In The Body of the World

In The Body of the World PDF

Author: Eve Ensler

Publisher: Random House India

Published: 2013-04-30

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 8184004184

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Playwright, author and activist Eve Ensler has devoted her life to the female body—how to talk about it, how to protect and value it. Yet she spent much of her life disassociated from her own body—a disconnection brought on by her father’s sexual abuse and her mother’s remoteness. “Because I did not, could not, inhabit my body or the Earth,” she writes, “I could not feel or know their pain.” But Ensler is shocked out of her distance. While working in the Congo, she is shattered to encounter the horrific rape and violence inflicted on the women there. Soon after, she is diagnosed with uterine cancer and, through months of harrowing treatment, she is forced to become first and foremost a body—pricked, punctured, cut, scanned. It is then that all distance is erased. As she connects her own illness to the devastation of the Earth, her life force to the resilience of humanity, she is finally, fully—and gratefully—joined to the body of the world. Unflinching, generous and inspiring, Ensler calls on us all to embody our connection to and responsibility for the world.

Body and World

Body and World PDF

Author: Samuel Todes

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2001-04-27

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0262264919

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Body and World is the definitive edition of a book that should now take its place as a major contribution to contemporary existential phenomenology. Samuel Todes goes beyond Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his description of how independent physical nature and experience are united in our bodily action. His account allows him to preserve the authority of experience while avoiding the tendency towards idealism that threatens both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Todes emphasizes the complex structure of the human body; front/back asymmetry, the need to balance in a gravitational field, and so forth; and the role that structure plays in producing the spatiotemporal field of experience and in making possible objective knowledge of the objects in it. He shows that perception involves nonconceptual, but nonetheless objective forms of judgment. One can think of Body and World as fleshing out Merleau-Ponty's project while presciently relating it to the current interest in embodiment, not only in philosophy but also in psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and anthropology. Todes's work opens new ways of thinking about problems such as the relation of perception to thought and the possibility of knowing an independent reality; problems that have occupied philosophers since Kant and still concern analytic and continental philosophy.

What Can a Body Do?

What Can a Body Do? PDF

Author: Sara Hendren

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2020-08-18

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 073522000X

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Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and LitHub Winner of the 2021 Science in Society Journalism Book Prize A fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and a call to imagine a better-designed world for us all. Furniture and tools, kitchens and campuses and city streets—nearly everything human beings make and use is assistive technology, meant to bridge the gap between body and world. Yet unless, or until, a misfit between our own body and the world is acute enough to be understood as disability, we may never stop to consider—or reconsider—the hidden assumptions on which our everyday environment is built. In a series of vivid stories drawn from the lived experience of disability and the ideas and innovations that have emerged from it—from cyborg arms to customizable cardboard chairs to deaf architecture—Sara Hendren invites us to rethink the things and settings we live with. What might assistance based on the body’s stunning capacity for adaptation—rather than a rigid insistence on “normalcy”—look like? Can we foster interdependent, not just independent, living? How do we creatively engineer public spaces that allow us all to navigate our common terrain? By rendering familiar objects and environments newly strange and wondrous, What Can a Body Do? helps us imagine a future that will better meet the extraordinary range of our collective needs and desires.

The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World PDF

Author: Elaine Scarry

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1985-09-26

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 0195036018

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Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, The Body in Pain is a profoundly original study that has already stirred excitement in a wide range of intellectual circles. The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it. Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate.

