In a recent article, Dawn Wilson (2021) has argued against single-stage accounts of photography by arguing against the latent photographic images upon which those accounts depend. Concomitantly, she argues that the only viable account of photography is multi-stage. Unlike single-stage accounts, multi-stage accounts do not postulate the existence of photographic images of any kind prior to development. Rather, according to multi-stage accounts, photographs are produced from “photographic registers.” In this Discussion Piece, I defend single-stage accounts by arguing (...) that Wilson’s rejection of latent photographic images is premised on an implausible view of what a latent photographic image is. Given a reasonable interpretation, the latent images described in single-stage accounts just are the photographic registers described in multi-stage accounts. (shrink)

A standard art-ontological position is to construe repeatable artworks as abstract objects that admit multiple concrete instances. Since photographic artworks are putatively repeatable, the ontology of photographic art is by default modelled after standard repeatable-work ontology. I argue, however, that the construal of photographic artworks as abstracta mistakenly ignores photography’s printmaking genealogy, specifically its ontological inheritance. More precisely, I claim that the products of printmaking media (prints) minimally must be construed in a manner consistent with basic print (...) ontology, the most plausible model of which looks decidedly nominalist (what I call the relevant similarity model) and that as such, photographic artworks must be likewise construed, not as abstracta but as individual and distinct concreta. That is, the correct ontological account of photographic art must be one according to which photographic artworks are individual and distinct concrete artworks. In the end, I show that the ontology of photographic art resists the standard repeatable-work model because the putative repeatability of photographic artworks is upon closer inspection nothing more than the relevant similarity relation between individual and distinct photographic prints. (shrink)

This paper takes as its point of departure Roland Barthes’s proposition in La Chambre claire that the nineteenth century “invented History and Photography,” that the era of photography is one of revolutions, and that the photograph’s “testimony” has diminished our capacity to think in terms of “duration.” Barthes also asserts that the French photographer Nadar is “the greatest photographer in the world,” but takes no account of Nadar’s acute receptivity to the history of the nineteenth century. The paper argues that, (...) though he fully recognized the unique properties of the new medium, Nadar himself was overridingly preoccupied with assessing photography’s role in a period when war and revolution were compromising the onward march of social and economic progress. Throughout his life, he was committed to the progressive ideas that he assimilated while growing up in Paris and Lyon in the 1830s. He wrote of the emergence of a Bohemian culture in the Latin Quarter of Paris, and remained keenly aware of the visual impressions that he had received in his youth from the popular lithographs of the pre-photographic era. He became a supporter of the artistic avant-garde, which led him to purchase important work by the landscape painter Daubigny. In his art criticism, he excoriated the later portraits of Ingres, which might have competed with his own reputation as a photographic portraitist. Yet, in his admiration for Delacroix, he emphasized the lengthy initiation necessary for the appreciation of the master’s paintings, implying a direct contrast with the “instantaneity” of the photographic process. By common consent, the period of Nadar’s great success as a portraitist, which secured his posthumous fame, occupied a short phase in his career as a whole. But his writings show that it was his lively intuition of the wider ramifications of photography that impelled him to move on—experimenting successfully with the first aerial photographs and documenting the catacombs of Paris with the aid of magnesium lighting. Though he could never experience television, he left a narrative in which the feasibility of transmitting images over a distance was presented as being startlingly realistic. In short, Nadar’s published work can be viewed as a sustained meditation on the interaction of historical experience and the media, which not only records but anticipates photography’s impact within the wider framework of visual culture. (shrink)

This Discussion Piece is a response to Mark Windsor's Discussion Piece (2023) 'Photographic Registers are Latent Images', which is a response to my article, (2021) 'Invisible Images and Indeterminacy: Why we need a Multi-stage Account of Photography' JAAC 79(2) 161-174.. -/- I argue that a photosensitive surface does not produce invisible pictorial features when it is exposed to light, and conclude, contra Windsor, that a photographic register is not a latent image. I argue that Windsor does not succeed (...) in defending a single-stage account of photography and I reconfirm that a multi-stage account is correct. (shrink)

