EPT essentially describes the elementary processes by which the smallest massive systems have to interact with their environments for repulsive gravity to exist. In this paper we model a nonrelativistic, one-component massive system that evolves in time by the processes as described by the EPT in an environment described by classical fields: the main result is a semi-classical model of a process at Planck scale by which a non-relativistic onecomponent system interacts with its environment, such that the interaction has both gravitational and electromagnetic aspects. Some worked-out examples are provided, among which the repulsion of an antineutron by the gravitational field of the earth. The general conclusion is that the semi-classical model of the EPT corresponds to non-relativistic classical mechanics. Further research is aimed at demonstrating that the EPT has a model that reproduces the successful predictions of general relativity. (shrink)

A number of philosophers :171–187, 2011; Arnold 2011, in Ethics Politics XV:101–138, 2013) have argued that agent-based, evolutionary game theory models of the evolution of cooperation fail to provide satisfying explanations of cooperation because they are too disconnected from actual biology. I show how these criticisms can be answered by employing modeling approaches from the situated cognition research program that allow for more biologically detailed models. Using cases drawn from recent situated cognition modeling research, I show how agent-based (...) models of the evolution of cooperation can become more empirically-informed and relevant to explaining the evolution of cooperation in real populations. I argue that because situated cognition models allow for more detailed representations of not just agents’ brains but bodies and environments as well, they can be informed by a much wider breadth of empirical research than traditional agent-based models. Moreover, because the simulated bodies of these agents exhibit particular behaviors, they can be more readily compared to the behaviors of actual organisms. I conclude that employing situated cognition approaches to modeling the evolution of cooperation is a more promising way to investigate the evolution of cooperation than more traditional agent-based evolutionary game theory models. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mary as the Exemplar of the Body's PovertyAngela FranksRecent MariologyFollowing the trajectory of Mariology and Marian devotion for the last century or so is enough to give one whiplash. On the one hand, the declaration of the doctrine of Mary's Assumption in 1950 by Pope Pius XII represents a strand of Mariology that emphasizes her divinely granted prerogatives and glory. In popular piety, this dogmatic emphasis was mirrored (...) by devotional practices that stressed Mary's mediatorial power.1 On the other hand, many theologians were concerned that such teaching and practice obscured the centrality of Christ, the Church, and the liturgy in Christian life.2 One could see the placing of Mary within chapter 8 of Lumen Gentium less than fifteen years after the declaration of the Assumption as a rebalancing of Mariology. Lumen Gentium (LG) resituated Mary within the doctrine of the Church, echoing patristic equations of Our Lady with the Church.3 One unintended effect of the conciliar move, however, was to make devotion to Mary seem unnecessary, despite the efforts of [End Page 1097] post-conciliar popes to encourage Marian piety—in particular, John Paul II, with his Marian motto Totus Tuus.John Paul II is in many ways an exemplar of conciliar Marian devotion. His Mariology integrates Mary into ecclesiology by emphasizing her role as the paradigmatic follower of Christ.4 This discipleship is, he is careful to say, due to her maternal role and the extraordinary graces that followed from it.5 But these graces did not eliminate her need to follow her son closely; rather, they made such discipleship possible.This interplay between Mary's need and the unique graces granted to meet that need is perhaps clearest in John Paul II's presentation of Mary's faith.6 This attitude of faith is "central" to John Paul II's presentation of Mary in the encyclical Redemptoris Mater (RM), according to Joseph Ratzinger.7 Because of her faith, which is based on the prior action of God in her life (§38, quoting LG §60), she is due "a wealth of praise" that "is more than ever necessary today" (RM §34). In John Paul II, the seeming either-or of twentieth-century Mariology is dissolved, but through the introduction of a causal relationship between the two. In other words, [End Page 1098] Mary's poverty—her need for and receptivity to God—is what makes her able to be rich, to be worthy of a wealth of praise.Perhaps surprisingly, John Paul Il's presentation of Mary as transparent to the mystery of Christ echoes his theology of the body. There, he repeats a hylomorphic maxim: "The body reveals the person." In this revelation, the poverty and the wealth of the body coincide. The body is of great dignity: it can reveal the person. But it is also poor, because it does not reveal itself but rather is transparent to the inner personal mystery. In this, it resembles Mary.This essay will pick up the trail laid down by John Paul II by examining Mary under the rubric of her poverty. Her poverty, I will argue, is exemplary for the poverty of the body, and neither Mary nor the body can be understood properly without understanding poverty. In this essay, I will explore these topics by looking at the Mariology of John Paul II and Hans Urs von Balthasar, before turning to what this Mariology means for the body and for creation in general.Mary's PovertyRedemptoris Mater presents Mary as a model of pilgrim faith, one who "goes before" us on the pilgrimage (RM §§5–6 and 25–28). Mary's reliance upon faith places her among the anawim, the poor of the Lord. John Paul II quotes §55 of Lumen Gentium to note that Mary "stands out among the poor and humble of the Lord, who confidently await and receive salvation from him" (RM §§8 and 11). As the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Joseph Ratzinger wrote around the time of the Marian encyclical, she is "totally dependent upon God and completely directed towards him, and at the side of her Son, she is... (shrink)

