Philosophy of the Body

The body has always been considered to be significant since the existence of humanity. It has not merely been analysed as the body, a living organism; rather, it has also been analysed in terms of its socio-cultural facets and political perspectives. Given this, the body has also been discussed through its biological and cultural characteristics, which resulted in oppositions between the body and soul as well as the body and mind. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to express philosophical and sociological evaluation of body. It is also within the purpose of this study to scrutinise socialised body characteristics in tandem with philosophical contexts through seminal critiques and theories. In this respect, Angela Carter’s selected works will be scrutinised in terms of socialised body characteristics such as ‘the role of social body, the socialisation of body, the nudity as the naked body, the transformation of individual body to social body (homo duplex), the duality in body, the existence of body (habitus), and clothing and identity in body’, which can be seen in Carter’s female characterisations and in the formation of their subversive body politics.
Keywords: Philosophy of Body, Sociology of Body, Body Politics, Body, The Female Body, Socialised Body, A Feminist Critique, Angela Carter.

L’histoire de la philosophie  mérite d’être psychanalysée. Car elle a ses refoulés et ses oubliés suspects. Dans le cas particulier qui nous concerne, l’oublié ou l’écarté est une femme : Elisabeth de Bohème. On a écrit des ouvrages volumineux sur le rôle du cartésianisme dans la libération de la femme du XVIIème siècle. Mais le cas d’Elisabeth est particulièrement intéressant du fait que ce que nous trouvons dans sa correspondance avec le philosophe n’est pas l’exemple d’une femme qui fait du cartésianisme l’outil idéologique de sa libération, mais celui d’une femme déjà libre intellectuellement qui rigoureusement et élégamment travaille à libérer le cartésianisme lui-même de ses propres contradictions.

This is the introduction to Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, a collection of essays on Wittgenstein and Seeing Aspects. Awareness of what Stanley Cavell called Wittgenstein’s  “spiritual fervor or [the] seriousness of his writing” reached a critical mass during the last decade  of the XXth century. We seek to draw renewed attention to what is, in its sustained development and wealth of instances, already a central notion for Wittgenstein in the later texts, a notion which should contribute to a more coherent picture of his thinking than it has been credited with doing. The growing awareness of the importance of seeing aspects to Wittgenstein’s thought clarifies, and in many respects transfigures, our understanding of that thought. In this introduction we set out what we take to be the most important issues seeing aspects opens.

בקורס ״לחשוב מהגוף - מחוויה חושית ליצירה״ נעסוק ביצירה הנובעת מן החושים. הפילוסוף מוריס מרלו-פונטי הגדיר והבהיר את הגוף כמדיום המכונן עבורנו את הידיעה. בהשראת מרלו-פונטי ותיאוריות אחרות העוסקות בגוף כמקור למחשבה ולגילום תרבותי, נבדוק תחושות פיזיות ביחס למערכות ההקשרים החברתיים והסביבתיים מתוכן אנו חושבות ופועלות. נעסוק באופן בו החושים חושפים אותנו לעולם, נבחן כיצד דמיון, רגש, תחושה ומחשבה מזינים זה את זה. נחווה, ננסח וננתח כיצד התרבות והסביבה מניעות אותנו באופן פיזי, ונלמד את הגוף כמדיום, המאפשר אגירת ידע, הבנה, פרשנות ויצירת משמעות. לאור כל אלה, ניצור עבודות אישיות המסתמכות על החושים הפיזיים כמקור לאמירה תרבותית.

The invention of politicis, between the fall of reek tribes and the rise of what Nietzsche called the "Greek enlightment". Society as a body. Polis, and geometry. The end of the social body and the rise of an economy of the human. Temporalisation and monetarisation of the human. Finance and the "futures".

The paper proposes a rethinking of the “Techniksfrage” and the “post-humanism” focused on the discussion of the human nature and the man’s place in the world. 0) “Philosophy of technology” went in search of an Universal Essence of The Technology,
ending with the construction of the opposition “techno-phobics/techno-maniacs”: it forgot the plurality of the technologies, and represented the technology as an unsurpassable destiny (Evil or Good). 1) Indeed, a “philosophical anthropology of the technology” makes it possible to think the relationship man/technology in a “soberly realistic” way: if man is naturally un-natural, the technological animal because of his
relational openness to the world, then technai express the modes through which he relates to the world and “declines” his generic nature. 2) Therefore, we cannot oppose a “subject”
(human/natural) to an “object” (artificial/unnatural): we have to understand the faktum of the relation which constitutes both them as always opened (subjectile and objectile). 3) According to this, the post-human could be thought as a overcoming-uplifting (post) of the evolutionary and existential logic that characterizes the human nature (human): a over-humanistic horizon could not be realistically conceived without the body, ec-centric center of human action – of the possible domination of the domination of nature.

Il corpo è il «carcere» (φρουρά) dell’anima: questa definizione che Platone dà nel Fedone è spesso interpretata come quella che maggiormente riassume la concezione platonica della corporeità. Anima e corpo sono due elementi antagonistici e il corpo trattiene nel sensibile e nel contingente l’anima, che punta invece verso l’intelligibile. Questo lavoro di tesi nasce dal desiderio di andare oltre questa definizione e confrontarsi con la complessità della visione antropologica di Platone, a partire da quattro dialoghi: il Fedone (cap. 1), la Repubblica (cap. 2), il Filebo (cap. 3) e il Timeo (cap. 4). Obiettivo di questa analisi sarà mostrare come, per Platone, il corpo non sia in un rapporto antagonistico con l’anima. Ridurre il corpo a «carcere dell’anima» implicherebbe un rifiuto della vita terrena e una visione ascetica dell’esistenza: ciò sarebbe in netto contrasto con l’importanza che Platone attribuisce alla politica. Corpo, anima, Καλλίπολις e cosmo sono in un gerarchico rapporto di armonia e ciascun elemento è necessario affinché questa risuoni secondo proporzione.

