On the Significance of Bodily Awareness for Bodily Action
Philosophical Quarterly 65 (261):790-812 (2015)
Abstract
What is the significance of bodily awareness for bodily action? The orthodox philosophical account from O'Shaughnessy claims that bodily awareness is necessary for bodily action. Whilst O'Shaughnessy's account appears to be consonant with the phenomenology of ordinary agency, it falls afoul to empirical counterexamples. The failure of O'Shaughnessy's account and its cousins might suggest that bodily action does not depend on bodily awareness. On the contrary, I argue that the contrast between the character of afferented and deafferented agency shows that bodily awareness is crucial to explaining the distinctive character of bodily action in neurologically normal agents. In particular, the capacity to feel one's body ‘from the inside’ appears to be a condition on the capacity to act with one's body in a way that is not like remote control. This dependency of capacities is at once empirically adequate and in tune with the phenomenology of ordinary agency.Author's Profile
DOI
10.1093/pq/pqv007
My notes
Similar books and articles
Bodily awareness and action-effect anticipations in voluntary action.Thomas Goschke - 2009 - PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 15 (1).
How the body in action shapes the self.Vittorio Gallese & Corrado Sinigaglia - 2011 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 18 (7-8):117-143.
Varieties of Pre-Reflective Self-Awareness: Foreground and Background Bodily Feelings in Emotion Experience.Giovanna Colombetti - 2011 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 54 (3):293 - 313.
On the Necessity of Bodily Awareness for Bodily Action.Hong Wong - 2009 - PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 15 (1).
Mental Action and Self-Awareness.Christopher Peacocke - 2006 - In Jonathan D. Cohen & Brian P. McLaughlin (eds.), Contemporary Debates in the Philosophy of Mind. Blackwell.
A phenomenological analysis of bodily self-awareness in the experience of pain and pleasure: on dys-appearance and eu-appearance. [REVIEW]Kristin Zeiler - 2010 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 13 (4):333-342.
Touch.Frédérique de Vignemont & Olivier Massin - 2013 - In Mohan Matthen (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception. Oxford University Press.
Bodily ownership, bodily awareness and knowledge without observation.José Luis Bermúdez - 2015 - Analysis 75 (1):37-45.
Analytics
Added to PP
2015-09-01
Downloads
95 (#131,445)
6 months
5 (#153,513)
2015-09-01
Downloads
95 (#131,445)
6 months
5 (#153,513)
Historical graph of downloads
Author's Profile
Citations of this work
Intentions: The Dynamic Hierarchical Model Revisited.Elisabeth Pacherie & Myrto Mylopoulos - 2019 - WIREs Cognitive Science 10 (2):e1481.
Motor Intentions: How Intentions and Motor Representations Come Together.Chiara Brozzo - 2017 - Mind and Language 32 (2):231-256.
On Proprioception in Action: Multimodality versus Deafferentation.Hong Yu Wong - 2017 - Mind and Language 32 (3):259-282.
References found in this work
Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason.Michael Bratman - 1987 - Cambridge: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Essays on Actions and Events: Philosophical Essays Volume 1.Donald Davidson - 1970 - Clarendon Press.
Springs of Action: Understanding Intentional Behavior.Alfred R. Mele - 1992 - Oxford University Press.