Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics

Contemporary culture increasingly suffers from problems of attention, over-stimulation, and stress, and a variety of personal and social discontents generated by deceptive body images. This book argues that improved body consciousness can relieve these problems and enhance one's knowledge, performance, and pleasure. The body is our basic medium of perception and action, but focused attention to its feelings and movements has long been criticized as a damaging distraction that also ethically corrupts through self-absorption. In Body Consciousness, Richard Shusterman refutes such charges by engaging the most influential twentieth-century somatic philosophers and incorporating insights from both Western and Asian disciplines of body-mind awareness.

Author: Richard Shusterman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 01/07/2008
Pages: 258
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780521675871

About the Author
Shusterman, Richard: - Richard Shusterman is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton. Educated at Jerusalem and Oxford, he is internationally known for his contributions to philosophy and his pioneering work in somaesthetics, a field of theory and practice devoted to thinking through the body. A recipient of senior Fulbright and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, Dr Shusterman has held academic positions in Paris, Berlin, and Hiroshima, and is the author of several books, most recently Surface and Depth and Performing Live. His Pragmatist Aesthetics has been published in thirteen languages.