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The Corporeal Turn
Sheets-Johnstone's 2009 interdisciplinary reader mapping the turn toward the body across philosophy, biology, dance, and cognitive science — the institutional consolidation of embodied thought.
The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader (2009) is Sheets-Johnstone's synthesis of the convergence across disciplines toward taking the body seriously as a cognitive agent. The book collects essays spanning philosophy, evolutionary biology, developmental psychology, cognitive science, dance studies, and neuroscience, organized around the central claim that a paradigm shift is underway — the 'corporeal turn' — in which thinkers across fields are recognizing that cognition, emotion, language, and selfhood cannot be understood without the moving, feeling, kinesthetically-engaged body. The book functions simultaneously as retrospective survey and programmatic statement, naming and consolidating a movement that had grown over decades.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The corporeal turn is the counter-movement to the Cartesian inheritance that defined Western philosophy for four centuries. Where Descartes separated mind from body and made cognition the province of the disembodied soul, the corporeal turn reunites them — not by reducing mind to body but by recognizing that the distinction itself was a philosophical error. The book documents this reunification across multiple disciplines