Embodied Cognition and the Living Body (2)
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Time:
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Saturday 15/5, 12:00-13:30
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Chair:
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Cristian Bodea
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Horațiu Traian Crișan
Affiliation: Iuliu Hațieganu University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Title: Phenomenology of embodiment and the meaning of illness
Abstract: In the last decades, the phenomenological research made some significant steps towards a more wide-ranging description of the phenomena related to illness, disease and suffering. One of its core concepts is that of the lived body and that of embodiment. On the one hand, the lived body, as opposed to the corporeal, physical one, was conceptualized as both the medium of our experience and our way of being-in-the-world. On the other hand embodiment refers to the way in which the self positions itself towards its own body. The experience of illness offers a resource for the phenomenology of embodiment because it shows in what way illness can make the self alter its relation to its own body, ranging from identity to separation. This paper analyses what are the phenomenological concepts of embodiment and how they can contribute to a better understanding of illness, given the fact that the medical concept does not take into account the subjective perspective and that embodiment expresses subjectivity better than other concepts.
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Codruța Cuceu
Affiliation: ”George Barițiu” Institute of History, Romanian Academy
Title: Embodiment, Disembodiment, Hyperembodiment. New approaches of psychopathology
Abstract: Recent researches present the concept of embodiment as a new major paradigm for an interdisciplinary approach to psychopathology. Within this paper, I will offer a short overview of the role of embodiment in psychopathology, first by tackling upon the concept of the bodily experience as it emerges from researches inspired by phenomenology, then by analyzing the concepts of disembodiment and hyperembodiment as corollary notions able to explain major disorders of embodiment, and, finally, by considering these two upshot terms from the perspective of their function in determining two different mental illnesses: schizophrenia and depression. The aim of this paper is to argue that dysfunctionalities of the (lived) body’s intermediation of one’s being-in-the-world, namely disembodiment and hyperembodiment of the self are able to offer an account for (symptoms in) mental disorders, thus enriching today’s research in psychopathology with new insight from the humanities.
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Andrei Ionescu
Affiliation: Ghent University; Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University
Title: Between Health and Pathology: Phenomenological and Cognitive Explorations of Paralysis and Invasion
Abstract: Recent cognitive and phenomenological approaches to intersubjectivity deem as reductive an understanding of social interactions solely in terms of „theory of mind,‟ i.e. as inferential and observational processes, and provide instead a multi-layered account of intersubjectivity incorporating 1) the embodied and affective coupling between self and others (primary intersubjectivity), 2) the capacity to participate in cooperative projects (secondary intersubjectivity), and 3) the acquisition of a self-other metaperspective (tertiary intersubjectivity). In this article I will argue that although these alternatives to theory of mind are extremely valuable for providing systematic explanations of both successful (e.g. empathy, affect attunement, embodied collaboration) and highly pathological (e.g. autism, schizophrenia) types of social interaction, they nevertheless leave unexplored intersubjective processes pertaining to the vast area between health and pathology. By introducing and analyzing (from both phenomenological and cognitive perspectives) two classes of phenomena located between mental health and illness, which I will refer to as „paralysis‟ and „invasion‟ (the former being characterized by a lack/deficiency of ways of relating to others and the latter by an unnecessary surplus), I aim to challenge and refine current cognitive and philosophical accounts of intersubjectivity and provide directions for future theoretical and empirical research.
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