Cover of Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy
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articles in english
1. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 65
Andrejs Balodis Body Without Extension: Bergson’s Conception Revisited
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By the close of the century the body had become the key site of political, social, economic and cultural intervention. For large part it has happen due to the topicality of the body in philosophical debates in the 20th century. In my paper I deal with Henry Bergson’s conception of body, its origins and its later reception in phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty, Barbaras). Bergson occupies dual position in the history of philosophy – on the one hand he revaluates the heritage of modern philosophy, on the other hand his thinking and method kick start completely different approach to classical philosophical issues, including the conception of the body. Bergsonian treatment of the body in terms of durée is one of his many innovations. I focus on the notion of my body in Bergson’s philosophy to show that despite criticism of phenomenological philosophy, Bergson offers radically new perspective on mind/body relation due to the understanding of the body.
2. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 65
Irina Beskova The Complexity of a Human Embodiment
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The paper is devoted to a problem of the human embodiment analysis from a systematic point of view. An understanding of three different levels of a human embodiment organization is proposed. It is shown that each of them has its own needs and capabilities of operating and problem-solving. It is argued that the human embodiment as no equilibrium and opened system generates different types of a complex behavior in the course of its natural development. And it is just the quality of a system’s complexity that lies in a basis of the forming of such emergent properties as a conscious capacity. From this point of view, the mind and the body represent two different kinds of displays of a common fundamental capacity of the system to demonstrate a complex behavior, leading to emergence of a new qualities and new forms of orderings. At the level of embodiment organization this capacity will be manifested in the born of a new level of structural organization: relatively independent uniqueness, acting in the outer space as a self-dependent entity, – from the one side; and capacity of consciousness, – from the other side.
3. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 65
Mark Joseph Calano Archiving Bodies: Kalinga Batek and the Impossibility of an Archive
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An archive is an integral part of literate life and is in the custody of political institutions for their historical value. It is a place and a reflection of social and institutional authority. It is first argued that societies who lack the faculty of recording histories contribute to the archive-making process in a different context. To advance this, the work of anthropologists on the Igorots, more specifically the Kalingas, of the Philippine Cordilleras and their tattooing practices are considered. It is claimed that in these societies, whose concept of the Western archive is absent, the body becomes a repository of significant life events and rituals concretized by tattoos. Tatooing becomes a form of memory on how bodies remember and create narratives. To better understand this point, Derrida’s two-fold understanding of the archive is discussed. The archive, on the one hand, as a commencement that evokes the writing of the archive and, on the other hand, the understanding of the tattoos as disjointed and incomplete allows us to understand tattoos as a trace.
4. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 65
Helen Chapny, Anna Kucheryavskaya Corporal and Linguistic Depths of Cognitive Processes
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Within the frame of complexity paradigm the possibility of the psychophysical mind-body problem reconsideration is regarded, as well as elimination of its duality. The body is considered through the prism of embodied mind theory and the embodied cognition approach as the unity of five interconnected dimensions of a person’s embodiment. Corporal and mental is one and the same thing, appearing in different guises on a perception surface. The careful consideration is also given to the wholism of a body-consciousness, a body-environment, a body-brain. The idea of embodied cognition and linguistic processes is established. Corporal and linguistic determination of cognitive processes gains a foothold.
5. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 65
Olga Gomilko ‘Saving Deficiency’ as Ontology of the Human Body
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This paper is a contribution in discussions about the nature of a human being. The global epoch reveals uncertainty as a fundamental characteristic of human existence. The knowledge of that is a driver to research into the areas, which are still beyond a philosophical consideration. Theoretical legitimization of the ‘prohibited knowledge’ about human nature 1) concerns its ‘the dark side’ defined as ‘inner demons’ (S. Pinker), 2) shatters illusory nature of own image as a crown of divine or natural creation, 2) gives birth to another illusion – on dehumanization and crisis of human existence. The problem of relation between mind and body constitutes a disputable core of the human nature. The dichotomy of mind and body presents an interpretation of the nature of a human being in a modern (Descartes’) vision. Denunciation of the mind-body dualism is a way of rethinking of a human being within emergence of a new philosophical ontology that is able to convey such aspects of reality as social instability, fragmentation, contingency, fragility, and unpredictability – the so-called ontological “negativity”. In contrast to human mind, human body is a substance that is open to chaos. Theoretic substantiation of chaos in corporality ontology enables overcoming of the mind-body dichotomy. Comprehension that chaos is a principal attribute of human corporality allows discerning an ontological substance in it, as no human existence is possible without it. The corporeal ‘uncertainty’ as a fundamental attribute of the human body, on the one hand, exposes it to chaos, destruction, and decay, but, on the other hand, enables a body to transform into the body that is to acquire the different cultural canons. Defining the ‘uncertainty’ as ‘saving deficiency’ contests conception of fallenness of the human body as its sinful and corrupted quality. After all fallibility as a condition of ‘saving deficiency’ opens horizon for numerous cultural canons to wit possibility for transformation of the human nature. An archaic body starts human’s battle against fear of own body that launch a process of human being transformations. The history of culture represents the stages of this battle. Homer’s archaic body is considered as ontological alternative of Descartes’ organism. Ontology of ‘saving deficiency’ of the human body allows going beyond the limits of the constructivist position in interpreting the history of the human body.
6. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 65
Ilya Kanaev Awareness of the Body as a Form of Self-consciousness
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This paper deals with the problem of self-consciousness in connection with awareness of the body. The latter is a necessary component in the activity of perception and execution of action in space (such as the determination of subject’s own place in space and operations with the objects of the world). The author considers the simple forms of awareness of the body, as the basis of the self-consciousness. More complex structures of identity, such as a person and Self, are based on it. The main referred authors: American psychologist J. Gibson, Russian physiologist N. A. Bernstein and others. Self-consciousness is understood by the author as a special kind of knowledge, carried out by the subject in its interaction with the world.
7. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 65
Jin-Woo Lee Body and the Limit of Human Enhancement
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In the heated debate about trans-humanism the main battleground remains, in my view, the human body. If trans-humanism holds that current human nature could be improved through the use of advanced science and technologies, it has become self-evident that human enhancement technology intends to overcome the corporality of human nature. Two questions arise at this point. One is, just what happens to our body? We need to ask first what is going on in or on our body when we apply human enhancement technology to ourselves and what exactly the costs are going to be. And, second, just what kind of moral role does the body play in making our life more human? The answer I want to give is that the ethical question how to live must be based on cultivating our body. In the following I will try to explore what is involved in modifying human nature. What can be “enhanced” and to what extent on and in our body through enhancement technology? While trying to answer these questions, I argue that body is the limit of human enhancement.
8. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 65
Johanna Oksala Neoliberal Bodies and Normative Femininity
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The paper discusses the disciplinary production of the normative feminine body and analyses the shift that has taken place in the rationality underpinning our current techniques of gender. I argue that Foucault’s radical intervention in feminist philosophy, and more generally in the philosophy of the body, has been the crucial claim that any analysis of embodiment must recognize how power relations are constitutive of the embodied subjects involved in them. His studies of disciplinary technologies show how bodies are constructed through mundane, everyday habits and techniques as certain kinds of subjects. Similarly, feminist appropriations of Foucault’s thought have demonstrated how feminine subjects are constructed through patriarchal, disciplinary practices of beauty. My argument is that that there have been significant changes in the last decades in the rationality underpinning these techniques of gender, however, which have emerged in tandem with the rise of the neoliberal, economic subject. I will appropriate Foucault’s idea of governmentality, and particularly of neoliberal governmentality, as an alternative framework to discipline for studying the contemporary construction of the feminine body. I will show that it provides us with a more comprehensive conceptual framework for understanding the construction of the feminine body in its current form.
9. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 65
Arturo Rico Bovio The Whole Body: A Philosophical Inquiry
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The author presents eleven theses summarizing his theory of a holistic philosophy of the body. Convinced that “body” is an indispensable category to meet the challenges of our time, explains his new concept that breaks the dualism of body and soul, while beyond the materialistic approach. The body we are is the totality of things visible and invisible. To approach it requires new categories, such as “bodily valences”, the “body coordinates”, besides others. Our body is the measure of the other bodies, the a priori of knowledge, but their results change because they depend on how we understand and live the body. The critique of culture and social, economic and political institutions, are to be examined from the body’s natural needs: biological, social and personal, which are the foundation and measure of values.
10. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 65
Carlos Hugo Sierra Merleau-Ponty and the Latent Opacity of Body: Analogies with East Asian Correlative Epistemology
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The main purpose in this paper is to present the philosophical affinities among the French phenomenological philosopher, M. Merleau-Ponty, and certain oriental traditions related to a very sophisticated cognitive hermeneutics as, for instance, the Buddhism doctrine with its different schools, certain epistemic foundations of Chinese ancient cosmology and, of course, the Daoism ontogenesis and alchemical processes of corporeal transformation, insofar as both prospects, in spite of the well-known cultural and historical distances, present an position against the mechanistic or substantialist understanding of body. In this sense, it seems clear that Merleau-Ponty’s strategic critique of cognitive paradigm about the constituent subject (in terms of an modernized Cartesian model of reality) and his philosophical alternative based on a pre-reflexive and silent experience that shows body and world as an indivisible unity, converts the carnal existence into an epistemological reference from which we can start to develop a theoretical confrontation or comparative study between his thought and key philosophical contents which belong to Eastern philosophical traditions.
11. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 65
Rachel Tillman The Matter of Health: Rethinking the Materiality of Living Bodies
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Concepts of health involve material dimensions that rely heavily on dominant theories of matter. Two approaches to understanding the nature of matter influence attempts to define health: scientific realism and social constructionism. Scientific realism assumes that bodily materiality is real and exists external to and independent of mind. On this view, definitions of health are objective and mind-independent. This view is permeates mainstream (allopathic) Western medical practice and theory. Social constructionism, on the other hand, insists that material configurations and even living bodies are socially constructed rather than natural. Critical theorists use a social constructionist approach to show the vulnerability of definitions of health to social and cultural forces. While these understandings of matter seem to be diametrically opposed, in this paper I show that they share a common assumption, which is that matter operates mechanistically; it is inert, passive, without agency. In both cases this assumption causes impasses that can be alleviated by a more dynamic account of matter. The work of feminist materialists Karen Barad and Elizabeth Wilson charts new paths for thinking matter more dynamically, and demonstrates how this shift can free us from the epistemological and political impasses that plague scientific realism and social constructionism. Furthermore, rethinking matter as more dynamic has significant implications for the task of defining health. It opens up the possibility for thinking the materiality of bodies in more accurate, just, and medically efficacious ways.
12. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 65
Daniel Wack Wittgenstein on the Practical Nature of Perception
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In introducing his discussion of seeing as in Part II of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein distinguishes between two uses of the verb ‘to see’. On the one hand, there is a use of ‘to see’ in which one succeeds in seeing in the relevant sense if one is able to represent the object seen. On the other, there is a use of ‘to see’ in which one succeeds if one recognizes a resemblance between two objects. In clarifying the relation between these two uses of ‘to see’ and thus the relation between perception and understanding, I articulate a Wittgensteinian account of perception in which one’s perception is organized and oriented by the demands of what one is going to do. Perception does not, for Wittgenstein, happen in stages, wherein understanding is brought to bear on a perceptual given. Instead, a practically oriented understanding orients and organizes our experience of what is salient, allowing us to go on in response.
articles in french
13. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 65
Fernanda Bernardo Le corps excrit: La pensée comme «se-toucher peau» ou corps chez Jean-Luc Nancy
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Cet exposé se propose de remarquer, très succinctement, nécessairement, qu’il n’y a plus chez le philosophe Jean-Luc Nancy un corps qui réfléchirait une âme, une spiritualité ou une pensée – en «relevant» singulièrement les dualismes de «l’âme» et du «corps» (à Descartes) autant que les monismes de la «chair» et les significations psychanalytiques du corps, les onto-théo-idéologies de l’immédiateté et de l’indivisibilité du toucher charnel ou spirituel autant que les philosophies (phénoménologies) du «corps-propre», Nancy nous donne à penser «le» corps comme (étant) la pensée ou l’écriture adressée saisie comme en situation, comme en location, c’est-à-dire, et dans un dire du philosophe à l’allure très spinozienne, «le» corps n’est pour lui que l’ «étendue[…] de l’âme», «l’étendue de psyché», voire «la pensée-en-corps».
articles in spanish
14. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 65
Paulina Monjaraz Fuentes La inseparabilidad entre conciencia y corporalidad en la psicología pura de Edith Stein
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Edith Stein realiza su aproximación fenomenológica a lo que es el cuerpo de la persona en la conciencia, lo cual le permite decir que la principal nota o característica del cuerpo es que es un cuerpo propio. Con el rigor fenomenológico que la caracteriza, poniéndose en la conciencia, integra la comprensión del cuerpo como cosa material y como viviente, logrando hacer ver cómo siendo el cuerpo cosa material, no se nos presenta sólo como cosa material, del mismo modo se nos da como viviente pero tampoco se da sólo como viviente. El modo del darse del cuerpo personal, es justamente lo que lo especifica, lo que lo hace ser este cuerpo y no otro cuerpo, lo que lo hace ser mío y no de otro. Edith Stein integra así la realidad material y el dinamismo viviente del cuerpo humano sin fraccionar o segmentar el análisis, logrando así mostrar la unidad sin posibilidad de separación entre cuerpo y conciencia.