Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 20, No.

1, 2003

Book Symposium
Bodies in Technology
Don Ihde, 2002
Minneapolis MN, University of Minnesota Press
155 pp., $18.95

Bodies of Technology

EDUARDO MENDIETA

It might be useful to write a commentary on Don Ihde’s newest book in terms of how
it fits into three decades of work on the philosophy of technology [1], that is, in terms
of how it advances, refines, or abandons earlier positions. It might also be useful to
position Ihde’s book with respect to other recent work in the philosophy of techno-
logy. It might be useful to have someone who is far more competent and invested in
this area of philosophy to comment and perhaps criticise. But I think that the context
does not call for an overview of Ihde’s career and contribution to a field in which he
has been a pioneer, nor am I a philosopher of technology. Yet, perhaps precisely
because I am not an insider to Ihde’s field my comments might be of some use. I will
begin by deseribing some of the main topics that this book studies, then I will raise
three sets of concerns, which may or may not be taken as criticisms.
In the most general terms one can say that Ihde’s book is about the body, or rather,
the plurality of bodies. It is thus, on a second level, and in an interesting sense, about
sex and gender, and how sex haunts us as a spectre of the ethereal, nominal, socially
constructed and established gender. It is, on a third level, about technology and, more
precisely, about the primacy of technology over science. This is perhaps the central
focus of Ihde’s book, namely the question of the plurality of technologies. Finally, but
no less importantly, this book is about sight, and seeing, and what seeing sees; or
rather, and more precisely, about how seeing is determined by its technologically
mediated embodiment. With respect to this last topic, one may say, in parallel to the
issues of bodies and technology, that there is no sight or the gaze, but seeing, or forms
of seeing, or technological mediations of seeing. This book is thus about bodies, sex/
genders, technologies, and modalities of seeing. Alternatively, one could say that this
book is about rejecting and refuting things like: the body, sex/gender, and the univocal
essence of technology, which all are only tenable on the ontologisation and dehistorisation
of material cultures and the practices of technological embodiment of perception and
(self ) representation.

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for Applied
Applied Philosophy,
Philosophy, 2003,
2003 Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main
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96 Eduardo Mendieta

Let me discuss each one of these topics briefly. With respect to bodies: in this book
Ihde talks primarily about two types of bodies. Body one is the phenomenological body
of the human person. This is the point of reference for a proto-physics, to use the
terminology of German philosophical anthropology. It is the body according to which
we experience up and down, left and right, the speed of falling through the air, which
is not and cannot be merely a visual experience, but primarily a tactile and dromono-
somatic experience, by which I mean that speed is felt rather than seen. It is this
dromono-somatic primacy of the experience of speed that gives rise to a visceral
disorientation when we look up from what we are reading and notice that our train is
moving, but do not feel the train moving, and then we realize that it is the train across
the platform, or the one on the adjacent tracks, that is moving. At that moment, when
we look up and see motion but are not feeling it, we also feel as though we had stepped
into a vacuum, or rather, as though an abyss had yawned under our very seats.
In the first two essays of his book, Ihde explores the ways in which body one always
returns to condition, circumscribe, humble, and even to debunk the utopian bodies
of techno-fantasies. The utopian bodies of techno-fantasies are bodies that seek to
assimilate body one, just described, to body two, as Ihde calls it. This second body is
constituted or constructed by cultural practices. Thus, if body one is Merleau-Ponty’s
body, the second one is Foucault’s. Another parallel can be established: whereas body
one corresponds to what Ihde called in Technology and the Lifeworld, micro-perceptions,
body two corresponds to macro-perceptions [2]. I take it that Ihde is at pains to
maintain the distinction between a material body that is not subsumable to cultural
practices, and a phantasmagorical body that re-inscribes, expands, and transforms in
accordance with fantasies, projects, and technologies that are ideological and techno-
logical. The reason is that we should not succumb to a complete nominalism and,
most importantly, because it is the irreducibility of body one that allows us to dis-
mantle and unmask the utopian promises of virtual reality.
Virtual reality, in Ihde’s view, perpetuates the Cartesian-Kantian reduction of
body one to body two, in terms of the reduction of perception to the visual. The
museum-model, or what Iris Murdoch calls, in her book the Sovereignty of the Good,
the ‘shop-model of the mind’, operates on the reduction of the subject to a perceiving
homunculus, who perceives by seeing; but in seeing it does not see itself. I will not
rehearse here the history of the emergence of the disembodied, epistemologised,
unencumbered, and virtualized modern monological subject. Ihde thinks that the
seduction of virtual reality is predicated on the virtues that were once attached to this
Cartesian-Kantian subject, but, at the same time, the virtual reality subject is one who
re-enacts the same reductions, the same kind of equivocations and simplifications. In
essence, Don Ihde finds virtual reality, and attempts to mimic it within movies, a very
primitive, crass, and regressive form of visualism. Virtual reality is a visual rupture that
promises a second body, but is nothing else than an ersatz embodied experience. For,
in virtual reality machines and environments, we are once again in the camera obscura
of the transcendental subject or the Cartesian homunculus. It is the subject looking
out ahead of itself, or a subject that is placed as it is assaulted by a swirl of colours
rushing past one’s field of vision, evoking the sense of falling down or rushing up. Ihde
also finds rather simplistic the polymorphous, mutating, ever shifting colours used in
movies like Brett Leonard’s 1992 The Lawnmower to evoke a non-phallic form of
polymorphously perverse sexuality.

