In discussing Disembodied Persons we need to confront two problems: A. Under what conditions would we consider that a person was present in the absence of the normal bodily cues? B. Could such circumstances arise? The first question may be regarded as epistemic and the second as metaphysical.

David Murray; VII—Disembodied Brains, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 70, Issue 1, 1 June 1970, Pages 121–138, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotel.

The communitarian critique of liberal agency is reminiscent of two earlier critiques: C. B. Macpherson's theory of possessive individualism and Marx's theory of alienation. As with the communitarian critique, Macpherson and Marx saw the liberal individual as being in some way 'disembodied'. Where they differed from communitarians was in the attention they paid to the actual social relations that gave rise to such an image. The comparison is thus fruitful because the emphasis Macpherson and Marx give to the concrete circumstances (...) of disempowerment highlights the overly abstract nature of the communitarian critique, demonstrating how it, and other similarly abstract normative theories, might maintain a focus on actual social relations. Key Words: alienation • communitarism • disembodiment • labor • liberalism • Macpherson • Marx • self. (shrink)

Abstract The idea of disembodied communication has received widespread discussion in the context of the various kinds of online interaction. Electronic mail is probably the purest form of text-based communication where interlocutors are present in mind rather than body. I argue that this online model provides a way of understanding and defending the possibility of a certain kind of public religious experience, contra the many critics of the very coherence of genuine religious experience. I introduce the concept of ‘telic possibility’, (...) a specific kind of modality, applying it to e-mail. I argue that we can reasonably move from the telic possibility of disembodied communication in mundane e-mail exchanges to the epistemic possibility of communication from a divine being in cases where the content of the messages is sufficiently extraordinary. Content Type Journal Article Category Special Issue Pages 1-17 DOI 10.1007/s13347-011-0051-6 Authors David S. Oderberg, Department of Philosophy, University of Reading, Reading, RG6 6AA UK Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433. (shrink)

Medieval Aristotelians assumed that we cannot assimilate forms unless our soul abstracts them from sensory images. But what about the disembodied soul that has no senses and hence no sensory images? How can it assimilate forms? This article discusses this problem, focusing on two thirteenth-century models. It first looks at Thomas Aquinas’ model, which invokes divine intervention: the separated soul receives forms directly from God. The article examines the problems this explanatory model poses and then turns to a second model, (...) defended by Matthew of Aquasparta: the separated soul actively apprehends forms that are present to it. It will be argued that this model explains assimilation in terms of appropriation, rather than reception, of forms and thereby radically changes the traditional account of cognition. Finally, the article draws some methodological conclusions, arguing that the focus on the ‘limit case’ of separated souls made theoretical change possible. (shrink)

We consider and reject a variety of attempts to provide a ground for identifying and differentiating disembodied minds. Until such a ground is provided, we must withhold inclusion of disembodied minds from our picture of the world.

How can we better understand and treat those suffering from schizophrenia and manic-depressive illnesses? This important new book takes us into the world of those suffering from such disorders. Using self descriptions, its emphasis is not on how mental health professionals view sufferers, but on how the patients themselves experience their disorder. A new volume in the International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry series, this book will be of great interest to all those working with sufferers from such disorders - (...) helping them to better understand their mental lives, and providing important insights into how best to treat them. (shrink)

In a recent article in Religious Studies, Professor P. W. Gooch attempts to wean the orthodox Christian from anthropological materialism by consideration of the question of the nature of the post-mortem person in the resurrection. He argues that the view that the resurrected person is a psychophysical organism who is in some physical sense the same as the ante-mortem person is inconsistent with the Pauline view of the resurrected body; rather, according to him, Paul's view is most consistent with that (...) which affirms the disembodied survival of the person. ‘I want to argue’, he writes, ‘for the thesis that a Pauline resurrection body may well be ontologically the same as a disembodied person.’ I intend to show that Professor Gooch has failed to provide any support for this view and indeed that his own view falls prey to the criticisms which he has raised against other views. (shrink)

