Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad offers illuminating new perspectives on contemporary phenomenological theories of body and subjectivity, based on studies of classical Indian texts that deal with bodily subjectivity. Examining four texts from different genres - a medical handbook, epic dialogue, a manual of Buddhist practice, and erotic poetry - he argues for a 'phenomenological ecology' of bodily subjectivity in health, gender, contemplation, and lovemaking. An ecology is a continuous and dynamic system of interrelationships between elements, in which the salience accorded to some type of relationship clarifies how the elements it relates are to be identified. The paradigm of ecological phenomenology obviates the need to choose between apparently incompatible perspectives of the human. The delineation of body is arrived at by working back phenomenologically from the world of experience, with the acknowledgement that the point of arrival - a conception of what counts as bodiliness - is dependent upon the exact motivation for attending to experience, the areas of experience attended to, and the expressive tools available to the phenomenologist. Ecological phenomenology is pluralistic, yet integrates the ways experience is attended to and studied, permitting apparently inconsistent intuitions about bodiliness to be explored in novel ways. Rather than seeing particular framings of our experience as in tension with each other, we should see each such framing as playing its own role according to the local descriptive and analytic concern of a text.

About the Author
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy at Lancaster University, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of six books and some fifty papers. Divine Self, Human Self (Bloomsbury) won the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies Best Book Award 2011-15.

Reviews
I do not think that there is any better way for those of us who read, live, and love in the material world to bring the body alive in its relationship with that world, with edges smudging, sometimes hardening, sometimes vanishing in its perceptions of pleasure, bliss, and pain. * Martha Ann Selby, Harvard University, Journal of the American Oriental Society *
Extraordinary, demanding, and often moving book * Sonam Kachru, University of Virginia, Philosophy East & West *
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad's provocative book comprises four excellent independent studies in comparative philosophy. Each can be picked up in any order and read independently of the others. ... The exegeses of the four texts are compelling, and Ram-Prasad is successful in showing us their contemporary relevance. * Arun Iyer, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *
In this excellent book Ram-Prasad (comparative religion and philosophy, Lancaster Univ., UK) asks how the body, as a conceptual category, is central to human experience. Summing up: Recommended * CHOICE *



Book Information
ISBN 9780192856920
Author Pofessor Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad
Format Paperback
Page Count 224
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 336g
Dimensions(mm) 232mm * 156mm * 12mm