The Sense of Body Ownership

Abstract One not only feels one’s body ‘from the inside’, but also has a sense of ownership over that body. This sense of body ownership can be compromised in illness and can also be experimentally induced, so that one feels artificial limbs to be one’s own. The convergence of the philosophical, experimental, and clinical literatures on the sense of body ownership has generated much excitement. It would appear that these disciplines are all studying the sense of body ownership. But when one looks more carefully, it is unclear whether these diverse disciplines are trying to answer the same question. In this chapter, we introduce five different questions about the sense of body ownership—constitutive, phenomenological, causal, functional, and mereological questions—so as to get clear on what we are studying when we claim we are studying body ownership, and use these distinctions to draw morals for the current debate.