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Movement is our mother tongue

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader. Exeter, UK, and Charlottesville, VA, USA: Imprint Academic. ISBN 9 781845 401535

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Notes

  1. Unless otherwise noted, all references are to this book.

  2. Some 10 years ago, Sheets-Johnstone published another collection of essays, aptly entitled The Primacy of Movement (Sheets-Johnstone 1999).

  3. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, Sheets-Johnstone is not a fan of Merleau-Ponty. Among other things, he is charged with failing to examine the experience of movement and as a consequence missing “its dynamic kinetic structure” (p. 263).

  4. See Bennett and Hacker (2003) for a very similar critique of a range of prominent cognitive neuroscientists.

  5. I should mention that this is another term Sheets-Johnstone dislikes because of the emphasis it places on linguistic abilities. Infants are not properly called “prelinguistic”; rather, “the acquisition of verbal language is post-kinetic” (p. 225).

  6. This is my term, not Sheets-Johnstone’s. She speaks of a “phenomenological hermeneutics” that can be applied to paleoanthropology (p. 93).

References

  • Bennett, M. R., & Hacker, P. M. S. (2003). Philosophical foundations of neuroscience. Oxford: Blackwell.

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  • Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and difference. Translated by A. Bass. London: Routledge.

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  • Heidegger, M. (1954). Was heisst Denken? Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.

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  • Sheets-Johnstone, M. (1999). The primacy of movement. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Danish National Research Foundation: Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, Njalsgade 140-142, 5th Floor, DK-2300, Copenhagen S, Denmark

    Søren Overgaard

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  1. Søren Overgaard
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Correspondence to Søren Overgaard.

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Overgaard, S. Movement is our mother tongue. Phenom Cogn Sci 10, 139–143 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9179-6

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