Download Free Bodies Of Meaning Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Bodies Of Meaning and write the review.

Challenges postmodernist theories of language and politics which detach language from human bodies and their material practices.
In The Meaning of the Body, Mark Johnson continues his pioneering work on the exciting connections between cognitive science, language, and meaning first begun in the classic Metaphors We Live By. Johnson uses recent research into infant psychology to show how the body generates meaning even before self-consciousness has fully developed. From there he turns to cognitive neuroscience to further explore the bodily origins of meaning, thought, and language and examines the many dimensions of meaning—including images, qualities, emotions, and metaphors—that are all rooted in the body’s physical encounters with the world. Drawing on the psychology of art and pragmatist philosophy, Johnson argues that all of these aspects of meaning-making are fundamentally aesthetic. He concludes that the arts are the culmination of human attempts to find meaning and that studying the aesthetic dimensions of our experience is crucial to unlocking meaning's bodily sources. Throughout, Johnson puts forth a bold new conception of the mind rooted in the understanding that philosophy will matter to nonphilosophers only if it is built on a visceral connection to the world. “Mark Johnson demonstrates that the aesthetic and emotional aspects of meaning are fundamental—central to conceptual meaning and reason, and that the arts show meaning-making in its fullest realization. If you were raised with the idea that art and emotion were external to ideas and reason, you must read this book. It grounds philosophy in our most visceral experience.”—George Lakoff, author of Moral Politics
Bodies of Meaning presents a vigorous challenge to postmodernist theories of language and politics which detach language from human bodies and their material practices. Beginning with the 'historical bodies' theorized by Marx, Darwin, and Freud, McNally develops an alternative account of language which draws on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin and recent contributions to materialist feminism. In bringing the body back into language, this book makes a major contribution to current debates in social and political theory.
On dance and culture
Bodies move, and they express. There is a body language, and there is a language employed to refer to the body, its parts, and the states of its being. Consciously and unconsciously people judge each other according to body and clothing behavior. What one thinks one expresses is not necessarily how one is seen and judged, and the variety of observations made of the body is diverse. Bodily behavior and interpretations of this behavior face change at frontiers of culture areas, or when cultures meet each other as a result of migration. This book addresses and expands upon these issues. Soheila Shahshahani teaches at the Shahid Beheshti University, Teheran, Iran.
Christian Pfeiffer explores an important, but neglected topic in Aristotle's theoretical philosophy: the theory of bodies. A body is a three-dimensionally extended and continuous magnitude bounded by surfaces. This notion is distinct from the notion of a perceptible or physical substance. Substances have bodies, that is to say, they are extended, their parts are continuous with each other and they have boundaries, which demarcate them from their surroundings. Pfeiffer argues that body, thus understood, has a pivotal role in Aristotle's natural philosophy. A theory of body is a presupposed in, e.g., Aristotle's account of the infinite, place, or action and passion, because their being bodies explains why things have a location or how they can act upon each other. The notion of body can be ranked among the central concepts for natural science which are discussed in Physics III-IV. The book is the first comprehensive and rigorous account of the features substances have in virtue of being bodies. It provides an analysis of the concept of three-dimensional magnitude and related notions like boundary, extension, contact, continuity, often comparing it to modern conceptions of it. Both the structural features and the ontological status of body is discussed. This makes it significant for scholars working on contemporary metaphysics and mereology because the concept of a material object is intimately tied to its spatial or topological properties.
Movement, smell, vision, and other perceptual experiences are ways of thinking and orienting ourselves in the world and are increasingly recognized as important resources for theology. In Meaning in Our Bodies, Heike Peckruhn seeks to discover how embodied differences like gender, race, disability, and sexuality connect to perceptual experience and theological imagination. Peckruhn offers historical and cultural comparisons, showing how sensory experience can order normalcy, social status, and communal belonging. She argues that scholars who appeal to the importance of bodily experiences need to acquire a robust and nuanced understanding of how sensory perceptions and interactions are cultural and theological acts of making meaning. This is a critical volume for feminist theorists and theologians, critical race theorists, scholars of disability and embodiment, and liberation thinkers who take experiences seriously as sources for theologizing and religious analysis.
Killing the Black Body remains a rallying cry for education, awareness, and action on extending reproductive justice to all women. It is as crucial as ever, even two decades after its original publication. "A must-read for all those who claim to care about racial and gender justice in America." —Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow In 1997, this groundbreaking book made a powerful entrance into the national conversation on race. In a media landscape dominated by racially biased images of welfare queens and crack babies, Killing the Black Body exposed America’s systemic abuse of Black women’s bodies. From slave masters’ economic stake in bonded women’s fertility to government programs that coerced thousands of poor Black women into being sterilized as late as the 1970s, these abuses pointed to the degradation of Black motherhood—and the exclusion of Black women’s reproductive needs in mainstream feminist and civil rights agendas. “Compelling. . . . Deftly shows how distorted and racist constructions of black motherhood have affected politics, law, and policy in the United States.” —Ms.
"There are books—few and far between—which carefully, delightfully, and genuinely turn your head inside out. This is one of them. It ranges over some central issues in Western philosophy and begins the long overdue job of giving us a radically new account of meaning, rationality, and objectivity."—Yaakov Garb, San Francisco Chronicle
The aim of this book is to provide an account of modernist painting that follows on from the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno. It offers a materialist account of modernism with detailed discussions of modern aesthetics from Kant to Arthur Danto, Stanley Cavell, and Adorno. It discusses in detail competing accounts of modernism: Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, Yve-Alain Bois, and Thierry de Duve; and it discusses several painters and artists in detail: Pieter de Hooch, Jackson Pollock, Robert Ryman, Cindy Sherman, and Chaim Soutine. Its central thesis is that modernist painting exemplifies a form of rationality that is an alternative to the instrumental rationality of enlightened modernity. Modernist paintings exemplify how nature and the sociality of meaning can be reconciled.