Has taste and smell ever been subject to philosophical and empirical investigation by ancient or medieval scholars? Were there ever theories of how, e.g. the percept of taste arises, like Aristotle theorizing about rays of light emanating from the eye? If not, is there a reason why did some senses not qualify to be as important as vision?
Background: I read a very interesting book about the conceptual history of vision research (http://goo.gl/CXSMor) and was left to wonder how other modes of perception were treated in ancient times.
Reddit, not /r/askhistorians mods, auto-removed this question due to the link shortener you used. You may want to stop using such shorteners in the future. I fetched it out of the spam folder and approved the question for you.
well just to get this out of the way Aristotle actually theorized that light entered the eye "intromission" rather than "emission." Empedocles was the one who theorized about eyes having an emitting light.
To answer your questions Democritus and Leucippus were the first to describe an atomic theory of the universe. They even used the word "ἄτομος" which means "indivisible" ("a" being the negation and "tomos" being cut like tonsillectomy) Leucippus is said to have first thought of this and taught it to his much more famous pupil Democritus; Democritus is often described as the father of modern science. He advocated use of a higher form of knowing beyond the senses.
The theory as they wrote it out was remarkably close to reality, the most famous example being if one were to cut a piece of wood or rock there would come a point where a bit would be "uncuttable." He reasoned that everything was composed of these atoms, that everything had a tremendous amount of them in them and they were separated by spaces. They even hypothesized different shapes, sizes and weights to correlate to the substance itself, so iron had a very rigid strong structure whereas water was flowing and loosely connected. he described different shapes and geometries to describe taste, like jagged for bitter and angular for salty. here are some citations:
The properties perceived by other senses are also conveyed by contact of some kind. Democritus' theory of taste, for example, shows how different taste sensations are regularly produced by contact with different shapes of atoms: some atoms are jagged and tear the tongue, creating bitter sensations, or are smooth and thus roll easily over the tongue, causing sensations of sweetness. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/democritus/
Some interesting differences in experience are the direct result of differences in kind of atoms--in their size and/or shape. For example, sweet tastes are caused by round atoms, of a good size. Sour tastes are caused by atoms that are bulky, jagged, and many-angled, without curves. Pungent tastes are caused by atoms that are round, fine, angular and crooked. Salty tastes are caused by angular atoms which are of a good size, twisted, with two sides equal. Bitter tastes arise from atoms that are curved and smooth but very crooked and small in size. Oily tasting things consist of atoms that are fine, round and small. [Source: Robinson, An Introduction to Early Greek Philosophy (1968), p. 200]