The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies
Michel Serres
There is no alternative to experiencing the world, to being endlessly traversed and changed by it. The world is the emanation of a body moving through it. A to-and-fro arises between the sensation of things and the sensation of self. Before thought, there is feeling. To say, with Descartes, "I think therefore I am" is to ignore humanity's sensory immersion in the world. "I sense therefore I am" is another way of saying that the human condition is not only spiritual or mental, but, first and foremost, embodied.
Sensing the World: An Anthropology of the Senses
David Le Breton
Curiosity led me from a life around hard rock mining into worlds of limitless imagination. I attended a small Catholic school at the edge of a mine tailings dump that nearly surrounded my neighborhood in Butte, Montana. One of the earliest and deepest impressions I got there was of our teacher, a nun who wore resentment like a habit, seeming to compliment us with the observation that we were "uncouth but honest".
Couth is defined as "possessing good manners, refinement, and sophistication. It is the positive, antonymic counterpart to the much more common word uncouth"
