Contemporary culture increasingly suffers from problems of attention, over-stimulation, and stress, and a variety of personal and social discontents generated by deceptive body images. This book argues that improved body consciousness can relieve these problems and enhance one’s knowledge, performance, and pleasure. The body is our basic medium of perception and action, but focused attention to its feelings and movements has long been criticized as a damaging distraction that also ethically corrupts through self-absorption. In Body Consciousness, Richard Shusterman refutes such charges by engaging the most influential twentieth-century somatic philosophers and incorporating insights from both Western and Asian disciplines of body-mind awareness.

Contents
Introduction;
1. Somaesthetics and care of the self: the case of Foucault;
2. The silent, limping body of philosophy: somatic attention deficit in Merleau-Ponty;
3. Somatic subjectivities and somatic subjugation: Beauvoir on gender and ageing;
4. Wittgenstein´s somaesthetics: explanation and melioration in philosophy of mind, art, and politics;
5. Deeper into the storm center: the somatic philosophy of William James;
6. Redeeming somatic reflection: John Dewey’s philosophy of body-mind.