Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book covers the famous Enlightenment memoirist Giacomo Casanova, eighteenth-century Paris cafs. The caf is a place where people go not merely to drink but also to think. Gallagher stresses a 'consensus across the disciplines that the contribution of embodiment to cognition is inescapable'. In short, cafs are central to intellectual history because the social interaction and solitary introspection within them fulfill vital human needs: nurturing human perceptions with beverages, sights, smells, and sounds these spaces have had a dramatic impact on intellectual history at various points. Caffeine today is people's number one choice of stimulant, and the coffee trade is second only to oil in global commodities. One would think that a Mediterranean country would be the first to develop a coffeehouse culture in the West, but this was not the case.