The inquiry moves to the context of the Modern turn and places particular emphasis on the content of Descartes’ metaphysics with its consequential “object” body. Offered as a heuristic genealogy of the body through Western history of philosophy and medicine, this inquiry begins with exploration of the diverse influences that shape classical Greek views of the body, ultimately rendering an “anatomical” body. An expressive body is an organismic whole, a living-lived interactive field of activity. With the support of Jonas’ biophilosophy of life, Levin’s invocation of the ontological body, and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of “flesh,” along with the life–mind continuity theory and participatory epistemologies, this dissertation proposes an expressive ontology of the body and posits that such an ontology may shift Western attitudes toward flourishing. This theoretical inquiry offers a critique of epistemologies of the body that originate in philosophy and in medicine as theorized and practiced in the West. The paper finally suggests that the structural connection made here can be traced from the fundamental organization of self-preservation to survival behaviors to constructive orientation and action. The paper also shows how these theoretical insights might have a consequence upon our understanding of a specific constructiveness of human cognition, here referred to as enarrativity, if this can be considered in a structural as well as evolutionary connection with the structure of life as such. The present paper shows how both thinkers describe the most fundamental properties of the living as autonomous sustenance. It is in this line of thinking that this paper compares two major philosophical conceptualizations of the living in the history of theoretical biology, namely those of Maturana and Aristotle. The main working assumption of the present paper is that several important insights in answering this question might be provided by the nature of life itself. The emergence of mind is a central issue in cognitive philosophy.
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