Artificial agents sometimes elicit surprisingly strong emotional responses, ranging from care and sympathy to discomfort or moral concern, for example in reactions to the mistreatment of robots. This chapter asks why such reactions arise at all and how humans come to engage empathically with artificial agents. We address this question by conceptualizing empathy not as a purely inferential process, but as an embodied and relational phenomenon grounded in bodily awareness, intersubjectivity, and social presence. Drawing on psychological, neuroscientific, and developmental research, we suggest that physical embodiment plays a critical role in scaffolding empathic responses, making embodied agents more likely to be engaged with as socially significant than virtual or disembodied counterparts. This perspective also allows us to examine what embodiment contributes to social interaction more broadly. We conclude by considering the practical and ethical implications of empathic engagement with artificial agents for social life, collaboration, and care.

Chapter 4 uses the figure of the mirror as a way into questions of mimesis, by which I mean sensuous, contact-based imitative practice, rather than “realistic” representation. This chapter theorizes what I call “mirror games,” which are embodied mimetic performances that find Bechdel experimenting with the space between self and other, subject and object. These games are about negotiating what it means to be her own person, a person who comes out of the body of her mother but who lays claim to a separate self. Is there a mode of mimetic reproduction that is enabling rather than annihilating? I investigate Bechdel’s corporeal, sensuous relationship to mimesis at three sites: photography, diaries, and symbolic play. At each site, Bechdel negotiates her similarity to, and her difference from, whatever it is she is copying: her mother’s face, her father’s photo album, a parent’s handwriting. The line is touch, caress; the line is also an edge that marks distinction, dividing this and that, me and you. Through these procedures, Bechdel develops a relational self that passes through alterity, as through the looking glass.

The theology of the incarnation set out in Chapter 12 depends upon the Spirit for its life. In this chapter, I set out something of the pneumatology that is involved. I begin with a speculative depiction of the Spirit’s role in the eternal Godhead, and then transpose that depiction into a series of new settings, moving in turn to the doctrines of creation, incarnation, salvation, and the eschaton. Under each heading I expound the Spirit’s role as the one who unfolds for us the gift of God’s inexhaustible life of love, and draws creatures into that life. I emphasise the ways in which, in doing all this, the Spirit characteristically works with bodies, in all their materiality, temporality, and diversity. Finally, I speak about the limitations upon our reception of the gift that the Spirit is laying out for us – the inherently fragmentary and provisional nature of any one form of reception, and the fallibility and corruption that characterise all forms of reception this side of the eschaton.

This chapter focuses on gender identity. I begin by exploring the gendered complexity of devotion to Jesus in the Christian tradition, from the gospels to the present day. With the help of a variety of trans theologians, I then return to the idea that in Christian devotion the Spirit gathers people in all the complexity and richness of their embodied existence around the imagined body of Jesus. I ask again what it means to negotiate such bodily life in relation to Jesus in the light of all the affordances and resistances provided by our bodies and by his. The movement for trans, non-binary, and queer liberation provides an opportunity to see how, in this ongoing and unfinishable negotiation, we are all discovering the possible ways of living in, with, and as our bodies, at every level from our chromosomes to the patterns of our feelings and our capacities for certain kinds of experience. This is a negotiation that involves each of us in the discovery and articulation of our own gender identity, and in the invention of forms of community life that will do justice to what we are discovering.

I suggest that embodied life is necessarily a matter of negotiation with the affordances and resistances both of our own bodies and of all that surrounds us. I suggest that those negotiations always involve our imaginations, which provide us with our sense of the forms of engagement that might be possible with all these bodies. I suggest that to know another living being well is always, in its fullest sense, a matter of knowing how one might live well with them, or of knowing how you might arrange a habitable life together with them in the light of the affordances and resistances that you each offer and that you encounter together in the world. Finally, I suggest that there is always more to be known of any given body, and that each body has a depth or interiority to it that comes into view only over the whole endless sequence of forms of life that can be woven with it. Bodies are, inherently, inexhaustible.

This chapter offers an interpretative phenomenology of functional neurological disorder (FND) by attempting to get a sense of ‘what it means’ and ‘what it feels like’ to live with the disorder. Drawing on the author’s own experience as well as first-person accounts from recent qualitative and phenomenologically informed research, the chapter explores the long and difficult journey to get a diagnosis for a neurological disorder that is incompatible with neurological disease and sheds light on how the symptoms of FND can fundamentally alter the meaning-structures that constitute subjectivity. The chapter focuses specifically on the emotion of shame, exploring how shame is both embodied and intersubjective and the extent to which it can disrupt and modify our experience of space and time. The chapter concludes by introducing the concept of ‘vulnerabilisation’ and how the complex, highly specialised, and bureaucratised structure of the healthcare system can cause iatrogenic harm by delegitimising patient experiences and creating unnecessary obstacles for accurate diagnosis and appropriate treatment. The aim is to illuminate the emotional and experiential complexity of the condition, the damaging toll symptoms can take on one’s self-understanding and way of being-in-the-world, and the additional harms the healthcare system can inflict on patients.

