The concept of the body has emerged as one of the most important areas of recent philosophical inquiry. Continental thinkers, beginning with the phenomenologists, began to rethink this important concept and to develop alternatives to traditional analytic reductionist attempts to characterize the body in mere physical or biological terms.

This volume begins with selections from phenomenological writings of Edmund Husserl, Martin Hidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. These selections are accompanied by essays from Donn Welton, Elmar Holenstein, David Levin, Anthony J. Steinbock and Drew Leder (Part I). The phenomenological accounts have been supplemented, perhaps replaced, by the psychotropic and genealogical analyses of Jacques Lacan and Michael Foucault (Part II), and by the semiological analysis of the gendered body offered by Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray (Part III). The theories of these important yet difficult thinkers are
Discussed in seminal essay by Charles Bonner, alphonso Lingis, Judith Butler, Kelly Oliver, and Tina Chanter.