The Virtual Body of Christ in a Suffering World

The Virtual Body of Christ in a Suffering World PDF

Author: Deanna A. Thompson

Publisher: Abingdon Press

Published: 2016-11-01

Total Pages: 131

ISBN-13: 1501815199

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We live in a wired world where 24/7 digital connectivity is increasingly the norm. Christian megachurch communities often embrace this reality wholeheartedly while more traditional churches often seem hesitant and overwhelmed by the need for an interactive website, a Facebook page and a twitter feed. This book accepts digital connectivity as our reality, but presents a vision of how faith communities can utilize technology to better be the body of Christ to those who are hurting while also helping followers of Christ think critically about the limits of our digital attachments. This book begins with a conversion story of a non-cell phone owning, non-Facebook using religion professor judgmental of the ability of digital tools to enhance relationships. A stage IV cancer diagnosis later, in the midst of being held up by virtual communities of support, a conversion occurs: this religion professor benefits in embodied ways from virtual sources and wants to convert others to the reality that the body of Christ can and does exist virtually and makes embodied difference in the lives of those who are hurting. The book neither uncritically embraces nor rejects the constant digital connectivity present in our lives. Rather it calls on the church to a) recognize ways in which digital social networks already enact the virtual body of Christ; b) tap into and expand how Christ is being experienced virtually; c) embrace thoughtfully the material effects of our new augmented reality, and c) influence utilization of technology that minimizes distraction and maximizes attentiveness toward God and the world God loves.

Hello, World! My Body

Hello, World! My Body PDF

Author: Jill McDonald

Publisher: Doubleday Books for Young Readers

Published: 2018-02-13

Total Pages: 26

ISBN-13: 1524766372

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Learn from home and explore the world with these fun and easy board books! Young children are fascinated by their eyes, ears, nose, fingers, and toes. Here’s a Hello, World! board book that teaches toddlers all about the human body, with shapes, sizes, colors, and super-simple facts. Hello, World! is a series designed to introduce first nonfiction concepts to babies and toddlers. Told in clear and easy terms and featuring bright, cheerful illustrations, Hello, World! makes learning fun for young children. And each sturdy page offers helpful prompts for engaging with your child. ("How many fingers can you count on each hand?") It's a perfect way to bring science and nature into the busy world of a toddler, where learning never stops. Look for all the books in the Hello, World! series: •Solar System •Weather •Backyard Bugs •Birds •Dinosaurs •My Body •How Do Apples Grow? •Ocean Life •Moon Landing •Pets •Arctic Animals •Construction Site •Rainforest Animals •Planet Earth •Reptiles •Cars and Trucks •Music •Baby Animals •On the Farm

Your Wonderful Body!.

Your Wonderful Body!. PDF

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 1982

Total Pages: 94

ISBN-13: 9780870444234

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Discusses the functions of the human body in a question and answer format, emphasizing ways of keeping the body fit and healthy. Includes a wall poster, 8 duplicating masters, and booklet (8 p.).

The Vagina Monologues

The Vagina Monologues PDF

Author: Eve Ensler

Publisher: Villard Books

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0375505121

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Drawing on conversations with hundreds of women about their genitalia, the author presents a collection of performance pieces from her one-woman show of the same name.

The Changing Body

The Changing Body PDF

Author: Roderick Floud

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-03-31

Total Pages: 459

ISBN-13: 1139500805

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Humans have become much taller and heavier, and experience healthier and longer lives than ever before in human history. However it is only recently that historians, economists, human biologists and demographers have linked the changing size, shape and capability of the human body to economic and demographic change. This fascinating and groundbreaking book presents an accessible introduction to the field of anthropometric history, surveying the causes and consequences of changes in health and mortality, diet and the disease environment in Europe and the United States since 1700. It examines how we define and measure health and nutrition as well as key issues such as whether increased longevity contributes to greater productivity or, instead, imposes burdens on society through the higher costs of healthcare and pensions. The result is a major contribution to economic and social history with important implications for today's developing world and the health trends of the future.

Being There

Being There PDF

Author: Andy Clark

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1998-01-23

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0262531569

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Brain, body, and world are united in a complex dance of circular causation and extended computational activity. In Being There, Andy Clark weaves these several threads into a pleasing whole and goes on to address foundational questions concerning the new tools and techniques needed to make sense of the emerging sciences of the embodied mind. Clark brings together ideas and techniques from robotics, neuroscience, infant psychology, and artificial intelligence. He addresses a broad range of adaptive behaviors, from cockroach locomotion to the role of linguistic artifacts in higher-level thought.