ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts two things. First, to establish philosophical context for these phenomenological investigations we turn to Aristotle’s treatment of touch and the senses in De Anima (On the Soul), and De Sensu et Sensibilibus (On Sense and Sensibilia), which have been influential in the separation and classification of the senses. Secondly, after some succinct preliminaries concerning phenomenology, a branch of philosophy which is unusually open to the interpretation of sensory experience, the author develop Husserl’s departure point from Brentano of phenomenology as a ‘descriptive psychology’, highlighting the need for a rich description of embodied processes and somatosensory events. So this is an opportunity to engage with relevant phenomenological debates, to directly address some of these vague and ill-defined somatic states, and to articulate something akin to a ‘felt’ phenomenology. No one in the history of philosophy has ever conducted ‘a more radical and patient investigation of touch’ than Aristotle, remarks French phenomenologist Jean-Louis Chretien.
