ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates that Aristotle presents with the first philosophical treatment of touch as one of five distinct senses. He attributes to touch a particular privilege and importance for living beings insofar as touch situates the sentient being both within the natural world and, simultaneously, as differentiated from it. In both the Physics and Generation and Corruption, Aristotle maintains that all movement requires contact, and so all movement requires bodies with extremities that can meet one another. In Generation and Corruption, Aristotle reiterates the importance of contact for enabling change in the natural world when he insists that in order to understand action and passion, "it is necessary to also understand contact. In order to count touch as one among the set of senses, Aristotle needs to maintain the structural analogy to the other senses; touch too, therefore, requires a medium in spite of phenomenological evidence to the contrary.
