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 Verkörperung der Sinnlichkeit

Autorentext

Babu Thaliath is Professor of Philosophy and German studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He studied civil engineering and German philology in India and pursued his PhD in philosophy at the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg and at the University of Basel. He was visiting scholar (postdoc) at the Institute for Philosophy, Humboldt University of Berlin and at the Dept. of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. He has been a fellow at the International Kolleg Morphomata of the University of Cologne, senior fellow at the Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz and François Chevalier Fellow at the Madrid Institute for Advanced Study (MIAS). He was awarded the 2023 KAAD-Stiftung Peter Hünermann Prize for academic excellence by KAAD Bonn, Germany.