Description: Contemporary culture increasingly suffers from problems of attention, over-stimulation, and stress, and a variety of personal and social discontents generated by deceptive body images. This book argues that improved body consciousness can relieve these problems and enhance one's knowledge, performance, and pleasure. The body is our basic medium of perception and action, but focused attention to its feelings and movements has long been criticized as a damaging distraction that also ethically corrupts through self-absorption. In Body Consciousness, Richard Shusterman refutes such charges by engaging the most influential twentieth-century somatic philosophers and incorporating insights from both Western and Asian disciplines of body-mind awareness.
Brief description: Richard Shusterman is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton. Educated at Jerusalem and Oxford, he is internationally known for his contributions to philosophy and his pioneering work in somaesthetics, a field of theory and practice devoted to thinking through the body. A recipient of senior Fulbright and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, Dr Shusterman has held academic positions in Paris, Berlin, and Hiroshima, and is the author of several books, most recently Surface and Depth and Performing Live. His Pragmatist Aesthetics has been published in thirteen languages.
Review Quotes: "In this beautifully written book, Shusterman articulates his unique conception of somaesthetics, in which reflective bodily awareness is presented as a means for self-cultivation. Shusterman gives a deeply insightful and highly original appreciation of the views of the body found in Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, William James, and John Dewey, but he also examines the limitations of each of these views, in order to reveal the profound importance of our embodiment for everything we experience, think, and do. The result is a compelling and highly nuanced account of what bodily consciousness is, how it is possible, and how it can contribute to individual and communal flourishing."
-Mark Johnson, Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon