Abstract
This book is a contribution to the field of sensory studies. Focused on perception, it asks what sensory cognition is and investigates how sensory inputs relate to human condition, what constitutes the relation between social and biological modes of perception, and how perceptual hierarchies define their respective cultures.
Comprising studies by anthropologists, historians, philosophers, and behavioural scientists, the volume covers a wide scope of questions pertaining to the issue of perception, and provides an introduction into anthropology of the senses for Czech readers. The anthropological section is focused on sensory anthropology.
While Halbich explores the development of sensory anthropology as a discipline, Pokorný reflects upon cultural contexts of tactility and Havlíček investigates olfactory cosmologies. The philosophically oriented texts tackle a general problem of perception from a number of perspectives.
The introductory study by Horský revolves around the notion of cultural a priori, inspired by Cassirer's philosophy of culture. It is followed by Pokorný's exploration of the same problem approached from competing perspectives of enactive and embodied theories of perception.
Based on analyses of Malebranche's, Leibnitz's and Komensky's ideas, Bojda's historical and philosophical study investigates the relation between perception and a conceptual (cultural, a priori) structure of consciousness. Benyovzsky's study of Goethe, a pivotal philosophical text of the present volume, explores the deep relation between our sensory experience and our uncovering of the world as such.
The book further includes two neuro-behavioural studies on olfactory memory and multimodal integration of perception by Martinec Nováková, which bring a more empirical scientific position to our discussion and enhance the interdisciplinary character of the volume.