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This same argumentative strategy is used by Ihde to unmask the privileging of the
viewing and gazing subject in what he calls ‘semiotic postmodernism’. In this Ihde
notes a remarkable reversal. While semiotic postmodernism sets out to displace and
demystify the disembodied and epistemologised Cartesian subject by pointing to its
linguistic/semiotic constitution, this method resuscitates what it sought to put to sleep
by privileging the mode of the reader of semiotic systems. For just as virtual reality is
parasitic on the visual, semiotic postmodernism presupposes an immaterial, unplaced,
unmediated reader of the world as text.
With respect to technologies, in this book Don Ihde focuses on two main problems.
The first has to do with the primacy of the visual in technology or, more precisely, with
the sovereignty of the visual in contemporary technology. The second problem is
addressed when Ihde focuses on the question of the role of the philosopher of techno-
logy vis-à-vis the social impact of technology. With respect to this second focus, Ihde is
primarily concerned with tracing a path between the extremes of technophilia and
technophobia, technoutopia and technodystopia. Here Ihde develops two elemental
insights. The first is that technology’s impact in society is fundamentally indetermin-
able. In other words, we cannot know in advance whether a technology will have
positive or negative effects on society and our environment. And the second is that the
problems caused by technology are better addressed by the development of new, and
perhaps more efficient, technologies, which in turn will harbour their own unforeseen
deleterious or beneficial effects. Retreat to a pre-technological time, or to a pristine
form of technology, are essentially regressive and conservative agendas that are as
pernicious as those that seek to eliminate the use of all technology. And here Don Ihde
seems to commend agnosticism, and a measured scepticism. Now, turning back to the
first point of focus, Ihde is particularly fascinated by the way in which both science and
technology were transformed by, on the one hand, the reduction of the knowing
subject to the seeing subject, and, on the other hand, the invention of machines for
reducing reality to perceptual-visual schemata. But this dual focus is not just a diag-
nosis, accompanied by an archaeology, but also a prognosis. Ihde is sanguine enough
to recognise that contemporary science and technology would not have developed in
the way they have developed had it not been for the emergence of visual technologies
and a regime of vision. Yet, he also seems to be suggesting that both science and
technology are restricted and restricting precisely because of the ways in which they
operate under the yoke of the hegemony of the visual.
I would like now to articulate some objections, caveats, and criticisms. The first set
of concerns has to do with Ihde’s critique of ocularcentrism, or the hegemony of the
visual — in both contemporary culture and science. While I agree with the general
thesis that Western culture in general is captive to visual rapture (though I would also
argue that US, North American, culture is particularly mesmerised by the visual), I
am not entirely in agreement that this is a transcultural phenomenon. Furthermore,
I do not think that the seductiveness of virtual reality, and its replication in some
action parks and movies, is entirely a mono-sensual experience. More specifically, I
think that there is a kinetic dimension of contemporary culture that Ihde is missing.
This kinetic dimension is not dromono-somatic, but rather dromono-aural, by which
I mean that speed is communicated by sound. I think that the virtual reality trip has
been enhanced and made more ‘real’ by the use of sound, hence the importance of
THX sound in theatres these days. Watching a movie nowadays is not just about being

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98 Eduardo Mendieta

assaulted visually, but also aurally — a common experience is that peculiar reverbera-
tion of our bodies we have as we leave a particularly fast movie. I know that Ihde has
written on sound, hearing, and listening. I think that this early work would contribute
greatly to a more balanced analysis of the virtual reality promise of contemporary
techno-utopianism.
The second set of concerns have to do with what I called earlier the primacy of
technology over science. There are some wonderful pages in Bodies in Technology that
reminded me of Henri Lefebvre, for instance, who in his book The Production of Space
correlates theory, perception, and technologies [3]. For Lefebvre, a new epistemolo-
gical outlook about space emerged with the invention of perspective, which, in turn,
intervened in the production of social space. This led Lefebvre to distinguish between:
the space of representation, the representation of space, and the space of praxis or
action. But, returning to Ihde, I think that he seems to be suggesting that since there
is a synchronicity between visualism in science, and the technologies of visual repres-
entation of scientific events, then there is a historical synchronicity among technological
regimes, imaging, and, by implication, theoretical models. I think this synchronisation
amongst the seen, how it is seen, and the episteme of the visual, is highly questionable.
As much as I am persuaded by Ihde’s prognosis that most of contemporary science has
fallen under the tyranny of the visual, I think that the history of the relationship
between what science studies, how it studies it, and how it theorises or conceives it is
far more fractious and asynchronous than Ihde allows for. And here I would like to rely
on Peter Galison to make a few points.
Peter Galison, in a recent essay, distinguishes between: first, the conditions of theoricity
(what must a theory exhibit and possess in order to count as reasonable and tenable
before it can be submitted to experimentation, or what counts as a theory of science);
second, the conditions of experimentality (what would count as corroboration or refuta-
tion of a theory, and what the terms are in which any kind of laboratory argumentation
must be couched; in other words, what counts as an experiment, and what are the
conditions for experiments to count as the tests of theories); and third, and finally, the
conditions of instrumentality (the material constraints of the production of laboratory
equipment for the testing of theories) [4]. In Galison’s view, a positivist periodisation
of scientific progress would be characterised by the continuity of observation, but a
discontinuity in theories, although these would be seen as building on the preceding
ones. In contrast, and keeping in mind the differentiation of conditions of theoricity,
experimentality, and instrumentality we would have a far more fragmented and disag-
gregated periodisation of science, technology, and scientific objects. Galison calls this
disaggregated and non-continuous periodisation ‘intercalated periodisation’. In the
terms I introduced earlier, I would call it a historical non-synchronicity among the
theories that may be formulated under a given epistemological regime, the technolo-
gical media for the embodiment of observation and perception, and the possible
conceptual and categorical schemata used to make sense of those observations and
theories. Thus, Galison points out that the conceptual break-throughs of 1905 (special
relativity), 1915 (general relativity), 1926 (non-relativistic quantum mechanics), and
1948 (quantum electrodynamics) were not accompanied by break-throughs in the
material cultures of instrumentation and experimentation.
I can illustrate this better with reference to the development in biology and astron-
omy in the last century. Biology lagged behind astronomy because theoretical models

