Thanks to an invitation from the editors, Brian Glenney and José Filipe Silva, a chapter has appeared in their rather wonderful Routledge collection The Senses and the History of Philosophy (2019). There are contributions from some well-known philosophers of perception and of ancient philosophy, too. My chapter neatly follows from Brian Glenney's chapter on the Molyneux... Continue Reading →
The Humanities Research Centre at the University of Leeds, UK has a fascinating series of talks in their Sadler Seminar Series this year. Under the theme 'Touch: Sensing, Feeling, Knowing', a rich mixture of philosophers, psychologists and others are presenting, and the talks are convened by Professor Helen Steward (Philosophy), Dr Amelia DeFalco (English) and Dr... Continue Reading →
My book Seeing With the Hands: Blindness, Vision and Touch after Descartes is out now with Edinburgh University Press [link]. In the USA it is distributed by Oxford University Press [link]. You can buy it from Amazon UK or Amazon US. The back cover text is reproduced below: A literary, historical and philosophical exploration of... Continue Reading →
Courtesy of staff at University of Pittsburgh's Medical Center (UPMC), in September 2013 I was invited to the Sensory Substitution Lab to do something that I have wanted to do for years: have a hands-on experience with a device that I have written about. WICAB's 'BrainPort' is a 'sensory substitution' device that translates a visual feed from a camera... Continue Reading →
As the book progressed, the original idea of a quirky history with some cross-over readership started to mutate into something more historically and philosophically consistent. My reading around Descartes and Locke especially added some necessary epistemological context, whilst a recent translation of an essay by Grosrichard (originally in Cahiers pour L'Analyse) where the Molyneux Question is... Continue Reading →
My article "Blindness, empathy and 'feeling seeing'" published recently in Emotion, Space and Society, it turns out, has been viewed 200 times. Thanks to the automated metrics of the Elsevier dashboard, I now know this. That's pretty good. Take a look at the article here. There has been a change of Editors and some additions to the Editorial... Continue Reading →
After a call for papers for a special issue 'Sensorium Commune' of the journal Communications, edited by Marie-Luce Girard and Olivier Sorost, I didn't realize what a fascinating journal it was. Not a straightforward 'communications' journal in the American sense, it was set up by Roland Barthes and others in France in the 1960s. Some... Continue Reading →
The next issue of the journal Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature has an article taken from research for a chapter on my book on blindness. Called '“Looking on darkness, which the blind do see”: Blindness, Empathy, and Feeling Seeing' it appears in a special issue on 'Blindness', 46.3. Look out for it... Continue Reading →
‘Seeing with the hands’: Philosophical Approaches to Touch and Blindness This is the 700 word article that I was asked to write for the Newsletter of the World Blind Union. This was an opportunity to speak to a non-sighted readership about some of the issues, concepts and ideas in my forthcoming book Seeing With the... Continue Reading →
In May I was interviewed on a local news programme for the South West of England, BBC Spotlight. The story concerns a blind man in Paignton Zoo encountering a real elephant for the first time. Although I was interviewed in the TV studio for a while, I only appear for seconds - oh well. The... Continue Reading →
Sensory/Motor 