The term Physical Education in postmodernity: contribution of some phenomenological perspectives

Modernity left us the discovery of subjectivity and a mechanistic conception of the human body as a legacy. Thus, different philosophers of the phenomenological school have preserved the patrimony of subjectivity and have worked to overcome the Cartesian dualism. However, philosophical advances do not always fertilize the pedagogical field for many reasons, so it is essential to promote a constant philosophical reflection in the context of Physical Education. For this reason, this essay has been developed with the aim to analyze the perspective of the human body in the German phenomenological stream of the 20th century, in particular, in the ideas of Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, and Edith Stein. Through the study of their different works, it can be mentioned that there is a key concept in their ideas, i.e. the living body. This body would express the spirit or the embodied subject, who experiences reality through his/her psychophysical being. Then, the human being would have, in all his/her experiences, a living body, but also physical or material. Therefore, from this analysis it is concluded that to overcome the mechanistic conception of the body in Physical Education, it is not necessary to change the name of said pedagogical discipline, but to understand that the human being's matter is inseparable from its subjectivity