Abstract
This chapter provides background information about this book’s philosophical approach to handedness. It argues against a purely instrumental conception of the hand in order to shift focus to the hand’s meaning-making role in the dynamic interaction of self and world. Handedness presents an asymmetry in this meaning-making ability. The chapter then defines this book’s use of the phenomenological method and some of its basic concepts: lived space, the lived body, corporeal or body schematization, anchoring, and maximal grip. It concludes with an outline of the overall structure of the book.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The position here differs from the exaptation hypothesis as it allows that hands were adapted for their present role rather than coopted from some other task. See Kushner (2017, p. 118). To be clear, this chapter requires no strong stance on the contested etiology of handedness, seeking only to explain the uniqueness of the human hand itself.
- 3.
This book is about handedness and this section merely lays out methodological commitments. It is not defending a “correct” interpretation of the phenomenological tradition. Those seeking a defense of the continuity of historical phenomenological projects may see e.g., Zahavi (2019, p. 32ff). For further discussion of phenomenology and its method see e.g., Gallagher and Zahavi (2021, pp. 23–30), Smith (2007, chapter 6), Zahavi (2019, chapter 3). This book’s approach tracks most closely with “California phenomenology” as presented in Yoshimi et al. (2019).
- 4.
The sex-gender hyphenation here reflects the fact that studies of handedness, sex, gender, and sexual orientation tend to either aggregate or fail to disaggregate sex and gender. I discuss the issue in Chap. 6.
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Westmoreland, P. (2023). Introduction: The Lived Experience of the Left. In: How Handedness Shapes Lived Experience, Intersectionality, and Inequality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23892-5_1
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