John Locke’s influential account of personal identity emphasizes the importance of consciousness.  This had led many commentators to argue that Lockean selves just are consciousnesses.  Charles Taylor has mounted persuasive critiques of this “punctual” Lockean self; such a conception of the self is too thin and stands divorced from our values and moral agency.  This chapter shifts the focus from Locke’s views on personal identity to his views on personhood in an effort to show that Locke is sensitive to the kinds of worries raised by Taylor.  Lockean persons are more than consciousness.  In particular, the chapter focuses on Locke’s exploration and analysis of the complex faculty psychology undergirding consciousness and on the ways in which persons can be embodied.  This allows for a richer conception of the self.  It then argues that this richer conception better aligns with Locke’s own views about the value and importance of the self and with what he says regarding our moral agency and our duty of self-improvement.  Finally, the chapter shows that understanding Locke’s examination of human cognition as contributing to an analysis of the self allows us to resituate him with respect to some of his predecessors in seventeenth-century England.

This chapter introduces the reader to the understanding of the human person articulated by Gregory Palamas (1296–1357) during the late Byzantine Hesychast controversy. The notion of the self elaborated and defended by Palamas is notable for its stress not only on the practice of inner prayer and stillness (“hesychia”) as crucial for the true cultivation of the self, but likewise for its robust defence of the embodiment of the self. Before discussing Palamas’ approach in detail, some background on the question of the relationship of body and soul in Greek patristic thought is offered, with special reference to Maximus the Confessor. This sets the scene for Palamas’ argumentation regarding the body as constitutive of the self together with the soul. Several ways in which Palamas both adopts and challenges classical views of the human self are presented. For instance, while the human soul might be detachable from the body, the human self, or person, is not. In some sense, moreover, every activity of the human self can be understood as a “common activity” of soul and body. The interweaving of body and soul in Palamas’ thought ultimately challenges a straightforward hylomorphic conception of the human being, notwithstanding certain commonalities.

Mary Astell (1666–1731) relies on a Cartesian account of the self to argue that both men and women are essentially thinking things and, hence, that both should perfect their minds or intellects. In offering such an account of the self, Astell might seem to ignore the inescapable fact that we have bodies. This chapter argues that Astell accommodates the self’s embodiment along two main dimensions. First, she tempers her sharp distinction between mind and body by insisting on their union. The mind and body are united in such a way that they exert reciprocal causal influence and form a whole together. Second, she argues that the mind–body union is good, that the union has its own distinctive form of good or perfection, and that the mind should pursue this good alongside its own.

The introduction outlines the main thesis that metaphor is not only for understanding abstract concepts but also for understanding human bodily experience. If the body itself is understood as metaphor, this gives a completely different view of how metaphor functions in thinking, language, and action.

Chapter 6 outlines three embodied systems – schema, image, and global – in order to explain the nature of systemic dissonance in the human body, along with the signal generated by this dissonance. The chapter discusses a number of religious cases of embodied dissonance, including spirit possession in India, body modification in the United States, the Hindu Kavadi practitioner in Southeast Asia, and the complicated bodily phenomena that characterize the life of the twelfth-century mystic, Bernard of Clairvaux. Systemic theory allows us to understand some embodied religious practices as complex responses to an internal body-self dissonance rather than the effect of a single cause.

Chapter 6 considers the ‘perceptual’ version presented autobiographically by Peter van Inwagen but supported conceptually by figures such as David Brown and Mark Wynn. Here sainthood is understood in terms of providing an embodied source of religious experience, and evidence is understood in perceptual terms. More specifically, the perception of divine reality is indirect and materially mediated through the saintly source, and examples are provided from Christianity, Judaism, Sufi Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Japanese folk religion, and secular media. Unlike the propositional version presented in Chapter 5, the perceptual version is inter-religious and does not lead to any specific understanding of divinity.

Folk dance remains a diffuse and contested concept and yet its performances and meanings retain contemporary saliency to many people across the world. This chapter reflects on definitional issues, the relationship of folk dance to ritual and folk dance’s embodied ideology in Europe and beyond. Given that nineteenth-century thinking haunts the later literature and manifestations of folk dance, I re-visit Felix Hoerburger’s concepts of ‘first existence’ and ‘second existence’ folk dance, together with their critique and key modifications by Andriy Nahachewsky and Anthony Shay. I consider contemporary ritual folk dancing that draws upon evolutionist theory for inspiration and discuss examples of folk dance as cultural heritage that bear performative testimony to perceived unbroken connections between land, people, gender, race and nation. I conclude by urging both persistent critical interrogation of folk dance as ideology in a global frame and further investigation of the choreographic and artistic relevance of folk dance to its widespread practitioners and audiences.

