How humans have felt and thought about the body-our bodies-has never been static. Rather, it has shifted across times and cultures, taking and losing definition due to any number of forces and trends-philosophical, religious, cultural, technological. Sometimes we imagine our identity purely as an extension of our fleshly self and its assemblage of functions, organs, and appendages, sometimes as something entirely separate and discrete-trapped as opposed to defined by our "mortal coil," as Hamlet frames it in his famous soliloquy. So, too, over time, our ideas about what constitutes the...
How humans have felt and thought about the body-our bodies-has never been static. Rather, it has shifted across times and cultures, taking and losing ...