Body and World [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Todes has tried to position his work somewhere between phenomenology and transcendatal idealism. Recent interest in this thinking is found in both philosophy and in Artifical Intelligence, both struggling to justify the embodiment of mind for different reasons. However, Todes work is situated in a tradition that views philosophy as primarily addressing major themes raised by other philosophers - a chain of debate. Hence, it may be difficult to appreciate his work without reasonably thorough knowledge of Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and a number of others. For instance, it is doubtful if the import of his arguments against Kant's categories of experience and the antimonies can be assessed unless Kant is previously understood (and therefore Hume, etc.). The hinge for Todes analyses is the issue of the relationship between experience and our understanding of it. Kant tried to 'solve' the problem by postulating a unified manifold of experience resulting from the innate expression of regulative principles which governed synthetic a priori judgments. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason encapsulated his epistemology and, as far as he was concerned, rescued knowledge from Humean scepticism. But what did this imply for the 'body subject'? This is the question addressed by Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty.

In this book, Todes renders a series of arguments to show that Kant intellectualised experience, and that there is room for a category of non-conceptual knowledge. In my own opinion, Todes rendering of Kant's understanding of judgment is mistaken. Moreover, his observations on nonconceptual knowledge are in the main, minor - again a personal opinion. The later appendices in the book reproduce material sharing an affinity with the obscurantism of Foucault and Derrida - a pity.

Overall this is an interesting book if you grasp the Kantian nettle identifed by Todes. However, I suggest counterbalancing it with Polanyi's Personal Knolwedge for a profoundly different set of arguments and almost contemporary in writing (circa late 50's). Other points of interest are the development of intersubjectivity in the child, which again should be explored against the interiority-exteriority arguments of Todes. There is too much in the book to cover in a short review, but it does touch on key philosophical issues that will remain of interest for the foreseeable future.

Samuel Todes has gone beyond Merleau Ponty's phenomenology-to explain about the role of a Body. The phenomenological thesis of Samuel Todes is discussed in the book and the current book is an edited version of Samuel Todes' dissertation at Harvard. The two introductions written by Hubert Dreyfus on 'Todes's Account of Nonceptual Perceptual Knowledge and Its Relation to Thought' and Piotr Hoffman on 'How Todes Rescues Phenomenology from the Threat of Idealism' are very informative, and discuss contemporary issues in the field of phenomenology and philosophy of the body.

Body and World is an original and systematic contribution to existential phenomenology. Samuel Todes goes beyond Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty in his description of how independent physical nature and experience are united in our bodily action.

The book also makes an important contribution to the current debate among analytic philosophers concerning non-conceptual content and its relation to thought. Samuel Todes also worked on noumenology (it's his own invented term for talking about the body as the source of our understanding of space and time, which is discussed in greater depth in the book of Samuel Todes), phenomenology, existentialism, the role of the human body in the sense of reality, philosophy of friendship and family. He is the author of The Human Body as Material Subject of the World and before his untimely death, Todes was also working on a social philosophy of the body, centering on a study of friendship.

"The book is a study in the natural philosophy of the human body. That is to say, it is a study of our's body role in our knowlegde of _objects_." Thank you.

For a great phenomenologist, which Sam Todes definitely was, this great book is striking for its grounding in Enlightenment philosophy. If the book were more widely read one of the side-effects would be to show that Enlightenment thought not only can be brought up to date, but in novel ways and even exciting ways. For Todes' thesis is and exciting one, showing as he does that the many of the dualities of Western culture come not from per se uselessness of the categories as from the as yet inabilty to see all these categories as grounded in our subject body as human beings. Compare Todes' discussion of Leibniz or Hume, to say nothing of his favorite Kant, to the very famous philosopher of the body Merleau-Ponty. You will find the difference between a crystalline stream and a brackish pond. Merleau-Ponty was the favorite of Catholic philosphers, or Catholic inspired ones, who constructed existential phenomenologies that could accomadate a religious tradition which formerly was quite proud of its hostility to embodied experience, which now "got religion" and found the body. Todes showed that the Enlightenment not only was not hostile to our experience as embodied persons but in fact was grounded in it, though he shows how it was insufficiently thematized. That the religious proponents of the philosophy of the body showed the ultimate shallowness of the Merleau-Ponty approach is demonstrated by the proof-in-the-pudding of their astounding personal immaturity, to say nothing of their egregious flouting of legal boundaries. I can speak to Sam Todes' enormous integration as someone who was privileged to know him for years. He stayed at my home on several occasions
and his utterly unforced wisdom is still a huge influence for me. Sam's attitude toward religion was especially inspirational. He had no fear of it; neither was he in its thrall. This is most poignantly expressed in this text when elucidates his notion of hope. Things only appear real for us as embodied beings when their is a horizon of hope. When our real circumstances lack this hopeful horizon the facts of life begin to be unreal, for reality is grounded in our experience of our subject body. Todes notes as a grim example that Auschwitz
is a hole in the world for all its terrible reality. Religion can be seen as a necessity to keep the reality of life intact. But it follows from this thought that when religion in any impedes this great function of creating a horizon of hope it forfeits its right to be taken seriously as a benefit in human affairs.Those like me who take an interest in dense tomes of Church History have a lot to ponder in this regard. I can say that Sam Todes was very interested in these matters, and his partner of many years, a famous poet, had written a long-poem on his labyrinthine exit from a limited Catholic world-view. What is hard to convey is the lightheartedness of the man in all these matters. One cannot hope to imitate such genius, but truly Sam Todes gave words and example to live by.