This paper considers the nature of schizophrenic autism and urges its importance for understanding the phenomenological core of schizophrenia. Different clinical manifestations of schizophrenic autism are demonstrated, and it is asked whether these might reflect different aspects of one underlying phenomenologically intelligible phenomenon. Four phenomenological hypotheses are put forward: that autism is a function of semantic drifting, emotional drifting, ontological incompleteness, or a particular ethic rejecting common sense. By way of conclusion an integrative hypothesis is considered: that autism is intelligible (...) in terms of the experience of disembodiment. (shrink)

In a recent paper, I challenged a currently fashionable argument against the intelligibility of disembodied survival. This argument urges that only bodily continuity can provide a satisfactory criterion for personal identity and since bodily continuity is, of course, ruled out ex hypothesi in disembodied survival, we could have no satisfactory criterion for identity of a disembodied person. Toward the end of the paper I issued a challenge to supporters of this argument; if there are reasonable standards for a criterion of (...) personal identity which do not beg the question in favor of the bodily continuity criterion, let them be stated and let us see if other criteria of personal identity can meet them as well as bodily continuity.The recent republication of a number of early papers by Bernard Williams has drawn my attention to a paper by Williams which may seem to anticipate and answer this challenge. In what follows I wish to see whether or not this is so; whether Williams has given standards for a criterion of personal identity which are reasonable, which bodily continuity can meet, and which other criteria cannot meet. (shrink)

David Murray; VII—Disembodied Brains, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 70, Issue 1, 1 June 1970, Pages 121–138, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotel.

In his "Death and Eternal Life" John Hick criticizes H.H. Price's view of disembodied existence after death on the grounds that (1) Price cannot consistently hold that this world is a public or semi-public world, the joint product of a group of telepathically-interacting minds, and that this world is formed by the power of individual desire, and (2) in a world that is the product of the individual's desires, moral progress is impossible. I argue that there is no contradiction in (...) (1), and that in the world envisioned by Price greater moral progress is possible in that one can no longer be deceived about one's motives or by the ambiguity of actions. (shrink)

A good case can be made for the claim that most recent studies in the philosophy of mind are marred by a failure to attribute sufficient importance to what is revealed from the first person perspective. When that perspective is ignored or neglected, a number of problems concerning the nature of self and consciousness arise, or become more difficult to resolve. One such problem is that of whether we can conceive of disembodied existence, i.e., of a self continuing to exist (...) after the death of the physical body. (shrink)

The idea that we may continue to exist in a bodiless condition after our death has long played an important role in beliefs about immortality, ultimate rewards and punishments, the transmigration of souls, and the like. There has also been long and heated disagreement about whether the idea of disembodied existence even makes sense, let alone whether anybody can or does survive dissolution of his material form. It may seem doubtful that anything new could be added to the debate at (...) this late date, but I hope to show that this is not so. I will explore the problem of disembodiment from a somewhat different direction than has been tried before, one that leads to what seem to me more interesting and more definite conclusions about its unintelligibility. Furthermore, the approach I will be taking puts both the traditional mind-body problem and the competing claims of dualism and physicalism in a fresh light that can help us to understand better the nature of our embodied existence. (shrink)

In this article I will show that the problem of embodiment goes back to the question of the mind-body split, as this has been established and discussed by the philosophical tradition. With the digital turn and the advent of ubiquitous computing the problem of embodiment has taken new forms that have led scholars to introduce the notion of a “new digital Cartesianism.” Subjectivation processes within digital culture have mostly been explained by resorting to what I will call the “E-D-R scheme,” (...) which assumes that a real detachment between the body and the mind really occurs in digital processes. Since—as I will show—this is not actually the case, I will suggest replacing this epistemological scheme with a new one, which I will call the “double-embodiment scheme,” in order to acquire a more fitting epistemological account of the underlying digital ontology. Finally, I will discuss the distinction between bodily extension and the incorporation of non-bodily objects introduced by Helena De Preester in order to show that, in the digital realm, this distinction is much more blurred and complex than she acknowledges: digital interaction requires both bodily extension and the incorporation of objects as complementary processes. (shrink)

