Body

History

Tobias Rees:

"Were humans always bodies? At the very least one could ask when, historically speaking, did the concept of the body first emerge? When did humans first come up with a concept of the body and thus experience themselves as bodies? What work was necessary –– from physiology to philosophy –– for this emergence? To ask this question requires the readiness to expose oneself to the possibility that the category of the body and the analytical vocabulary that is contingent on this category is not obvious. There might have been times before the body –– and there might be times after it. For example, if one reads books about ancient Greece, say Bruno Snell’s The Discovery of the Mind, one learns that archaic Greek didn’t have a word for what we call the body. The Greeks had a word for torso. They had two words for skin, the skin that protects and the skin that is injured. They had terms for limbs. But the body, understood as a thing in itself, as having a logic of its own, as an integrated unit, didn’t exist."

(https://www.histhum.com/kinds-of-uncertainty-on-doubt-as-practice/)