Our own body seems to be the object that we know the best for we constantly receive a flow of internal information about it. Yet bodily awareness has attracted little attention in the literature."Mind the Body" is the first comprehensive treatment of bodily awareness. Frédérique de Vignemont seeks to answer questions such as: how do I perceive my body? How do I perceive other people's bodies? Can I really feel your pain? What makes me feel this specific body is my own? Why do I care about it? To what extent can I feel an avatar's body as my own? To answer these questions, we need a better understanding of the various aspects of bodily self-awareness, including the spatiality of bodily sensations, their multimodality, their role in social cognition, their relation to action, and to self-defence.This volume combines philosophical analysis with recent experimental results from cognitive science, leading us to question some of our most basic intuitions.

IntroductionPart I: Body Snatchers1: The phenomenology of bodily ownership2: Whose body?3: The immunity of the sense of ownershipPart II: Body Builder4: Bodily space5: The body map theory6: A multimodal account of bodily experience7: My body among other bodies8: Taxonomies of body representationsPart III: Bodyguard9: The Bodyguard hypothesis10: The narcissistic bodyAppendix 1 - Bodily illusionsAppendix 2 - Neurological and psychiatric bodily disordersAppendix 3 - Somatoparaphrenia

Frédérique de Vignemont, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris

Frédérique de Vignemont is a CNRS research director at the Jean Nicod Institute in 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. Her new project investigates the perceptual peculiarities of peripersonal space, which can be conceived of as the territory of the self. She has published widely in philosophy and psychology journals on the first-person, body schema, agency, empathy, and more recently on pain. She is the recipient of the 2015 Young Mind & Brain prize. She is also one of the executive editors of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology.