Description:
Building on contemporary research in embodied cognition, enactivism, and the extended mind, this book explores how social institutions in contemporary neoliberal nation-states systematically affect our thoughts, feelings, and agency. Human beings are, necessarily, social animals who create and belong to social institutions. But social institutions take on a life of their own, and literally shape the minds of all those who belong to them, for better or worse, usually without their being self-consciously aware of it. Indeed, in contemporary neoliberal societies, it is generally for the worse. In The Mind-Body Politic, Michelle Maiese and Robert Hanna work out a new critique of contemporary social institutions by deploying the special standpoint of the philosophy of mind--in particular, the special standpoint of the philosophy of what they call essentially embodied minds--and make a set of concrete, positive proposals for radically changing both these social institutions and also our essentially embodied lives for the better.
Review Quotes:
"The Mind-Body Politic is a book about the pervasiveness of neoliberal, capitalist ideology and the harmful ways in which we are affected by it, even outside of our own awareness. ... The Mind-Body Politic is a philosophical essay that at times reads more as a call to arms. ... most of the time, theoretically sound and argumentatively strong. ... it will undoubtedly be illuminating at least to the politically involved philosopher of mind ... . " (Josephine Pascoe, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 23 (1), 2024)
"The book is not only an exposition of political discourse but concurrently an analysis of form, a rich and ambitious undertaking." (Isobel Armstrong, Modern Philology, Vol. 117 (1), May, 2019)