The Embodiment of Senses

Kant famously claimed that all our representations must be of a spatial as well as temporal kind. However, this spatiality and temporality is nothing accessible to experience itself, but precedes it logically, as it’s a priori condition. Babu Thaliath’s remarkable book stands in a Post-Kantian if not altogether Neo-Kantian tradition inasmuch as it attempts to bring back this a priori into experience itself. In doing so, he materializes and empiricizes the apriori. As The Embodiment of Senses demonstrates, the scaffolding undergirding our corporeal orientation in the world is not merely a logical necessity: perception itself offers the cues about how it is organized.   

Emmanuel Alloa, Chair of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art at the University of Fribourg

This book is an important addition to the growing literature on new approaches to the senses. It combines a deep understanding of a historical philosophical tradition with contemporary scientific approaches to perception, particularly vision. By critically analysing the problem of spatialisation of the senses and the aporias of vision in Western modernist philosophy, Thaliath successfully develops a valuable argument for the embodiment of the senses. 

Sundar Sarukkai, Formerly Professor of Philosophy, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore

This book provides a comprehensive understanding of the prevailing problems in the study of the spatiotemporal extension of sensory perceptions, especially vision. The actual extension of the senses remains an unresolved problem in the history of modern philosophy and science, after Descartes subsumed the senses under the non-extended soul, the res cogitans, and Kant subsequently conceived of space and time as purely a priori forms of sensibility. The book re-examines the prevailing problems of sensibility, especially of the sense of sight, within a historiographical and scientific-philosophical framework. It is a valuable resource for graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers working in the fields of philosophy, perception theory, psychology, and cognitive science in both basic and advanced research.

The book is an English translation of the author’s work, originally published in German by Verlag Karl Alber in 2017 under the title Die Verko¨rperung der Sinnlichkeit