Thinking through the Body

Richard Shusterman is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, where he also directs the Center for Body, Mind, and Culture. He is the author of numerous books, including Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (Cambridge, 2008), Performing Live (2000) and Pragmatist Aesthetics (1992, 2nd edition, 2000, and published in fifteen languages).

• Introduction; Part I. Somatic Being, Knowing, and Teaching: 1. Thinking through the body: educating for the humanities; 2. The body as background; 3. Self-knoweldge and its discontents: from Socrates to somaesthetics; 4. Muscle memory and the somaesthetic pathologies of everyday life; 5. Somaesthetics in the philosophy classroom: a practical approach; Part II. Somaesthetics, Aesthetics, and Culture: 6. Somaesthetics and the limits of aesthetics; 7. Somaesthetics and Burke's sublime; 8. Pragmatism and cultural politics: from textualism to somaesthetics; 9. Body consciousness and performance; Part III. The Arts and the Art of Living: 10. Somaesthetics and architecture: a critical option; 11. Photography as performative process; 12. Asian ars erotica and the question of sexual aesthetics; 13. Philosophy as awakened life: everyday aesthetics of embodiment in American transcendentalism and Japanese zen practice; 14. Somatic style.

'Richard Shusterman's collection takes the first philosophical step in the new millennium, going beyond the action theory that emerged in the 1970s and building a historical pyramid from Socrates to his own conception of somaesthetics: a scholarly monument ranging from muscle memory to vital topics in aesthetics, including ars erotica.' Arthur C. Danto, Columbia University