Unity of mind, body, soul, spirit is necessary for our thriving, for actualising our potentials, for being an exemplar, for living a truly human life.
We all bear the potential 'megalopsychia', to be an exemplar. As part of our being humans we can equally flourish physically, mentally, and spiritually. In order to actualise our true selves, those of us engaged with the life of mind need to explore the life of body and vice versa. Because we cannot excel in one field if we ignore another dimension of our existence.

It is only a book review here, am yet to develop my full paper.

Si la ciencia ficción ha sido siempre un espacio abierto a la deconstrucción de los discursos dominantes y a la exploración de planteamientos no-hegemónicos, el anime de ciencia ficción se caracteriza especialmente por la profundidad con la que ha explorado la cuestión de la relación entre cuerpo, tecnología e identidad. Aunque, en este sentido, el anime de ciencia ficción constituye en sí mismo un cuerpo de pensamiento sobre los límites de la identidad, al explorarlo resulta conveniente disponer de una clave conceptual que permita descifrar los aspectos más sofisticados de ese pensamiento. En este capítulo, sin perder de vista las nociones básicas expuestas por autores como Deleuze y Haraway sobre el papel del cuerpo en el anime, se recuperan algunos aspectos específicos de las filosofías de Bergson y Simondon  para explorar el tratamiento en el anime de asuntos como el aspecto espiritual de la relación entre lo humano y lo tecnológico, la posibilidad de la extensión corporal y su relación con el concepto de individuación y la relación entre la idea transhumanismo y diferentes modelos de temporalidad. A modo de ejemplo, estas herramientas conceptuales son aplicadas al análisis de algunos aspectos de dos clásicos del anime de ciencia ficción, la película Akira y la série Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Bodies without limits: Technology and identity in science fiction anime
Science fiction has been offered the possibility to deconstruct dominant discourses and explore non-hegemonic approaches, and science fiction anime is particularly characterized by the deepness with which it explores the question of the relationship between body, technology and identity. Even thought, in this sense, science fiction anime constitutes itself a theoretical body of thinking about the limits of identity, in order to explore it is desirable to have a conceptual key which allows us to decipher the more sophisticated aspects of that thought. In this chapter, without losing sight of the basic notions expressed by authors such as Deleuze and Haraway on the role of the body in anime, I will recover some specific aspects of the philosophies of Bergson and Simondon to explore how anime treats issues such as spiritual aspect of the relationship between the human and the technological, the possibility of the extension of the body and its relation to the concept of individuation, and the relationship between the concept of transhumanism and different models of temporality. As an example, these conceptual tools are applied to the analysis of some aspects of two classic sci-fi anime, the movie Akira and the series Neon Genesis Evangelion.

This article focuses on the transformation of the female reproductive body with the use of assisted reproduction technologies under neo-liberal economic globalisation, wherein the ideology of trade without borders is central, as well as under liberal feminist ideals, wherein the right to self-determination is central. Two aspects of the body in western medicine-the fragmented body and the commodified body, and the integral relation between these two-are highlighted. This is done in order to analyse the implications of local and global transactions in women's reproductive body parts for their right to self-determination and individual agency and what this means for their embodiment. We conclude by exploring whether women can become embodied subjects by exercising their proprietary right to their bodies through directing technology to achieve their own goals, while at the same time being fragmented into parts and losing their personhood and bodily integrity.

An attempt to define a physical being as opposed to the mental being that we, as creatures, are most of the time. This is not entirely a purely physical being, but with a very reduced component of thought and an underdeveloped mental life. One could envision such a being thinking of simples things like the way athletes move, talk and act, or automata figures like Frankenstein or the golem, whose verbal expression is particularly contained, or simply by observing the behavior of any human being when a physical necessity takes over, such as hunger or exhaustion. This a different creature from the fully mentally operative rational being that most human beings are most of the time. It’s not an entirely stupid creature, just more body and physically oriented. It’s not inhuman, perhaps not even less human, just very constrained on its field of action. And it’s also strangely familiar and not exactly evil. This is the creature of sport, of war, of many kinds of work, but not entirely of lust, nor of wickedness, which is mental.

Continuing the project that Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht started with In Praise of Athletic Beauty (2006) and benefiting from much that has been put forward in Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (2004), Crowds (2021) intends to speculate analytically on a subject’s ontological status when immersed in a crowd. As expected, the book is mostly anchored on continental philosophy: his references are authors interested in the being-as-body such as Husserl and Heidegger, who form the basis for a focus on the bodily presence as opposed to the dimension of intellectual meaning. Gumbrecht’s reasoning in those previous works tries to gravitate towards the body, a culture of presence and, specifically in this one, the ontological differences that being immersed in a crowd and watching sports may bring out.

This article focuses on the transformation of the female reproductive body with the use of assisted reproduction technologies under neo-liberal economic globalisation, wherein the ideology of trade without borders is central, as well as under liberal feminist ideals, wherein the right to self-determination is central. Two aspects of the body in western medicine-the fragmented body and the commodified body, and the integral relation between these two-are highlighted. This is done in order to analyse the implications of local and global transactions in women's reproductive body parts for their right to self-determination and individual agency and what this means for their embodiment. We conclude by exploring whether women can become embodied subjects by exercising their proprietary right to their bodies through directing technology to achieve their own goals, while at the same time being fragmented into parts and losing their personhood and bodily integrity.