Discussion of the human soul has bulked large in the literature of philosophy and religion. I defend the possibility of disembodied Cartesian minds by examining the criticisms of three philosophers who argue that there are serious difficulties about any attempt to account for the identity of such Cartesian minds through time. I argue that their criticisms of the possibility of disembodied minds are damaging but not fatal. I hold that the central issue behind their criticisms of Cartesian minds is whether (...) any nonphysical mental criterion can be formulated for the identity of such entities. Even though no such criterion can be given, disembodied minds that persist through time remain logical possibilities. (shrink)

In a number of places, Richard Swinburne has defended the logical possibility of perception without a body; and has inferred from this logical possibility that substance dualism is true. I challenge his defence of disembodied perception by arguing that a disembodied perceiver would not be able to distinguish between perceptions and hallucinations. I then claim that even if disembodied perception were possible, this could not be used to support substance dualism: such an inference would be either invalid or question-begging.

Successful social functioning requires quick and accurate processing of emotion and generation of appropriate reactions. In typical individuals, these skills are supported by embodied processing, recruiting central and peripheral mechanisms. However, emotional processing is atypical in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Individuals with ASD show deficits in recognition of briefly presented emotional expressions. They tend to recognize expressions using rule-based, rather than template, strategies. Individuals with ASD also do not spontaneously and quickly mimic emotional expressions, unless the task encourages (...) engagement. When processing emotional scenes, ASD individuals show atypical basic motivational responses, despite intact ability to verbally determine stimulus valence. We discuss how these findings highlight the contribution of both embodied and disembodied mechanisms to typical and atypical emotional functioning. (shrink)

This paper defends a hylomorphic version of animalism according to which human persons survive as immaterial, bodiless animals after death. According to the hylomorphism under consideration, human persons have souls that survive death, and according to the animalism under consideration, human persons are necessarily animals. One might think this implies that human persons don't survive their deaths since if they were to survive their deaths, they would be immaterial animals after death, but necessarily animals are material. This paper shows that (...) the hylomorphic animalist can overcome this problem in a way that respects the intuition that animals are material. In addition, the paper defends the hylomorphic animalist survivalist from the objection that her view introduces an insoluble mereological puzzle. (shrink)

In light of the theme and concerns of the present collection of essays, we may ask whether ‘distance in general’, and ‘critical distance in particular’, has truly disappeared with postmodernity. Proposing an immediate and interruptive political engagement with local issues, Jacques Rancière’s articulation of political mobilisation does seem to confirm this claim. Upon further inspection, however, his emancipatory politics repeat the same mistake of valuing an abstract universal at the expense of a concrete particular, however paradoxical this may seem at (...) first sight. The present article develops this thesis in three moments. On the first hand, it highlights Rancière’s notion of conflict as being institutive of politics. Secondly, it connects this ‘sensible’, and Rancière’s understanding of politics as being aesthetic, to Kant’s ‘Transcendental Aesthetics’. The French author sees in the leading section of the first Critique the grounding possibility of freeing up time and space within the social realm; the representation of a common political surface that can be reshaped; political equality; emancipation. The last section shows how this recourse to the transcendental subject in Rancière’s politics follows and embraces a traditional position in the history of philosophy whereby identity is denigrated at the profit of a disembodied universalism. (shrink)

The dominant discourse on dementia promotes a view that as individuals progress with the disease, they experience a neurological decline causing a loss of self. This notion, grounded in a Cartesian representation of selfhood, associates a loss of self as directly related to cognition. This paper presents an alternative anthropological framework, embodied selfhood, that challenges this representation. It then examines a potential tool, graphic medicine, to translate this theory into caregiving practice. Through analyzing three graphic novels—Wrinkles, Tangles, and Aliceheimer’s—this paper (...) demonstrates how tension exists between different conceptions of selfhood and associated implications for caregivers and patients alike. (shrink)

