Translated by Jordan Stump, introduction by Caleb Carr and original illustrations by Jules Ferat.

Benjamin Jowett's translations of Plato have long been classics in their own right. In this volume, Professor Hayden Pelliccia has revised Jowett's renderings of five key dialogues, giving us a modern Plato faithful to both Jowett's best features and Plato's own masterly style. Gathered here are many of Plato's liveliest and richest texts. Ion takes up the question of poetry and introduces the Socratic method. Protagoras discusses poetic interpretation and shows why cross-examination is the best way to get (...) at the truth. Phaedrus takes on the nature of rhetoric, psychology, and love, as does the famous Symposium. Finally, Apology gives us Socrates' art of persuasion put to the ultimate test--defending his own life. Pelliccia's new Introduction to this volume clarifies its contents and addresses the challenges of translating Plato freshly and accurately. In its combination of accessibility and depth, Selected Dialogues of Plato is the ideal introduction to one of the key thinkers of all time. (shrink)

Which is better: a guarantee of a modest amount of moral value, or a tiny probability of arbitrarily large value? To prefer the latter seems fanatical. But, as I argue, avoiding such fanaticism brings severe problems. To do so, we must decline intuitively attractive trade-offs; rank structurally identical pairs of lotteries inconsistently, or else admit absurd sensitivity to tiny probability differences; have rankings depend on remote, unaffected events ; and often neglect to rank lotteries as we already know we would (...) if we learned more. Compared to these implications, fanaticism is highly plausible. (shrink)

For aggregative theories of moral value, it is a challenge to rank worlds that each contain infinitely many valuable events. And, although there are several existing proposals for doing so, few provide a cardinal measure of each world's value. This raises the even greater challenge of ranking lotteries over such worlds—without a cardinal value for each world, we cannot apply expected value theory. How then can we compare such lotteries? To date, we have just one method for doing so (proposed (...) separately by Arntzenius, Bostrom, and Meacham), which is to compare the prospects for value at each individual location, and to then represent and compare lotteries by their expected values at each of those locations. But, as I show here, this approach violates several key principles of decision theory and generates some implausible verdicts. I propose an alternative—one which delivers plausible rankings of lotteries, which is implied by a plausible collection of axioms, and which can be applied alongside almost any ranking of infinite worlds. (shrink)

Various decision theories share a troubling implication. They imply that, for any finite amount of value, it would be better to wager it all for a vanishingly small probability of some greater value. Counterintuitive as it might be, this fanaticism has seemingly compelling independent arguments in its favour. In this paper, I consider perhaps the most prima facie compelling such argument: an Egyptology argument (an analogue of the Egyptology argument from population ethics). I show that, despite recent objections from Russell (...) (2023) and Goodsell (2021), the argument’s premises can be justified and defended, and the argument itself remains compelling. (shrink)

Thought experiments feature prominently in both scientific and philosophical methods. In this paper, I investigate two questions surrounding knowledge in the thought experiment process. First, on what implicit knowledge do thought experiments rely? Second, what provides epistemic justification for beliefs acquired through the process? I draw upon neo-Aristotelian metaphysics and Husserlian phenomenology to argue that essence is the object of implicit knowledge that anchors the imagined possibilities involved in thought experiments to the actual world, and that this essentialist knowledge enables (...) the possibility of prima facie justification being conferred by the phenomenological givenness of thought experiment scenarios. (shrink)

Hayden White probes the notion of authority in art and literature and examines the problems of meaning - its production, distribution, and consumption - in different historical epochs. In the end, he suggests, the only meaning that history can have is the kind that a narrative imagination gives to it. The secret of the process by which consciousness invests history with meaning resides in the content of the form, in the way our narrative capacities transforms the present into a (...) fulfillment of a past from which we would wish to have desceneded. (shrink)

Philosophy & Public Affairs, Volume 50, Issue 2, Page 202-238, Spring 2022.