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that relied heavily on non-experimental and non-observable criteria and elements guided
the former. The ideas of species, and phyla, were too abstract and non-testable. At
the same time, the conditions of materiality for experimentation were highly under-
developed. Specific experimental models were lacking, and instruments for their veri-
fication and testing were also absent. All of this changed when Crick and Watson
introduced the DNA theory. The DNA theory allowed scientists to formulate specific
theoretical models, and to begin formulating experimental methods and procedures.
In this way, biology underwent a major revolution. Biology became more scientific,
or its condition of theoricity was elevated. Now, the study of living organisms in terms
of anatomy and evolutionary differentiation started turning into biochemistry, mol-
ecular biology, and genetic biology. As the models about the nature of the living got
more theoretical and abstract, they could also begin to be represented visually and
mathematically. This in turn allowed for the development of more abstract and formal-
ised theories, which allowed biochemists to interact with other disciplines that relied
on such levels of formalisation and mathematisation. These interactions made it
possible for new conditions of instrumentality to be introduced. Thus, the analysis
of life turned into the analysis of genes, and then this in turn become an analysis
of molecules and their interactions. In time, the interactions among certain bases
and acids, proteins, and mega-molecules would be represented and visualised by
means of computer imaging and the translation of chemical reactions in terms of
colours and spectography. These advances in biology basically took place in the last
forty years. In contrast, astronomy always combined a high level of interaction amongst
the object of study, the instruments of its study, and the theories that offered models
about celestial bodies. As Freeman Dyson puts it in his wonderful, The Sun, the
Genome, and the Internet, astronomy could advance more rapidly, and earlier, than
biology because its theorists were also the makers of the machines and tools used to
test theories about celestial bodies [5]. The point I am trying to make is that there is
a non-synchronicity, or what Galison calls an intercalated periodisation, that prevents
the simultaneity among the conditions of instrumentality, the conditions of theoricity,
and the conditions of experimentality. This means that there are other factors that
intervene in the mediation between theories, laboratory practices, and the material
cultures that create a given technological milieu. And in this way synchronicity and
parallelism between the hegemony of the visual and the primacy of imaging techno-
logies as are entailed by Ihde are either untenable or require further clarification on
his part.
The third and final series of concerns have to do with Ihde’s distinction between
body one and body two. I take it that just as he places micro and macro-perceptions
in a continuum, he places the distinction between the Merleau-Pontian and Fou-
cauldian bodies on a continuum. Yet, a continuum is not exempt from the questions
that might be raised against a blunt juxtaposition. When do we make a shift from
the merely cultural to the purely phenomenological? Is there a way in which we can
continue bracketing what is merely cultural so as to arrive at the invariable matrix
of any phenomenological experiencing? Would Ihde agree, in other words, that there
is a way in which, if we continue pushing our reductions in the direction of the
phenomenological body, there would be a point at which we would arrive at some-
thing that is invariant, ultimate, and behind which there is no going? Furthermore,
would this ultimate phenomenological body correspond to the natural body, the body

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100 Eduardo Mendieta

to which we attribute sex, and not gender? And if Ihde accepts this, does he not open
himself to the following objections: is not what we call the ultimate (letzte) phenomeno-
logical body that which is not inflected or tainted by the cultural? In other words, is the
phenomenological body the alibi that allows us to question the travesties, tyrannies,
and foibles of the cultural body? And if this is the case, can one not say that body one
is but detritus, a projection, a figment of body two?
This objection may be diffused if we translate talk of body one and body two
into Ihde’s categories from his former book Technology and the Lifeworld [2]. There he
talks about ‘unmediated relations’, that is, relations that are not mediate by artifacts;
‘embodiment relations’ that are mediated by technological artifacts; and ‘hermeneut-
ical relations’, which are mediated by artifacts, but the artifact itself must be interpreted,
or mediated by a hermeneutical practice. Here talk of unmediated and mediated,
of artifact and absence of perceptual prostheses would suggest talk of subject and
object, in which the former is ontologically juxtaposed to the latter. In Ihde’s case,
however, this is not so, for what is thought to be a subject and an object are deter-
mined by their modes of interaction, or mediation. It is not the case that a technology
intervenes post facto to catalyse or bring about a transformation of something that
was pre-existent to their interaction. Instead, the subject as such is thought of only in
terms of the technologies of perception that allow it to be conceived as a certain object,
or realm of objects, in a particular way. This is best illustrated with the invention
of certain visual machines, like the camera obscura, which allowed us to conceived of
the subject as a cogito, and the object, as an ideal or mental representation of a
perception. Here I would like to quote Peter-Paul Verbeek, from his wonderful article
on Don Ihde’s work, ‘Mediation does not simply take place between a subject and an
object, but rather co-shapes subjectivity and objectivity . . . Human beings and the world
they experience are the product of technological mediation, and not just the poles
between which the mediation plays itself out.’ [6] If this is a fair representation of
Ihde’s views, then we should say that body one and body two ‘are products of tech-
nological mediation.’ It is only from the standpoint of a technological regime that
we can discover what is, or could be, body one. And in this way, body one becomes
the territory that is not reducible to the map, but which is always dependent on
the maps that represent it to speak its truth. And, if this is both a generous and
accurate representation of Ihde’s aims and theoretical inclinations, then I would sug-
gest that it is not that there are bodies in technology, but that we are bodies of technology.
Bodies in technology seem to presuppose that bodies are prior to their mediation
and interaction with the technology that suffuses and discloses our world for us. Yet,
the thrust of Ihde’s thinking in this book, as well as his earlier ones, is to show how
bodies are constituted by their technological mediation, and in this way the ‘in’ in
the title of his book seems to betray the best insights of his work. World and subject are
co-constituted through their technologically embodied interactions. For this reason,
we cannot talk of the body as something primordial and prior to its technological
embodiment, but only about the co-determination of body, technology, and world by
their interaction.

Eduardo Mendieta, The Philosophy Department, State University of New York at Stony
Brook, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA. eduardo.mendieta@stonybrook.edu

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 Book Symposium: Embodying Technoscience 101

NOTES
[1] D I (2002) Bodies in Technology (Minneapolis: MN, University of Minnesota Press).
[2] D I (1990) Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth (Bloomington, Indiana University
Press).
[3] H. L (1991) The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, Blackwell Publishers).
[4] P. G (2002) Material culture, theoretical culture, and delocalization, in J. W. Scott and D. Keats
(eds.) Schools of Thought: Twenty-five Years of Interpretive Social Science (Princeton, Princeton University
Press).
[5] F J. D (1999) The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet (Oxford, Oxford University Press).
[6] P-P V (2001) Don Ihde: the technological lifeworld, in Hans Achterhuis (ed.) American
Philosophy of Technology: The Empirical Turn, trans. Robert P. Crease (Bloomington, Indiana University
Press), p. 131.