Embodied and phenomenological approaches to neuropsychiatry have proven to be promising for assessing social cognition and its impairments. Second-person neuroscience has demonstrated that the dynamics of social interaction make a difference when it comes to how people understand each other. This article presents the Perceptual Crossing Experiment (PCE) as a paradigm for studying real-time dyadic embodied interactions in the context of schizophrenia. We draw on the phenomenological concept of interbodily resonance (IR) and show how the PCE can be used to (...) accurately model and assess IR. We then turn to disembodied interaction in schizophrenia and finally propose the PCE as a translational tool for systematically assessing the hindered IR that individuals with schizophrenia suffer from. We offer an experimental approach to phenomenology which could be informative for the development of more embodied interventions aiming to remedy the profoundly disrupted social life that patients with schizophrenia live with. (shrink)

The article discusses the philosophical problems associated with the dualistic conception of the person dominant in traditions influenced by Platonism. The key suggestion made in the article is that opting for an embodied rather than a disembodied posthumous existence for the human person will in no way hinder the theistic philosopher when it comes to arguing that God exists in a disembodied form.

The issues that Paul Standish alerts us to are significant since they situate McDowell's argument in reference to works lying outside the mainstream tradition o.

We evaluate the role of embodiment in ordinary mental state ascriptions. Presented are five experiments on phenomenal state ascriptions to disembodied entities such as ghosts and spirits. Results suggest that biological embodiment is not a central principle of folk psychology guiding ascriptions of phenomenal consciousness. By contrast, results continue to support the important role of functional considerations in theory of mind judgments.

As science focuses exclusively on the physical, it seems to assume that the brain has a key role in the origin if not also the constitution of our consciousness; and thus the destruction of the brain, the nervous system, and the body makes it pointless or even absurd to think of any personal consciousness after death. But one need not be convinced by this. However, any effort to investigate a possible post-mortem life depends on forming a coherent conception of what (...) such a life could be. Can we speak, without incoherence or contradiction, of a person continuing to exist after death in a disembodied state? Our concern in this study lies here. Based on Lund’s view, we will present and defend an argument that one can conceive of a self who is fully embedded in the natural world and deeply embodied in a physical organism, and yet could have a rich variety of experiences in an afterworld encountered after death. In this theory, the close association of the mental and the physical is due to a causal connection - a connection that fails to establish that the physical brings the mental into existence and is compatible with theories that the source of consciousness is not in the brain. (shrink)

"The book examines the conceptual difficulties that are raised by the belief that all, or some, persons survive death. Two versions of the belief are considered: the belief in disembodied personal survival, and the belief in bodily resurrection. In each case, two questions are raised: Can we give intelligible content to supposed accounts of the form of life such a survivor might lead? Can we give intelligible content to the claim that such a being is identical with one of ourselves? (...) The author argues that it is only with regard to the second question that interactable difficulties of logic arise, but he suggests that these difficulties defeat the belief in disembodied survival altogether, thus leaving the belief in bodily resurrection with a very puzzling status. In the course of the argument the themes of disembodied perception, spirit agency, and reincarnation are discussed, and recent philosophical discussions of some of the puzzles of personal identity are considered."--front flap. (shrink)

