“Leder here offers a truly creative and compelling study of the nature of distressed embodiment. He identifies one of the key culprits in the mistreatment of humans and animals to be the Cartesian-rooted notion that a fundamental divide exists between mind and body. This, Leder argues, often leads people to consider our own and others’ bodies as passive, commodifiable, machine-like, and/or alien. Leder’s descriptions and diagnoses of these problematic conceptions are truly eye-opening, and he offers rich resources for thinking anew the nature of embodied reality and the many ways we have for recuperating a more holistic relationship to embodiment.”

Kirsten Jacobson, University of Maine

“Leder invites his reader to focus anew upon the distress, in its full measure of harshness and complexity, of those who find themselves ill. Their plight, Leder emphasizes, has not disappeared, no matter how scientifically enlightened or technologically effective medical practices have become. The investigations that follow offer the fruits of a lifelong engagement on the part of their author into how a phenomenological account of the body is crucial for (re)orienting medicine to its core missions of diagnosis, treatment, and healing. With a novelist’s eye for telling detail but a tone of intimacy with the reader that is uncommon for philosophical texts, he invites us into the philosophical equivalent of medical consultation and demonstrates that working out the paradoxes involved when living bodies are treated by other living bodies is crucial if medicine is to remain true to its charge of healing those who suffer.”

James Hatley, Salisbury University