Our own body. What could be more familiar and common than our own body? We do not have to question its presence since it is always with us as long as we are there. Yet if we do start musing about it, it immediately loses its taken for granted nature and may become a rather enigmatic phenomenon. In retrospect, I can say that my interest for putting into question the obvious nature of being embodied goes back a long time. Since my teens I have been fascinated by the human body, its anatomy and physiology, which motivated me to start studying being a physiotherapist. After having worked as a physiotherapist for a couple of years, I realized that through acquiring anatomical and pathological knowledge, and a wide variety of physical examination and treatment skills, ‘the body’ did not share its secrets, at least, not with me. I lacked the conceptual and analytical tools to actually phrase the perplexity of something as commonplace as our own being embodied. As such, it was no surprise – again in retrospect – that I took up philosophy, and progressively got absorbed in the philosophy of the body.

Once one is immersed in philosophy, many questions on ‘the body’ present themselves. In this study I limit myself to the question of identity. Foundations for these meditations on body and identity were laid during my post-doctoral project at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, in which I analyzed the relationship between embodied identity and artistic representations of the body (2001-2006), and when teaching my philosophy for psychology students courses at Tilburg University in the Netherlands (2004-2009). To make my courses as digestible as possible for these students, who had no background in philosophy, I developed coursework around the theme of personal and bodily identity, and interlarded them with many topical cases, especially clinical ones. By using these cases, I quickly came to realize that a case can be much more than just a fine illustration of a philosophical theory. During classes and discussions the examples often served as an instigator of further questioning and curiosity. This is what led me to develop my philosophical reflections for this book on the basis of several present-day cases and examples.