Mark Johnson is one of the great thinkers of our time on how the body shapes the mind. This book brings together a selection of essays from the past two decades that build a powerful argument that any scientifically and philosophically satisfactory view of mind and thought must ultimately explain how bodily perception and action give rise to cognition, meaning, language, action, and values. A brief account of Johnson’s own intellectual journey, through which we track some of the most important discoveries in the field over the past forty years, sets the stage. Subsequent chapters set out Johnson’s important role in embodied cognition theory, including his cofounding (with George Lakoff) of conceptual metaphor theory and, later, their theory of bodily structures and processes that underlie all meaning, conceptualization, and reasoning. A detailed account of how meaning arises from our physical engagement with our environments provides the basis for a nondualistic, nonreductive view of mind that he sees as most congruous with the latest cognitive science. A concluding section explores the implications of our embodiment for our understanding of knowledge, reason, and truth. The resulting book will be essential for all philosophers dealing with mind, thought, and language.

This book combines insights from the humanities and modern neuroscience to explore the contribution of affect and embodiment on meaning-making in case studies from animation, video games, and virtual worlds. As we interact more and more with animated characters and avatars in everyday media consumption, it has become vital to investigate the ways that animated environments influence our perception of the liberal humanist subject. This book is the first to apply recent research on the application of the embodied mind thesis to our understanding of embodied engagement with nonhumans and cyborgs in animated media, analyzing works by Émile Cohl, Hayao Miyazaki, Tim Burton, Norman McLaren, the Quay Brothers, Pixar, and many others. Drawing on the breakthroughs of modern brain science to argue that animated media broadens the viewer’s perceptual reach, this title offers a welcome contribution to the growing literature at the intersection of cognitive studies and film studies, with a perspective on animation that is new and original. ‘Affect and Embodied Meaning in Animation’ will be essential reading for researchers of Animation Studies, Film and Media Theory, Posthumanism, Video Games, and Digital Culture, and will provide a key insight into animation for both undergraduate and graduate students. Because of the increasing importance of visual effect cinema and video games, the book will also be of keen interest within Film Studies and Media Studies, as well as to general readers interested in scholarship in animated media.

This book presents an elaborated argument for why functionalism, as well as other dematerialized and disembodied theories of mind, can’t be right. In discussing the question of whether or not we are just material beings, Hilary Putnam once claimed that “we could be made of Swiss cheese and it wouldn't matter.” Fifty years later, functionalism still reigns, and the psychological irrelevance of the materiality of our bodies remains a hardwired assumption of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. As this book shows, the idea of the possibility of a disembodied mind is rooted in a philosophical depreciation of the particular in favor of the abstract, an attitude which runs through Western philosophy as a red thread. The Embodiment of Meaning demonstrates how this privileging of the immaterial-abstract over the material-particular is not only untenable from a logical-philosophical point of view; it also runs counter to a basic fact of human psychology itself: rather than being irrelevant, the world precisely matters most in its material particularity. In addition to offering a thoroughgoing criticism of the Platonic-functionalist “abstract-over-particular” idea, the book aims to substantially contribute to a less ambiguous understanding of the various ways in which “matter matters.”

This book is a comprehensive study of one of the most insightful and fertile but also most neglected philosophers of the twentieth century, Susanne Langer. Failure to recognise Langer's seminal philosophical sources has led to frequent misinterpretations and misunderstandings of her unique philosophical thought. Beginning with an overview of Langer's life and education, this study provides a much-needed explanation of how Langer's thinking was shaped by four seminal sources: her mentors Henry Sheffer and Alfred North Whitehead and the European philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Langer's ability to unite seemingly disparate fields such logic, art, and embodied cognition around the notion of symbolic form, places aesthetics not at the margins of philosophy but at its very centre. By locating Langer's work in the broader context of major developments in twentieth-century European and American philosophy, Dengerink Chaplin shows how she was often ahead of her time. Shedding new light on Langer as an American philosopher whose innovative thought crosses the customary boundaries between analytic and continental philosophy, this book confirms why she continues to have relevance today.

Embodied inquiry is the process of using embodied approaches in order to study, explore or investigate a topic. But what does it actually mean to be 'embodied'? This book explores why and how we use our bodies in order to research, what an embodied approach brings to a research project, and the kinds of considerations that need to be taken into account to research in this way. We all have bodies, feelings, emotions and experiences that affect the questions we are interested in, the ways in which we choose to approach finding out the answers to those questions, and the patterns we see in the data we gather as a result. Embodied Inquiry foregrounds these questions of positionality and reflexivity in research. It considers how a project or study may be designed to take these into account and why multimodal and creative approaches to research may be used to capture embodied experiences. The book offers insights into how to analyse the types of data emerging from embodied inquiries, and the ethical considerations that are important to consider. Accounting for the interdisciplinary nature of the field, this book has been written to be a concise primer into Embodied Inquiry for research students, scholars and practitioners alike.

Focusing on the body as a visual and discursive platform across public space, we study marginalization as a sociocultural practice and hegemonic schema. Whereas mass incarceration and law enforcement readily feature in discussions of institutionalized racism, we differently highlight understudied sites of normalization and exclusion. Our combined effort centers upon physical contexts (skeletons, pageant stages, gentrifying neighborhoods), discursive spaces (medical textbooks, legal battles, dance pedagogy, vampire narratives) and philosophical arenas (morality, genocide, physician-assisted suicide, cryonic preservation, transfeminism) to deconstruct seemingly intrinsic connections between body and behavior, Whiteness and normativity.

The human body is not a given fact-it is acquired, achieved, and learned. The body remembers, and it does so in collectively relevant ways. This book discusses how, why, and to what extent corporeal memories are constructed but also resisted, modified, or created anew.

The new edition of The Meaning of Movement serves as a guide to instruction in the Kestenberg Movement Profile (KMP) and as the system’s foremost reference book, sourcebook, and authoritative compendium. This thoroughly updated volume interweaves current developmental science, cultural perspectives, and KMP-derived theory and methods for research and techniques for clinical practice. Through the well-established KMP, clinicians and researchers in the realms of nonverbal behavior and body movement can inform and enrich their psychological interpretations of movement. Interdisciplinary specialists gain a way to study the embodiment of cognition, affects, learning styles, and interpersonal relations based on observation and analysis of basic qualities of movement.

In the past fifty years, scholars of human development have been moving from studying change in humans within sharply defined periods, to seeing many more of these phenomenon as more profitably studied over time and in relation to other processes. The Handbook of Life-Span Development, Volume 1: Cognition, Biology, and Methods presents the study of human development conducted by the best scholars in the 21st century. Social workers, counselors and public health workers will receive coverage of of the biological and cognitive aspects of human change across the lifespan.