Various philosophers accept moral views that are impartial, additive, and risk-neutral with respect to moral betterness. But, if that risk neutrality is spelt out according to expected value theory alone, such views face a dire reductio ad absurdum. If the expected sum of value in humanity's future is undefined--if, e.g., the probability distribution over possible values of the future resembles the Pasadena game, or a Cauchy distribution--then those views say that no option is ever better than any other. And, as (...) I argue, this holds in practice: our evidence supports such a probability distribution. Indeed, it supports a probability distribution that cannot be evaluated even if we adopt one of the various extensions of expected value theory proposed in the literature. Must we therefore reject all impartial, additive, risk-neutral moral theories? It turns out that we need not. I develop an alternative solution: a new method of extending expected value theory, which allows us to deal with this distribution and to salvage those moral views. I also examine how this solution affects one of the most notable implications of those views--namely, longtermism. (shrink)

Suppose you found that the universe around you was infinite—that it extended infinitely far in space or in time and, as a result, contained infinitely many persons. How should this change your moral decision-making? Radically, it seems, according to some philosophers. According to various recent arguments, any moral theory that is ’minimally aggregative’ will deliver absurd judgements in practice if the universe is (even remotely likely to be) infinite. This seems like sound justification for abandoning any such theory. -/- My (...) goal in this thesis is simple: to demonstrate that we need not abandon minimally aggregative theories, even if we happen to live in an infinite universe. I develop and motivate an extension of such theories, which delivers plausible judgements in a range of realistic cases. I show that this extended theory can overcome key objections—both old and new—and that it succeeds where other proposals do not. With this proposal in hand, we can indeed retain minimally aggregative theories and continue to make moral decisions based on what will promote the good. (shrink)

The question of violence and how society can emancipate oneself from it has occupied many philosophers. Walter Benjamin attempted to answer this question in 1920 through the notion of divine violence. This idea has recently been resurrected by philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler. Divine violence is turned to as a means of emancipating society from systemic oppression and coercive law. However, it is a notion that has been met by major critiques. Most notable (...) is Jacques Derrida’s critique given in Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority. This article examines Judith Butler’s turn to divine violence in opposition to the critique of divine violence given by Derrida. Butler attempts to merge divine violence and non-violence to create a means of non-violent revolution capable of emancipating society from oppression and coercive law. However, to make this argument, Butler needs to overcome Derrida’s objection that suggests that divine violence is a dangerous notion with the potential to justify horrendous forms of political violence. Does Butler successfully create a non-violent divine violence capable of achieving this desired emancipation? Or does divine violence continue to be a notion with a dangerously destructive potential as Derrida suggests? These are the questions that this article attempts to answer through a detailed examination of both Butler’s and Derrida’s work on divine violence. Ultimately, it is established that divine violence should be jettisoned into the realm of the divine, rather than harnessed for political ends. (shrink)

How might we extend aggregative moral theories to compare infinite worlds? In particular, how might we extend them to compare worlds with infinite spatial volume, infinite temporal duration, and infinitely many morally valuable phenomena? When doing so, we face various impossibility results from the existing literature. For instance, the view we adopt can endorse the claim that worlds are made better if we increase the value in every region of space and time, or that they are made better if we (...) increase the value obtained by every person. But they cannot endorse both claims, so we must choose. In this paper I show that, if we choose the latter, our view will face serious problems such as generating incomparability in many realistic cases. Opting instead to endorse the first claim, I articulate and defend a spatiotemporal, expansionist view of infinite aggregation. Spatiotemporal views such as this do face some difficulties, but I show that these can be overcome. With modification, they can provide plausible comparisons in cases that we care about most. (shrink)

Can it be rational to be risk-averse? It seems plausible that the answer is yes—that normative decision theory should accommodate risk aversion. But there is a seemingly compelling class of arguments against our most promising methods of doing so. These long-run arguments point out that, in practice, each decision an agent makes is just one in a very long sequence of such decisions. Given this form of dynamic choice situation, and the (Strong) Law of Large Numbers, they conclude that those (...) theories which accommodate risk aversion end up delivering the same verdicts as risk-neutral theories in nearly all practical cases. If so, why not just accept a simpler, risk-neutral theory? The resulting practical verdicts seem to be much the same. In this paper, I show that these arguments do not in fact condemn those risk-aversion-accommodating theories. Risk aversion can indeed survive the long run. (shrink)

