The Routledge Handbook of Bodily Awareness

Bodily awareness is one of the most interesting and enigmatic forms of experience. Our earliest and most pervasive form of conscious experience, it also arguably remains the most private. Bodily awareness has also long played a central role in the study of the mind and self-consciousness, and is fundamental to much current philosophical and psychological research.

The Routledge Handbook of Bodily Awareness is an outstanding reference source to this fascinating subject. Comprising over thirty chapters by an international team of contributors, the Handbook is divided into seven parts:

• Epistemology and Metaphysics
• Historical Issues
• Body Representation
• Sensing the Body
• Dynamics
• Pathology
• Interaction

Within these sections specific topics covered include bodily ownership, personal identity, self-consciousness, body modelling in robot design, body illusions, touch, proprioception, phantom limb syndrome, pain, eating disorders, out-of-body experiences and virtual reality. The handbook features specially commissioned contributions from researchers in a wide array of disciplines, whilst being accessible to readers with any disciplinary background. It also includes an interdisciplinary introduction, written by the editors, tying together the central themes with particular attention to the interaction between conceptual, technological and empirical issues.

The Routledge Handbook of Bodily Awareness will be of great interest to those in a wide variety of philosophical subdisciplines as well as those in psychology, cognitive science, sociology and related subjects.

Adrian J.T. Alsmith is Lecturer in Philosophy at King’s College London, UK. He has published on bodily awareness, body representation, self-consciousness, and multisensory spatial perception. He is co-editor of The Subject’s Matter (MIT Press, 2017).

Matthew R. Longo is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. He studied at Berkeley and Chicago before conducting postdoctoral research at University College London. His research investigates the psychological and neural bases of bodily experience.