body

Knowledge

2022

We explain what a body is in different contexts: philosophy, biology, physics, chemistry, astronomy, mathematics and more.

The most common sense that we give to the word body refers to the human body.

What is the body?

By the word body we can refer to numerous different realities, depending on the specific area of ​​the body. knowledge in question. However, as we will see later, all these senses have to do with the physical, the tangible, the material, the concrete or the determined.

This word comes from Latin corpus, term with which they referred in Roman antiquity to the human figure. Possibly that is the main and most important meaning of all that we can find: that of the human body.

Said like this, a body is understood as the set of organs, systems Y cells that constitute each of us human being, and to which we are inevitably bound by the existence. All that we are, what we distinguish from the world and from others, that which delimits us, is our body.

In the philosophy Western, the body was always opposed to the soul, understood as the mind, consciousness and human aspects that are not tangible, but abstract and mental. Important ancient philosophers, such as Plato (c. 427-347 BC), considered the body as the prison of the soul, and compared the human being to a rider on horseback: the mount was the physical and animal, while the rider it was consciousness and lucidity.

With this they affirmed that the body is far from our essence and our true being, that is, that it corresponds to our animal, instinctive and primitive part, far from the higher world of ideas.

Something similar did many religions, especially the great monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), who considered the body as the source of sins, linking it with the vile and perishable aspects of the human being, in contrast to his immortal soul.

According to this perspective, the really important thing was to guarantee the salvation of the spirit, even if for this the body had to be punished or subjected to privations and mortifications, as the ascetics and anchorites of antiquity used to do, or as the monks of different religions do through vows. of chastity, poverty or silence.

In this way, when referring to human beings (and, sometimes, animals), we use the word body today to refer only to the physical and material, either as synonymous appearance (“So and so has a good Body”), hygiene and health (“You have to have a good clean bodily"), Or even to refer to the corpses (" They found the Body of the explorer lost in the jungle ”).

As we will see below, much of this way of understanding the body corresponds to the more technical and specific concepts of the word, as used by the Sciences and other academic disciplines.

Body in biology

Just like human beings we have a body that medicine has been studying for centuries through methods Y techniques very different depending on the time, animals and other living beings also have theirs, that biology in its different branches (anatomy, zoology, botany, mycology, microbiology, etc.) is dedicated to studying and understanding.

For this discipline, a body is the organized set of complex cellular systems, in the case of multicellular beings, and in the case of unicellular beings, refers to the contents of the cell.

Body in physics and chemistry

The term body acquires a slightly different meaning when we approach it from the physical and the chemistry, disciplines that study the force and the matter, respectively.

In physics, one speaks of the body or, also, of a physical object or object, to refer to a set of ordinary matter, with its own characteristics, which can be considered as an element in itself for the purposes of the physical systems involved.

A ball, for example, can be a physical body or object, if we are considering a soccer game as a physical system. But if we consider it from a chemical point of view, instead, we will be dealing with an organized set of molecules polymeric, each of which can be studied separately, and we will lose sight of the object that these molecules constitute.

Body in astronomy

Celestial bodies differ from the void around them.

In astronomy, the celestial bodies (or astronomical objects) are the different elements found in the outer space, such as planets, stars or asteroids. These objects have their own recognizable characteristics, which differentiate them from the void around them and even from gas clouds and other forms of less structured space matter (the nebulaeHowever, they are also astronomical objects).

Body in math

In the field of math, you can talk about the body on at least two different occasions, one related to the algebra and another with geometry:

  • Algebraic body: It is an algebraic expression that respects the logic of addition and multiplication for its terms, thus fulfilling the associative, commutative and distributive properties.
  • Geometric body: It is any object that exhibits longitude, latitude and depth, that is, the three dimensions.

Body in jurisprudence

The corpus delicti is a material object involved in a crime.

In legal matters, we often speak of a body or an object (often corpus) to refer to a material thing involved in some legal matter. For example, there is talk of body of crime to refer to the material object involved in a crime, such as the knife or pistol with which someone was murdered.

On the other hand, the legal corpus is the set of the laws written on a specific issue or a specific area of ​​the right, that is, to a compilation of texts legal.

Body in sociology

In sociology Y anthropology, the term body is used to refer to an organized set of persons that cooperate for a certain common purpose. The Business they are corporate bodies, the mass of voters are the body of voters, the dancers who participate in a show are a body of dance, and so on.

On the other hand, for the study of the human being, absolutely all relationships are corporeal, since they cannot occur without the intervention of the body: even the thought and the relationships They are given thanks to the intervention of the brain and other organs, so that the entire human existence is, in its various aspects, irremediably linked with the body.

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