The Embodiment of Meaning

""Farid Zahnoun combines the precision and clarity that analytical philosophers strive for with the scope and depth that continental philosophers aim at. He makes clear that many assumptions of current thinking about the mind are up to their teeth metaphysically biased and shows how the mind is shaped by its material particularity and by socionormative practices. If it has ever occurred to you that all that is of interest about embodiment has already been said, this book will make you think again."" Erik Myin, University of Antwerp ""There is a natural human tendency—often exacerbated in philosophy, and pervasive in contemporary analytic philosophy—to overlook our ineliminable contribution to the sense things make to us: first to our ‘phenomenal body’ in pre-objective, pre-conceptual perceptual experience, and then, on that basis, to our Kantian ‘understanding,’ at the level of our true-or-false objective representations. It was Kant who first identified and diagnosed the resulting ‘transcendental realist’ illusion of supposing that the sense we make of things in our objective representations is a sense they have as ‘things as they are in themselves,’ altogether independently of human judgment and of our sense-making practices. And it was the phenomenological tradition that has shown that, and how, that sense is itself rooted in pre-objective perceptual experience that is essentially embodied. Wisely anchoring his discussion in contemporary philosophy of mind—where the above tendencies have led to ‘functionalist’ views of the mind that downplay or outright repress the embodied nature of human perceptual experience and (therefore) cognition, and consequently to the influential doctrine of the ‘multiple realizability’ of the mental—Zahnoun works carefully, but at the same time forcefully and originally, to expose much of contemporary philosophy of mind as resting on fundamental confusions that stem from the repression of the essential embodiment of meaning. At a time of increased balkanization in professional philosophy, this ambitious, broad-ranging, and eye-opening book stands out in its sustained effort to engage seriously with mainstream philosophy of mind, and to invite its practitioners to reconsider some of their most basic presuppositions"" Avner Baz, Tufts University