Results by title
89 books match the query 'Mind & Body' and 11 start with s
Sade
The Invention Of The Libertine BodyMarcel Henaff
University of Minnesota Press, 1999
A new model for examining Sade and his creations.
A new model for examining Sade and his creations.
Decried as a misogynist and pornographer, imprisoned for debauchery and for his writings, there is scarcely a cultural figure as flamboyant and controversial as the Marquis de Sade, the father of the new libertine body. But this is not, Hénaff maintains, the only way to see Sade. In this long-awaited English translation, Hénaff says that Sade should be discussed less for the sensual heat of his writing and more for the larger poetic and economic model his work represents.With unabashed candor, Sade describes bodies in terms not of flesh but of production, use, exchange, and waste. In his writing, this libertine self is unleashed from its constraints, no longer bound by old conceptions of desire and traditions of courtship. Hénaff’s argument that Sade is a sign of his times-exposing the courtly facade of a society unable to preserve itself-reveals dark, disquieting secrets about the direction of civilization. The libertine body, he says, is a child of this new order.ISBN 0-8166-2536-0 Cloth £34.50 $49.95xxISBN 0-8166-2537-9 Paper £14.00 $19.95x296 Pages 5 7/8 x 9 OctoberTranslation inquiries: University of Minnesota Press
Science Incarnate
Historical Embodiments of Natural KnowledgeEdited by Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Bringing body and knowledge into such intimate contact is occasionally seen as funny, sometimes as enraging, and more often just as pointless. Vividly written and well illustrated, Science Incarnate offers concrete historical answers to such skeptical questions about the relationships between body, mind, and knowledge.
Focusing on the seventeenth century to the present, Science Incarnate explores how intellectuals sought to establish the value and authority of their ideas through public displays of their private ways of life. Patterns of eating, sleeping, exercising, being ill, and having (or avoiding) sex, as well as the marks of gender and bodily form, were proof of the presence or absence of intellectual virtue, integrity, skill, and authority. Intellectuals examined in detail include René Descartes, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Ada Lovelace.
Science Incarnate is at once very funny and deeply serious, addressing issues of crucial importance to present-day discussions about the nature of knowledge and how it is produced. It incorporates much that will interest cultural and social historians, historians of science and medicine, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists.
Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality
Edited by Jean-Pierre Dupuy
CSLI, 1998
Self
Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and DeathRichard Sorabji
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Sensing Qualia
Solving the Hard Problem of ConsciousnessPaul G. Skokowski
University of Chicago Press, 2026
Philosophers of mind and neuroscientists often debate what they call the hard problem of consciousness, that is, how we might account for qualia—our subjective experiences of phenomena like color, taste, pain, smell, and more. In Sensing Qualia, Paul G. Skokowski surveys the most influential theories of mind since Descartes in order to establish a new theory he calls sensory naturalism, which recognizes the senses as natural detectors of physical properties in the world.
Drawing on neuroscience, physics, and philosophy, Skokowski provides a naturalistic framework for studying qualia in the physical world and explores the limits of qualia in androids and AI. The result is a compelling explanation of qualia for anyone curious about the nature of conscious experience in humans and AI.
Shamans and Robots
On Ritual, the Placebo Effect, and Artificial ConsciousnessRoger Bartra
University of Minnesota Press, 2024
A profound exploration of the external influences that shape human consciousness, from healing rituals to digital devices
In this voyage through thousands of years of psychosomatic healing, distinguished anthropologist and sociologist Roger Bartra examines the placebo effect as a key to our understanding of human consciousness. Shamans and Robots demonstrates how biology and technology become intertwined within human culture by using the various histories of ritual and symbolic healing to speculate about future developments in artificial intelligence.
Charting the extensive history of the placebo effect through medieval healing, shamanism, and early psychoanalytic practices, Bartra posits that consciousness is not simply the province of the mind but something equally shaped by external systems and objects. He finds evidence of this “exocerebrum”—the extension of our brains outside the body—in the shamanistic concept of the placebo, in which external objects heal our bodies, and in modern technical devices like prostheses or robots, whose development of a mechanical consciousness would have to mimic, and in turn elucidate, the processes involved in the creation of consciousness in humans. Through this radical concept, he analyzes digital media’s relationship to the functions of the human brain and probes the possibility of artificial consciousness.
