The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies

Michel Serres

dic 2008 · Bloomsbury Publishing

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Available for the first time in English!
Winner of the Prix Médicis Essai!

Marginalized by the scientific age with its metaphysical and philosophical systems, the lessons of the senses have been overtaken by the dominance of language and the information revolution.
Exploring the deleterious effects of the systematic downgrading of the senses in Western philosophy, Michel Serres - a member of the Académie Française and one of France's leading philosophers - traces a topology of human perception. Writing against the Cartesian tradition and in praise of empiricism, he demonstrates repeatedly, and lyrically, the sterility of systems of knowledge divorced from bodily experience.
The fragile empirical world, long resistant to our attempts to contain and catalog it, is disappearing beneath the relentless accumulations of late capitalist society and information technology. Data has replaced sensory pleasure, we are less interested in the taste of a fine wine than in the description on the bottle's label. What are we, and what do we really know, when we have forgotten that our senses can describe a taste more accurately than language ever could?

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Michel Serres was Professor in the History of Science at Stanford University, USA and a member of the Académie Française, France. A renowned and popular philosopher, he was a prize-winning author of essays and books, such as The Five Senses (2008), Genesis (1995), and Biogée (2013).

Margaret Sankey is the McCaughey Professor of French Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia, and joint translator of The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary by the French sociologist Gilbert Durand.

Peter Cowley lectures in French Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia, where he is also Director of Translation Studies.