Embodying Technoscience

EVAN SELINGER

It is a pleasure to comment briefly on Don Ihde’s latest book, not only because I have
worked closely with Don over the last four years, but also because he is one of the rare
philosophers to bring phenomenological and hermeneutic concerns to bear on the
topic of embodiment in a technoscientific context. I shall deal with this, then go on to
discuss epistemology engines.
Today the issue of embodiment, as it pertains to science and technology, is mostly
analysed by interdisciplinary investigators in the field of Science and Technology Stud-
ies (STS). They use methods from anthropology, ethnography, history, and sociology
to study scientific practice, including the body as it is situated in a material culture.
Sometimes they thematise the body in such a way that from a phenomenological
perspective one might say that STS investigators completely lose it. This happens
when: (1) the body is externalised and distributed into networks, and (2) when its
significance is reduced to the social structures that influence how bodily action is
interpreted. According to Peter Dear, the reason why many STS practitioners do not
follow a phenomenological trajectory is that they construe scientific experience as
sense-data mediated and augmented by countless arrays of socio-cognitive conven-
tions. They emphasise these conventions and their historical conditions of possibility in
order to show that empirical observations made by scientists are ultimately intersubject-
ively justified by mechanisms that are typically associated with appeals to political or
religious authority.
Despite the strong emphasis on social practices, there are still many instances in
STS research in which something like the trace of a phenomenological body exists.
Within STS there are numerous (explicit and implicit) references to Michael Polanyi’s
concept of tacit knowledge [1]. Tacit knowledge is found in cognitive processes and

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behaviours that are steered by features, such as intuition, that are inaccessible to con-
sciousness and propositional articulation. Put in traditional philosophical terms, tacit
knowledge corresponds to what Gilbert Ryle calls ‘knowing how’ and typically is
distinguished from ‘knowing that’, which is explicit theoretical knowledge [2]. The
reason why STS theorists rely on a notion of tacit knowledge is that many of their
analyses centre on the coordination of expert skill. As Hubert Dreyfus argues, experts
depend on tacit knowledge to perform skilfully [3]. Their fluid bodily movements are
not guided by deliberation or focused attention, but rather through the training of
affect and the experiential acquisition of contextual sensitivity, their actions becoming
immediate and intuitive situational responses. ‘Knowing-that,’ by contrast, involves
consciously accessible knowledge that can be articulated. It is not characteristic of
the expert, but rather, the person’s learning a skill through explicit instruction and
recitation of rules. It applies to someone who pays conscious attention to the economy
of his or her movements.
For example, Harry Collins recently sought to expand Polanyi’s classification of tacit
knowledge by broadening its range of application beyond skills to the production of
scientific results in empirically verifiable cases [4]. On the basis of field work in the
United States and observations of experimental work in Glasgow University, Collins
claims that the problem of tacit knowledge accounts for why twenty-year-old Russian
measurements of the quality factor (Q ) of sapphire have only just been repeated in
the U.S. Collins’ focus on tacit knowledge allows him to stress the epistemological
importance of personal contact and trust between scientists. It also allows him to
suggest that phenomenological information that is not currently contained in experi-
mental reports should be added to increase the likelihood of accurately reproducing
scientific findings.
Ihde recognises that STS investigations are problematic because they presuppose
and rely on an account of the tacitly performative body but they lack a robust account
of embodiment. In other words, they lack a structural understanding of the tactile
and kinaesthetic features of the body that make tacit knowledge possible. While they
detail some concrete instances of bodily praxis, they do not inquire into the embodied
conditions of actional possibility. From Ihde’s perspective, this oversight is not surpris-
ing. STS investigations correspond to what Heidegger calls ‘ontic analysis’ and as such
they lack ontological insight into what the body essentially is [5]. To discover this
primordial sense, one needs to turn to phenomenology, moving from Husserl and
Merleau-Ponty [6] to contemporary investigators such as Shaun Gallagher and Jonathan
Cole (who work on body image and body schema) [7], and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
(who works on inter-corporeality and intelligence in motion) [8].
Although Ihde is well versed in all of this literature, and, as do other phenomenologists,
believes that bodily action is the focal and necessary basis for human intelligence, I
would characterise some of his most recent goals as compementary but not akin to
theirs. To be sure, again like many phenomenologists, he distinguishes the phenomenolo-
gical body, which he calls ‘body one’ (i.e. the body that corresponds to our motile,
perceptual, and emotive being in the world) from the social and cultural body, which
he calls ‘body two’. Ihde also repeatedly emphasises that perception is always whole-
body-perception, which is to say, perception is structured not only by vision, but by all
the senses, and is experienced as a plenary gestalt in relation to an environment. Yet his
recent work, as exemplified by Bodies and Technology, adds historical, material, and

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social dimensions that are not often found, or at least not as explicitly developed, in
other phenomenological literature.
That Ihde’s interests differ from other phenomenologists’ can be seen in his recent
work on epistemology engines. ‘Epistemology engine’ is a phrase that Ihde uses to desig-
nate an interactive link between bodies and technologies. Here ‘episteme’ is used in
Foucault’s sense of the term. It refers to a historical period in which certain ideas about
knowledge are dominant even though an explicit understanding about the guiding
motifs that influence how this knowledge is configured may be lacking. The word
‘engine,’ which in everyday language refers to a machine that converts energy into
mechanical force or motion, is used by Ihde to designate how practical involvement
with technologies can put certain ideas into motion. This specific sense of engine is
best captured by a phrase often used by historians of technology: “Science owes more
to the steam engine than the stream engine owes to science.” This phrase suggests a
radical inversion between the traditional priority of theory over practice. Traditionally,
just as engineering is depicted as applied physics, technological innovation is char-
acterised as scientific spin-off. But in the case of the steam engine, technological
innovation inaugurated revolutionary changes in theoretical understanding. In particu-
lar, it paved the way for advances in calorific theory that in turn led to the development
of thermodynamics.
Put in philosophical terms, Ihde draws from the phenomenological insight that
practical coping precedes theoretical reflection. This is why he inquires into how
technologically mediated practical action can subsequently inform how theories, even
theories about the body, are configured. The main idea here is that the environment
in which one is immersed exerts a strong metaphorical influence over how most, if
not all, things that enter into that environment are interpreted. His recent work shows
how material practices can function as a pre-conscious springboard that shapes what
theorists imagine the body to be and how they imagine it to function. Thus, instead
of viewing the so-called history of philosophy principally as an intellectual history of
ideas, Ihde places it on a continuum with lifeworld activity. He provocatively suggests
that philosophical ideas can be generated from technologically meditated lifeworld
praxes. Although he may not be comfortable admitting it, Ihde’s outlook on the
genesis of ideas bears more than a superficial resemblance to materialist views of
history found in the Marxist tradition.
In Bodies in Technology Ihde investigates two epistemology engines: the camera obscura
and virtual reality technologies. In the first case, Ihde shows how the practical use of
the camera obscura (the phrase literally means ‘dark room’, and essentially describes a
pinhole camera that inverts images of light) as an object of amusement during the
Renaissance led to changes in how the body was theorised. Not only does Leonardo da
Vinci create a camera-eye analogue, and not only does Galileo use a variation to
discover sunspots, but as a guiding image it influences early modern epistemology in
both its rationalist and empiricist variants. As comments in La Dioptrique suggest,
Descartes’ model of the relation between mental substance and the external world are
modelled on the camera obscura. Ihde writes:

