Main description:

The ever increasing ability of medical technology to reshape the human body in fundamental ways - from organ and tissue transplants to reconstructive surgery and prosthetics - is something now largely taken for granted. But for a philosopher, such interventions raise fundamental and fascinating questions about our sense of individual identity and its relationship to the physical body. Drawing on and engaging with philosophers from across the centuries, Jenny Slatman here develops a novel argument: that our own body always entails a strange dimension, a strangeness that enables us to incorporate radical physical changes.

Contents:

Introduction The Issue of Identity: Being Self and Other Social-scientific and Ethical Analyses of Body Modifications A Phenomenology of Identity Chapter I: Heavy, Inanimate and Nauseating Bodies Carrying along Our Body The Fallen Soul Inanimate Life The Modern Soul The Soul that Inhabits the Stomach Reality Bracketed off Sweating and Blushing Chapter II: Body Boundaries Strange Bones Handiness, or Handling One's World Body Schema Leib and Koerper: Difference and Unity Tolerating the Strange Limits to Tolerance Chapter III: Mirror, Please Tell Me Who I Am 'Oh My God, I Look as Hot as I Feel' Narcissism Other Narcissuses The Power of the Gaze Own and Strange in the Mirror Image Chapter IV: I Exist on the Outside Turned Inside out The Inner Self as Unassailable Stronghold Seen from the Outside Touch Recognition without Narcissism Chapter V: My Strange I Prosthetic Wings The Speaking and Spoken I Thinking is Speaking For - Sum Living with Intruders What is Strange and What Is Own Epilogue