Sepehr Razavi

What is active touch? A common conception of active touch gives a rough but rather intuitive sketch. That is, active touch can be understood as mainly object-oriented, controlled movement. While parts or the totality of this characterization is espoused by an important number of researchers on touch, I will argue that this conception faces important challenges when we pay close attention to each of these features. I hold that active touch should be considered as before all else purposive. This view has its roots in the active sensing literature in robotics but will be amended to give insight into human touch in the natural world.

How do philosophers and psychologists receive paradigmatic cases from pathology? More specifically, how are some essential features of ‘normal’ cognitive, affective or perceptual functions derived from these pathological cases? In this paper, I argue that Maurice Merleau-Ponty offers a fecund answer to this question by putting forth a logic of supplementation in pathology that distinguishes the coping behavior of the organic world in contrast to an inorganic one. Supplementation, instead of substitution, marks the world of the living, particularly in its higher forms, as it denotes a persistence through impairment governed by an organic norm. A prominent example of this appears in his reading of the patient Schneider case, a classic example from Goldstein and Gelb’s Gestalt psychology. While earlier commentators were interested in underlying whether or not Merleau-Ponty used this example to denote the persistence of a key function or the disruption of another, what has been missed, on my view, is a far more consequential point about pathologies and how they structure our relation to our world.