Body and World [Paperback]

Samuel Todes (Author), Hubert L. Dreyfus (Introduction), Piotr Hoffman (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2, 2001 | ISBN-10: 0262700824 | ISBN-13: 978-0262700825

Body and World is the definitive edition of a book that shouldnow take its place as a major contribution to contemporary existentialphenomenology. Samuel Todes goes beyond Martin Heidegger and MauriceMerleau-Ponty in his description of how independent physical natureand experience are united in our bodily action. His account allows himto preserve the authority of experience while avoiding the tendencytoward idealism that threatens both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.Todes emphasizes the complex structure of the human body ;front/back asymmetry, the need to balance in a gravitational field, and so forth ;and the role that structure plays in producing the spatiotemporal field of experience and in making possible objective knowledge of the objects in it. He shows that perception involves nonconceptual, but nonetheless objective forms of judgment. One can think of Body and World as fleshing out Merleau-Ponty's project while presciently relating it to the current interest in embodiment, not only in philosophy but also in psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and anthropology. Todes's work opens new ways of thinking about problems such as the relation of perception to thought and the possibility of knowing an independent reality ;problems that have occupied philosophers since Kant and still concern analytic and continental philosophy.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A much needed and insightful account that stays with the phenomenological evidence, a rich phenomenological resource." Shaun Gallagher The Times Literary (UK)

"How did masturbation, arguably the safest sexual act, come to be seen as a moral aberration with ghastly physical effects? Laqueur is persuasive. An engaging writer." Briefly Noted The New Yorker

"This remarkable book, originally prepared as Samuel Todes's dissertation, delves deeply into issues that have only now, forty years later, become central concerns in epistemology, philosophy of action, and philosophy of mind. These issues had been broached by Husserl in manuscripts and had been followed up by Heidegger and above all by Merleau-Ponty, but Todes carries the discussion further with careful analyses and original ideas. He discusses how the body has anticipations that can be satisfied or frustrated, and shows how these processes are of crucial importance for clarifying the nonconceptual elements in knowledge. He also throws much-needed light on the percipient as a bodily subject, on the unity of the person and the unity of the object experienced. The book is a classic in the sense that it remains as thought-provoking and illuminating today as when it was written."--Dagfinn Føllesdal, Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy, Stanford UniversityPlease note: The first "o" of the endorser's last name has a slash through it.

About the Author

Samuel Todes was Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University at the time of his death in 1994. Body and World is based on his dissertation, written in 1963 and published in 1990 in the series Harvard Dissertations in Philosophy under the title The Human Body as Material Subject of the World.

Hubert L. Dreyfus is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley.

Product Details

• Paperback: 370 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (April 2, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262700824
• ISBN-13: 978-0262700825
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #803,803 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Know your Kant well..., August 21, 2005

By 

John Harpur (Trim, Meath, IRELAND) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Body and World (Paperback)

Todes has tried to position his work somewhere between phenomenology and transcendatal idealism. Recent interest in this thinking is found in both philosophy and in Artifical Intelligence, both struggling to justify the embodiment of mind for different reasons. However, Todes work is situated in a tradition that views philosophy as primarily addressing major themes raised by other philosophers - a chain of debate. Hence, it may be difficult to appreciate his work without reasonably thorough knowledge of Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and a number of others. For instance, it is doubtful if the import of his arguments against Kant's categories of experience and the antimonies can be assessed unless Kant is previously understood (and therefore Hume, etc.). The hinge for Todes analyses is the issue of the relationship between experience and our understanding of it. Kant tried to 'solve' the problem by postulating a unified manifold of experience resulting from the innate expression of regulative principles which governed synthetic a priori judgments. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason encapsulated his epistemology and, as far as he was concerned, rescued knowledge from Humean scepticism. But what did this imply for the 'body subject'? This is the question addressed by Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty.

In this book, Todes renders a series of arguments to show that Kant intellectualised experience, and that there is room for a category of non-conceptual knowledge. In my own opinion, Todes rendering of Kant's understanding of judgment is mistaken. Moreover, his observations on nonconceptual knowledge are in the main, minor - again a personal opinion. The later appendices in the book reproduce material sharing an affinity with the obscurantism of Foucault and Derrida - a pity.

