# Feeling Fit for Function-– Haptic Touch and Aesthetic Experience **Opening (not a real abstract):** Which of our sensory modalities are capable of delivering distinctively aesthetic experiences? A traditional answer is to defend the possibility of aesthetic experience for the distal senses of vision and audition while excluding the proximal senses of taste, smell, and touch.1 The distal senses have aesthetic credentials, the thinking goes, because they inform us of complex, public objects, in contrast to the private and rudimentary pleasures of mere internal sensation. Admitting the proximal senses to the aesthetic domain would ‘obliterate’ a distinction that is both long-standing and firmly marked in linguistic usage between genuinely appreciative experiences such as regarding a painting or listening to music on the one hand, and the simple enjoyment of ‘taking a bath’ or ‘drinking lemonade’ on the other (Parsons and Carlson, 2008, p. 178). It is only to the former class of **Authors:** [[Tom Roberts]]