The Mind-Body Politic

by Michelle Maiese, Robert Hanna

Building on contemporary research in embodied cognition, enactivism, and the extended mind, this book explores how social institutions in contemporary neoliberal nation-states systematically affect our thoughts, feelings, and agency. Human beings are, necessarily, social animals who create and belong to social institutions. But social institutions take on a life of their own, and literally shape the minds of all those who belong to them, for better or worse, usually without their being self-consciously aware of it. Indeed, in contemporary neoliberal societies, it is generally for the worse. In The Mind-Body Politic , Michelle Maiese and Robert Hanna work out a new critique of contemporary social institutions by deploying the special standpoint of the philosophy of mind―in particular, the special standpoint of the philosophy of what they call essentially embodied minds― and make a set of concrete, positive proposals for radically changing both these social institutions and also our essentially embodied lives for the better.

338 pages, Paperback

Published August 15, 2020

Reviews

[Amanda Narvali]

I read this book while investigating relational autonomy and was curious about how social institutions can impact agency. I enjoyed the discussion of online learning and the case study chapters. Overall, I thought the book jumped over some concepts/thoughts too quickly by giving an example and then not really explaining the reference.