Mind the Body An Exploration of Bodily Self-Awareness

Our own body seems to be the object that we know the best for we constantly receive a flow of internal information about it. Yet bodily awareness has attracted little attention in the literature.

Mind the Body is the first comprehensive treatment of bodily awareness. Frédérique de Vignemont seeks to answer questions such as: how do I perceive my body? How do I perceive other people's bodies? Can I really feel your pain? What makes me feel this specific body is my own? Why do I care about it? To what extent can I feel an avatar's body as my own? To answer these questions, we need a better understanding of the various aspects of bodily self-awareness, including the spatiality of bodily sensations, their multimodality, their role in social cognition, their relation to action, and to self-defence.

This volume combines philosophical analysis with recent experimental results from cognitive science, leading us to question some of our most basic intuitions.

Frederique de Vignemont is a CNRS research director at the Jean Nicod Institute in Paris. Her research is at the intersection of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Her major current works focus on bodily awareness, self-consciousness, and social cognition. Her new project investigates the perceptual peculiarities of peripersonal space, which can be conceived of as the territory of the self. She has published widely in philosophy and psychology journals on the first-person, body schema, agency, empathy, and more recently on pain. She is the recipient of the 2015 Young Mind & Brain prize. She is also one of the executive editors of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology.

Introduction
Part I: Body Snatchers
1. The phenomenology of bodily ownership
2. Whose body?
3. The immunity of the sense of ownership
Part II: Body Builder
4. Bodily space
5. The body map theory
6. A multimodal account of bodily experience
7. My body among other bodies
8. Taxonomies of body representations
Part III: Bodyguard
9. The Bodyguard hypothesis
10. The narcissistic body
Appendix 1 - Bodily illusions
Appendix 2 - Neurological and psychiatric bodily disorders
Appendix 3 - Somatoparaphrenia