Human Flesh: Phenomenology and Evolution of the Social Body (Series in Continental Thought)

Much recent research on human evolution emphasizes that social behavior and cognition are at the heart of everything that is distinctively human.This body of research generally understands sociality in terms of social reasoning and the brain that supports it.Human Flesh shifts the focus. What if human sociality is not primarily or exclusively located in the brain but rather is distributed throughout the body?What if the foundation of the human way of life lies in intercorporeity: the ways in which our affective, sensorimotor social bodies-our eyes, hands, voices, ears, and desires-open our bodies and minds up to one another?Human Flesh develops a framework for exploring these questions based on Merleau-Ponty’s unfinished work on human evolution, combining it with contemporary research in phenomenology, embodied cognitive science, evolutionary anthropology, and primatology.It applies that framework to explore how the different senses and sensory organs take on their distinctively human