The bodily and extra-bodily extension of senses

Abstract

The extension of senses remained an unresolved aporia throughout the history of the theory of perception. An appropriate example of the historical persistence of this aporia would be the priority-dispute between extramission and intromission theories of vision prevailing since the ancient philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and others. The resurgence or rehabilitation of the intromission theory of vision in the early Cartesian modernity strategically reversed the predominant position of the sense of touch, which had prevailed in the medieval scholastic philosophy, in favour of the sense of sight. Since then, the external extension of vision has remained an aporia, as problematized and discussed in the works of Descartes, Locke, Molyneux, Berkeley, Condillac, Helmholtz, Gibson, and others. The present treatise is an attempt to reconsider the aporicity of the bodily and extra-bodily extension of senses and resolve it by means of a methodological analogy between the bodily extension of sensations and the extra-bodily extension of the senses of sight and hearing. On the theoretical level, this investigation tries to establish a complementarity between philosophical and scientific epistemologies. This may lead to a scientific proof, on the basis of which the real extension of the bodily and extra-bodily senses could be dictated by a philosophical epistemology and confirmed by a scientific-experimental investigation.