This chapter considers reductionism, a major aspect of neuroscience research. I consider reductionist claims that we can only understand nervous systems from knowledge of their component parts. I then consider reductionist approaches and what we have learnt by following them, highlighting that a complete reductionist account of any nervous system region hasn’t been and is probably impossible to achieve. I then discuss decomposable hierarchical and non-decomposable heterarchical systems, and how relational aspects suggest we cannot understand the latter systems from cataloguing their individual components. I then discuss two effects that have received little attention despite being known for decades – volume transmission and ephaptic signalling – that highlight the need to consider component parts in relation to the whole system. I finish by discussing non-reductionist views, equipotentiality, cybernetics, the holonomic brain and embodied cognition, highlighting, as many have in the past, that debating between reductionist and non-reductionist approaches is a false dichotomy.

This chapter considers how mid to late twentieth-century settler poets were reconceptualising place through bringing regionality to the fore, signalling the particularities of colonisation, and a nascent understanding of Country in the interconnectedness of lands, air and waterways. It argues that writers of this period were becoming aware of the sovereign custodianship in evidence around them and the embodied aspects of subjectivity. The chapter includes a discussion of the resonance of colonial violence and reflexive subjectivity that was appearing in the writing of Douglas Stewart, and the impressionistic locality and implication of their own presence in a poem by David Campbell. It analyses how poets such as Randolph Stow and Philip Hodgins navigate forms of discomfort in occupying violated places. The chapter then turns to the mediation on localities and their knowledge systems in the work of Laurie Duggan and PiO before turned to the representation of the littoral and affect in the poetry of Charles Buckmaster, Robert Gray and Robert Adamson. Lastly, it considers the optic poetics of Grace Perry, Jennifer Rankin and Jill Jones.

This chapter discusses the effects on eighteenth-century conceptions of ‘the people’ of the experience of the revolutionary decade of the 1790s and the conservative reaction against it, paying particular attention to the writing of William Hazlitt, William Wordsworth, and their poet-activist friend John Thelwall. It discusses ideas of a convention of the people found in the popular radical circles influenced by Thomas Paine that Thelwall frequented, especially in relation to appeals to the state of exception that might allow for a revolutionary intervention in the constitution via a convention of the people. It ends by discussing the way these debates migrated into a tension between a philosophical idea of the people and an embodied politics that might coalesce around practical objects of reform that continued on far into the nineteenth century.

It is discussed in more detail how perceptions relate to propositional knowledge. In doing so, “myths” of the perceptual Given are evaluated. One myth is that a mere perception can itself justify propositions, or ground assertoric judgments, and that it can therefore be a foundational justifier. This is the Myth of the Given in Sellars and McDowell. Kant would deny that intuitions can justify propositions independently of conceptual content, be it infallibly or fallibly. After all, he makes the well-known complementarity claim about cognition “in the proper sense,” according to which intuitions without concepts are blind. However, as argued in the preceding chapters, their blindness does not entail that they do not have epistemic power in their own right.

The 20-item Female Sexual Subjectivity Inventory (FSSI) and the 20-item Male Sexual Subjectivity Inventory (MSSI) have five subscales (elements) and can produce a total score for sexual subjectivity. The five measured elements (4 items each) assessed with each inventory are sexual body-esteem, entitlement to self-pleasure, entitlement to pleasure from a partner, self-efficacy in achieving desire and pleasure, and sexual self-reflection. The measure can be referred to as a measure of sexual subjectivity, psychological sexual health, or sexual self-perceptions. In total it assesses perceptions of the self as a sexual being with choice, desire, and deserving of pleasure. The FSSI and MSSI can be administered online or in-person and it has been included in research with adolescents and adults. The FSSI and MSSI are free to use. This chapter begins with a discussion of the development of the MSSI and FSSI from item generation to psychometric analyses. This is followed with psychometric information, including the factor structure and invariance, and evidence of reliability and validity. Additional sections cover administration, scoring, and information about abbreviated versions. Finally, the response scale, the items in their entirety, instructions for administration and scoring, and permissions, copyright and contact information are provided.

The 37-item Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness, Version 2 (MAIA-2; Mehling et al., 2018) assesses body awareness; that is, the ability to notice sensory signals originating from inside the body that provide information about its physiological states, processes, and actions. The MAIA-2 can be administered online or in-person to adults, including to clinical populations such as people with chronic pain, eating disorders, and depression (the 32-item MAIA-Youth should be used for children and adolescents). The MAIA-2 is free to use, and no written permission is required to use it for scholarly and non-commercial purposes. This chapter first describes the development of the MAIA-2, and then provides evidence of its psychometric properties. More specifically, the MAIA-2 was initially purported to have an 8-factor structure within exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. However, fit indices for the 8-factor model have been less-than-ideal in numerous studies, and more recently authors have found acceptable model fits when examining bi-factor models and a higher-order models, suggesting that the MAIA-2 items and scales, respectively, also load onto a general factor, with the exception of the Not-Distracting and Not-Worrying items, which may correlate with this factor. MAIA-2 scores are scalar invariant across men and women, and composite reliability, test-retest reliability, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and incremental validity largely support the use of the MAIA-2. Next, this chapter provides directions to the MAIA-2 items and instructions for administration, and the item response scale and scoring procedure. An overview of available translations and abbreviations is provided. Finally, permissions, copyright, and contact information are provided for readers.