In What the Body Commands, Colin Klein proposes and defends a novel theory of pain. Klein argues that pains are imperative; they are sensations with a content, and that content is a command to protect the injured part of the body. He terms this view "imperativism about pain," and argues that imperativism can account for two puzzling features of pain: its strong motivating power and its uninformative nature. Klein argues that the biological purpose of pain is homeostatic; like (...) hunger and thirst, pain helps solve a challenge to bodily integrity. It does so by motivating you to act in ways that help the body recover. If you obey pain's command, you get better. He develops his account to handle a variety of pain phenomena and applies it to solve a number of historically puzzling cases. Klein's intent is to defend the imperativist view in a pure form -- without requiring pain to represent facts about the world.Klein presents a model of imperative content showing that intrinsically motivating sensations are best understood as imperatives, and argues that pain belongs to this class. He considers the distinction between pain and suffering; explains how pain motivates; addresses variations among pains; and offers an imperativist account of maladaptive pains, pains that don't appear to hurt, masochism, and why pain feels bad. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on the notion of clinical medicine as a hermeneutical enterprise and to bridge the gap between the general perspectives of hermeneutics and the particularities of medical practice. The case of a patient with low back pain is analyzed. The discussion centers around the metaphor of the patient as a text and a model of five social discourses about low back pain. The problems addressed are: (1) the nature of a moral experience, (2) (...) the variety of available texts, (3) the difference between the doctor's and patient's narratives, and (4) the patient's and doctor's responsibility regarding the existential, biographical meaning of an illness. Although many problems are left unsolved, it is argued that from a philosophical point of view the notion of medicine as a hermeneutical enterprise opens up the possibility of gaining insight in the foundations of the clinical encounter. (shrink)

Arguments analogous to those found in the late medieval theory of the king’s two bodies, popularized by Ernst Kantorowicz, were resurrected in early nineteenth-century constitutional theories of the moderating powers of monarchy. Post-revolutionary French liberal thought, echoed by its Portuguese counterpart, rediscovered the virtues of the institution of royalty, notably the immaterial and immortal body of the king. This rediscovery was prompted by the uncertainties of different national political contexts which made many contemporaries believe it desirable to integrate restored (...) monarchies within modern constitutional models for state stability. This first occurred with the Bourbons’ return to post-Napoleonic France and the restoration of the monarchy in 1814, and then with the Braganza royal family’s return to Portugal in 1821 after thirteen years of rule from Brazil. Using arguments similar to those previously made in late medieval European political and legal thought, French and Portuguese liberals developed a theory of the king’s two powers, according to which the monarch at once exercised a moderating power, defined by the abstract institutional nature of the king’s person, and an executive power, embodied within his physical person. This conceptualization of royal duality was intended to make it possible to delegate executive power to ministers, leaving the king only the attributes of a largely symbolic power. Liberals thereby hoped to confine the monarch to his purely institutional body in a de-politicized constitutional role. (shrink)

This article analyses some of the anatomical waxes in the Museo della Specola in Florence. Executed in at least two different periods in the history of Florentine wax modelling , they project culturally determined images of the body which are analysed from a historico-semiotic perspective. "Rotten corpses," a "disembowelled woman" and a "flayed man" emerge as salient figures in the collection and reveal the close tie between anatomical representations and aesthetics, social relations and religious scruples, in other words, the (...) culture tout court which produced them. (shrink)

. This article analyses some of the anatomical waxes in the Museo della Specola in Florence. Executed in at least two different periods in the history of Florentine wax modelling, they project culturally determined images of the body which are analysed from a historico-semiotic perspective. “Rotten corpses,” a “disembowelled woman” and a “flayed man” emerge as salient figures in the collection and reveal the close tie between anatomical representations and aesthetics, social relations and religious scruples, in other words, the (...) culture tout court which produced them. (shrink)