The idea that looking at a photograph is akin to face-to-face perception and that photographs provide genuine perceptual access to the objects they depict was notoriously defended by Kendall Walton in “Transparent Pictures.” Walton’s main thesis is that photographs are transparent in the sense that we can see objects through them. The main goal of this article is to support Walton’s view by providing a full account of photographic transparency. I will argue that the transparency that characterizes photography is (...) not metaphorical but in fact exhibits all the essential properties of transparent materials. To understand how a photograph can be transparent, one must understand the special type of causal connection between a photograph and what it shows. Building on Fritz Heider’s work, I will argue that photography is a visual medium, like air, water, glass, or mirrors, capable of transmitting the visual properties of distant objects to the perceiver. (shrink)

We compare William Henry Fox Talbot’s 1835 photographic negative 'Latticed Window (with the Camera Obscura) August 1835' with Richard Beaudoin’s 2009 solo piano work 'Étude d’un Prélude VII -- Latticed Window'. We claim that the score of Beaudoin’s work is a musical photograph of a performance of another musical work, and support the claim by describing their respective photographic and compositional processes, emphasizing the uniqueness of this score in being mechanically counterfactually dependent on its target (a recording of (...) a Chopin prelude performed by Martha Argerich). We then compare Beaudoin’s score with other possible musical photographs, including musical recordings, sonic spectrographs, ordinary musical transcriptions, and typical musical scores. Finally, we consider an argument based on the transparency of photographs. (shrink)

Philosophy's only celebration of photography's 150th, the long-neglected philosophical job of clarification: drawing basic distinctions and defining basic conceptions, including photographic depiction, photographic detection, 'photograph of', 'documentary'. More than a lexicon, it explains why photography is important, by historically characterizing it through its uses for depiction, detection, reproduction, all of which have shaped the modern world. By consideration of it as 'mechanical', the paper explains photography's differences from practices with which it shares these functions. Happy birthday, photography.

Kendall Walton famously argues that photographic images—in contrast with handmade images—are transparent; we see through them to the persons or objects that were in front of the camera at the moment of exposure. Walton also argues, separately, that our philosophical investigations in the representational arts generally should adopt the methodology of theory construction. This article brings together these two strands of Walton's thought by rendering his argument for photographic transparency in the form of a theory consisting of a (...) perceptual natural kind and an underlying naturally dependent process, the former postulated in order to account for various photographic explananda. The surprising result is that Walton's theory, thus construed, yields at least one prediction that is in conflict with what we observe and that, because of this, he is forced to embellish his theory in ways that render it psychologically implausible and that raise the worry of ad hoc patching up. (shrink)