In this paper I develop a novel account of the phenomenality of language by focusing on characteristics of perceived speech. I explore the extent to which the spoken word can be said to have a horizonal structure similar to that of spatiotemporal objects: our perception of each is informed by habitual associations and expectations formed through past experiences of the object or word and other associated objects and experiences. Specifically, the horizonal structure of speech in use can fruitfully be compared (...) to that of a tool in use. The comparison suggests an account of our linguistic faculty as continuous with more foundational faculties of perception and action. I provide empirical corroboration of this account by drawing on recent neuroimaging studies of the multimodal, sensorimotor bases of speech comprehension. I then discuss how such an understanding of our linguistic ability helps advocates of embodied, non-representationalist accounts of cognition respond to a common objection. Critics grant that embodied approaches may be adequate to account for lower-level, online modes of cognition, such as perception and action, which directly engage their object. But they question whether such approaches can “scale up” to higher modes of cognition, such as imagination, memory, thought, and language, which can entertain absent, non-existent, or abstract objects. By providing a plausible account of the continuity of lower cognition and language-involving cognition, my approach responds to this objection, at least where language is concerned. (shrink)

France’s 35-hour workweek is one of the boldest progressive reforms in recent years. Drawing on existing survey and economic data, supplemented by interviews with French informants, this article examines the 35-hour week’s evolution and impacts. Although commonly dismissed as economically uncompetitive, the policy package succeeded in avoiding significant labor-cost increases for business. Most 35-hour employees cite quality-of-life improvements despite the fact that wage moderation, greater variability in schedules, and intensification of work negatively impacted some—mostly lower-paid and less-skilled—workers. Taking into account (...) employment gains, the initiative can be considered a qualified success in meeting its main aims. (shrink)

Radical and autopoietic enactivists disagree concerning how to understand the concept of sense-making in enactivist discourse and the extent of its distribution within the organic domain. I situate this debate within a broader conflict of commitments to naturalism on the part of radical enactivists, and to phenomenology on the part of autopoietic enactivists. I argue that autopoietic enactivists are in part responsible for the obscurity of the notion of sense-making by attributing it univocally to sentient and non-sentient beings and following (...) Hans Jonas in maintaining a phenomenological dimension to life-mind continuity among all living beings, sentient or non-sentient. I propose following Merleau-Ponty instead, who offers a properly phenomenological notion of sense-making for which sentience is a necessary condition. Against radicalist efforts to replace sense-making with a deflationary, naturalist conception of intentionality, I discuss the role of the phenomenological notion of sense-making for understanding animal behavior and experience. (shrink)

In Canada, there is interest in expanding medical assistance in dying (MAID) to include advance requests (AR) for people living with dementia (PLWD). However, operationalizing the intolerable suffering criterion for MAID in ARs for PLWD is complicated by the Canadian legal context—in which MAID is understood as a medical intervention and suffering is conceptualized as subjective—and the degenerative nature of dementia. ARs that express a wish to receive MAID when the PLWD develops pre-specified impairments are problematic because people are unlikely (...) to accurately predict the conditions that will cause intolerable suffering. ARs that express a wish to receive MAID when the PLWD exhibits pre-specified behaviors that likely represent suffering are problematic because they are inconsistent with the subjective conceptualization of suffering. Further research is required to determine whether adopting an objective conceptualization of suffering is justified in these cases and, if so, how to reliably identify intolerable suffering in PLWD. (shrink)

This paper clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between speaking and spoken speech, and the relation between the two, in his Phenomenology of Perception. Against a common interpretation, I argue on exegetical and philosophical grounds that the distinction should not be understood as one between two kinds of speech, but rather between two internally related dimensions present in all speech. This suggests an interdependence between speaking and spoken aspects of speech, and some commentators have critiqued Merleau-Ponty for claiming a priority of speaking over (...) spoken speech. However, there is a sense in which Merleau-Ponty is right to emphasize the priority, namely, in terms of the ontological priority of the speaking subject with respect to language understood as a constituted cultural ideality. The latter only maintains its ontological status insofar as it is taken up by a language community. I favorably contrast Merleau-Ponty’s views on this question to those of the late Heidegger and de Saussure, and suggest potential applications of this clarified position for contemporary discussions in philosophy of language. (shrink)

