Haptics: relating to the sense of touch. Greek: haptikos, from haptesthai, to grasp, to touch. Seeing is believing, but touching is the truth. Haptics in philosophyThis essay is an exploration of the notion of haptics in architecture. It will explore this in architectural design and the experience of architectural space. I will discuss perception as a precursor to tactile sensation. In philosophical terms, perception is how we understand our environment through our senses through identification and interpretation. Philosophical approaches in architecture take this perception of the world and apply it to the concepts of understanding and designing living spaces. In classical philosophy, the sense of sight was privileged. Plato proposed the eye as a method of accessing enthusiasts or divine inspiration. In the "cave" Plato describes a human being who has been chained in a certain position and can only see shadows of things. Once freed from his bonds he emerges into the light to 'see' things as they really are. This privileging of sight over the other senses highlights Plato's belief that vision was the noblest sense. Plato and other classical philosophers asserted that true knowledge is independent of bodily perceptions. However, vision, as evidenced by the “cave” allegory, was sometimes omitted from this denigration of bodily perceptions. One reason is that vision offers the possibility of remote observation, thus making objective analysis possible. In the Symposium Plato glorifies the "mind's eye", the most theoretical of the senses. Not mediated by touch, smell or taste, it is non-physical and therefore seen as the higher sense. Aristotle clearly outlines his position on sight in the Metaphysics. He speaks of…half of the paper…the tactile realm through which a distinct and special spatial character is brought into being. The building is rarely experienced as a whole image, more as a series of moments, experienced through visual and tactile encounters. Holl places emphasis on the essence of materials in architecture, what he defines in his 2000 book "Parallax" as "material chemistry". question". This is essentially the essence of a material. Material for Holl can have emotional effects and can signify particular “moods” that manifest themselves in their psychological effect. The materiality of Holl's work becomes the medium through the how we are perceptually connected to the world around us. Our tactile experiences in the realm of architecture are, according to Holl, influential in how we perceive the world. As we live in the built environment, our lives are configured through the materiality of the architecture.