Peter Westmoreland

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Vicar in Emile provides a phenomenological model for the co-constitution of self and world out of experiences as they emerge in the first person perspective. Self and world or non-self are intertwined in experience. Self is a spontaneous activity that differentiates and selects items given in experience as belonging to it based on how those items are given: by feelings or sentiments originating in the self or by sensations originating in the external world. Making this differentiation is not easy due to the interpenetration of self and world. Self constitutes itself according to ontological categories of mind and body that sort the sentiments. Self is constituted as a union of mental and bodily sentiments. Self constitutes the world according to how sentiments orient it toward the world and how sensations give the world to the self.

This chapter critically examines current conceptualization of handedness in laterality studies. It shows that researchers define handedness as the preference of or skill in using one hand rather than the other across various common activities: writing, throwing, etc. However, this approach is inherently right hand biased: because researchers define handedness according to hand use and hand use is biased toward the right hand, the definition of handedness is right hand biased as well. I argue further that a phenomenological model based in spatial orientation rather than hand use provides a more inclusive concept of handedness. Importantly, the key to understanding handedness is not to focus on which hand one uses, but on how one uses one’s hands in space. I also identify several structures of experience of handedness, including dexterocentrism (the world is oriented around right hand use), dexteronormativity (one “should” use the right hand for various activities), and manual frustration (the inability to express one’s handedness because of dexterocentrism).

This chapter brings handedness to bear on sex, gender, and sexual orientation. It focuses on two well-established empirical facts. First, women are more likely to be right-handed than men. Second, heterosexuals, and especially heterosexual women, are more likely to be right-handed than non-heterosexuals. This chapter seeks to explain those two phenomena. First, it develops a comparison of handed body comportments to Iris Young’s masculine and feminine body comportments. This analysis reveals an intersection of differing handed and gendered body norms. Second, it uses that analysis to argue that the intersection of norms of handedness, gender, and sexual orientation constrains women and non-heterosexuals more deeply than men and heterosexuals.

This chapter focuses on handedness and throwing in several sports. Thinkers conceive the differences between left- and right-handedness in sports via a “nature” versus “nurture” framework, understood here as either innate brain superiority or a scarcity advantage that left-handers possess because of their low numbers relative to right-handers. I argue that the perceived advantage of left-handers often results from differing movement styles rather than scarcity or brain traits. Moreover, I argue that left-handed players commonly face disadvantages because of their movement and that even sports reliant on ostensible symmetry in play can exhibit significant right hand bias. I suggest specific training foci that would allow left-handers more success. This analysis shows that the conceptual apparatus developed in the first part of this book is robust enough to yield insights for practical, physical phenomena.

This chapter continues investigation of potential harms of handedness. It draws ideas from several feminist theories to develop a preliminary framework to evaluate the severity of multiple forms of harm to which left-handers are subjected ranging from stereotypes in biological research to social stigmatization to impediments related to body schematization. It argues that we can plausibly compare left-handers to oppressed minorities, even if harms of handedness differ significantly from those that paradigmatically oppressed groups face.

This chapter focuses on the lived experience of handedness, especially left-handedness. It argues that left- and right-handers are not mirror image identical. Quantitatively, left-handers use their right hands more than right-handers use their left hands. Qualitatively, left-handers make much more use of lateral space near the body than right-handers do. Yet, left-handers are required to “act like a right-hander,” meaning they are constrained in their use of lateral space, permitted to use it only in those cases where right-handers also use lateral space, such as when throwing. There are no examples of the opposite phenomenon, where right-handers are asked to follow a left-handed norm. The chapter thus shows the depth of dexteronormativity and begins to illuminate structural inequalities that non-right-handers face, particularly through the concept of “misfit.”

This chapter provides background information about this book’s philosophical approach to handedness. It argues against a purely instrumental conception of the hand in order to shift focus to the hand’s meaning-making role in the dynamic interaction of self and world. Handedness presents an asymmetry in this meaning-making ability. The chapter then defines this book’s use of the phenomenological method and some of its basic concepts: lived space, the lived body, corporeal or body schematization, anchoring, and maximal grip. It concludes with an outline of the overall structure of the book.

This chapter seeks to explain why it is more difficult to discriminate between left and right than between up and down or front and back. It analyzes how four key figures have thought about laterality in twentieth-century philosophy: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Samuel Todes, Ed Casey, and David Morris. The result is a thoroughgoing phenomenology of asymmetry that studies how self and world engage each other across these directional dyads. This phenomenology both situates handedness within a recent philosophical tradition and provides an answer to the question of how we differentiate directions. It also offers a theory of perception for which scientists and other theorists must account in their study of left and right.

