Mind the Body: An Exploration of Bodily Self-Awareness, by Frédérique de Vignemont
Hong Yu Wong, Gregor Hochstetter · Mind · 2020
Frédérique de Vignemont’s Mind the Body is the most comprehensive study of bodily awareness and the sense of body ownership (SoBO) there is. She brings together relevant work from philosophy and from the brain, cognitive, and clinical sciences in a way that is unprecedented. She systematises the debate on SoBO by cataloguing different views and structuring the dialectic. She synthesises her published work into a new overall narrative, with some key changes. The key new developments are the phenomenal contrast argument for a positive phenomenology of SoBO and the bodyguard hypothesis about SoBO. Other highlights include: her critique of the notions of body image and body schema and her suggestions how to move beyond that tired dichotomy, her bold account of how multimodal bodily self-ascriptions can be immune to error through misidentification, and her discussion of why bodily awareness is constitutively multimodal. Anyone interested in these topics will be indebted to her work.