Many have held that photographs give us a firmer epistemic connection to the world than do other depictive representations. To take just one example, Bazin famously claimed that “The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making” ([Bazin, 1967], 14). Unfortunately, while the intuition in question is widely shared, it has remained poorly understood. In this paper we propose to explain the special epistemic status of photographs. We take as our starting place (...) (in §1) Kendall Walton’s startling proposal that photographs are special because they are “transparent” [Walton, 1984] — that is, that they are special because, unlike other depictive representations, they enable us literally to see their depicta.1 Walton’s proposal has not convinced many; however, it has proven surprisingly difficult to say just what is wrong about the transparency thesis. In §§2–4 we’ll rise to this challenge and show why photographs are not transparent in Walton’s sense. Finally, in §§5–7 we’ll propose and defend a novel diagnosis of what is epistemically special about photographs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.4 (2005) 307-310 [Access article in PDF] Aesthetics, Criticism, and Psychotherapy John Z. Sadler Keywords aesthetics, psychiatry, psychotherapy, Sibley In his wide-ranging survey of how Kantian aesthetic theory is implicated in psychothera-py, John Callender has raised at least a dozen potentially profound and rewarding possibilities in applying aesthetic theory to psychiatry and psychotherapy. Although the idea of marrying aesthetic theory to psychiatry and psychotherapy (...) is not new, Callender's direction of the merger is distinctively novel. The mid-twentieth century had a distinct literature in applying psychoanalytic and psychiatric theory to aesthetic experience, summarized by the sizable bibliography by Norman Kiell, Psychiatry and Psychology in the Visual Arts and Aesthetics: A Bibliography (1965). This line of interdisciplinary work influenced a later generation of art historians and literary theorists in applying (particularly) psychoanalytic theory to interpretation and appreciation of the arts, contributions that are still being developed today, along with the emergence of complementary viewpoints from cognitive neuroscience (Peretz and Zatorre 2003; Rose 2004; Zeki 1999). Callender's project, however, is quite the converse—he wishes to show how philosophical aesthetics can contribute to psychiatry and clinical psychology. Exploring the aesthetics of psychiatry is the innovation.Before focusing my own comments on a few of Callender's points, I wish to call attention to the substantive questions he has directly raised or implied by his discussions. These questions are worthy of further development in this and other journals, and I hope that Callender will succeed in engaging the minds of his readers and inspire them to work in this exciting area in the philosophy of psychiatry. In his elegant review of Kant's key theoretical points of aesthetics, his discussion provokes us to consider the kinds of evaluations that patients make of themselves (moral? aesthetic? others?), as well as the kinds of evaluations clinicians make in their judgments of psychopathology. Evolutionists may wonder about the adaptive significance of aesthetic capacities (e.g., derivatives of grooming? mating displays?). In presenting Kant's notion of "disinterestedness" or contemplative judgment, readers may wonder about overlap with notions of therapist neutrality and unconditional positive regard. Should therapist relationships with patients be dominated by a similar aesthetic sensibility? What does the aesthetic posture have to do with the therapist posture?Importantly, Callender notes the connections and ambiguities between moral values and aesthetic values. This is borne out in his later discussions of clinical case material (considered again below). He focuses primarily on the duplication of aesthetic and moral values in the same terms of praise (honesty, integrity, originality), but there is no question that aesthetic experiences are had by viewers of art exhibiting perverse or depraved [End Page 307] imagery (consider, for instance, Francis Bacon's "3 Screaming Popes" or, even more extremely, the grotesque staged photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin). The implication here is that (as an example) to understand the aesthetics of sadomasochistic art may help us to understand the psychology of sadomasochistic people.By the time he introduces his case material, Callender has raised the issue of intersubjectivity in aesthetic experience, an experience that may be devoid of discursive cognitive content but may be profound with emotional content, thus challenging tenets of cognitive psychology and psychotherapy. His discussion of cases reflecting elements of Kant's components of aesthetic judgment point toward new ways of understanding psychopathology as disturbances in aesthetic self-appraisal.I would like to return to the problem of moral and aesthetic judgments in psychotherapy and in psychopathology. Dr. Callender presents three cases—a woman who has been traumatized by multiple instances of sexual abuse, a young girl with postpartum depression with fears of losing her child because of bad mothering, and a third patient with anorexia nervosa who demonstrates the typically distorted body self-image. I suggest that the aesthetic nature of these patients' self-judgments is not so clear cut as Callender suggests. His sexual abuse case summary certainly suggests a woman consumed by shame. Because shame is a typical "moral emotion," the question is raised of moral badness being involved in her self-concept as well as, or perhaps... (shrink)

Within the loose group of studies that are sometimes labelled Heideggerian cinema – studies in which scholars consider film in conjunction with Heidegger's philosophy – little attention has been paid to Heidegger's actual view of cinema. This omission is not only odd but it is also problematic. In the off-hand comments Heidegger directs towards film throughout his collected works he criticises the medium for its covering over of Being, a fact that makes engaging with film through Heidegger's thinking a questionable (...) project. The present article aims to address this omission and to provide a conception of Heideggerian cinema that does not ignore, but answers, Heidegger's criticism. It argues that it is not the technological nature of cinema that is the source of Heidegger's hostility towards the medium but his conception of the film-photographic image as a transparent copy of the world. It is on this basis that cinema is denied the ca... (shrink)

