This chapter will focus on ‘bodily feelings’, which express the various facets of the enduring relation that the subject has with her body in relation to the world. In particular, it will focus on three such feelings: the feeling of bodily presence, the feeling of bodily capacities, and the feeling of bodily ownership. After describing these bodily feelings in more detail, we will ask to what...
Abstract According to the extended mind hypothesis, “There is nothing sacred about skull and skin” for our cognitive abilities (Clark and Chalmers 1998). Is this also true for bodily awareness? In this chapter I consider several versions of what we can call the extended body hypothesis. According to a weak version, bodily awareness is not limited by the biological boundaries of our body. In...
The enactive approach aims at providing a unified account of perceptual experiences in terms of bodily activities. Most enactive arguments come from the analysis of visual experiences (Noë, 2004), but there is one domain of consciousness where the enactive theses seem to be less controversial, namely, bodily experiences. After drawing the agenda for an enactive view of tactile experiences, I...
Theories of embodied cognition abound in the literature, but it is often unclear how to understand them. We offer several interpretations of embodiment, the most interesting being the thesis that mental representations in bodily formats (B-formats) have an important role in cognition. Potential B-formats include motoric, somatosensory, affective and interoceptive formats. The literature on...