This paper looks at embodiment from a cross-disciplinary perspective. The notion that embodiment is an essential requirement for conscious awareness is explored using both a scientific and religious approach. Artificial intelligence, transhumanism and cybernetics are discussed as they force a pragmatic approach to defining and understanding situated embodiment. The concept of human immortality or extended longevity is also investigated as this further exposes the myths of transcending corporeality and also helps to explain the mission of transhumanism.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 116-133 [Access article in PDF] Writing and the Disembodiment of Language Tony Jackson I AS IS WELL KNOWN, the study of writing in relation to speech played an important part in opening the door to poststructuralist theory, especially in the seminal works of Jacques Derrida. 1 Taking off from his rereading of Saussurean structuralism, Derrida famously made the deconstructive case that reversed and (...) then dissolved the ancient understanding of writing as the secondary, parasitic representation of the authentic signs of spoken language. But the question may well be asked: How will our understanding of writing and speech change if we take off from a nonrelativistic theory of representation? For it is from a thoroughly relativized theory of signs that poststructuralist theory and its derivatives all one way or the other begin. We will look at this in more detail below, but for now suffice it to say that this kind of theory always takes it that representation precedes the real in a fundamental way. No natural relationship exists between any sign and its referent. Given this fundamental disjunction as a foundation, the various theories lead to the practical work of explaining how signification does manage to occur. For example, meaning is a function of logocentrism in Derrida; desire in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory; discourse in theory after Foucault; ideology in the various new historicisms; and so on. In contrast to these understandings of representation, cognitive linguistics—I will use this broad term to include findings from the related but differentiated subfields of cognitive semantics, cognitive grammar, cognitive rhetoric—claims that at least on a very fundamental level semantics always precedes any actual manifestation of language, which is to say meaning precedes representation. This is because a foundational [End Page 116] level of universal concepts arises from biologically determined percepts. According to this view, crucial, general kinds of meaning are a function not of discourse or power but of the evolution of the human organism in the ecosystem of the third planet from the sun. 2In order to see how the cognitive linguistic arguments run, we will take an example from George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Lakoff brings in the work of cognitive anthropologist Eleanor Rosch in order to explain the way categorization functions in our perceptual interaction with the world. Rosch's findings, obtained through empirical studies using standard scientific methods, strongly suggest that human experience in its most general sense is "preconceptually structured" by our innate ability to categorize according to base-level prototypes (p. 270). Humans, even children as young as two years old, have a kind of gestalt cognitive process that tends to be oriented toward certain objects and features of the world, such that these objects and features—called cognitive reference points or prototypes—are universally "known," apart from culture and language. An example of this would be the response to primary colors as opposed to secondary colors. Rosch showed that even members of cultures lacking words for the primary colors found it easier to learn names for those colors than for secondary colors (pp. 40-41). We are, it appears, cognitively attuned to the primary colors. Further, we are cognitively constructed so as to sort colors automatically by gradations away from or closer to the primary colors. Culture will of course teach us certain beliefs about colors, but we do not "learn" to respond and operate on this basic level of perception.In the next step of the argument, we find that our "basic-level concepts correspond to [this] preconceptual structure" (p. 270). That is, in considering ourselves as linguistic creatures, we find that thinking or conceptuality also operates according to prototypes. Again, this is held to be true only of specifiable basic-level concepts. Though concepts that arise in cultural life may possibly "impose further structuring on what we experience," nonetheless, "basic experiential structures are present regardless of any such imposition of [learned] concepts" (p. 271). Evolutionarily, language would have to emerge after these innate perceptual structures. Language as a representation would also depend heavily on prototype categorization, not... (shrink)

This paper considers the possibility of a disembodied conscious soul, arguing that a great deal of current research converges in a direction that denies the possibility of a bodiless consciousness for human beings. Contemporary attacks on Cartesianism also serve as attacks on the view of some hylomorphist Catholics, such as Thomas Aquinas, that there can be a disembodied consciousness between death and resurrection, a view that violates the Catechism of the Catholic Church. However, there may be a way out for (...) the Catholic hylomorphist which was suggested by Dante—the possibility of a temporary body. The first section of the paper will summarize the contemporary attack against both the Cartesian soul and physicalist systems that reduce the mind to the brain. The alternative position proposed is that the human being is a psychosomatic unity at the level of the organism as a whole, and that both mind-body and brain-body dualism should be avoided. Such a position, I will argue, supports the notion that a disembodied soul, including a disembodied consciousness, is not possible for human beings. Finally, I will discuss Dante’s views on temporary bodies and explore three ways of understanding a temporary body, any of which can preserve a conscious intermediate state between death and resurrection. (shrink)