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Published on: March 8, 2019
Sensory fields: the visual and the bodily
1Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
Abstract:
Philosophers of perception have been readier to postulate the existence of a visual field than to acknowledge sensory fields in other modalities. In this paper, I argue that the set of phenomenal features that philosophers have relied on when positing a visual field aptly characterise, mutatis mutandis, bodily sensation. I argue, in particular, that in localised bodily sensations we experience the body as a sensory field. I first motivate this claim for the case of haptic touch, and then generalise it to other kinds of bodily sensation. I demonstrate the theoretical fruitfulness of this notion of a bodily field for the debate on the phenomenology of bodily ownership.
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