Philosophy has always been ambivalent about the senses. Its doubts begin with Plato, who makes fun of people who take pleasure in the sound of music, or in the colours and shapes of spectacles, while failing to grasp the nature of beauty itself (Plato Republic474d–477b). Plato's distinction between these philodoxoi, who relish appearances and love opinion, and philosophers, who go beyond perception in order to know the essence of things, lays some of the groundwork for the separation of rational minds and sensitive bodies in the pages of Descartes. The Cartesian argument that that we know that we exist because we think – and not because we see, hear, smell, taste and touch – is one of philosophy's most audacious efforts to establish that its methods for finding out the truth are intrinsically superior to the organs of perception that mediate experience and make life meaningful, whether one is a philosopher or not (Descartes 2008: 28). According to the tradition that starts with Plato and reaches a point of lasting influence in Descartes, sense perception is an obstacle that the intellect must remove in its quixotic pursuit of innocent knowledge.