Bodily sensations

Bodily sensations are those feelings, or sensory experiences, most intimately associated with one’s body: aches, tickles; feelings of pain and pleasure, of warmth, of fatigue. Many philosophers contrast bodily sensations with perceptions of the external world, claiming that sensations provide one with awareness of nothing independent of them. An alternative approach is to take sensations to be a form of awareness of one’s body – on one view sensations are simply the perception of the state and properties of one’s body. Bodily sensations have been seen as a major problem for any attempt to give an account of the mind that takes it to be part of the material world as investigated by the physical sciences.