This article offers a philosophical-empirical account of embodied skilful performance in the practice of plant biotechnology. Drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty and others, we elaborate how skilful performance emerges from and through reciprocal relations encompassing the body-in-the-world and the world-in-the-body. The contribution of this article lies in offering an account of skilful performance that is attentive to a perceiving, motile, feeling body entwined with world. In genetically modifying plants, scientists direct their senses of touch and vision to manipulating plant (...) materials and matter, ‘reading’ subtle changes in tissue cultures, plantlets and so on. In rhythmic movements, they extend their bodies through skilful use of complex equipment, while calling on ‘intuition’ to guide their work. Skilful performance, then, relies on our lived body that is not merely a physical object among other objects, nor a passive instrument for the mind, but dynamic and inescapably entwined with people and things in a world in flux. Bringing to the fore how perceiving, motile, feeling bodies are implicated in skilful performance has significant implications for education and workplace training. (shrink)

The phenomenon of experienced agency is related to perceptual‐motor coordination, and Solfo and van Leeuwen discuss two ways that context can change this relationship. One is that agency is experienced only in contexts where environmentally‐coupled actions are stitched together over time to form long‐range correlations. The other is that the locus of agency depends on the temporal relationship between actions and events in the environment.

Sense of agency can be defined as the self-awareness of bodily movement, whereas extended agency as the self-awareness of affecting, through movement, events concomitant with movement. As a distinctive manifestation of agency, we review Spizzo's effect. This effect arises when agents coordinate their rhythmic movements with visual pulses. Once coordination is established, agents feel controlling the onset or the offset of the pulses through their movements. Spizzo's effect, therefore, constitutes a manifest case of extended agency, in which agents are aware (...) of controlling, through movement, the pulses temporally concomitant with movement. We propose that sense of agency requires continuity of kinesthesia, which in turn requires the continuity of selfhood. The continuity of kinesthesia is necessarily deduced from the consistent kinematics observed in movements, whereas the continuity of selfhood may stem from the patterns of rhythmic coordination that humans encounter ever since intrauterine life. The primacy of these patterns in adults is in accordance with phenomena such as Spizzo's effect, which require coordination to be induced. We, therefore, propose coordination as the fundamental interaction from which selfhood, kinesthesia, and agency arise. (shrink)

This article offers critical and constructive perspectives essential to understanding living bodies, and, in effect, to showing that kinesthesia, tactility and affectivity matter because they are central to animate life. Critical perspectives focus on practices that distance us from the lived realities of animate nature, on insights into those realities, and on ways in which language is intimately related to those realities. Constructive perspectives focus on ontogenetic studies that empirically testify to our being animate organisms from the start. The studies (...) validate Husserl’s insight into the developmental progression from ‘I move’ to ‘I do’ to ‘I can’. On the basis of these perspectives, concluding observations focus on the mutual validation of empirical and phenomenological research, on the distinction between movement and objects in motion, on the distinction between perceiving and feeling one’s body, and on the distinction between having a body and being a body. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Present-day fixations on “embodied minds,” and “enactive” assessments of life fail to recognize alive, moving bodies, precisely as James Joyce implicitly shows in his experience-anchored descriptions of the ineluctable modality of the visual and of the audible. Joyce's experience-anchored descriptions accord with Edmund Husserl's renditions of “the kinestheses” and their integral relationship to perception and to the development of agency. They furthermore accord with John Dewey's writing on aesthetics that describe the immediacy of motion into sense and sense into (...) motion in both nonhuman animal life and aesthetic experience. William James's connection of the stream of thinking with the stream of breathing is in further accord. Such accords show that animate forms of life are essentially mindful bodies sensuously and affectively attuned to their surrounding world. Cave art, both its creation and appreciation, is further testimony to mindful bodies as is internationally known musician Roger Sessions eloquent descriptions documenting the integrality of movement to all the arts. All such accords testify to the central and essential presence of the sense modality of movement—kinesthesia—and its bodily engaged dynamics in animate life and in art. (shrink)

This paper takes five different perspectives on kinesthesia, beginning with its evolution across animate life and its biological distinction from, and relationship to proprioception. It proceeds to document the historical derivation of “the muscle sense,” showing in the process how analytic philosophers bypass the import of kinesthesia by way of “enaction,” for example, and by redefinitions of “tactical deception.” The article then gives prominence to a further occlusion of kinesthesia and its subduction by proprioception, these practices being those of well-known (...) phenomenologists, practices that exemplify an adultist perspective supported in large part by the writings of Merleau-Ponty. Following this extended critical review, the article shows how Husserl’s phenomenology enlightens us about kinesthesia and in doing so offers us substantive clues to the phenomenology of learning as it takes place in the development and acquisition of skillful movement. It shows further how phenomenological methodology contrasts markedly with existential analysis, most significantly in its recognition of, and its ability to set forth a developmental history, a veritable genetic phenomenology that is basically a phenomenology of learning anchored in kinesthesia. After showing how that phenomenology of learning finds mutual validation in a classic empirical study of infant movement, the article ends by highlighting how human “I cans” are grounded in “I move,” specifically, in the pan-human ability to learn one’s body and learn to move oneself. (shrink)

In a diverse range of recent research activities, I have worked to develop productive distinctions between embodied knowledge, embodied practice, embodied technique, and embodied research; but I have settled for a brief gloss of the crucial descriptor ‘embodied’.1 In this essay I offer a critical and philosophical approach to embodiment, explaining why we continue to need this concept and what I believe it can still do for us.