Robert E. Wood

Five Bodies—and a Sixth: On the Place of Awareness in the Cosmos

What one takes to be a body is identified initially as what is available to sensing. Sensing and reflecting are not so available. How one conceives of their relation admits of at least six possibilities exhibited in the history of philosophy: Hobbesian materialism, Berkleyan idealism, Platonic dualism of soul and body, Aristotelian hylomorphism, Cartesian dualism of thought and extension, and a Leibnizian-Whiteheadian view of psycho-physical co-implication. The latter view redraws the conceptual map in a way most in keeping with experience as a whole and with neural physiology in particular.