In this book, Rom Harre attempts to build a comprehensive account of the roles our bodies play in our lives. He argues that these roles are determined less by organic functioning than by cultural conventions and social meanings and that, rightly or wrongly, our type of body is fateful for the way our lives can be lived. From among the vast array of ways our bodies and their nature and condition enter our lives, he explores three main questions. The first concerns the metaphysical: how we use our bodies to determine and to express the kind of person we are. Next, the various forms of normative judgements and public and private evaluations that bodily forms and functions are subjected to are examined. Finally, the body and its parts and functions are looked at in the light of their use both as signifiers, systems of signs and as blank surfaces on which significance is "inscribed". These, he suggests, are the metaphors of corporeal semantics. "Physical Being" concludes Rom Harre's trilogy concerning the ways of being human, and provides an informative study of the norms and principles of body uses.