The Primacy of Movement

Through diligent and rigorous attention to both natural history and phenomenological accounts of kinetic phenomena, particularly the phenomenon of self-movement, this richly interdisciplinary book brings to the fore the long-neglected topic of animate form and with it, a long-neglected inquiry into the significance of animation. It addresses methodological and foundational issues at length. In its detailed and extensive examinations and analyses of movement — which range from Aristotle’s recognition of motion as the principle of nature to a critique of the common notion of movement as change of position, from critiques of present-day materialists’ trivializations of movement as mere output to kinesthetically-tethered accounts of the qualia of movement, from expositions of an evolutionary semantics and of the tactile-kinesthetic body as generative source of corporeal concepts to expositions of thinking in movement and of the pan-human phenomenon of learning to move oneself — this book lays out in ground-breaking ways fundamental epistemological and metaphysical dimensions of animate life. (Series A)