Objective: The aim of this research was to study the mediation of body dissatisfaction, physical self-concept, and body mass index (BMI) on the relationship between physical activity and self-concept in adolescents. Materials and Methods: A sample of 652 Spanish students between 12 and 17 years participated in a cross-sectional study. Physical self-concept and general self-concept were assessed with the Physical Self-Concept Questionnaire (CAF), body dissatisfaction with the Body Shape Questionnaire (BSQ), and physical activity was estimated with (...) the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ-SF). BMI was utilized as a measurement of body composition. Structural equation modeling was used to assess the results. Results: The resulting models showed good fit indexes. Physical activity had a positive and indirect effect on self-concept (β = 0.29, p < 0.01) and direct effects on dissatisfaction (β = -0.26, p < 0.01) and physical self-concept (β = 0.20, p < 0.01). BMI had a direct effect on dissatisfaction (β = 0.31, p < 0.01) and on physical self-concept (β = -0.10, p < 0.01) and an indirect effect on general self-concept (β = -0.24, p < 0.01). However, it was only associated with physical activity in males, playing a mediating role between physical activity and body dissatisfaction. Conclusion: Physical activity can help individuals to achieve a positive self-concept and promote psychological well-being in adolescents through the improvement of physical perceptions and body satisfaction. The importance of BMI, body dissatisfaction, and physical self-concept on the configuration of the self-concept are also emphasized. Educational policymakers and Physical Education teachers should implement strategies to promote physical activity in the schools and provide a Quality Physical Education programs to increase physical activity during adolescence. (shrink)

: This article analyses some of the anatomical waxes in the Museo della Specola in Florence. Executed in at least two different periods in the history of Florentine wax modelling (in the late 17th century and between the 18th and 19th centuries), they project culturally determined images of the body which are analysed from a historico-semiotic perspective. "Rotten corpses," a "disembowelled woman" and a "flayed man" emerge as salient figures in the collection and reveal the close tie between anatomical (...) representations and aesthetics, social relations and religious scruples, in other words, the culture tout court which produced them. (shrink)

Is your mind the same thing as your brain, or are there aspects of mind beyond the brain's biology? This is the mind-body problem, and it has captivated curious minds since the dawn of human contemplation. Today many insist that the mind is completely reducible to the brain. But is that claim justified? In this stimulating anthology, twenty-five philosophers and scientists offer fresh insights into the mind-brain debate, drawing on psychology, neurology, philosophy, computer science, and neurosurgery. Their provocative conclusion? (...) The mind is indeed more than the brain. (shrink)

This paper is focused on the theory of drives, particularly on its economic model, which was an integral part of Freud’s original formulation. Freud was aiming to make a link between the psychic energy of drives and the biophysical rules of nature. However, he was not able to develop this model into a comprehensive system linking the body and the mind. The further development of psychoanalytic theory, in various attempts to comprehend the theory of drives, can be described as (...) taking different approaches. Some of them equate drives with bodily impulses, others abandon the economic model, a few stay with Freud’s original model. I believe that the Friston notion of free energy and the hierarchical model of the brain allows us to develop this model and to integrate the economic model into some contemporary theories of drives. I argue against those theories equating drives with biological impulses. My arguments are supported by Freud’s project itself but also by recent developments within neuro-psychoanalysis describing the process of mentalizing homeostasis, interoceptive signals and relations with caregivers. I argue for those theories which see the drives as psychic forces, which through developmental processes and cathexes acquire aims and objects, and become intertwined with impulses originating internally and externally, such as affect, interoceptive impulses, perception of the external world, and impulses from erotogenic zones in particular. Here, I present my analysis of the compatibility and consistency of free energy and the hierarchical model perspective, and two psychoanalytical traditions of thoughts: French psychoanalysis and the post-Kleinian school of British psychoanalysis. In particular, my analysis focuses on the contemporary Kleinian notion of unconscious phantasies, especially Bronstein’s description of their semiotic aspects. Secondly, I look at Segal’s view of drives as dialectic forces of adaptation vs. conservatism. Analyzing the French tradition, I focus on Green’s perspective on the drives, Lacan’s distinction between drives and desire, and Penot’s description of the process of subjectivation. I conclude that free energy, as described by Friston, can be seen as a source of the drives’ energy and the process of minimizing it is an equivalent of what Freud described as binding the free energy, in which psychic unbound energy acquires distinctive features and becomes bound. (shrink)

