Drew Leder

American philosopher and scholar of phenomenology, known for work on the lived body and embodiment (author of The Absent Body and related writings on illness and medical humanities).

This list of books are ONLY the books that have been ranked on the lists that are aggregated on this site. This is not a comprehensive list of all books by this author.

  1. 1. The Absent Body

    The book examines how modern medicine, technology, and cultural attitudes render the lived body absent—treated as an object rather than the site of subjective experience—and argues that this estrangement erodes bodily awareness and alters the meaning of suffering and healing. Drawing on phenomenological insight and clinical examples, it analyzes how pain, illness, and diagnostic practices expose a conflict between the body's presence as experienced and its absence as an objectified specimen, producing phenomena like phantom limbs, depersonalization, and the silencing of bodily testimony. It calls for recovering the body's lived presence in medical care and everyday life to restore agency, ethical attention, and a fuller understanding of what it means to be embodied.

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