The Sense of Touch
Description
This book offers the first comprehensive study of medieval and modern debates on the nature of touch - its objects, limits, and operations - from the mid thirteenth century to the early twentieth century. Spanning the period from the rise of Aristotelian university curricula to the flourishing of experimental psychology, it demonstrates how touch recurrently emerged as a central concern in philosophical and scientific inquiry.
In recent years, scholarly interest in the history of sense perception, perceptual theories, and the physiology of the sensory organs has grown significantly. This volume advances these fields by bringing to the fore a foundational question that has engaged philosophers, teachers, practitioners, and physicians for centuries, yet has not received sustained and focused analysis at the intersection of the history of philosophy and the sciences: what is touch?
The nine chapters of this collection, authored by leading specialists, illuminate the core debates surrounding touch and emphasize their broader intellectual significance. With a chronological scope spanning more than six centuries, the book will appeal to a wide community of scholars in philosophy and the sciences, as well as to advanced students and researchers, responding to the growing interest in the study of sense perception in general and touch in particular.
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Persons
Chiara Beneduce, Ph.D. (2017), is a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven. Her research focuses on late medieval philosophy and science, with particular attention to the interplay between natural philosophy and medicine. She is the author of La scienza del tatto. Un percorso tra filosofia naturale e medicina (Editrice Bibliografica, 2024) and has published widely on medieval theories of the body, the senses, and generation.
Mattia Mantovani, Ph.D. (2018), is an FWO Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at KU Leuven. His work focuses on late medieval and early modern philosophy and science, with a special focus on animal perception and on Descartes. He has edited several volumes and special issues, including Cartesian Imagery: Picturing Philosophy in the Early Modern Age (Brill, 2026) and Aristotle's De sensu in the Latin Tradition, 1250-1650 (Micrologus, 2023).
Denise Vincenti, Ph.D. (2016), is a tenure-track assistant professor (Rtd-B) in History of Philosophy at the University of Perugia (Department of Philosophy, Social and Human Sciences, and Education). Her research mainly focuses on the interplays between philosophy and psychology in the late 19th-early 20th centuries, with a specific interest on topics such as habit, emotion, unconscious, madness, hallucination, hypnotism, coenesthesia and kinaesthesia.
Content
1.The Aristotelians' Touch. Commenting On Sense and What is Sensed (De sensu et sensato) in Thirteenth-Century Oxford(Monika Mansfeld).- 2. Labour Pain and Touch in Late Medieval Science(Chiara Beneduce).- 3. Nicholas of Autrecourt on the Superiority of Touch and the Ontology of Sensible Qualities(Aurélien Robert).- 4. With Fingers and Tongue: The Primacy of Touch and Tactile Qualities in Renaissance Galenic Medicine(Elisabeth Moreau).- 5. Touch in Second Scholasticism: Francisco Suárez, John Poinsot, Bartolomeo Mastri and Bonaventura Belluto(Daniel Heider).- 6. The Sense of (Interoceptive) Touch in Descartes(Alison Simmons).- 7. From Fingertips to Papillae: Marcello Malpighi on the Sense of Touch(Luca Tonetti).- 8. Mary Shepherd on Proprioception and Knowledge of the External World(Antonia LoLordo).- 9. Touch a priori? Tactile Perception of Space in Nineteenth-century Physiology and Psychology(Denise Vincenti).