Exploring the epistemological puzzel of phantom limb: towards embodied phenomenology?

'Almost everyone who has had a limb amputated will experience a phantom limb - the vivid impression that a limb is not only present, but in some cases, painful' (Ramachandran 1999). The amputee's experience of the phantom has two contradictory elements: its felt presence - the 'living' limb - and its seen absence - the organic limb's destruction. Such ambivalent experience leads to tensions in how to account for what it is to know the phantom (an epistemological question). From the 3rd person point of view of many clinicians, the external presence of the phantom is much like a hallucination - knowledge of this disordered reality is solely explained through physiology and representations we have formed in our selves. Here there is an appeal to what may be called a mediational epistemologies that is, understanding of the 'outer' world is grasped through something inner (Taylor 2005). However an appeal to a scientific account of the phantom leaves out the 1st person perspective of what it Is like, that is, how it is understood from the amputees 'embodied' perspective (Merieau-Ponty 1962). Mediational epistemologies omit an embodied account of knowing, accessible through carefully listening to amputees and their experiences of the phantom. This kind of embodied knowing is accessible by a method known as phenomenology which can be described as getting back to fundamental descriptions of what phenomena are like (in this case knowing the phantom limb phenomena). From the amputees perspective the embodied knowledge of the phantom involves sensing its 'living' presence that interacts with the world, is often painful and effects how patients cope with physical rehabilitation - in positive as well as negative ways (Tomasini 2005). The research explores the dichotomies and resolutions of knowing from different perspectives. It involves puzzling over different ways and limits of knowing what the phantom is/is like in relation to mind and body. It may have practical benefits to the rehabilitation of amputees.