The author presents a biogenetic structural theory of the body image in human beings. The theory accounts for both the universal principles and the variance in body image cross‐culturally. All humans develop a neurocognitive model of their body which combines information about the body obtained via both the internal and external sensory systems. Their experience of themselves is mediated in part by this model. The initial model of the body is "hard‐wired" and already present and (...) active in the cognitively and perceptually competent pre‐ and perinatal human being, and develops as a consequence of both genetically imposed and socioculturally influenced processes of growth. The role of behavior in this process is shown to be the control of perception such that the body image experienced in perception approximates that anticipated by the cognized self. The theory accounts for the use of the body‐assymbol and the distortion of the body image for communicative purposes. The neurophysiology of imagery is reviewed and suggestions are made for possible clinical methods that might be used to effect therapeutic changes in pathological body imagery. (shrink)

In The Body of Compassion, Joel Shuman presents an important, new theological treatment of contemporary bioethics, weaving together personal experience, a critical treatise on contemporary bioethics, and an exploration of a Christian theological alternative.The author first draws the reader into a consideration of the current state of bioethics by relating the story of his grandfather, a hard-working family man who died a solitary death, unaccompanied by loved ones, in the unfamiliar and sterile world of a hospital. Troubled by the (...) way his grandfather died, Shuman takes the reader along as he explores how modern medicine has distanced itself from dealing with people as living beings beyond their immediate physicality. He examines how various approaches to bioethics over the past twenty years have tried to remedy this problem by prescribing certain standards for treatment and how each of these ultimately has fallen short due to the lack of “a teleological concern for the body”—i.e., to trying to understand what the body is actually for in a larger context. From this point, Shuman deftly moves to a discussion of the centrality of the body to Christianity, focusing on how baptism, participation in the liturgy, and the partaking of the Eucharist all serve to unite Christians as one in the body of Christ. For Christians, the author argues, the body does not just belong to the individual but rather is one with the community of the Church. With this in mind, Shuman proposes a new kind of bioethics for Christians, where care for the body of Christ becomes the model of how we should care for and receive care from each other.This fresh and thought-provoking book is sure to be of interest to ethicists, medical professionals, and everyone who is troubled by places where science and religion intersect and seem to conflict. (shrink)

Psychosomatic medicine, with its prevailing biopsychosocial model, aims to integrate human and exact sciences with their divergent conceptual models. Therefore, its own conceptual foundations, which often remain implicit and unknown, may be critically relevant. We defend the thesis that choosing between different metaphysical views on the ‘mind–body problem’ may have important implications for the conceptual foundations of psychosomatic medicine, and therefore potentially also for its methods, scientific status and relationship with the scientific disciplines it aims to integrate: biomedical (...) sciences, psychology and social sciences. To make this point, we introduce three key positions in the philosophical ‘mind–body’ debate and investigate their consequences for the conceptual basis of the biopsychosocial model in general and its ‘psycho-biological’ part in particular. Despite the clinical merits of the biopsychosocial model, we submit that it is conceptually underdeveloped or even flawed, which may hamper its use as a proper scientific model. (shrink)

In the last two decades there have been many critics of western biomedicine's poor integration of social and psychological factors in questions of human health. Such critiques frequently begin with a rejection of Descartes' mind-body dualism, viewing this as the decisive philosophical moment, radically separating the two realms in both theory and practice. It is argued here, however, that many such readings of Descartes have been selective and misleading. Contrary to the assumptions of many recent authors, Descartes' dualism does (...) attempt to explain the union of psyche and soma - with more depth than is often appreciated. Pain plays a key role in Cartesian as well as contemporary thinking about the problem of dualism. Theories of the psychological origins of pain symptoms persisted throughout the history of modern medicine and were not necessarily discouraged by Cartesian mental philosophy. Moreover, the recently developed biopsychosocial model of pain may have more in common with Cartesian dualism than it purports to have. This article presents a rereading of Descartes' mental philosophy and his views on pain. The intention is not to defend his theories, but to re-evaluate them and to ask in what respect contemporary theories represent any significant advance in philosophical terms. (shrink)

This paper concerns Plato’s characterization of the body as the soul’s tool. I take perception as an example of the body’s usefulness. I explore the Timaeus’ view that perception provides us with models of orderliness. Then, I argue that perception of confusing sensible objects is necessary for our cognitive development too. Lastly, I consider the instrumentality relationship more generally and its place in Plato’s teleological worldview.

