CULTURE, COGNITION,
AND THE
HUMAN BODY

READINGS

John Sutton                                        Back to my home page.
Tel. (02)-9850-8817, or email.               Back to the Philosophy Department, Macquarie University.

This page covers reading material for my Honours course, semester 2, 2000. It's also a general resource for material on the particular overlap of areas I'm working round, and is intended to be selective rather than exhaustive. Please do email me if you have comments or suggestions.

Back to this Honours course home page.
Link to Cognitive Science and Philosophy bibliography/index.
Link to index on the interdisciplinary study of memory (under construction).


Cultural & Philosophical Approaches to the Embodied Mind
Body History
Proprioception and Body-Image
Dynamical Cognitive Science

Links for Week 4:
Hubert L. Dreyfus,  'The Current Relevance of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology',
      from The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 4 (Spring 1996)
Andy Clark & David Chalmers (1998) The Extended Mind. Analysis 58 (1), 7-19.

Cultural & Philosophical Approaches to the Embodied Mind
Philosophy of the Body, Theories of Gender
Philosophy of Medicine 
and the Body
Complexity, Informatics, Bodies
Continental Philosophy 
of the Body
Cognitive Anthropology & Cross-Cultural Studies

Philosophy of the Body, Theories of Gender
Battersby, Christine, The Phenomenal Woman . See chapter , 'Her Body/ Her Boundaries: gender
        and the metaphysics of containment'.
Casey, Ed 'The Ghost of Embodiment: on bodily habitudes and schemata', in D. Welton (ed), Body and Flesh (Blackwell).
Grosz, Elizabeth, Volatile Bodies (Allen & Unwin, 1994)
Haraway, Donna, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (Free Association Books, 1991)
Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark, Philosophy in the Flesh (Chicago UP, 1999).
Stewart, Susan, On Longing (Duke UP, 1993)
Wilson, Elizabeth, Neural Geographies: feminism and the microstructure of cognition
        (Routledge, 1998). [And see my review].

Philosophy of Medicine and the Body
Canguilhem, Georges, The Normal and the Pathological (Zone Books, 1989)
Canguilhem, Georges, A Vital Rationalist (Zone Books, 1994).
Duden, Barbara, Disembodying Women: perspectives on pregnancy and the unborn (Harvard UP, 1993).
Leder, Drew, The Absent Body (Chicago UP, 1990)
Martin, Emily, The Woman in the Body
Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain: the making and unmaking of the world (Oxford UP, 1985)

Complexity, Informatics, Bodies
Cilliers, Paul, Complexity and Postmodernism (Routledge, 1998)
Hayles, N. Katherine, How We Became Posthuman : Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature,
        and Informatics (Chicago UP, 1999).
Johnston, John, 'Machinic Vision', Critical Inquiry 26 (1999), 27-48
Serres, Michel, Hermes: literature, science, philosophy (Michigan UP, 1982).
Stengers, Isabelle, Power and Invention (Minnesota UP, 1997).

Continental Philosophy of the Body
Dreyfus, Hubert L., 'The Current Relevance of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Embodiment',
        The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 4 (Spring 1996) [also see proprioception below]
Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror (Columbia UP, 1982)
Lingis, Alphonso, Foreign Bodies (Routledge, 1994)
[See also the page on Cognitive Science and Continental Philosophy]

Cognitive Anthropology & Cross-Cultural Studies
[see also Kuriyama below]
Bourdieu, Pierre, 'Structures, Habitus, Practices', in Outline of a Theory of Practice.
Lambek, Michael & Strathern, Andrew, Bodies and Persons: comparative perspectives from Africa
        and Melanesia (Cambridge UP, 1998)
Leroi-Gourhan, Andre, Gesture and Speech (MIT Press): esp. ch.7 'The Freeing of Memory'.
Lock, Margaret, 'Cultivating the Body: anthropology and epistemologies of bodily practice and knowledge',
       Annual Review of Anthropology 22 (1993), 133-155
Low, Morris, 'Medical Representations of the Body in Japan: gender, class, and discourse in the 18th century',
       Annals of Science 53 (1996), 345-359
Strathern, Andrew , Body Thoughts (Michigan UP, 1996). Excellent survey of philosophy, history, anthropology.
Strauss, Claudia, and Quinn, Naomi, A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning (Cambridge UP,
        1997), especially chapters 1 & 3.
Zysk, Kenneth, 'Vital Breath (prana) in ancient Indian medicine and religion', in Yosio Kawakita et al (eds),
        The Comparison between Concepts of Life-Breath in East and West (Ishiyaku EuroAmerica, 1995)


Body History
Body History: General
History of Sexuality
Ancient Bodies
'Pre-Modern' Bodies?
Mechanical Bodies & C17th Body History
Enlightenment Bodies
Body History: General
Bynum, Caroline W., 'Why All the Fuss about the Body?', Critical Inquiry 22 (1995), 1-33.
Duden, Barbara, The Woman Beneath the Skin (Harvard UP, 1991), ch.1 'Toward a History of the Body'.
Duden, Barbara, Disembodying Women: perspectives on pregnancy and the unborn (Harvard UP, 1993).
Feher, M (ed), Fragments for a History of the Human Body 3 volumes (Zone Books, 1989)
Foucault, Michel, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', in P. Rabinow (ed), The Foucault Reader (Pantheon, 1984).
Rousseau, G.S. & Porter, Roy, 'Introduction: toward a natural history of mind and body', in Rousseau & Porter
        (eds.), The Languages of Psyche (California UP, 1990).
Smith, Roger, 'Intellectual History and Modern Brain Science', Intellectual History 6/7 (winter 2000), 81-92
Tiffany, Daniel, Toy Medium: materialism and modern lyric (California UP, 1999).
Tomaselli, Sylvana, 'The First Person: Descartes, Locke, and mind/body dualism', History of Science 22 (1984), 185-205

History of Sexuality
Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality volume 1 (Vintage, 1978)
Jacquart, Danielle, and Thomasset, Claude, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages (Polity Press, 1988)
Jordanova, Ludmilla, Sexual Visions: images of gender in science and medicine (Harvester Press, 1989)
Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex (Columbia UP, 1991)
Schiebinger, Londa, The Mind Has No Sex? (Harvard UP, 1990)

Ancient Bodies
Brown, Peter, The Body and Society
Foucault, Michel, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self (Vintage, 1984)
Jaynes, Julian, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (2nd
        edition, Houghton Mifflin, 1990). [With Dan Dennett, 'Julian Jaynes' Software Archaeology']
Kuriyama, Shigehisa, 'Pneuma, Qi, and the Problematic of Breath', in Yosio Kawakita et al (eds),
        The Comparison between Concepts of Life-Breath in East and West (Ishiyaku EuroAmerica, 1995)
Kuriyama, Shigehisa, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and
       Chinese Medicine (Zone Books, 1999).
Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind (Princeton UP, 1992): ch.1 'The Divinity of Inside and Outside', ch.2 'Innards'.

'Pre-Modern' Bodies?
Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and his World (Indiana UP, 1984).
Duden, Barbara, The Woman Beneath the Skin (Harvard UP, 1991), ch.4 'The Perception of the Body' [an
        18th-century case study of embodied experience apparently quite alien to the modern]
Harris, Jonathan Gil, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: discourses of social pathology in early modern
        England (Cambridge UP, 1998). See esp. ch.2 '"Enter at the least pore": medicine & bodily infiltration'.
Hillman, D & Mazzio, C (eds), The Body in Parts: fantasies of corporeality in early modern Europe (Routledge,
        1997). See especially the introduction, and Paster, 'Nervous Tension: networks of blood and spirit'.
Muir, Edwin, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge UP, 1997), ch.3 'Carnival & the Lower Body'
Paster, Gail Kern, The Body Embarrassed: drama and the disciplines of shame (Cornell UP, 1993). As well as
        the brilliant introduction [course reader], see especially ch.1 'Leaky Vessels' on liquid expressiveness of bodies.
Pouchelle, Marie-Christine, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages (Rutgers UP, 1990). Brilliant,
        psychoanalytically-informed reading of strange medieval texts and fantasies.
Sawday, Jonathan, The Body Emblazoned: dissection and the human body in Renaissance
        culture (Routledge, 1996). [See also my review, 'Uncanny Innards']
Scarry, Elaine, 'Donne: but yet the body is his booke', in Scarry (ed.), Literature and the Body (Baltimore, 1988)
Siraisi, Nancy, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine (Chicago UP, 1990). Clear introductory account:
        see especially chapter 4 'Physiological and Anatomical Knowledge'.

