The body in the mind_Vignemont

The notion of bodily awareness is at the crossroads of philosophical debates on the self, action and space. The way we relate to our body, including the way we perceive it, control it and affectively react to what happens to it, is unlike the way we relate to other objects. Our body may be the object we know the best, from which we constantly receive a flow of information from vision, touch, proprioception, the vestibular and the visceral systems. Yet, when it comes to describing what it is like to be embodied, to experience this body as one’s own, one soon realizes that there is a vast unexplored field beyond the rough “feeling of the same old body always there”, as William James described it. Despite its richness, bodily awareness has attracted relatively little attention from philosophers despite the increasing focus on the body in cognitive science of the last 20 years. Embodied cognitive science has become an industry but the body itself remains an object rarely explicitly investigated. The embodied approach claims to return the mind to the body. But we need to step back from speculations about the role of the body for the mind and starts at the very beginning by understanding how the mind represents the body.