Linguistic Bodies

“This is the most complex, deep, far-reaching, and highly nuanced account I have seen of the multiple levels of embodied mind—organic, sensorimotor, and interpersonal—that give rise to, and are in turn shaped by, our linguistic activity broadly and richly construed. Integrating vast bodies of research from multiple traditions and fields of study, this book profoundly explores the way our linguistic capacities and performances emerge through our ongoing embodied, intersubjective, enactive engagement with our material, social, and cultural worlds. We are not creatures who merely acquire and use language. Instead, we are in and through language, constituted and continually re-constituted via our participatory sense-making.”

Mark Johnson, Philip H. Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon

“This is a book about you, and about us, so it is of high interest. From the outset the authors engage in making meaning with you, as reader, as linguistic body—an exercise in participatory sense-making as you travel along a dynamic terrain that covers topics involving enactive bodies, agency, social interaction, and especially language. There is no better book on the role of language in embodied cognition, the institution of norms, and the formation of communities.”

Shaun Gallagher, Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in Philosophy, IUniversity of Memphis; Professorial Fellow, Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, University of Wollongong, Australia

“Human beings are linguistic bodies. Using this guiding formula, the authors of this groundbreaking book chart a path from life to animal bodies to participatory sense-making to language to ethics. A major contribution, this book offers a profound new framework for understanding language and what it is to be human.”

Evan Thompson, Professor of Philosophy, University of British Columbia