Mechanical Bodies & 17th-century Body History
[See also readings on Descartes and the human body]
Barker, Francis, The Tremulous Private Body: essays on subjection (Methuen, 1984).
Dear, Peter, 'A Mechanical Microcosm: bodily passions, good manners, and Cartesian mechanism',
        in C. Lawrence and S. Shapin (eds), Science Incarnate: historical embodiments of natural
        knowledge (Chicago UP, 1998), 51-82
Easlea, Brian, Witch-Hunting, Magic, and the New Philosophy (Harvester Press, 1980)
Mayr, Otto, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Johns Hopkins UP, 1986). Pits
        Cartesian authoritarianism in physiology, technology, and politics against an alleged growing commitment to liberty
        in English natural philosophy and social thought. See especially pp.62-7, 117-122.
Merchant, Carolyn, Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York, 1980)
Reiss, Tim, 'Denying the Body? Memory and the dilemmas of history in Descartes', Journal of the History of
        Ideas 57 (1996), 587-607. Wonderful, wise paper on the Cartesian legacy and cross-cultural body matters.
Rupp, Jan C.C. 'Foucault, Body Politics, and the Rise of Modern Anatomy', Journal of Historical Sociology 5 (1992), 31-60

Enlightenment Bodies
Flynn, Carol Houlihan, 'Running out of matter: the body exercised in 18th-century fiction', in Rousseau & Porter
        (eds.), The Languages of Psyche (California UP, 1990).
Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilisation (Random House, 1965)
Huet, Marie-Helene, Monstrous Imagination (Harvard UP, 1993)
Rousseau, G.S. & Porter, Roy (eds.), The Languages of Psyche (California UP, 1990).
Stafford, Barbara Maria, Body Criticism: imaging the unseen in Enlightenment art and medicine
      (MIT Press, 1991). Especially ch.1 'Dissecting', ch.6 'Sensing'.
Stallybrass, Peter, & White, Allon, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Methuen, 1986).


Proprioception and Body-Image
Eilan, Naomi, Marcel, Anthony, and Bermudez, Jose, 'Self-Consciousness and the Body: an interdisciplinary
        introduction', in Bermudez, Marcel, & Eilan (eds), The Body and the Self (MIT Press, 1995), 1-28.
Gallagher, Shaun, and Meltzoff, Andrew, 'The earliest sense of self and others: Merleau-Ponty and
        recent developmental studies', Philosophical Psychology 9 (1996), 211-233
Monica Meijsing, 'Self-Consciousness and the Body', Journal of Consciousness Studies 7 (2000), 34-52


Dynamical Cognitive Science
For a broader list see separate index on Dynamicism and Distributed Cognition.

Here is a brief list of central works:
Clark, Andy, & Chalmers, David, The Extended Mind. Analysis 58 (1) 7-19.
Clark, Andy, Being There: putting body, brain, and world together again (MIT Press, 1997).
Clark, Andy, ‘Embodiment and the Philosophy of Mind’, in A. O’Hear (ed.), Current Issues in
        Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge U.P., 1998), 35-51
Dennett, Daniel C., Kinds of Minds (Basic Books, 1996), chapter 5 section 2 ‘Making
        Things to Think With’
Eliasmith, Chris,  'The third contender: a critical examination of the dynamicist theory of cognition',
        Philosophical Psychology 9, 441-463. From the abstract:
        In this paper I begin with a short description of the dynamicist project and its role as a cognitive theory.
        Subsequently, I determine the theoretical commitments of dynamicists, critically examine those commitments
        and discuss current examples of dynamicist models. In conclusion, I determine dynamicism's relation to
        symbolicism and connectionism and find that the dynamicist goal to establish a new paradigm has yet to be realized.
Hutchins, Edwin, Cognition in the Wild (MIT Press, 1995), chapter 9 ‘Cultural Cognition’
Rogers, Yvonne, A Brief Introduction to Distributed Cognition
        [Summary: Distributed Cognition is a hybrid approach to studying all aspects of cognition, from a cognitive, social and organisational
        perspective. The most well known level of analysis is to account for complex socially distributed cognitive activities, of which a
        diversity of technological artefacts and other tools and representations are an indispensable part.]
Schechtman, Marya, 'The Brain/Body Problem', Philosophical Psychology 10 (1997), 149-164
van Gelder, Tim, 'Dynamic Approaches to Cognition' [Adobe Acrobat Reader required], or in
        The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MIT Press, 1999), pp.243-5.
Varela, Franciso, Thompson, Evan, & Rosch, Eleanor, The Embodied Mind: cognitive
        science and human experience(MIT Press, 1992).


John Sutton
Dept of Philosophy
Macquarie University.

Back to this Honours course home page.
Last updated 26 April 2002.