Kontakt: Der Tastsinn in Texten der Aufklärung

The study describes the conceptual and metaphorical field relating to what figures in the Enlightenment as the sense of touch/feeling. In so doing it homes in on a phenomenon whose operative and physiological definition is anything but straightforward. The approaches discussed here indicate the problems involved in situating this sense in anatomical terms and specifying its function. The corpus of texts underlying the study is taken from literature, philosophy, and natural history. These are subjected to a reading that makes it possible to examine the complex nature of the issue in question by drawing upon systematic concepts.