To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent—absent or, as in some domains of Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal (...) fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself . . . international, transhistorical, transcultural."1 Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that culture may appear to us. As Barthes says, "narrative...is translatable without fundamental damage" in a way that a lyric poem or a philosophical discourse is not. · 1. Roland Barthes, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives," Music, Image, Text, trans. Stephen Heath , p. 79.· 2. The words "narrative," "narration," "to narrate," and so on derive via the Latin gnārus and narro from the Sanskrit root gnâ . The same root yields γνωριμος : see Emile Boisacq, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque , under the entry for this word. My thanks to Ted Morris of Cornell, one of our greatest etymologists. Hayden White, professor in the program of history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the author of The Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, The Greco-Roman Tradition, and Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. " The Narrativization of Real Events" appeared in the Summer 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. Critical Responses to the present essay include Louis O. Mink's "Everyman His or Her Own Annalist", and Marilyn Robinson Waldman's "The Otherwise Unnoteworthy Year 711: A Reply to Hayden White," both in the Summer 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

Some accounts of human distinctiveness focus on anatomical features, such as bipedalism and brain size. Others focus on cognitive abilities, such as tool use and manufacture, language, and social cognition. Embodied approaches to cognition highlight the internal relations between these two groups of characteristics, arguing that cognition is rooted in and shaped by embodiment. This paper complements existing embodied approaches by focusing on an underappreciated aspect of embodiment: the appearance of the human body as condition of human sociality and cognition. (...) I approach this issue through Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the animate body as an intertwining of perceiving and perceivable aspects. The eye is both an animal’s embodied, perceptual openness onto the world, and the means by which that experiential openness can be perceived by others. The morphology and appearance of its embodiment condition how an animal comes to understand others and itself as animate subjects. I interpret the perceivable appearance of the human eye and skin in comparison with those of other animals. An underappreciated dimension of human distinctiveness, I argue, is the way the human sense organs render human perceiving comparatively more perceivable to conspecifics. (shrink)

What is a paradox? -- Knowing and believing -- Vagueness and identity -- Logic and truth -- Mathematical paradoxes -- Probability paradoxes -- Space and time -- Impossibilities -- Deciding and acting -- Index of philosophers.

This paper provides a critical discussion of the views of Merleau-Ponty and contemporary enactivism concerning the phenomenological dimension of the continuity between life and mind. I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s views are at odds with those of enactivists. Merleau-Ponty only applied phenomenological descriptions to the life-worlds of sentient animals with sensorimotor systems, contrary to those enactivists who apply them to all organisms. I argue that we should follow Merleau-Ponty on this point, as the use of phenomenological concepts to describe the “experience” (...) of creatures with no phenomenal consciousness has generated confusion about the role of phenomenology in enactivism and prompted some enactivists to ignore or turn away from phenomenology. Further, Merleau-Ponty also emphasizes the stark distinction between the vital order of animals and the human order to a greater degree than many phenomenologically inspired enactivists. I discuss his view in connection with recent research in developmental and comparative psychology. Despite the striking convergence of Merleau-Ponty’s visionary thought with the most recent findings, I argue that he somewhat overstates the difference between human experience and cognition, and that of our closest animal kin. I outline a developmental-phenomenological account of how the child enters the human order in the first years of life, thereby further mitigating the stark difference between orders. This results in a modified Merleau-Pontian version of the phenomenological dimension of life-mind continuity which I recommend to enactivism. (shrink)

Approaches to the naturalization of phenomenology usually understand naturalization as a matter of rendering continuous the methods, epistemologies, and ontologies of phenomenological and natural scientific inquiry. Presupposed in this statement of the problematic, however, is that there is an original discontinuity, a rupture between phenomenology and the natural sciences that must be remedied. I propose that this way of thinking about the issue is rooted in a simplistic understanding of the phenomenological reduction that entails certain assumptions about the subject matter (...) of phenomenology and its relationship to the natural sciences. By contrast, Merleau‐Ponty's first work, The Structure of Behavior, presents a radically different approach to the phenomenological reduction, one that traverses the natural sciences and integrates them into phenomenology from the outset. I outline the argument for this position in The Structure of Behavior and then discuss consequences for current methodological issues surrounding the naturalization of phenomenology, focusing on the relationship between empirical sciences of mind, phenomenological psychology, and transcendental phenomenology. This novel exegesis of Merleau‐Ponty's view on the reduction offers new insight into his oft‐quoted remark that the phenomenological reduction is impossible to complete. (shrink)

