Our relationship with our body is extremely complex. We have a wide range of different kinds of sensations: that is, the senses, pains, pleasures, the feeling of heat, of cold and so on. We also do things with our body, we engage in athletic activities, we harm one another, we pleasure one another, we jump for joy, we frown in disbelief, we hunch over in despair… How can we disentangle this giant knot of doings and feelings that is the body? How can we study our perception of the body? What is the relationship between the body and its environment? Today's guest is the person to answer all these questions, or at least some of them.

Frédérique de Vignemont is a CNRS senior researcher in philosophy in Paris. She is the deputy director of the Institut Jean Nicod as well as a philosophy scholar in residence at NYU Paris. Her research is at the intersection of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Her major current works focus on bodily awareness, self-consciousness, and social cognition. She has published widely in philosophy and psychology journals on the first-person, body schema, agency, empathy, and more recently on pain. Her new book, Mind the Body (Oxford University Press, 2018), provides the first comprehensive treatment of bodily awareness and of the sense of bodily ownership, combining philosophical analysis with recent experimental results from cognitive science.

Credits:

Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson

Artwork: Ella Bergru

Editing: Matthieu Fraticelli

Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel

Communication: Tanay Katiyar