Questions such as What is a person?, What is consciousness? and Is there a difference between the mind and the body? can be better clarified if the idea of embodiment is understood. Embodiment, defined by R. Scott Kretchmar, "describes one fundamental condition of personhood, namely, that humans are always located somewhere and sometime and that human consciousness is never free from the influence of body constraints like chemicals and the number of brain cells in one's head." Embodiment can be understood from many different pathways, including religion, science, and philosophy. The following links may be able to provide helpful insights on the road to discover what your meanings of personhood and consciousness are by way of understanding embodiment.
Mending
the Split (http://www.gartland.com/phoenix/95-7/7-mendi.html)
Most religions denounce the demands of the flesh thus
creating "dueling dualities," but Jacquelyn Short, MSW says it is okay
to love sensuous pleasures as well as holy feelings.
Biosemantics
towards a new synthesis in Biology (http://www.gypsymoth.ento.vt.edu/~sharov/biosem/hoffmeyr.html)
We consist of three worlds: the ordinary world
around us, the world of mental experiences, and the immaterial world of
thought, questions, etc. What is reality? What is mind?
Notes
on "Origins of an Embodied Cognition: Moving, Perceiving, and Thinking
in Infancy"
(http://www.physics.wisc.edu/~shalizi/notebooks/development-dynamics.html)
Early perceptual motor skills are the foundation of later,
more abstract thinking-this differs from early Cartesian rules.
Theology and
Form: Reflections on the Spaces of the Imagination
(http://www.svare.com/johndixon/DixonTF7.htm)
Modern physics makes the Cartesian view of separated
mind and body impossible because reality is simply an "interlocking hierarchy
of rhythmically interacting structures of Energy."
Consciousness
in Human and Robot Minds (http://www.tufts.edu/as/cogstud/papers/concrobt.htm)
What does it mean to be conscious?
Vile Bodies-A mental
machination (http://is.rice.edu/~pound/bodies.html)
The dualism question of body-vs.-anti-body is discussed
and the question of reality is approached.
The
current Relevance of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Embodiment (http://phil.indiana.edu/ejap/1996.spring/dreyfus.1996.spring.html)
Defends, explains, and draws out implications of Merleau-Ponty's
Phenomenology of Perception statement the "the life of consciousness is
subtended by an 'intentional arc' which projects round about us our past
our future, our human setting, our physical, ideological, and moral situation."
Classical
Review of Person, Soul and Identity (http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/b/bmcr/bmcr-9512-gerson-person.txt)
Review of Robert Bolton's book Person, Soul, and Identity.
A Neoplationic Account of the Principle of Personality.
Additions submitted by Adam LaRue, Fall, 1998:
Provides
articles on the relationship between Embodiment and Sensory motor Kinesthetics
(http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/~malcolm/place/Embodiment.html#Kinesthetics)
Provides
articles on Embodiment with regard to Territoriality
(http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/~malcolm/place/Embodiment.html#Territoriality)
Return to class readings page: Kinesiology 493: Philosophy of Kinesiology