The Philosopher S Touch

Renowned philosopher and prominent French critic François Noudelmann engages the musicality of Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Roland Barthes, all of whom were amateur piano players and acute lovers of the medium. Though piano playing was a crucial art for these thinkers, their musings on the subject are largely scant, implicit, or discordant with each philosopher's oeuvre. Noudelmann both recovers and integrates these perspectives, showing that the manner in which these philosophers played, the composers they adored, and the music they chose reveals uncommon insight into their thinking styles and patterns. Noudelmann positions the physical and theoretical practice of music as a dimension underpinning and resonating with Sartre's, Nietzsche's, and Barthes's unique philosophical outlook. By reading their thought against their music, he introduces new critical formulations and reorients their trajectories, adding invaluable richness to these philosophers' lived and embodied experiences. The result heightens the multiple registers of being and the relationship between philosophy and the senses that informed so much of their work. A careful reader of music, Noudelmann maintains an elegant command of the texts under his gaze and appreciates the discursive points of musical and philosophical scholarship they involve, especially with regard to recent research and cutting-edge critique.

Music is a significant object of reflection for contemporary philosophers, yet little has been written on the interplay of music and thought. François Noudelmann critically engages the musicality of Barthes, Sartre and Nietzsche, all of whom were amateur piano players, giving an insightful reading of their work in light of their music. The practice of playing the piano was crucial to these philosphers, but their writing on the topic was scant, implicit, or in discordance with their philosophical oeuvre. Noudelmann reveals how the manner in which they played, the composers they explicitly and secretly adored, and the music they chose to write about is telling of these philosophers’ writing styles and thinking patterns. Noudelmann invites us to imagine the physical and theoretical practice of music as a dimension underpinning and resonating with their philosophical work proper. He thus unearths new perspectives on the philosophical trajectories of the three. Noudelmann has an elegant command of the texts under study, and understands the discursive points and concerns of philosophical and musical theorists of recent decades. He also brings to the work of Barthes, Sartre, and Nietzsche a sense of lived, embodied experience, raising the question of the relationship between philosophy and the senses, a philosopher’s life and thought.

An empirically informed philosophical account of human touch as a single, unified sensory modality that plays a central role in perception. It is through touch that we are able to interact directly with the world; it is our primary conduit of both pleasure and pain. Touch may be our most immediate and powerful sense—“the first sense” because of the central role it plays in experience. In this book, Matthew Fulkerson proposes that human touch, despite its functional diversity, is a single, unified sensory modality. Fulkerson offers a philosophical account of touch, reflecting the interests, methods, and approach that define contemporary philosophy; but his argument is informed throughout by the insights and constraints of empirical work on touch. Human touch is a multidimensional object of investigation, Fulkerson writes, best served by using a variety of methods and approaches. To defend his view of the unity of touch, Fulkerson describes and argues for a novel, unifying role for exploratory action in touch. He goes on to fill in the details of this unified, exploratory form of perception, offering philosophical accounts of tool use and distal touch, the representational structure of tangible properties, the spatial content of touch, and the role of pleasure in tactual experience. Fulkerson's argument for the unique role played by exploratory action departs notably from traditional vision-centric philosophical approaches to perception, challenging the received view that action plays the same role in all sensory modalities. The robust philosophical account of touch he offers in The First Sense has significant implications for our general understanding of perception and perceptual experience.

This book, written out of Derrida's long-standing friendship with Jean-Luc Nancy, examines the central place accorded to the sense of touch in the Western philosophical tradition.

This notable collection provides an interdisciplinary platform for prominent thinkers who have all made significant recent contributions to exploring the nexus of philosophy and narrative. It includes the latest assessments of several key positions in the current philosophical debate. These perspectives underpin a range of thematic strands exploring the influence of narrative on notions of selfhood, identity, temporal experience, and the emotions, among others. Drawing from the humanities, literature, history and religious studies, as well as philosophy, the volume opens with papers on narrative intelligence and the relationship between narrative and agency. It features special sections of in-depth commentary on a range of topics. How, for example, do narrative and philosophical biography interact? Do celebrated biographical and autobiographical accounts of the lives of philosophers contribute to our understanding of their work? This new volume has a substantive remit that incorporates the intercultural religious view of philosophy’s links to narrative together with its many secular aspects. A valuable new resource for more advanced scholars in all its constituent disciplines, it represents a significant addition to the literature of this richly productive area of research.