Towards a dialectical understanding of human embodiment
This thesis is essentially programmatic. This is not to say that it should be seen as a prolegomenon to any future metaphysics of body and mind; I can hardly claim such an exulted status for what I have to say. Rather, I am content to raise certain questions and indicate certain directions in which I believe a more systematic investigation of these issues should take us. Equally, I also hope that enough of a case can be made out here for the claim that such an investigation, if not a full-fledged prolegomenon, is essential if we are to free ourselves from a fundamental impasse in contemporary philosophy of mind. It is no exaggeration to say that Cartesianism continues to stride our thought like a colossus, informing and shaping our conceptualisations of what it is to be a subject of thought and experience, as well as our more general conceptualisations of what we take the world to be and what our relationship with it actually is. The Cartesian turn in philosophy has generally left us with a framework of binary categories in which only a divisive account of these conceptualisations is possible. This is because these Cartesian binaries are not simply oppositional but are oppositional in ways such that their
Burwood, Stephen Anthony
Philosophy
Towards a dialectical understanding of human embodiment. This thesis is essentially programmatic. This is not to say that it should be seen as a prolegomenon to any future metaphysics of body and mind; I can hardly claim such an exulted status for what I have to say. Rather, I am content to raise certain questions and indicate certain directions in which I believe a more systematic investigation of these issues should take us. Equally, I also hope that enough of a case can be made out here for the claim that such an investigation, if not a full-fledged prolegomenon, is essential if we are to free ourselves from a fundamental impasse in contemporary philosophy of mind. It is no exaggeration to say that Cartesianism continues to stride our thought like a colossus, informing and shaping our conceptualisations of what it is to be a subject of thought and experience, as well as our more general conceptualisations of what we take the world to be and what our relationship with it actually is. The Cartesian turn in philosophy has generally left us with a framework of binary categories in which only a divisive account of these conceptualisations is possible. This is because these Cartesian binaries are not simply oppositional but are oppositional in ways such that their
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