Experience Embodied: Early Modern Accounts of the Human Place in Nature

by Anik Waldow

Overview

Anik Waldow develops an account of embodied experience that extends from Descartes' conception of the human body as firmly integrated into the causal play of nature, to Kant's understanding of anthropology as a discipline that provides us with guidance in our lives as embodied creatures. Waldow defends the claim that during the early modern period, the debate on experience not only focused on questions arising from the subjectivity of our thinking and feeling, it also foregrounded the essentially embodied dimension of our lives as humans. By taking this approach, Waldow departs from the traditional epistemological route dominant in treatments of early-modern conceptions of experience. She makes the case that reflections on experience took center stage in a debate that was moral in nature, because it raised questions about the developmental potential of human beings and their capacity to instantiate the principles of self-determined agency in their lives.

These questions emerged for many early modern authors since they understood that the fact that humans are embodied entailed that they are similarly responsive and causally-determined like other non-human animals. While this perspective made it possible to acknowledge that humans are part of the causal dynamics of nature, it called into question their ability to act in accordance with the principles of free, rational agency. Experience Embodied reveals how early modern authors responded to this challenge, offering a new perspective on the centrality of the concept of experience in comprehending the uniquely human place in nature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190086114
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/03/2020
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	9.40(w) x 6.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Anik Waldow is Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Sydney. She mainly works in early modern philosophy and has published articles on the moral and cognitive function of sympathy, early modern theories of personal identity and the role of affect in the formation of the self, skepticism and associationist theories of thought and language. She is the author of Hume and the Problem of Other Minds (Continuum 2009), editor of Sensibility in the Early Modern Era: From Living Machines to Affective Morality (Routledge 2016), and co-edited Herder: Philosophy and Anthropology (OUP 2017).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations

Introduction

Part I: The Moral Importance of Experience

Chapter 1: Experience and Cartesian Agency
1.1 Experiencing and Knowing the Self
1.2 Confused Notions of Body and Mind
1.3 Agency in the Conduct of Life
1.4 Conclusion

Chapter 2: Locke's Experiential Persons
2.1 On the Mental and Bodily Dimension of Reward and Punishment
2.2 Habit Training versus Conditioning
2.3 Persons as Agents
2.4 Reason, Reflection and Correction
2.5 Conclusion


Part II: On the Continuity between Sensibility and Reason

Chapter 3: Moral Reflection as Perception: A Humean Account
3.1 What is Natural about Human Nature?
3.2 Sympathy, Perception and Reflection
3.3 History and the Refinement of Moral Capacities
3.4 Conclusion

Chapter 4: Manipulated Sensibilities: Rousseau on Human Nature
4.1 The Theatre, Moral Education and Affective Susceptibility
4.2 Rousseau's Attack
4.3 Natural Goodness and the Construction of Morality
4.4 Normativity and Nature
4.5 Conclusion

Chapter 5: Affect and Imagination in Processes of Cognition: Herder
5.1 The Sensing Body and the Emergence of Language
5.2 Reason as an Organisational Principle
5.3 Discovering the World through Imagination and Affect
5.4 Conclusion


Part III: How to Study the Human Being? Philosophy and the Empirical Method

Chapter 6: Natural History and the Formation of the Human Being: Kant and Herder
6.1 The Human Place in Nature
6.2 The Organic Growth of History
6.3 Historical Explanations
6.4 Conclusion

Chapter 7: Diversifying Method: Kant's Janus-Faced Conception of the Human Being
7.1 Environmental Determinism
7.2 Kant's Dual-Aspect Account of Character
7.3 Anthropology as a Pragmatic Endeavour
7.4 Philosophy and the Sciences
7.5 Conclusion

Coda: Experience Embodied

Bibliography
Index