Self-portrait photography presents an elucidatory range of cases for investigating the relationship between automatism and artistic agency in photography— a relationship that is seen as a problem in the philosophy of art. I discuss self-portraits by photographers who examine and portray their own identities as artists working in the medium of photography. I argue that the automatism inherent in the production of a photograph has made it possible for artists to extend the tradition of self-portraiture in a way that is (...) radically different from previous visual arts. In Section I, I explain why self-portraiture offers a way to address the apparent conflict between automatism and agency that is debated in the philosophy of art. In Section II, I explain why mirrors play an important function in the production of a traditional self-portrait. In Sections III and IV, I discuss how photographers may create self-portraits with and without the use of mirrors to show how photography offers unique and important new forms of self-portraiture. (shrink)

What is photography? -- Rethinking the political -- The photograph as the source of civil knowledge -- Civil uses of photography.

Ghost Image is made up of sixty-three short essays—meditations, memories, fantasies, and stories bordering on prose poems—and not a single image. Hervé Guibert’s brief, literary rumination on photography was written in response to Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, but its deeply personal contents go far beyond that canonical text. Some essays talk of Guibert’s parents and friends, some describe old family photographs and films, and spinning through them all are reflections on remembrance, narcissism, seduction, deception, death, and the phantom images that (...) have been missed. Both a memoir and an exploration of the artistic process, Ghost Image not only reveals Guibert’s particular experience as a gay artist captivated by the transience and physicality of his media and his life, but also his thoughts on the more technical aspects of his vocation. In one essay, Guibert searches through a cardboard box of family portraits for clues—answers, or even questions—about the lives of his parents and more distant relatives. Rifling through vacation snapshots and the autographed images of long-forgotten film stars, Guibert muses, “I don’t even recognize the faces, except occasionally that of an aunt or great-aunt, or the thin, fair face of my mother as a young girl.” In other essays, he explains how he composes his photographs, and how—in writing—he seeks to escape and correct the inherent limits of his technique, to preserve those images lost to his technical failings as a photographer. With strains of Jean Genet and recurring themes that speak to the work of contemporary artists across a range of media, Guibert’s Ghost Image is a beautifully written, melancholic ode to existence and art forms both fleeting and powerful—a unique memoir at the nexus of family, memory, desire, and photography. (shrink)

Widely recognized as America's premiere photography critic, Coleman took an interest in emerging digital technologies long before his colleagues. In fact, the earliest text in this new book of essays concerning the advent of electronic media is from 1967. The intervening thirty years have found Coleman returning to topics such as digitized images, the shifting concept of intellectual property, the impact of computers on photography as a whole, and the social implications of the Internet and World Wide Web. A wide-ranging (...) selection of essays, lectures, and writings, The Digital Evolution makes for stimulating reading, and should be well received by those familiar with Coleman's previous collection of essays, Critical Focus. (shrink)

The photograph of Ai Weiwei’s middle finger set against the backdrop of Tiananmen Square has become an icon of politically subversive art. But can we see beyond the middle finger? Here I argue that current theories of political aesthetics operate on an oversimplified dichotomy between two competing paradigms of political art, and that this threatens a more nuanced engagement with contemporary artistic practices. In the first part, I re-examine both the antagonistic relation between art and politics exemplified in Plato's verdict (...) against poetry as a socially corrosive form of imitation as well as the instrumental relation of art and politics developed in Friedrich Schiller’s conception of aesthetic education as a means of social and political reform. Then, drawing on recent work by the controversial Chinese artist, I argue for a model of political art that can account for the more complex interrelation of criticism and cultural affirmation evident in a growing body of politically-oriented art. (shrink)

A photographic reprint of the 1920 edition of Fry's graceful essays on painting, sculpture, and the principles of aesthetics criticism. --A. C. P.

