Dis/Abilities

How have we conceived of 'blindness', and what has been the role of touch and the other senses in blind or vision impaired subjects in literacy,  navigating, or conceptualizing space? In my monograph for Edinburgh University Press, Seeing With the Hands: Blindness, Vision & Touch after Descartes (2016), I examine historical and philosophical responses to the so-called ‘Molyneux Problem’ first published in the second edition of philosopher John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), and taken up by Bishop Berkeley in 1709, where blindness is treated as an epistemological problematic. In a period where cataract operations were becoming increasingly performed and discussed, the book follows the development of philosophical approaches to blindness, vision and touch firstly in England, then in France by Voltaire, Buffon, and Diderot. The book addresses the place of blindness in philosophy and early psychology as a counterpoint to the supposed centrality of vision. I argue that questions raised at this historical juncture about cross-modal perception (the ability for sensory information to be translated between different sensory modalities) have clear implications for contemporary conceptions of blindness and technologies of sensory substitution (the ability to conduct tasks by substituting onse sense such as touch for another such as vision). This includes the exciting and pioneering work of Mexican-American neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita on Tactile-Visual Sensory Substitution (TVSS) systems.

The interest in blindness follows in the wake of my doctoral thesis and has developed into other publications, including journal articles about blindness for British Journal of Visual Impairment (2006) and The Senses and Society (2006). I have published articles on literary and autobiographical treatments of blindness, firstly in a special issue on blindness of Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature (2013) and, secondly, in an article for Emotion, Space and Society (2014).

Sensory Substitution

The history of the idea of ‘sensory substitution’ continues to fascinate me. There are a number of technologies for those with sensory impairments that help by substituting one sense for another through technology. I have written about the centrality of subjects with disabilities in the development of technologies of sensory substitution, and for early ideas of brain plasticity particularly by the neuroscientist Paul Bach-Y-Rita in my chapter ‘Philosophies of sensory substitution: The case of the seeing tongue’ in the Oxford UP collection Perception and its Modalities (2014, edited by Matthen, Stokes, Biggs), plus my chapter ‘Molyneux, neuroplasticity, and technologies of sensory substitution’ for the Routledge collection The Senses and the History of Philosophy (edited by Glenney & De Silva, 2019), entry for the Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences on ‘The Molyneux Problem’ (edited by Jalobeanu & Wolfe, 2020), and an article ‘Hearing Gloves and Seeing Tongues? Disability, Sensory Substitution and the Origins of the Neuroplastic Subject‘ in Body and Society (2021).