The Bodily Nature of Consciousness - Kathleen V. Wider

"The Bodily Nature of Consciousness is a stunning achievement. Combining an existential-phenomenological approach with her knowledge of recent biological research, Wider argues that self-consciousness is rooted in body-awareness. She has taken a great step in advancing our understanding of the nature of consciousness."-Hazel E. Barnes, author of Humanistic Existentialism: The Literature of Possibility"Kathleen Wider has few if any peers in her ability to bring strands from analytic philosophy together with an extremely in-depth understanding of the philosophy of Being and Nothingness in order better to understand both the latter's strengths and weaknesses and just what consciousness itself, at least for all of us post-Cartesians, must be."-William McBride, Purdue UniversityIn this work, Kathleen V. Wider discusses Jean-Paul Sartre's analysis of consciousness in Being and Nothingness in light of recent work by analytic philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. She brings together phenomenological and scientific understandings of the nature of consciousness and argues that the two approaches can strengthen and suppport each other. Work on consciousness from two very different philosophical traditions-the continental and analytic-contributes to her explanation of the deep-seated intuition that all consciousness is self-consciousness.