[The] modern subject is the homunculus inside the camera obscura. What
comes from the outside are the impressions from the res extensa that are cast
inside the box or body upon its receptor, the eye (retina) analogue where

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images form that represent the external world. So here, at a stroke, we have
invented early modern epistemology with its (a) individualized subject (b)
enclosed in an object-body, (c) thus creating a body/mind dualism (d) with no
direct knowledge of the external world, but a representational one by way of
images [9].

A similar process of epistemological modelling is found in Locke. His image of the

mind as tabula rasa, the white screen upon which are cast the representations of things
in the external world, displays features of the subject as a self inside the camera who
can only be aware directly of representations of the external world cast upon the
screen. By establishing a connection between the camera obscura and early modern
epistemology, Ihde not only tries to explain how technological use shapes an under-
standing of the body, but also how this understanding led to the modern mind-body
problem and the initial philosophical solution of positing a non-perspectival God who
served as the guarantor of an objective correspondence theory of truth.
From Ihde’s perspective, virtual reality technologies are the present-day variant of
the camera obscura and they can be said to influence the postmodern epistemological
positions endorsed by STS theorists who propose an ontological symmetry between
humans and non-humans. What exactly is this ontological symmetry? According
to Ihde, there are a number of ways in which STS theorists answer this question and
they can be placed on a continuum exhibiting strong and weak varieties. The prin-
cipal concern that STS researchers have with regard to non-humans is the view that
they traditionally have been misunderstood; their voices have been filtered through
the mediation of subject, which is to say human-centred analysis. Consequently,
some STS theorists try to deconstruct the privileging of a subject-centred analysis
by allowing non-humans to express themselves, treating them as ‘actants’ who, like
humans, affect the world through expressions of agency. Put in Merleau-Pontyian
terms, they try to allow the non-humans to ‘sing’ the world. But according to Ihde,
this STS strategy fails because it is bounded by the logic of anthropomorphic
projection.
Within the continuum of symmetry-oriented thinkers, Ihde notes the following rhe-
torical commonality that undergirds various descriptions: ‘Its voice is the well-known
anonymous voice of technical writing that (a) employs rigorous avoidance of all
anthropomorphisms, (b) is usually cast in terms of formal or abstract or, even better,
mathematical formulations, and (c) reduces all entities to variables within its system’
[10]. He finds this strategy extant in the cases of theorists pushing for strong symmetry.
For example, in his study of scallops, Michel Callon describes these mollusks as
needing to be ‘enrolled’ in order to ‘co-operate’ with fishermen [11]. Likewise, in
Bruno Latour’s study of Louis Pasteur, he discusses Pasteur’s need to form alliances
with microbes [12]. Ihde also find this strategy extant in cases where theorists push for
a weaker symmetry. For example, Andrew Pickering refers to the non-humans through
the idioms of ‘resistance’, ‘accommodation’, and the performative ‘dance of agency’
[13], and Donna Haraway frequently employs a strategy of grouping heterogeneous
terms under the unified figure of ‘cyborg’ [14]. Although these thinkers view them-
selves either as post-modern or as amodern, Ihde characterises them as caught in a
Cartesian framework. This is because: ‘(a) the perspective from which the symmetry is

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drawn is unknown, (b) the absence or transcendence of the narrator again creates a
god-trick of nonsituatedness, and (c) the question of for whom the system operates
also hides the politics of semiotic systems’ [15].
According to Ihde, the failure of these STS theorists runs parallel to the failure of
virtual reality to live up to the fantasies surrounding it. Ihde concedes that computer
games do in fact open up an ‘alterity relation in which the machinic entity becomes
a quasi-other or quasi-world with which the human actor relates’ [16]. He also admits
that the mediated structure of communication found in e-mail exchanges opens up
a ‘hermeneutic human-technology relation in that the machinic mediation presumably
refers to a real other of a sort and becomes in this case a kind of language-analog
mediation’ [17]. But in neither instance is the phenomenological body left behind
or the carnal and existential needs of the body supplanted, no matter how enthral-
ling these technologies may be. Humans can only use virtual reality technologies (or
any technology for that matter), because the human-technology relation is funda-
mentally parasitic upon bodily norms. In short, despite the hype surrounding virtual
reality, the lived body never totally fuses with the computerised one, which is to say
that ontological symmetry between the human and the non-human is never fully
established.
Finally, two minor criticisms. The first pertains to Ihde’s philosophy of embodiment.
I want to suggest that: (1) it is not nearly as descriptive as it could and perhaps ought
to be, and that (2) his own analysis of technology suggests as much. Merleau-Ponty’s
conception of the lived body came to be criticised by a number of theorists ranging
from Iris Marion Young [18] to Ihde himself for not being gendered and for being
too constrained by fantasies of active sportsmanship. In other words, his single version
of the lived body did not accord with many first-person experiences and as a result
did not accord with the primary standard of phenomenological justification. Although
he displays hermeneutic sensitivity and does not fall into Merleau-Ponty’s trap, Ihde
still leaves the reader with an all too undifferentiated, one might even say, generic
sense of the body. In the future I would like to see him expand his account so that he
pays closer attention to how the different types of apprenticeship that different bodies
go through influence prevailing attitudes towards technology.
Prima facie, some people find it easier to adapt to technological mediation than
others. Some people are willing to be seduced by utopian and dystopian technolo-
gical pronouncements. Some people are even willing to incorporate a strong cyborg
existence into their everyday routines. One might wonder, as I do, what separates the
former from the latter kinds of people. Perhaps it is simply a matter of individual
choice. Perhaps the issue is psychological and pertains to the rigidity and flexibility of
personality types. Perhaps sociologists and systems-theorists are the best people to
consult on this question since they can explain how desires and aversions are manu-
factured. But if the lifeworld is as important as Ihde claims, then there ought to be a
discernible connection between it and the choices that embodied agents gravitate
towards. Because Ihde eschews the broad social and normative analyses of technology,
it is conspicuous that he refrains from discussing why the lived body averts or is pulled
to some technological trajectories but not others.
For example, many senior citizens retired before computers were common in the
workplace. They are frequently depicted as scornful of the Information Age and

