An original, elegant, and far-reaching philosophical inquiry into
what it means to feel alive. The Inner Touch presents the
archaeology of a single sense: the sense of being sentient.
Aristotle was perhaps the first to define this faculty when in his
treatise On the Soul he identified a sensory power, irreducible to
the five senses, by which animals perceive that they are
perceiving: the simple "sense," as he wrote, "that we are seeing
and hearing." After him, thinkers returned, time and again, to
define and redefine this curious sensation. The classical Greek and
Roman philosophers as well as the medieval Arabic, Hebrew, and
Latin thinkers who followed them all investigated a power they
called "the common sense," which one ancient author likened to "a
kind of inner touch, by which we are able to grasp ourselves."
Their many findings were not lost with the waning of the Middle
Ages. From Montaigne and Francis Bacon to Locke, Leibniz, and
Rousseau, from nineteenth-century psychiatry and neurology to
Proust and Walter Benjamin, the writers and thinkers of the modern
period have turned knowingly and unknowing to the terms of older
traditions in exploring the perception that every sensitive being
possesses of its life. The Inner Touch reconstructs and reconsiders
the history of this perception. In twenty-five concise chapters
that move freely among ancient, medieval, and modern cultures,
Daniel Heller-Roazen investigates a set of exemplary phenomena that
have played central roles in philosophical, literary,
psychological, and medical accounts of the nature of animal
existence. Here sensation and self-sensation, sleeping and waking,
aesthetics and anesthetics, perception and apperception, animal
nature and human nature, consciousness and unconsciousness, all
acquire a new meaning. The Inner Touch proposes an original,
elegant, and far-reaching philosophical inquiry into a problem that
has never been more pressing: what it means to feel that one is
alive.Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative
Literary Studies
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