Contact

Use in the book

The comparison of philosophy and style says thoughts can touch across many possible points, whereas the fitting relation of one word to another has only one point on a particular occasion. Contact is there complete or absent, not an imprecise degree of resemblance. The geometrical account imagines points swelling into contact as notes join in resonance. The late reflection on emanations allows bodies to be in contact without being close, through light or shadow, and to be felt beforehand through heat or cold. These are different explanatory images rather than a unified physical law.

Places to read

1. I, p. 53, entry 1, ¶3Stylistic correspondence requires a uniquely fitting point of contact.
2. I, p. 196, entry 8, ¶1Contact helps explain continuity between indivisible points.
3. II, p. 792, entry begun p. 791, no. 6, ¶6Light and shadow permit a proposed contact without proximity.

Translation in this edition

The English translation preserves the possibility expressed by can in the last witness and the distinction between proximity and contact. It leaves the swelling-points analogy as Joubert’s argument, while the finer touch of the style discussion preserves tact’s tactile force.

Use in the book

Theophrastus extracts two conditions from the report: likeness and contact. Fitting matters, he suggests, because it brings the entrant into contact with what receives it. But if those are the real conditions, perfect fit is not necessary: a smaller like body touching a larger one should already produce sensation. The objection depends on separating a channel's being filled from some part of its surface being touched.

This sharpens the earlier statement that some small things travel through without touching. Mere transit is therefore insufficient in the reported sensory mechanism. The criticism does not demonstrate that Empedocles explicitly listed two conditions in these words; Theophrastus says that this is what his account assigns knowledge to. It is an analytical reconstruction, whose value is precisely its articulation of what the fit model requires.

Places to read

1. A 86 §§ 7–8 (testimony)2Theophrastus, On the Senses 7. Contrasts entering without contact with entering in a perceptually effective way.
2. A 86 §§ 14–15 (polemical)Theophrastus, On the Senses 15. Argues that mere contact of like bodies ought to suffice even without fitting.

Translation in this edition

The English word “touch” can conceal the shift between a mode of physical interaction and one member of the sensory repertoire. The same Greek family supports both, but their functions in the argument differ.