The Sense of Movement: An Intellectual History

The sense of movement, or the feeling of one’s body in motion, has a rich intellectual history which stretches over the last three centuries. Differentiated from general touch, linked to intuition of agency, tied to the feel for reality, sometimes called ‘the sixth sense’, it was then reformulated as kinaesthesia, proprioception and haptic sense.Talk of sensed movement abounds in the contemporary arts and performance, sport andwalking and in the sciences of cognition and motor control. This book is the first to set out the historical roots. It combines original historical inquiry with elucidation of the concepts and arguments at work when people say sensing movement matters. It is a work of wide range, synthesizing discussions separated by discipline boundaries between physiology, psychology, philosophy and history of science. The writing combines the voice of a scholar with the voice of a participant in movement.