Adrian Alsmith / A recent workshop

THE BODY AND THE SELF, REVISITED

DECEMBER 10 – 11, 2015

COPENHAGEN

Organised by Adrian Alsmith.

This workshop celebrated the vicennial anniversary of Bermudez et al.’s landmark 1995 publication The Body and the Self (MIT, Bradford Books). Each presentation was a draft of a contribution to a forthcoming MIT Press collection, edited by Adrian Alsmith and Frédérique de Vignemont. The study of bodily experience and bodily self-awareness has blossomed considerably in the last two decades. The aim of the new collection – tentatively titled, The Body and the Self, Revisited – is to revisit the themes of The Body and the Self in light of new experimental evidence and advances in philosophical, neuroscientific and psychological theory.

Themes discussed in the workshop (and planned contributions to the volume) include: whether the body is necessarily represented in visual experience (Richardson); the functional role of limb representations in somatoparaphrenia (Garbarini); the sense of body ownership and the spatiality of bodily sensation (Bermúdez); brain plasticity in tool-users (Farné) and phantom limb sufferers (Makin); the functional role of self-representation in a predictive coding architecture (Hohwy and Michael); and whether the representation of agency is a necessary condition on self-consciousness (Peacocke). Project partner Hong Yu Wong discussed the relationship between bodily experience and bodily action; he is planning a contribution to the volume focussed on balance.

The workshop was held privately, at the King Arthur Hotel. This enabled authors to share their work in a relatively small group and have plenty of discussion to give everyone some understanding of the range of topics being dealt with in the volume. The event was co-funded by grants to Adrian Alsmith from the Volkswagen Foundation and the Danish Council for Independent Research | Humanities.

See the full programme here.

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