ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the relevant characteristics of touch, starting from Edmund Husserl's ambiguous position toward the issue in his seminal reflection on the body. It describes the ideas in favor of the priority of touch to two main arguments by examining to what extent the decisive characteristics rely on the sense of touch as a "sense" and to what extent they depend on the nature of the organs involved. The chapter examines the sense of sight, taking its alleged weaknesses as point of departure. It develops an analysis of eyesight revealing certain traits and factors that have been neglected in philosophical accounts of perception. The chapter also examines the intuitional pre-eminence of touch as it initially occurred in phenomenology, and as it has been recently reconfirmed in the philosophy of mind. While the phenomenal character of touch is considered to be of constitutive importance, the phenomenal nature of eyesight is often overlooked.
