Being a body

Even Descartes acknowledged that: ‘I am not only lodged in my body as a pilot in a vessel .my mind and body compose a certain unity’ [1]. Today, our understanding of this ‘certain unity’ remains insufficient. The ambition to ‘naturalize the mind’ is constantly renewed but, as Gallagher says in his new book, ‘implicitly, the idea that the body has little to do with cognition continues to haunt all claims to the contrary’ (p. 134). Still, he adds, ‘there are important exceptions to this theoretical elimination of the body’ (p. 136). Gallagher counts among these exceptions. Gallagher’s approach renews the philosophical debates that classically wonder if the mind can be naturalized. Rather than pursuing abstract conceptualization of mental and bodily properties, and rather than taking for granted results and interpretations of brain-imaging studies, Gallagher overcomes the limitations of both anti-reductionism and neuronal reductionism by specifically considering how the body shapes the mind.