Sense of Touch

Chiara Beneduce, Ph.D. (2017), is a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven. Her research focuses on late medieval philosophy and science, with particular attention to the interplay between natural philosophy and medicine. She is the author of La scienza del tatto. Un percorso tra filosofia naturale e medicina (Editrice Bibliografica, 2024) and has published widely on medieval theories of the body, the senses, and generation.Mattia Mantovani, Ph.D. (2018), is an FWO Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at KU Leuven. His work focuses on late medieval and early modern philosophy and science, with a special focus on animal perception and on Descartes. He has edited several volumes and special issues, including Cartesian Imagery: Picturing Philosophy in the Early Modern Age (Brill, 2026) and Aristotle’s De sensu in the Latin Tradition, 1250–1650 (Micrologus, 2023).Denise Vincenti, Ph.D. (2016), is a tenure-track assistant professor (Rtd-B) in History of Philosophy at the University of Perugia (Department of Philosophy, Social and Human Sciences, and Education). Her research mainly focuses on the interplays between philosophy and psychology in the late 19th-early 20th centuries, with a specific interest on topics such as habit, emotion, unconscious, madness, hallucination, hypnotism, coenesthesia and kinaesthesia.

• 1.The Aristotelians’ Touch. Commenting On Sense and What is Sensed (De sensu et sensato) in Thirteenth-Century Oxford(Monika Mansfeld).- 2. Labour Pain and Touch in Late Medieval Science(Chiara Beneduce).- 3. Nicholas of Autrecourt on the Superiority of Touch and the Ontology of Sensible Qualities(Aurélien Robert).- 4. With Fingers and Tongue: The Primacy of Touch and Tactile Qualities in Renaissance Galenic Medicine(Elisabeth Moreau).- 5. Touch in Second Scholasticism: Francisco Suárez, John Poinsot, Bartolomeo Mastri and Bonaventura Belluto(Daniel Heider).- 6. The Sense of (Interoceptive) Touch in Descartes(Alison Simmons).- 7. From Fingertips to Papillae: Marcello Malpighi on the Sense of Touch(Luca Tonetti).- 8. Mary Shepherd on Proprioception and Knowledge of the External World(Antonia LoLordo).- 9. Touch a priori? Tactile Perception of Space in Nineteenth-century Physiology and Psychology(Denise Vincenti).