Overall this is an interesting book if you grasp the Kantian nettle identifed by Todes. However, I suggest counterbalancing it with Polanyi's Personal Knolwedge for a profoundly different set of arguments and almost contemporary in writing (circa late 50's). Other points of interest are the development of intersubjectivity in the child, which again should be explored against the interiority-exteriority arguments of Todes. There is too much in the book to cover in a short review, but it does touch on key philosophical issues that will remain of interest for the foreseeable future.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Natural Philosophy of the Human body, August 10, 2001

By 

Arun Kumar (Darmstadt, Germany) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Body and World (Paperback)

Samuel Todes has gone beyond Merleau Ponty's phenomenology-to explain about the role of a Body. The phenomenological thesis of Samuel Todes is discussed in the book and the current book is an edited version of Samuel Todes' dissertation at Harvard. The two introductions written by Hubert Dreyfus on 'Todes's Account of Nonceptual Perceptual Knowledge and Its Relation to Thought' and Piotr Hoffman on 'How Todes Rescues Phenomenology from the Threat of Idealism' are very informative, and discuss contemporary issues in the field of phenomenology and philosophy of the body.

Body and World is an original and systematic contribution to existential phenomenology. Samuel Todes goes beyond Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty in his description of how independent physical nature and experience are united in our bodily action.

The book also makes an important contribution to the current debate among analytic philosophers concerning non-conceptual content and its relation to thought. Samuel Todes also worked on noumenology (it's his own invented term for talking about the body as the source of our understanding of space and time, which is discussed in greater depth in the book of Samuel Todes), phenomenology, existentialism, the role of the human body in the sense of reality, philosophy of friendship and family. He is the author of The Human Body as Material Subject of the World and before his untimely death, Todes was also working on a social philosophy of the body, centering on a study of friendship.

"The book is a study in the natural philosophy of the human body. That is to say, it is a study of our's body role in our knowlegde of _objects_." Thank you.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Philosopher of the Enlightenment, November 26, 2007

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Peter P. Fuchs (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Body and World (Paperback)

For a great phenomenologist, which Sam Todes definitely was, this great book is striking for its grounding in Enlightenment philosophy. If the book were more widely read one of the side-effects would be to show that Enlightenment thought not only can be brought up to date, but in novel ways and even exciting ways. For Todes' thesis is and exciting one, showing as he does that the many of the dualities of Western culture come not from per se uselessness of the categories as from the as yet inabilty to see all these categories as grounded in our subject body as human beings. Compare Todes' discussion of Leibniz or Hume, to say nothing of his favorite Kant, to the very famous philosopher of the body Merleau-Ponty. You will find the difference between a crystalline stream and a brackish pond. Merleau-Ponty was the favorite of Catholic philosphers, or Catholic inspired ones, who constructed existential phenomenologies that could accomadate a religious tradition which formerly was quite proud of its hostility to embodied experience, which now "got religion" and found the body. Todes showed that the Enlightenment not only was not hostile to our experience as embodied persons but in fact was grounded in it, though he shows how it was insufficiently thematized. That the religious proponents of the philosophy of the body showed the ultimate shallowness of the Merleau-Ponty approach is demonstrated by the proof-in-the-pudding of their astounding personal immaturity, to say nothing of their egregious flouting of legal boundaries. I can speak to Sam Todes' enormous integration as someone who was privileged to know him for years. He stayed at my home on several occasions

and his utterly unforced wisdom is still a huge influence for me. Sam's attitude toward religion was especially inspirational. He had no fear of it; neither was he in its thrall. This is most poignantly expressed in this text when elucidates his notion of hope. Things only appear real for us as embodied beings when their is a horizon of hope. When our real circumstances lack this hopeful horizon the facts of life begin to be unreal, for reality is grounded in our experience of our subject body. Todes notes as a grim example that Auschwitz

is a hole in the world for all its terrible reality. Religion can be seen as a necessity to keep the reality of life intact. But it follows from this thought that when religion in any impedes this great function of creating a horizon of hope it forfeits its right to be taken seriously as a benefit in human affairs.Those like me who take an interest in dense tomes of Church History have a lot to ponder in this regard. I can say that Sam Todes was very interested in these matters, and his partner of many years, a famous poet, had written a long-poem on his labyrinthine exit from a limited Catholic world-view. What is hard to convey is the lightheartedness of the man in all these matters. One cannot hope to imitate such genius, but truly Sam Todes gave words and example to live by.