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106 Evan Selinger

too disdainful of change to adapt to computers. Yet, in some instances it is essential for
them to become computer-savvy in order remain connected with other people, special
interests, financial changes, and world events. Perhaps Ihde could analyse this situation
from an embodied perspective and show how what appears to be fear and stubbornness
is at bottom an embodied response to an environment that is unfriendly to them qua
embodied aged beings. For example, whereas the ability to see an icon or the cursor
being dragged can be taken for granted when teaching computer use to children, it
cannot be presupposed with many senior citizens whose visual realm may be severely
restricted. It would thus be interesting to see Ihde apply phenomenological variation to
different relations between bodily ease and views about technology.
My second criticism is one that Ihde has received for years and pertains to normativity.
Rather than rehashing the traditional complaints about how phenomenological invest-
igation is so descriptive that it leads to a lack of normative concern, I want to be specific
and return to the issue of ontological symmetry in the post-modern STS accounts.
Discussions of ontological symmetry suggest that a profound shift in perception about
the relation between humans and non-humans is in order. What Ihde does not discuss
is the degree to which this ‘agentic shift’ (to borrow a phrase from Stanley Milgram
[19]) is part of a metaphorical line of thinking whereby humans transfer responsibility
for an outcome from themselves to a more abstract agent. In classical Marxist analysis,
the concern over symmetry is expressed with regard to the alienation that ensued when
workers are treated like machines. Today, one might be inclined to say that the
problems associated with symmetry between machines and humans affect members of
all classes. An example from Neil Postman will concretize this point:
Through a curious form of grammatical alchemy, the sentence ‘We use the
computer to calculate’ comes to mean ‘The computer calculates.’ If a com-
puter calculates, then it may decide to miscalculate or not calculate at all.
That is what bank tellers mean when they tell you that they cannot say how
much money is in your checking account because ‘the computers are down.’
The implication, of course, is that no person at the bank is responsible.
Computers make mistakes or get tired or become ill. Why blame people? [20]
I would like Ihde to comment more in future on the ideological nature of symmetrical
thinking and address how it impacts not only on epistemological but also on moral
models. I suspect that this line of inquiry will move Ihde away from the issue of
symmetry entirely. It seems to me that we are in the midst of a historical shift in which
trust in human experts is becoming redistributed to trust in machine experts. Changes
in a number of areas that interest Ihde, from computer-modelled war simulators to
medical imaging, suggest that human decision-making is increasingly being depicted as
unreliable and too subjective, whereas standardised technologies are taken to eliminate
doubt, complexity, and ambiguity. Certainly this is an area in which phenomenologists
such as Dreyfus are interested. But for all of Dreyfus’s virtues, he is far too
phenomenological and not sufficiently hermeneutically sensitive. This makes the issue
of technological expertise even more pressing for Ihde to explore as new territory that
is continuous with his past work.

Evan Selinger, The Philosophy Department, State University of New York at Stony Brook,
Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA. eselinger@hotmail.com

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 Book Symposium: Bodies, Bodies Everywhere 107

NOTES
[1] M. P (1974) Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago, University of Chicago
Press).
[2] G. R (1984) The Concept of Mind (Chicago, University of Chicago Press).
[3] H. D and S. D (1986) Mind Over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in
the Era of the Computer (New York, Free Press).
[4] H. M. C (2001) Tacit knowledge, trust, and the Q of sapphire, Social Studies of Science 31, 71–85.
[5] M. H (1962) Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York,
Harper and Row).
[6] M. M-P (1962) Phenomenology of Perception, Trans. Collin Smith (New York, The Human-
ities Press).
[7] S. G and J. C (1988) Body image and body schema, in Donn Welton (ed.) Body and Flesh:
A Philosophical Reader (Oxford, Blackwell), 131–147.
[8] M. S-J (1999) The Primacy of Movement (Philadelphia, John Benjamins).
[9] D I (2002), pp. 72–73.
[10] Ibid., p. 79.
[11] M C (1986) Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and
the fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay, in John Law (ed.) Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of Know-
ledge (London, Routledge), 196–233.
[12] B L (1998) The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press).
[13] A. P (1995) The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago, University of Chicago
Press).
[14] D H (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York, Routledge).
[15] D I (2002), p. 80.
[16] Ibid., p. 81.
[17] Ibid., p. 82.
[18] I M Y (1998) Throwing like a girl, in Donn Welton (ed.) Body and Flesh: A Philosophical
Reader (Oxford, Blackwell Publishers), pp. 259–273.
[19] S M (1974) Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York, Harper and Row).
[20] N. P (1993) Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York, Vintage Books).