This paper proposes a theory of text on-screen as “unvoiceover.” It addresses both the case for captioning as social good and the affordances (aesthetic, affective) of writing in or over the moving image. Advancing an argument informed by perspectives from d/deaf Studies, Critical Disability Studies and Digital Interface Studies, and applying modes of analysis from literary criticism alongside those proper to the study of moving image and sound, it examines the idiosyncrasies of text-in-motion as non-sonorous, fugitive counterpart to the traditional, (...) troublesome “voiceover.” To develop a poetics of the unsounding voice on-screen, the paper focalizes its argument through multimedia artist Liza Sylvestre’s Captioned series: a body of moving image work that is itself, paradoxically, uncaptioned. Framing Sylvestre’s lyrical “unvoiceover” as a reimagining of the lost roles of film explainers and literary intertitles, I argue that the artist’s takeover of the caption track intervenes critically in contemporary debates about the ethics of audio-visual translation, situated description and access as public ethos rather than private concern. Posing the artist’s personal-and-political writing as suggestive of a lower-case analogue to Deaf Gain, I show how Sylvestre’s “unvoiceover” educates its “receivers” in the purpose and functioning of captions. By reading Sylvestre’s writing on-screen more closely than its fugitive form seems to invite, I show how the unvoiceover encultures its own demands on its readers and elicits its own habits of reading. By scrutinizing how Sylvestre’s series makes the case for captioning, this paper makes the case for a new appraisal of the aesthetic, affective and political affordances of the unvoiceover as writing on the run. (shrink)

Aggregative moral theories face a series of devastating problems when we apply them in a physically realistic setting. According to current physics, our universe is likely _infinitely large_, and will contain infinitely many morally valuable events. But standard aggregative theories are ill-equipped to compare outcomes containing infinite total value so, applied in a realistic setting, they cannot compare any outcomes a real-world agent must ever choose between. This problem has been discussed extensively, and non-standard aggregative theories proposed to overcome it. (...) This paper addresses a further problem of similar severity. Physics tells us that, in our universe, how remotely in time an event occurs is _relative_. But our most promising aggregative theories, designed to compare outcomes containing infinitely many valuable events, are sensitive to how remote in time those events are. As I show, the evaluations of those theories are then relative too. But this is absurd; evaluations of outcomes must be absolute. So we must reject such theories. Is this objection fatal for all aggregative theories, at least in a relativistic universe like ours? I demonstrate here that, by further modifying these theories to fit with the physics, we can overcome it. (shrink)

In a recent article, ‘Why lockdown of the elderly is not ageist and why levelling down equality is wrong’, Savulescu and Cameron argue that a selective lockdown of older people is not ageist because it would treat people unequally based on morally relevant differences. This response argues that a selective lockdown of older people living in long-term care homes would be unjust because it would allow the expansive liberties of the general public to undermine the basic liberties of older people, (...) and because it would discriminate on the basis of extrinsic disadvantages. (shrink)

Our universe is both chaotic and (most likely) infinite in space and time. But it is within this setting that we must make moral decisions. This presents problems. The first: due to our universe's chaotic nature, our actions often have long-lasting, unpredictable effects; and this means we typically cannot say which of two actions will turn out best in the long run. The second problem: due to the universe's infinite dimensions, and infinite population therein, we cannot compare outcomes by simply (...) adding up their total moral values - those totals will typically be infinite or undefined. Each of these problems poses a threat to aggregative moral theories. But, for each, we have solutions: a proposal from Greaves let us overcome the problem of chaos, and proposals from the infinite aggregation literature let us overcome the problem of infinite value. But a further problem emerges. If our universe is both chaotic and infinite, those solutions no longer work - outcomes that are infinite and differ by chaotic effects are incomparable, even by those proposals. In this paper, I show that we can overcome this further problem. But, to do so, we must accept some peculiar implications about how aggregation works. (shrink)

This addition to the St Andrews Studies series contains a wide-ranging collection of essays on all aspects of moral philosophy and its impact upon public life in the twenty-first century. The book brings together ethicists from a variety of traditions interested in moral truth and its relation to religious faith. A key theme is interaction between major Catholic thinkers with philosophers from non-religious traditions. Topics include reason and religion, natural law, God and morality, anti-consequentialism, rights and virtues.