Philosophers struggle to identify a conception of race in Descartes’s philosophy. Yet, Descartes was not wholly silent on matters of foreign ethnicity and identity. This paper compares Descartes’s various statements on savages and barbarians, which have never been methodically analyzed. A tensive view emerges across several texts wherein Descartes asserts that all persons are rational while simultaneously presuming the epistemic inferiority of the foreign other construed as “savage” or “barbarous.” Further examination indicates that prejudice against this foreign other is endemic to both Descartes’s epistemology and his conception of the mind-body union.

This book delivers philosophy’s first sustained examination of handedness: being left-handed, right-handed, etc. It engages literature from phenomenology and continental philosophy, analytic philosophy, laterality studies, cognitive science and psychology, gender studies and feminist philosophy, sociology, political science, and more to provide a systematic accounting of the nature of handedness, its basis in lived experience, its effects on bodily performance, its role in varieties of inequality, and its part in oppression and liberation. As a radical asymmetry in the body, handedness plays a key role in human flourishing. It informs both personal bodily movement and social life, from handshakes and high fives to high tech tools made for one hand or the other. Moreover, with left-handers making up just 10% of the population, handedness presents a significant inequality in lived experience. To live and live well, we must understand handedness.

This paper provides a philosophical evaluation of the concept of handedness prevalent but largely unspoken in the scientific literature. This literature defines handedness as the preference or ability to use one hand rather than the other across a range of common activities. Using the philosophical discipline of phenomenology, I articulate and critique this conceptualization of handedness. Phenomenology shows defining a concept of handedness by focusing on hand use leads to a right hand biased concept. I argue further that a phenomenological model based in spatial orientation rather than hand use provides a more inclusive concept of handedness.

Rousseau's Savoyard Vicar makes creative use of Descartes's meditative method by applying it to practical life. This ?misuse? of the Cartesian method highlights the limits of the thinking thing as a ground for morality. Taking practical philosophy as first philosophy, the Vicar finds bedrock certainty of the self as an agent in the world and of moral truths while distancing himself from Cartesian positions on the distinction, union and interaction of mind and body. Rousseau's Moral Letters harmonize with the Vicar's view. Descartes would reject the Vicar's appropriation, as real-life problems cannot wait on meditation to answer them

Silence, Implicite et Non-Dit chez Rousseau/Silence, the Implicit, and the Unspoken in Rousseau prend acte d'un grand nombre de publications ayant trait à l'analyse par Rousseau des langues et du langage, de la parole par rapport à l'écriture, de la voix (y compris la voix de la nature). Mais ce volume se consacre tout particulièrement au fonctionnement et aux effets du silence, de l'implicite et du non-dit dans la pensée de Rousseau. Son approche est à la fois polyvalente et cohérente, et ses réflexions sur le silence sont associées à d'autres préoccupations esthétiques, politiques, et morales de son œuvre. Silence, Implicite et Non-Dit chez Rousseau/Silence, the Implicit, and the Unspoken in Rousseau capitalizes on a great number of publications dealing with Rousseau's analysis of languages and language, speech versus writing, of voice (including the voice of nature). But this volume is particularly dedicated to the study of the functioning and the effects of silence, the implicit and the unspoken in Rousseau's thought. His approach is both polyvalent and consistent, and his reflections on silence are associated with other aesthetic, political, and moral concerns in his work.

90% of human beings are right-handed. Naturally, the human world is dexterocentric, or designed for encounter with the right hand. Moments of this right hand bias are widely recognized, and, through devices such as left-handed scissors, coffee mugs, and wooden spoons, non-right-handers fi nd accommodation. From the perspective of one-off accommodations, however, the extent of right hand bias is unclear. This paper offers a unifying framework for understanding right hand bias. It focuses not on which hand is used, but on how the hands are used in space. This is a novel approach to laterality studies. I first argue that differences in how left and right-handers inhabit space entail dissimilar left and right-handed body comportments. I next argue that the norms governing spatiality conform to the right-handed comportment, yet apply to all. I conclude that right hand biased norms are pervasive. We can next ask if they are oppressive.

Tensions between sentiments and reason are a well-known feature of Rousseau’s moral theory. To explain these tensions, this paper appeals to Rousseau’s moral foundationalism. In this foundationalism, I argue, feeling and reason operate jointly to establish the content and normativity of moral law. This joint operation is not always smooth, and additionally there is much leeway in this theory, which explains the theory’s ability to accommodate various interpretations and emphases as well as its struggle to delimit specific moral laws, choices, and actions. The most important element of this foundationalism is conscience, which does the work of voicing moral laws with content and normativity grounded in moral sentiments.