This dissertation asserts that physical theater reveals itself as a movement to not only generate body-based aesthetic performance, but also advocate an overall epistemological paradigm shift based in embodiment. This project investigates Lecoq's figure of the actor-creator through the lens of cognitive neuroscience, cognitive linguistics, and cognitive philosophy. It demonstrates how cognitive neuroscience has given clear voice to embodied philosophy, finally allowing body-based performer training practices to be understood in their full context and range. It outlines how body-based performer training hijacks preexisting cognitive abilities, rendering a cognitive state of theatrical creativity in which the actor-creator is fully equipped to both make and inhabit theatrical creation. The dissertation opens out to other body-based practices, including the Viewpoints of SITI Company and the work of Jerzy Grotowski, to explain how this coalition of physical work has ramifications beyond practice, advocating an embodied epistemology and ontology. The dissertation draws out how theatre has long been intimately involved with philosophy, but how this involvement has been plagued by a deep anti-corporeal prejudice. This prejudice-despite insights from the arts, social sciences, and other fields-has prevented an embodied philosophical approach from taking hold in western philosophy. Using Thomas Kuhn's stages of scientific revolution, this project traces the development of physical theatre in relation to western theatre, and ultimately western epistemological history. This project culminates by explaining how physical theatre practices have always sought to overthrow the linguistically based epistemological tradition, and envision the conditions and qualities of a corporeal epistemology