A richly rewarding vision of the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics, with fourteen essays by the originator of the field.

Shusterman’s Somaesthetics is a wide-ranging collection of penetrating essays by twelve scholars examining in rich detail the many dimensions of philosopher Richard Shusterman’s pragmatism and somaesthetics, complemented by his own chapter of responses to these scholars

Contemporary culture increasingly suffers from problems of attention, over-stimulation, and stress, and a variety of personal and social discontents generated by deceptive body images. This book argues that improved body consciousness can relieve these problems and enhance one's knowledge, performance, and pleasure. The body is our basic medium of perception and action, but focused attention to its feelings and movements has long been criticised as a damaging distraction that also ethically corrupts through self-absorption. In Body Consciousness, Richard Shusterman refutes such charges by engaging the most influential twentieth-century somatic philosophers and incorporating insights from both Western and Asian disciplines of body-mind awareness. Rather than rehashing intractable ontological debates on the mind-body relation, Shusterman reorients study of this crucial nexus towards a more fruitful, pragmatic direction that reinforces important but neglected connections between philosophy of mind, ethics, politics, and the pervasive aesthetic dimensions of everyday life.

This essay collection explores the crucial connections between aesthetic experience and the interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics. After examining philosophical accounts of embodiment and aesthetic experience, the essays apply somaesthetic theory to the diverse fine arts and the art of living.

“I regard Higuchi’s book as particularly valuable because it highlights dimensions of somaesthetics that have not been sufficiently explored. I refer not only to the various traditional Japanese somatic disciplines whose somaesthetics aspects Higuchi reveals, but also to central topics far beyond Japanese culture.” -Foreword by Richard Shusterman Higuchi, one of the pivotal scholars in introducing Shusterman’s somaesthetics to Japanese audiences in the early 2000s, provides insight into how this philosophy has developed in Japan, and the affinity it has developed with a non-Western culture. Dividing his insights into the categories of innovation, practice, and educational implications, Higuchi presents the Japanese perspective on somaesthetics, with contributions from four of his students. They develop the philosophical discussion of areas such as the aesthetics of sport, bodily knowing, learning as mimesis, and learning culture through language. In this way, the book illuminates the philosophy of somaesthetics using Japanese experience and research while presenting a unique perspective on Japanese culture. This book will be of especial interest to scholars of Japanese culture, and of the philosophy of aesthetics and education.

Thirteen original essays explore the qualities and challenges of urban life (in Europe, Asia, and the Americas) from a variety of disciplinary perspectives that illustrate the aesthetic, cultural, and political roles of bodies in the city streets.

This much acclaimed book has emerged as neo-pragmatism's most significant contribution to contemporary aesthetics. By articulating a deeply embodied notion of aesthetic experience and the art of living, and by providing a compellingly rigorous defense of popular art—crowned by a pioneer study of hip hop—Richard Shusterman reorients aesthetics towards a fresher, more relevant, and socially progressive agenda. The second edition contains an introduction where Shusterman responds to his critics, and it concludes with an added chapter that formulates his novel notion of somaesthetics.