I have two objectives in this article. The first is methodological: I elaborate a minimal phenomenological method and attempt to show its importance in studies of infant behavior. The second objective is substantive: Applying the minimal phenomenological approach, combined with Meltzoff’s “like-me” developmental framework, I propose the hypothesis that infants learn the pointing gesture at least in part through imitation. I explain how developments in sensorimotor ability (posture, arm and hand control and coordination, and locomotion) in the first year of (...) life prepare the infant for acquiring the pointing gesture. The former may directly enable the latter by allowing the infant to experience its own body as being “like those” of others, thus allowing it to imitatively appropriate a broader range of adult behavior. My proposal emphasizes the embodiment of mind in the development of cognition, contrary to latent dualistic tendencies in some developmental literature. (shrink)

In this international and interdisciplinary collection of critical essays, distinguished contributors examine a crucial premise of traditional readings of Plato's dialogues: that Plato's own doctrines and arguments can be read off the statements made in the dialogues by Socrates and other leading characters. The authors argue in general and with reference to specific dialogues, that no character should be taken to be Plato's mouthpiece. This is essential reading for students and scholars of Plato.

Education’s autonomy cannot be found in schooling. For a theory of education to also adequately support education’s autonomy, it must decouple itself from schooling since schooling is a technology of efficiency and acculturation that serves technocratic interests that strip autonomy from education. Using Christer Fritzell’s examination of relative autonomy of schools, Matthew Hayden and William Gregory Harman will show that the ideological domination of schooling by technocratic interests structurally and functionally subordinates schooling. This subordination takes the form of technocratic (...) operationalization of education concepts and schooling practices, resulting in the desublimation of learning. Hayden and Harman conclude that resublimation is required in order to restore the possibility of education’s autonomy in schooling. (shrink)

In his late lecture course titled “Nature and Logos: The Human Body” (1959-1960), Merleau-Ponty proposed that we understand human symbolism, language, and reason by viewing the human being initially as a variant on animal embodiment and perception prior to being a rational animal. To elaborate this project, he outlined an “esthesiology” informed by the study of evolution. However, in the sketches that survive of “Nature and Logos,” we find neither a detailed explanation of how Merleau-Ponty understood this approach nor its (...) concrete execution with respect to the human body. In this paper I reconstruct Merleau-Ponty’s esthesiology. An animate body possesses two “sides”: it is a sensing organism open onto the world and a sensible part of the natural world. Visual animals such as humans can see, see themselves, and be seen by others. To understand their way of life, we must study not only the body’s capacities for perception and action, but also how those capacities are seen by other organisms, especially conspecifics. The body’s visibility shapes the social prospects of a species and its potential for developing complex sociality, language, and cognition. I apply this basic esthesiological principle to study the human eye. Both in its vision and its visibility, the human eye is a distinctive variation of animality and one that conditions and shapes human sociality and cognition. I develop this insight with respect to a central philosophical theme of Merleau-Ponty’s late work, the relation of the visible and the invisible. I conclude by discussing the importance of Merleau-Ponty’s esthesiology for his late thought and current discussions of the naturalization of phenomenology. (shrink)

In recent years, social cognition approaches to human evolution and Material Engagement Theory have offered new theoretical resources to advance our understanding of the prehistoric hominin mind. To date, however, these two approaches have developed largely in isolation from one another. I argue that there is a gap between social- and material-centred approaches, and that this is precisely the sociomateriality of the appearance of ancestral hominin bodies, which evolved under selective pressure to develop increasingly complex, cooperative sociality. To get this (...) sociomaterial body in focus, I develop an esthesiological framework, appropriated from Merleau-Ponty (2003), for interpreting the expressive body in an evolutionary and comparative context. The guiding hypothesis of esthesiology is that before being rationality (social or material), “humanity is another corporeity” (Merleau-Ponty, 2003, p. 208). Esthesiology studies the appearance of the body and its sense organs as an intertwining locus of a sensing power (the ability to see, to touch, etc.) and a sensible character (the visible, touchable body). It is this dual-aspect character of the body that facilitates the most basic affective and sensorimotor modes of sociality. Examining these features from a comparative perspective, we find that the human body is distinctively suited to prosocial communication and cooperation: a more cooperative eye, an exposed and communicative skin. I thus propose a cooperative body hypothesis, by analogy with the cooperative eye hypothesis (Tomasello et al., 2007). Esthesiology provides a framework for integrating and interpreting a wide range of otherwise disconnected facts concerning human and nonhuman animal bodies, forms of life, cognition, and evolution, thereby bridging the gap between social cognition and material engagement perspectives. In doing so, however, it not only solves problems and proposes new directions of investigation, but also demands theoretical revisions from each. (shrink)