A very distinctive and important new option for Christian theology. McFague proposes in a clear and challenging way a theological program based on what she calls 'the organic model' for conceiving God.

본고는 반성에 대한 리오타르의 후기 저작 두 가지를 논한다. 리오타르는 그의 칸트 독해에서 반성 개념에 대해 논한 바 있다. 본고는 그 중 칸트의 숭고미에 대하여 를 리오타르의 보다 이전의 저술인 비인간 에 포함된 에세이, “Si l’on peut penser sans corps” 와 관련하여 논한다. 이는 칸트의 반성에 대한 리오타르의 보다 자세한 논의인 칸트의 숭고미에 대하여 를 보다 넓은 차원에서 이해하고자 하는 시도이다. 이를 위해 본고는 후기 리오타르 사상에서 주요하게 등장하는, 사유와 신체 모두와 연관을 맺는 정념 개념에 주목한다.

Xavier Le Roy’s performance Self-Unfinished is emblematic of how contemporary dance’s resistance to the submission of the body to a codified ideal body model manifests itself through the staging of bodies “beyond codes”, i.e., bodies that take surprising, sometimes even apparently “monstrous” shapes. The purpose of this article is to investigate the “monstrosity” of Self-Unfinished and to sketch out an analysis of it following Hermann Schmitz's theory of the Leib and Tonino Griffero’s account on atmospheres.

Under the independence and competence assumptions of Condorcet’s classical jury model, the probability of a correct majority decision converges to certainty as the jury size increases, a seemingly unrealistic result. Using Bayesian networks, we argue that the model’s independence assumption requires that the state of the world (guilty or not guilty) is the latest common cause of all jurors’ votes. But often – arguably in all courtroom cases and in many expert panels – the latest such common cause is a (...) shared ‘body of evidence’ observed by the jurors. In the corresponding Bayesian network, the votes are direct descendants not of the state of the world, but of the body of evidence, which in turn is a direct descendant of the state of the world. We develop a model of jury decisions based on this Bayesian network. Our model permits the possibility of misleading evidence, even for a maximally competent observer, which cannot easily be accommodated in the classical model. We prove that (i) the probability of a correct majority verdict converges to the probability that the body of evidence is not misleading, a value typically below 1; (ii) depending on the required threshold of ‘no reasonable doubt’, it may be impossible, even in an arbitrarily large jury, to establish guilt of a defendant ‘beyond any reasonable doubt’. (shrink)

One of the common targets that contemporary feminists are critical of concerning the problem of the body is Rene Descartes' mind and body relation. Feminist scholars can identify at least three lines of investigation of the body in contemporary thought that may be regarded as legacies of the Cartesian view, which treat the body as primarily an object for: 1) the natural sciences, particularly for the life sciences, biology, and medicine; 2) as an instrument or a (...) machine at the disposal of consciousness or allocating an animating, willful subjectivity; and 3) as a vehicle of expression of private thoughts and feelings; that is, as fundamentally passive and transparent. Recently, feminist scholars are seriously thinking of a new conceptual model that can displace Cartesian dualism and that can emancipate notions of the body from Cartesian dominant mechanistic models and metaphors. In this light, this paper turns to a Confucian theory of the body for revelation and the case of Mencius is introduced, in which the mind is regarded as the major component of the body and a coherent model is adopted. Can we then conclude to ask in what ways the reclaiming of the body in the Contemporary Western discussion may learn from the Confucian ideas of the body...? (shrink)

The use of metaphors and analogies was widespread in English political literature during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and for contemporary readers they were more than merely rhetorical artifices – they were used to illustrate and, in some cases, even to provide evidence. In this regard, none was more apt than the most prominent of these analogies: that between the human body and the state. The political thought of the time established an unshakeable connection between the two, building (...) an argument for how their structures and ways of functioning mirrored each other. This paper examines one of the most extensive and thorough examples of corporal analogies in early modern English political literature – that of Edward Forset’s A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique (1606) – and shows how such corporal analogies were used to construct an absolutist political model wherein the king was depicted as the soul, the head and the heart of the body politic. The paper integrates Forset’s A Comparative Discourse within the context of the ideological struggles from the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, while its place within the larger picture of the medieval and early modern metaphor of the body politic is also examined, in order to assess the lineage and originality of Forset’s ideas and point out how the same kind of analogies could be used to provide significantly different political interpretations. (shrink)

