Body and Reality
An Examination of the Relationships between the Body Proper, Physical Reality, and the Phenomenal World Starting from Plessner and Merleau-Ponty
What is our ultimate reality: the physical universe or the world of everyday-life experience? Only a philosophy of the body can answer this question.
Transcript Publishing / ISBN: 978-3-8376-4163-9
Body and Reality is Open Access – download for free HERE.
Contributions of Body and Reality
- Defends both physical and phenomenal realism. In doing so, it overcomes the traditional but false opposition between phenomenology and physical realism.
- Demonstrates that the body is at the center of the nexus of the phenomenal world and physical reality.
- Offers a thorough introduction to Helmuth Plessner's view of the body—one of only few available in English.
- Contains an extensive comparison of Plessner's and Merleau-Ponty's views of the body.
Abstract
Is materialism right to claim that the world of everyday-life experience – the phenomenal world – is nothing but an illusion produced in physical reality, notably in the brain? Or is Merleau-Ponty right when he defends the fundamental character of the phenomenal world while rejecting physical realism? I address these questions by exploring the nature of the body proper in Merleau-Ponty and Plessner, arguing that physical and phenomenal realism are not mutually exclusive but complementary. The argument includes a close examination of the relationships between scientific and pre-scientific perspectives, between living and non-living things, and between humans and animals.
Praise for Body and Reality
"Van Buuren provides a detailed and thoughtful exposition of Helmuth Plessner's fairly complex views on the human body and its relation to knowledge and reality in dialogue with Merleau-Ponty and contemporary philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, P.M.S. Hacker, and Charles Taylor. The book isn't restricted to covering Plessner's views in his most well-known work, the Levels of Organic Life and the Human (1928), but also relates these ideas to others in texts published throughout Plessner's long career. In addition to being an excellent exposition of the ideas of others, the book is a very competent and well-argued piece of philosophy in its own right. Anyone interested in embodiment, realism/anti-realism, or naturalism, could learn things from it."
— Dr. Phillip Honenberger, affiliated faculty at the Department for Philosophy & Religious Studies, Morgan State University
Body and Reality is Open Access - download for free HERE.