This chapter explores the intersection of Aristotle’s virtue ethics and Husserl’s phenomenology within the context of dementia research, emphasising the concept of habits. By introducing curability as the counter-pole to vulnerability, the chapter highlights a shift towards integrating medical and philosophical perspectives. It argues that embodied practices, regarded as meaningful, are key in both preventing and treating dementia. Through Aristotle’s ethics, the chapter examines malign habitualisation in touch with the preventive turn. Here, the vice of intemperance is related to excessive alcohol consumption, alcohol dependence, and Korsakoff’s dementia. Through Husserl’s phenomenology, the chapter examines the power of benign habitualisation, connecting embodiment, narrativity, and affectivity. Drawing on a video of Marta Cinta, a former ballerina with Alzheimer’s, the chapter rethinks influential concepts, such as narrative identity and second nature, through the lens of embodiment. The chapter ultimately demonstrates that embodied habits, when perceived as meaningful, can aid in balancing health, well-being, and eudaimonia. Focusing on the affective sphere, the study contemplates whether we can still feel home in embodied habits despite dementia.

This chapter reconceives core symptoms of schizophrenia by shifting the explanatory centre of gravity from putative structural breakdowns of time-consciousness to its affective distortion as rooted in the living, situated body. Drawing on Heidegger’s existential temporality and Merleau-Ponty’s embodied, social and psychopathological temporality, the authors propose ‘schizophrenic vulnerability’ as a world-involving mode of dysregulation in which affective ‘irruptions’ alter saliency and meaning in past–present–future relations without abolishing structure itself. This argument unfolds across six progressive steps: a critical review of clinical phenomenology’s shift from structural to affective accounts of time, exegetical analyses of relevant notions in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, schizophrenia’s prodromal phase, embodied affective temporality in schizophrenia, intersubjective affective temporality in schizophrenia, and a case study of ‘mission delusions’ in which an affectively charged future mandate reorganises existential time. The chapter concludes by emphasising a perspective that situates schizophrenia at the mind–body–world interface, deepening dialogue between phenomenology and psychiatry.

This chapter introduces the philosophical rationale for investigating emotions in their dimensions of embodiment and existential vulnerability, drawing on phenomenology, psychopathology, and psychotherapy as complementary perspectives. Grounded in phenomenology and enactivism, it argues that emotions are essentially embodied, intersubjective phenomena through which we experience the world as meaningful in the first place. According to this approach, emotions cannot be adequately captured by cognitivist or appraisal-theoretic frameworks alone but must be explored in their embodied dimensions and intertwinement with existential vulnerability. This constitutive vulnerability is described as an ontological condition rooted in the lived body, its essential exposure to others and contingency. The Introduction surveys contemporary philosophy of emotion, mapping competing accounts across cognitive, perceptual, feeling-based, and motivational theories, before arguing that all tend to consider the richness of the lived body insufficiently. The volume’s three parts address the experiential richness of the lived body by moving from phenomenological analyses of emotional life and vulnerability, through psychopathological perspectives, to the transformative role of embodied emotions in psychotherapy. The Introduction thereby establishes embodiment as the conceptual bridge integrating emotion theory, psychopathology, and psychotherapy into a unified inquiry of emotions as a central aspect of human vulnerability.

The four symphonies of Michael Tippett occupy a central position in his output. Written at different stages in his compositional career, each symphony not only functions as an important waypoint along Tippett’s stylistic journey, but also has something of significance to express, whether that concerns the genre itself and its relationship to past composers and models, the human condition, or contemporary society. The concept of humanity is central to Tippett’s oeuvre; in interrogating this humanistic element, this chapter examines Tippett’s four symphonies (and the withdrawn early Symphony in B♭) through a triple lens of narrative, agency and embodiment, an approach driven not only by the immediacy of the symphonies’ communicative musical language, but also through a recognition of Tippett’s views of symphonic music as reflecting the ‘inner flow of life’. The chapter argues that listening for narratives of agency and embodiment brings new light, and life, to Tippett’s symphonies and acts as a powerful reminder of what it is to be human.

This chapter provides a critical reflection on past and current research on ethnic and racial discrimination and youth development with recommendations for future research directions. First and foremost, I emphasize the need for positionality, reflexivity, and representational ethics to avoid advancing false or problematic narratives and to advance research that is more transparent and accountable. It also is necessary to distinguish and better contextualize ethnic discrimination (rooted in ethnocentrism) and racial discrimination (rooted in modern imperialism and White supremacy) rather than conflate these two constructs and measure them in ahistorical ways. These considerations require researchers to select or develop critically appropriate measurement tools, moving beyond commonly used measures that may not be relevant or appropriate to all racialized groups. Ethnic and racial discrimination during youth development requires special considerations, as discrimination coincides with identity formation and pubertal development. Yet there remains limited research on the ways in which these developmental tasks and experiences interplay. Given the complexities of how ethnic and racial discrimination manifest during youth development, researchers may want to consider novel methods like storytelling to embody discriminatory experiences and strengthen ecological validity.