Ellie Epp workshop index

Embodiment Studies web worksite index

Body & cosmos: a three-part minicourse The intention of this minicourse is to lay out a vision of how we as human bodies can live and work in deep love with the universe. These are links to notes accompanying lectures given at the IMA summer residency 2006. Body and cosmos I: A philosophical map In religion, science, and philosophy there has been a long history of derogating the physical body. Derogation of bodies (and with them at times the whole of the physical world) has resulted in descriptions of the senses that minimize their capabilities and exclude cognitive powers - for instance mystical experience, intuition, creativity, imagination, and reason - that are more highly valued. But perception is in fact the ground of all of these capabilities. In Body and cosmos I will use findings in poetics and cognitive science to redescribe perceiving as the essential core of human intelligence and connectedness. Body and cosmos II: Love eyes I am impressed by two things about visual perception: how much we can know by looking, and how much pleasure we can take in seeing. Neither mechanistic nor dualistic accounts of seeing have had much to say about these significant facts. If we understand ourselves as spirited bodies rather than disembodied minds or machines, how will we understand seeing? Can a more organic redescription of visual perception support abilities we already have and don't use? Are we afraid of seeing? Is there an ethic of seeing? A politics of seeing? How much more can we see? In Body and cosmos II I'll approach these questions by showing four experimental films that invite rapturous knowledge.   Body and cosmos III: What is a body? Students in past workshops have sometimes been puzzled about how to understand bodies as physical structures. Body and cosmos III will use images and metaphors to build an accessible and intuitive understanding of the notion of order or structure as it can be understood at the scales of the large universe around us, the human body, and the minute neural networks that allow us to be perceptive and intelligent.