ABSTRACT
In his famous Letter on the Blind of 1749, the French essayist and philosopher Denis Diderot writes of the experiences of a blind man in the French town of Puiseaux. Asked whether he would be overjoyed if he ever regained the use of his eyes, the blind man of Puiseaux supposedly replied: I would just as soon have long arms: it seems to me that my hands would tell me more about what happens on moon than you can find out with your eyes and your telescopes; and besides, eyes cease to see sooner than hands to touch. Although Descartes had written of the analogy of eyes and hands in his Dioptrique of 1637, the problem of space and touch in congenitally blind as an issue in the philosophy of perception was raised by Irish philosopher and scientist William Molyneux in a letter to John Locke, after the publication of first edition of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690.
