Touch, texture, and tickling. From touch working as a form of recognition to the sensation of shapes, touch is a part of our everyday lives. In episode 63 of Overthink, Ellie and David begin their series on the five senses with touch. They discuss the significance of Cinderella’s original fur slipper and why Lucretius believed that milk and honey particles have a smooth, round shape. They also consider why some ancient philosophers consider touch the primary sense and what we learn about the nature of the self from the phenomenology of touching and being touched.

Works Discussed

Matthew Fulkerson, The First Sense: A Philosophical Study of Human Touch
Galen, Complete Works
G. Stanley Hall, "The Psychology of Tickling, Laughing and the Comic"
William Harvey, The Circulation of the Blood and Other Writings
Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations
Danijela Kambaskovic-Sawers and Charles T. Wolfe,“The senses in philosophy and science: from the nobility of sight to the materialism of touch”
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible
Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation
Michel Serres, The Five Senses

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Touch