Epistemology of corporeality and motor and education: an historical, critical, heuristic approach

Abstract

The paper presents studies on the mind-body problem in philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, showing how the relationship mind-brain-body highlights links between brain activity, mental activity, and physical activity. These bonds are stronger in the earliest age of the subjects and the development of representations and cognitive processes is strictly connected to the quality of motor activity. The ego development starts with motor experiences; it is the effect of correlation between them and emotional, intellectual, social
dimensions. Movement is related to mind that creates it, and it builds and shapes the brain. The interaction between motor and psychic aspects makes essential the link between pedagogical studies, psychological, sociological, anthropological, biological and scientific languages that explain the development of sensory-motor, intellectual and emotional related to the progressive development of the personality. It is proposed to found epistemologically a pedagogy of corporeality situated in a humanistic-personalist vision of
education, which starts from an idea of man as a bio-psycho-social unit, where body and mind, indissoluble, make him unique and unrepeatable. The enhancement of the body and the motor activity could be situated in such anthropology able to provide foundations and critical and heuristic cues to educational research.