Seeing with the Hands: Blindness, Vision and Touch After Descartes

ISBN-13: 9781474405317 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 224 str.

Mark Paterson

Opis

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.

Spis treści

Preface; Introduction: On questioning blindness and what the blind ‘see’; 1. ‘Seeing with the Hands’: Descartes, blindness, and vision; 2. ‘Suppose a man born blind…’: Cubes and Spheres, Hands and Eyes; 3. Objects that ‘touch’d his eyes’: Surgical experiments in the Recovery of Vision; 4. Voltaire, Buffon, and Blindness in France; 5. The Testimony of Blind Men: Diderot’s Lettre; 6. Reading with the fingers. Tactile signs and the possibilities for a language of touch; 7. Seeing With the Tongue: Sight Through Other Means; 8. Blindness, Empathy, and ‘Feeling Seeing’: Literary Accounts of Blind Experience; References.