The Philosophers Touch

Download or read book The Philosopher’s Touch written by François Noudelmann and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-03 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned philosopher and prominent French critic François Noudelmann engages the musicality of Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Roland Barthes, all of whom were amateur piano players and acute lovers of the medium. Though piano playing was a crucial art for these thinkers, their musings on the subject are largely scant, implicit, or discordant with each philosopher's oeuvre. Noudelmann both recovers and integrates these perspectives, showing that the manner in which these philosophers played, the composers they adored, and the music they chose reveals uncommon insight into their thinking styles and patterns. Noudelmann positions the physical and theoretical practice of music as a dimension underpinning and resonating with Sartre's, Nietzsche's, and Barthes's unique philosophical outlook. By reading their thought against their music, he introduces new critical formulations and reorients their trajectories, adding invaluable richness to these philosophers' lived and embodied experiences. The result heightens the multiple registers of being and the relationship between philosophy and the senses that informed so much of their work. A careful reader of music, Noudelmann maintains an elegant command of the texts under his gaze and appreciates the discursive points of musical and philosophical scholarship they involve, especially with regard to recent research and cutting-edge critique.

Download or read book The Philosopher's Touch written by Francois Noudelmann and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-10 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music is a significant object of reflection for contemporary philosophers, yet little has been written on the interplay of music and thought. François Noudelmann critically engages the musicality of Barthes, Sartre and Nietzsche, all of whom were amateur piano players, giving an insightful reading of their work in light of their music. The practice of playing the piano was crucial to these philosphers, but their writing on the topic was scant, implicit, or in discordance with their philosophical oeuvre. Noudelmann reveals how the manner in which they played, the composers they explicitly and secretly adored, and the music they chose to write about is telling of these philosophers’ writing styles and thinking patterns. Noudelmann invites us to imagine the physical and theoretical practice of music as a dimension underpinning and resonating with their philosophical work proper. He thus unearths new perspectives on the philosophical trajectories of the three. Noudelmann has an elegant command of the texts under study, and understands the discursive points and concerns of philosophical and musical theorists of recent decades. He also brings to the work of Barthes, Sartre, and Nietzsche a sense of lived, embodied experience, raising the question of the relationship between philosophy and the senses, a philosopher’s life and thought.

Download or read book Things written by Carolyn Korsmeyer and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Things: In Touch with the Past explores the value of artifacts that have survived from the past and that can be said to embody their histories. Such genuine or real things afford a particular kind of aesthetic experience-an encounter with the past-despite the fact that genuineness is not a perceptually detectable property. Although it often goes unnoticed, the sense of touch underlies such encounters, even though one is often not permitted literal touch. Carolyn Korsmeyer begins her account with the claim that wonder or marvel at old things fits within an experiential account of the aesthetic. She then presents her main argument regarding the role of touch-both when literal contact is made and when proximity suffices, for touch is a fundamental sense that registers bodily position and location. Correct understanding of the identity of objects is presumed when one values things just because of what they are, and with discovery that a mistake has been made, admiration is often withdrawn. Far from undermining the importance of the genuine, these errors of identification confirm it. Korsmeyer elaborates this position with a comparison between valuing artifacts and valuing persons. She also considers the ethical issues of genuineness, for artifacts can be harmed in various ways ranging from vandalism to botched restoration. She examines the differences between a real thing and a replica in detail, making it clear that genuineness comes in degrees. Her final chapter reviews the ontology that best suits an account of persistence over time of things that are valued for being the real thing.

Download or read book Touch and the Ancient Senses written by Alex Purves and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-17 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike the other senses, touch ranges beyond a single sense organ, encompassing not only the skin but also the interior of the body. It mediates almost every aspect of interpersonal relations in antiquity, from the everyday to the erotic, just as it also provides a primary point of contact between the individual and the outside world. The essays in this volume explore the ways in which touch plays a defining role in science, art, philosophy, and medicine, and shapes our understanding of topics ranging from aesthetics and poetics to various religious and ritual practices. Whether we locate the sense of touch on the surface of the skin, within the body or – less tangibly still – within the emotions, the sensory impact of touching raises a broad range of interpretive and phenomenological questions. This is the first volume of its kind to explore the sense of touch in antiquity, bringing a variety of disciplinary approaches to bear on the sense that is usually disregarded as the most base and obvious of the five. In these pages, by contrast, we find in touch a complex and fascinating indicator of the body’s relation to object, environment, and self.

Download or read book The Inner Touch written by Daniel Heller-Roazen and published by Mit Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An original, elegant, and far-reaching philosophical inquiry into the sense of being sentient--what it means to feel that one is alive--that draws on philosophical, literary, psychological, and medical accounts from ancient, medieval, and modern cultures.

Download or read book How to Feel written by Sushma Subramanian and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are out of touch. Many people fear that we are trapped inside our screens, becoming less in tune with our bodies and losing our connection to the physical world. But the sense of touch has been undervalued since long before the days of digital isolation. Because of deeply rooted beliefs that favor the cerebral over the corporeal, touch is maligned as dirty or sentimental, in contrast with supposedly more elevated modes of perceiving the world. How to Feel explores the scientific, physical, emotional, and cultural aspects of touch, reconnecting us to what is arguably our most important sense. Sushma Subramanian introduces readers to the scientists whose groundbreaking research is underscoring the role of touch in our lives. Through vivid individual stories—a man who lost his sense of touch in his late teens, a woman who experiences touch-emotion synesthesia, her own efforts to become less touch averse—Subramanian explains the science of the somatosensory system and our philosophical beliefs about it. She visits labs that are shaping the textures of objects we use every day, from cereal to synthetic fabrics. The book highlights the growing field of haptics, which is trying to incorporate tactile interactions into devices such as phones that touch us back and prosthetic limbs that can feel. How to Feel offers a new appreciation for a vital but misunderstood sense and how we can use it to live more fully.

Download or read book Seeing with the Hands written by Paterson Mark Paterson and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-11 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A literary, historical and philosophical discussion of attitudes to blindness by the sighted, and what the blind 'see'Why has there been a persistent fascination by the sighted, including philosophers, poets and the public, in what the blind 'see'? Is the experience of being blind, as Descartes declared, like 'seeing with the hands'? What happens on the rare occasions when surgery allows previously blind people to see for the very first time? And how did evidence from early experimental surgery inform those philosophical debates about vision and touch? These questions and others were prompted by a question that the Irish scientist, Molyneux, asked an English philosopher, Locke, in 1688, but which was to have implications for British empiricism, French sensationism, and the beginnings of psychology that outlasted the long tail of the Enlightenment. Through an unfolding historical and philosophical narrative the book follows up responses to this question in Britain and France, and considers it as an early articulation of sensory substitution, the substitution of one sense (touch) for another (vision). This concept has influenced attitudes towards blindness, and technologies for the blind and vision impaired, to this day.Key FeaturesUnfolds the history of 'blindness' from 17th century that shades into the beginnings of psychologyQuestions the assumed centrality of vision and the eye in Enlightenment philosophy and scienceTraces the core idea of 'sensory substitution' from hypothetical speculations in the 17th century to present day technologies for the blind and vision impaired