Bodies, Bodies Everywhere: Response to my Critics

DON IHDE

From the outset, I want to express my appreciation for the careful work my critics have
taken concerning Bodies in Technology. Eduardo Mendieta has shown himself to be
both a polymath and an in-depth critic by both extending relationships to others in the
field, and by going back at least as far as Technology and the Lifeworld [1] in his analysis
of this work. Evan Selinger has taken particular care to relate Bodies in Technology to
the latest of the conversation communities with whom I today relate, i.e., science
studies, STS, and technoscience.
My response will take only limited steps, beginning with some comments upon the
context of Bodies in Technology. My career began with interests in phenomenology,
but in particular, phenomenology of perception, both visual and auditory. By the 70’s

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108 Don Ihde

I had already discovered the role of technologies insofar as they mediate and transform
our very bodily relations to the Umwelt or experienced environment. So, by the late
70’s and throughout the 80’s I was re-identified as a ‘philosopher of technology’.
However, from the beginning I was particularly interested in the role of instrumenta-
tion in science and something of a turning point occurred with Instrumental Realism:
The Interface between Philosophy of Technology and Philosophy of Science [2]. This was a
turn towards philosophers of science, at least those who were interested in instruments
and experiment, and thus a new conversation community beyond those interested in
phenomenology. This trajectory continued and recently resulted in an attempt to
reframe much philosophy of science in a praxis and hermeneutic vein with Expanding
Hermeneutics: Visualism in Science [3]. Bodies in Technology, however, marks yet another
turn, this one aimed more at the interdisciplinary fields of science studies, and their
related areas. And, with each of these steps, one can identify different interlocutors as
well. What is at stake is a question concerning who shall interpret science. Scientists
rarely are good self-interpreters, and traditionally the history and philosophy of science
claimed this role. By the 80’s the social sciences began to make radical inroads into this
role as well and I, too, began to read in those areas.
Both Mendieta and Selinger have provided insightful analyses, and often highlighted
in complimentary, positive ways, some of the major themes of Bodies in Technology;
there is no need for me to respond to these. Instead, but not in order, I shall respond
to their criticisms: Selinger revives a general criticism which has been made about my
work over many years, the criticism that I neglect or do not forefront normative issues,
and he hints that this may be in part due to my adaptation of phenomenological and
hermeneutic descriptive methods. In part, I plead guilty to this criticism because it is
true that insofar as philosophy has as two of its thematic directions, epistemology on the
one side, and ethics on the other, I am simply more interested in the former. But,
mitigating this preference is also my recognition that normative issues, particularly as
seen from my understanding of phenomenology, are so complex that I can find no way
to make these issues as clear as I can the epistemological ones. I have repeatedly
argued that all technologies are multistable, that the history of technology shows repeat-
edly that there is a designer fallacy that reveals that technologies are rarely determined
solely by design intent. And, my trademark is one that eschews both the utopian and
dystopian generalisations too often made by my traditional forefathers. Where I have
addressed the normative, I have tried to demonstrate this complexity and there is some
of that in the philosophy of technology section of Bodies in Technology. The chapters on
prognosis and eco-philosophy show my basically pragmatic approach to the normative.
The criticisms that I find the most enjoyable to address, however, are two made by
Mendieta, the first of which relates to visualism in the sciences. Mendieta and Selinger
both recognise that a phenomenological account of the body is one which makes
‘whole body’ action and perception primary, and thus to ‘reduce’ attention to the
visual is to distort this holism of bodily experience. And, both also recognise that the
strong visualist traditions (still vestigial or worse in many sciences) belongs to early
modern ‘Cartesianism’. I recognise this historical sedimentation and see, even today, that
some sciences remain more ‘Cartesian’ than others. The homunculus in the camera
obscura of both Descartes and Locke remains alive and well, particularly in the cognit-
ive and neurological sciences of the day. The homunculus has merely retreated into
‘brain processes’ and away from the pituitary gland. It is no wonder then, that so many

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analytic philosophers, themselves still captive to early modern epistemology, have turned
to the cognitive sciences. But, it should be clear that this is not an epistemology which
I espouse. This does not mean that the sciences that remain caught in early modern
models should simply be rejected – as too many in my tradition tend to do – rather,
one should see how science praxis does not actually entail what vestigial Cartesianism
claims. Yes, science is visualist and perhaps even increasingly so. It takes virtually all
data, whether from auditory sources or sources beyond any of our bodily capacities,
and translates this data into visual form. Sonar pings, once auditory, are now visual dis-
plays; voice recognition becomes an oscilloscope pattern; X-ray emissions from Chandra,
beyond vision, become visualisable, and so on. I reframe this as a deep hermeneutic
practice. One must know how to translate, and one must know how to ‘read’ the
resultant patterns. I further argue, that what science has done with its preference for
the visual, is to have created an incredibly complex and subtle visual hermeneutics whose
‘writing’ is found, not in propositional texts, but in images and graphs which the crit-
ically trained ‘reader’ can interpret. (Much of this argument is to be found in Expanding
Hermeneutics: Visualism in Science, but is often back-referenced in Bodies in Technology.)
So, my response to Mendieta is that I am not a visualist myself, but I appreciate the
way in which the sciences have been able to make the visual ‘speak’ as well.
Mendieta’s second criticism, along a similar line, is more interesting. Here he uses
Peter Galison’s work to try to open a fissure in my close-linking of the material culture
of the lifeworld to the production of scientific theories. Galison, Mendieta points out,
argues that sometimes the instrumental material conditions for experiments are not
available when a theoretical break-through is made and that the three sets of conditions
are often more fragmented and disaggregated than most periodisers would claim [4].
Galison’s approach is one which dislikes both framework interpretations and period-
icity. Mendieta cites this disaggregation as belonging to several major breakthroughs
in twentieth-century micro-physics. I shall address only one of these here, the break-
though of special relativity of 1905, and use Galison against Galison to support my
own stance.
I would be foolish to challenge Galison’s grasp of the history of physics, and so I will
accept that the experimental conditions for trying special relativity might have been
lacking. But, if so, Galison seems to be implicitly holding out for an internal/external
division concerning material culture. That, in turn, perhaps belongs vestigially to his
own deeper immersion in the analytically driven philosophy of science of the last
century as well. My thesis has been that science remains immersed in the lifeworld and
the lifeworld is both historical-cultural and material cultural. Thus, in contrast to my
forefathers, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, science in my view does not leave the lifeworld,
but remains engaged and embedded in it. This is particularly seen better when the
weight of the focus turns towards material practices. So, back to Galison: from my
perspective, Galison’s ‘Einstein’s clocks: the place of time’, is a nearly perfect example
of the science-lifeworld interaction [5]. Paraphrased as succinctly as I can, what Galison
shows is that the standard myth about Einstein (that he, unable to get an academic job,
whiles away his time in the patent office while dreaming up special relativity on the
side) is wrong. Contrarily, the patents which were often under Einstein’s attention had
to do with clocks and railway schedules. How can one synchronise time throughout an
entire, material system, and thus avoid train wrecks, etc? Einstein realised that in the
actual material system, it takes time for a signal to arrive, the farther the source, the

