Embodiment and Mechanisation: Reciprocal Understandings of Body and Machine from the Renaissance to the Present

Abstract

This book explores the interaction between mechanistic beliefs about human bodies and the successive technologies that have established and illustrated these beliefs. Drawing upon newer perspectives on technology and embodied human thought it provides a position from which widely held assumptions about our relationship with technology can be understood and questioned, by both showing how these presuppositions have emerged and developed, and examining the extent to which they are dependent upon our grasp of specific technologies