Both a look at the human body’s potential to restore itself and a profound reflection on the curative power of symbolic structures, Shamans and Robots explores how our technologies increasingly serve as extensions of our cognitive selves.
Shapeshifting Subjects
Gloria Anzaldua's Naguala and Border ArteKelli D. Zaytoun
University of Illinois Press, 2022
An original and moving analysis, Shapeshifting Subjects draws on unpublished archival material to apply Anzaldúa's ideas to new areas of thought and action.
Social Practices as Biological Niche Construction
Joseph Rouse
University of Chicago Press, 2023
In this book, Joseph Rouse takes his innovative work to the next level by articulating an integrated philosophy of society as part of nature. He shows how and why we ought to unite our biological conception of human beings as animals with our sociocultural and psychological conceptions of human beings as persons and acculturated agents. Rouse’s philosophy engages with biological understandings of human bodies and their environments as well as the diverse practices and institutions through which people live and engage with one another. Familiar conceptual separations of natural, social, and mental “worlds” did not arise by happenstance, he argues, but often for principled reasons that have left those divisions deeply entrenched in contemporary intellectual life. Those reasons are eroding in light of new developments across the disciplines, but that erosion has not been sufficient to produce more adequately integrated conceptual alternatives until now.
Social Practices and Biological Niche Construction shows how the characteristic plasticity, plurality, and critical contestation of human ways of life can best be understood as evolved and evolving relations among human organisms and their distinctive biological environments. It also highlights the constitutive interdependence of those ways of life with many other organisms, from microbial populations to certain plants and animals, and explores the consequences of this in-depth, noting, for instance, how the integration of the natural and social also provides new insights on central issues in social theory, such as the body, language, normativity, and power.
Stoicism and Emotion
Margaret Graver
University of Chicago Press, 2007
In this elegant and clearly written work, Margaret Graver gives a compelling new interpretation of the Stoic position. Drawing on a vast range of ancient sources, she argues that the chief demand of Stoic ethics is not that we should suppress or deny our feelings, but that we should perfect the rational mind at the core of every human being. Like all our judgments, the Stoics believed, our affective responses can be either true or false and right or wrong, and we must assume responsibility for them. Without glossing over the difficulties, Graver also shows how the Stoics dealt with those questions that seem to present problems for their theory: the physiological basis of affective responses, the phenomenon of being carried away by one’s emotions, the occurrence of involuntary feelings and the disordered behaviors of mental illness. Ultimately revealing the deeper motivations of Stoic philosophy, Stoicism and Emotion uncovers the sources of its broad appeal in the ancient world and illuminates its surprising relevance to our own.
Studying Human Behavior
How Scientists Investigate Aggression and SexualityHelen E. Longino
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Subjects of the World
Darwin's Rhetoric and the Study of Agency in NaturePaul Sheldon Davies
University of Chicago Press, 2009
Being human while trying to scientifically study human nature confronts us with our most vexing problem. Efforts to explicate the human mind are thwarted by our cultural biases and entrenched infirmities; our first-person experiences as practical agents convince us that we have capacities beyond the reach of scientific explanation. What we need to move forward in our understanding of human agency, Paul Sheldon Davies argues, is a reform in the way we study ourselves and a long overdue break with traditional humanist thinking.
Davies locates a model for change in the rhetorical strategies employed by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species. Darwin worked hard to anticipate and diminish the anxieties and biases that his radically historical view of life was bound to provoke. Likewise, Davies draws from the history of science and contemporary psychology and neuroscience to build a framework for the study of human agency that identifies and diminishes outdated and limiting biases. The result is a heady, philosophically wide-ranging argument in favor of recognizing that humans are, like everything else, subjects of the natural world—an acknowledgement that may free us to see the world the way it actually is.