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110 Don Ihde

more time involved, and through this the absolute space and time of Newton could not
hold. Instead, the ‘special relative’ space-time of signal travel time had to be taken into
account. This is indeed a shift in a space-time paradigm equivalent to the early modern
awareness that Aristotelian ideas of motion could also no longer hold when Galileo
observed the chandelier as a pendulum. But, it is also a shift precisely because it shows
the interaction with new configurations of material culture, i.e. clocks and railway
systems, which are also parallel to those of Galileo with ballistics, the pendulum, and
the telescope. Thus, Galison, without an internal/external difference in material cul-
ture, can easily be read as affirming a science-lifeworld interaction similar to that of my
own stance.
This point also reverberates with Selinger’s claim that my stance may be closer to
that of Marx than I acknowledge. Insofar as I see innovation as arising within the
context of a material culture, Selinger has a point. But, on the other side, the lifeworld
is not simply the material culture, but also includes historical-cultural and bodily
praxes. Nor is it to be construed as ‘determined’ by material culture or driven dom-
inantly by material culture alone. Returning again to the lifeworld-science theme, I
think I can more than meet Mendieta’s worries about astronomy and biology and their
relation to material or instrumental culture. There is a myth about the role of the
microscope and biology that claims that the microscope was never fully accepted as a
trustworthy instrument until the nineteenth century. Ian Hacking has contributed to
that myth with his famous article on microscopes and a quotation from Bichet to that
effect [6]. But, contrarily, as Catherine Wilson and Clara Pinto-Correia have shown,
the microscope was widely used and revealed multiple new insights from Leeuenhoek
onwards [7]. It remains true, however, that unlike the telescope, which in Galileo’s
hands drove early modern astronomy towards the Copernican solution over the Ptolemaic
one, the microscope was unable to resolve the largest controversy over reproduction
between the preformationists and the epigenecists. But it did do well in deconstructing
‘spontaneous generation’, and in showing that both male and female elements (sperm
and ova, visible under the microscope) were required for reproduction. Again, the new
science was one embodied in an instrumental technology. And, while Mendieta argues
that the new genetic sciences became ‘more scientific’ with the discovery of DNA and
the identification of micro-processes available only since the mid-twentieth century,
the same reference to instrumentation needs to be noted – Rosalyn Franklin’s x-ray
crystallography was the imaging device which revealed the two-strand helix [8].
Astonomy is even more dramatic in that until the mid-twentieth century, all as-
tronomy was optical and limited to the frequencies of light. When radar led to radio
astronomy and a Nobel Prize was given for identifying the background radiation of
the universe, and later when instruments began to provide emission patterns ranging
from gamma to radio waves, well beyond the limits of optical telescopy, we are again
immersed in the embodiment of science in its technologies. Thus, I claim, I do not need
to modify my claims about the role of science essentially embodied in its technologies.
Both Mendieta and Selinger also note that my deconstruction of Cartesianism, on
one side, applies in a different way to certain strands of postmodernism on the other.
Bodies in Technology is a sustained argument against the symmetries found in the
semiotic derived varieties of postmodernism. It is that symmetry which is preferred by
some major thinkers in science studies and these are engaged in the chapters related to
them.

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 Book Symposium: Bodies, Bodies Everywhere 111

Finally, I want to turn to the most painful of the criticisms, Selinger’s criticism that
I must go farther with differentiating amongst bodily styles or types. He recognises that
I have joined the feminists in noting that the forefathers, Merleau-Ponty, and also
Heidegger, recognise only a generic body and that this is most likely masculine. Iris
Young and Susan Bordo have done better than I in both making this clear and in
providing nuanced phenomenological descriptions of feminine bodily comportments
[9]. Selinger gets me, though, with the aging body. He argues that the generational gap
between the young and computers and the aged and computers, may be partially
related precisely to bodily comportments and abilities and not simply to generational
familiarity. While it is obviously technologically possible to have a larger reading font,
perhaps a better keyboard, and all sorts of developments which take into account aging
capacities, typically manufacturers do not market to this populace, but continue to
produce one-size-fits-all. Thus, who benefits, who is left out, and who is kept in, may
have indexical relations to embodiment as well. I admit that, and reluctantly even
conclude that, a phenomenology of aging embodiment is called for. That’s painful.
What I wanted to do in Bodies in Technology, particularly in the light of the sym-
metric semantical theories so popular in science studies, was to re-inject concern for
embodiment both in its concrete, sensory dimensions, and in its cultural hermeneutics.
I am grateful that both my critics understood this aim and have shown, in their own
examples, the relevance of these notions for technoscience today.

Don Idhe, The Philosophy Department, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony
Brook, NY 11794, USA. dihde@notes.cc.sunysb.edu

NOTES
[1] D I (1990) Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth (Bloomington, Indiana University
Press).
___________ (1979) Technics and Praxis: A Philosophy of Science, Boston Series in the Philosophy of
Science, volume 24, and Sythese Library (Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers).
___________ (1983) Existential Technics (Albany, NY: SUNY Press).
___________ (1993) Philosophy of Technology: An Introduction (St. Paul, Minn., Paragon House).
___________ (1993) Postphenomenology: Essays in the Postmodern Context (Evanston, Northwestern Univer-
sity Press).
[2] D I (1991) Instrumental Realism: The Interface between Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Techno-
logy (Bloomington, Indiana University Press).
[3] D I (1998) Expanding Hermeneutics: Visualism in Science (Evanston, Ill., Northwestern University
Press).
[4] P. G (2002) Material culture, theoretical culture and delocalization, in Joan W. Scott and Debra
Keats (eds.) Schools of Thought: Twenty-five Years of Interpretive Social Science, edited by (Princeton,
Princeton University Press).
[5] P. G (2000) Einstein’s clocks: the place of time, Critical Inquiry, 26:4, 355–389.
[6] I H (1983) Representing and Intervening (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), p. 169.
[7] C. W (1995) The Invisible World (Princeton, Princeton University Press) and C. P-C
(1997), The Ovary of Eve (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). Both are excellent histories of the
microscope.
[8] J. W (1995) The Double Helix (New York, New York Academy of Science).
[9] Descriptions by both Iris Young and Susan Bordo may be found in Donn Welton (1999) (ed.) Body and
Flesh (Oxford, Blackwell Publishers).

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