Representations of the body depend on a social framework, a vision of the world and a definition of the person. The body is a symbolic construction and not a reality in its own right. A priori, its characterization seems to be self-evident, but ultimately nothing is less comprehensible. Far from being unanimously accepted by human societies, making the body stand out as a reality in some way distinct from man seems an uneasy effort, contradictory between one time (...) and place and another. Many societies do not retain it as part of their vision of the world. They do not detach man from his body in the dualist fashion so common to Western man. We might recall here the incident recounted by Maurice Leenhardt, who asked an elderly Kanak what the West had contributed to Melanesia. The answer surprised him. “What you brought us is the body”. With the intrusion of cultural and social values and forms from the Western world that tend to individualism, there came an awareness of the body as a barrier and a boundary distinguishing each person from every other person. In the societies to which we refer, the components of a person include the flesh without setting this off separately. The body itself is an abstraction. On the phenomenological level, only a person whose body gives him a face and establishes his presence in the world can exist. Man is indiscernible from the flesh that models him. (shrink)

Flowing from his model for a contemporary theological anthropology as embodied sensing, the author focuses on the corporeal-linguistic turn in the 21st century and explores how his use of bodymapping, as an applied aspect of theological anthropology within the context of narrative therapy, intersects with the work of the neuro-scientist, Antonio Damasio on consciousness, and specifically his research on how the brain constantly maps the body in the brain. The author also explores the notion of sensing in the latest (...) book of the Irish philosopher Richard Kearney and based on this, expands his model for theological anthropology to the embodied sensing of meaning. (shrink)

Drawing upon the work of Merleau-Ponty, Borrett et al. (2000) have attempted to model the primordial, "empty heads turned towards the world." Putting the issue of embodiment aside for another day, they propose two separate models, one of movement and the other of perception. While I am sympathetic to the point of their project, I argue in this commentary that their models are insufficiently vague. The following analytic abstractions to which they commit themselves seem seriously at odds with (...) the nature of their task: action versus perception; vision versus the other senses; spatial properties versus, for example, colour and meaning; and 'a controller' versus the body and its environment. (shrink)

The distinction between body image and body schema has been incredibly influential in cognitive neuroscience. Recently, researchers have begun to speculate about the relationship between these representations (Gadsby, 2017, 2018; Pitron & de Vignemont, 2017; Pitron et al., 2018). Within this emerging literature, Pitron et al. (2018) proposed that the long-term body image and long-term body schema co-construct one another, through a process of reciprocal interaction. In proposing this model, they make two assumptions: that the long-term (...) body image incorporates the spatial characteristics of tools, and that it is distorted in the case of Alice in wonderland syndrome. Here, I challenge these assumptions, with a closer examination of what the term “long-term body image” refers to. In doing so, I draw out some important taxonomic principles for research into body representation. -/- . (shrink)

In their article, Pitron and de Vignemont (2017) provide an insightful and well overdue discussion of the relationship between long-term body representation models and Alice in Wonderland syndrome. Here, I supplement their discussion with a number of observations. First, I present a cautionary note regarding the interpretation of experiential changes in body size as reflective of changes in the content of body representations. Second, I show how their evidence contradicts an alternative model of body representation (...) arising from research into anorexia nervosa—the “LTB” hypothesis. Finally, I highlight a significant issue with their proposed co-construction model. -/- . (shrink)

This paper is prompted by the charge that the prevailing Western paradigm of medical knowledge is essentially Cartesian. Hence, illness, disease, disability, etc. are said to be conceived of in Cartesian terms. The paper attempts to make use of the critique of Cartesianism in medicine developed by certain commentators, notably Leder (1992), in order to expose Cartesian commitments in conceptions of disability. The paper also attempts to sketch an alternative conception of disability — one partly inspired by the work of (...) Merleau-Ponty. In particular, three key Cartesian claims are identified and subjected to criticism. These are as follows: (a) The claim that the body is an object, (b) what is termed here ‘the modularity thesis’, and (c) the claim that the body cannot be constitutive of the self (i.e. since the soul/mind/brain is). In opposition to these claims, it is argued that the body is properly viewed as a subject; that there are neither purely mental, nor purely physical disabilities; and that selves are constituted, at least in part, by their bodies. (shrink)