Is there anything peculiarly "photographic" about photography—something which sets it apart from all other ways of making pictures? If there is, how important is it to our understanding of photographs? Are photographs so unlike other sorts of pictures as to require unique methods of interpretation and standards of evaluation? These questions may sound artificial, made up especially for the purpose of theorizing. But they have in fact been asked and answered not only by critics and photographers but by laymen. (...) Furthermore, for most of this century the majority of critics and laymen alike have tended to answer these questions in the same way: that photographs and paintings differ in an important way and require different methods in interpretation precisely because photographs and paintings come into being in different ways. These answers are interesting because, even within the rather restricted classes of critics, photographers, and theorists, they are held in common by a wide variety of people who otherwise disagree strongly with each other—by people who think that photographs are inferior to paintings and people who believe they are superior; by people who think that photographs ought to be "objective" and those who believe they should be "subjective"; by those who believe that it is impossible for photographers to "create" anything and by those who believe that they should at least try. Joel Snyder teaches criticism and history of photography at the University of Chicago and is presently compiling a book of his own photographs. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Picturing Vision" and "Reflexions on Las Meninas: Paradox Lost", written with Ted Cohen in the Winter 1980 issue. Neil Walsh Allen produces educational audio-visual materials and has designed eight permanent exhibits on the history and applications of photography for the Smithsonian Institution. (shrink)

IN THE winter and spring of 1031,1 was invited to give a series of ten lectures at Harvard University. The subject chosen was the Philosophy of Art; the lectures are the origin of the present volume. The Lectureship was founded in memory of William James and I esteem it a great honor to have this book associated even indirectly with his distinguished name. It is a pleasure, also, te recall, in connection with the lectures, the unvarying kindness and hospitality of (...) my colleagues in the department of philosophy at Harvard. I am somewhat embarrassed in an effort to acknowledge indebtedness to other writers on the subject. Some aspects of it may be inferred from authors mentioned or quoted in the text. I have read on the subject for many years, however, more or less widely in English literature, somewhat less in French and still less in German, and I have absorbed much from sources which I cannot now directly recall. Moreover, my obligations to a number of writers are much greater than might be gathered from allusions to them in the volume itself. My indebtedness to those who have helped me directly can be more easily stated. Dr. Joseph Ratner gave me a number of valuable references. Dr. Meyer Schapiro was good enough to read the twelfth and thirteenth chapters and to make suggestions which I have freely adopted. Irwin Edman read a large part of the book in manuscript and I owe much to his suggestions and criticism. Sidney Hook read many of the chapters, and their present form is largely the result of discussions with him; this statement is especially true of the chapters on criticism and the last chapter. My greatest indebtedness is to Dr. A. C. Barnes. The chaptershave been gone over one by one with him, and yet what I owe to his comments and suggestions on this account is but a small measure of my debt. I have had the benefit of con versations with him through a period of years, many of which occurred in the presence of the unrivaled collection of pictures he has assembled. The influence of these conversations, together with that of his books, has been a chief factor in shapingmy own thinking about the philosophy of esthetics. Whatever is sound in this volume is due more than I can say to the great educational work carried on in the Barnes Foundation. That work is of a pioneer quality comparable to the best that has been done in any field during the present generation, that of science not ex cepted. I should be glad to think of this volume as one phase of the widespread influence the Foundation is exercising. I am indebted to the Barnes Foundation for permission to reproduce a number of illustrations and to Barbara and Willard Morgan for the photographs from which the reproductions were made. J. D. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: A Baby with a Hand Grenade Implications of a “Causal” Medium Ethical Concerns about Photography Sontag's Critique of Arbus Some Difficulties with Sontag's Analysis The Ethics of Taking a Photograph The Ethics of Viewing a Photograph.

What is photography? Is it primarily a source of knowledge about the world or an art? Many have said the former, because it records the world automatically, others the latter because it embodies human subjectivity. Can it photography be both or must we choose? In On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry Diarmuid Costello examines these fascinating questions and more. In so doing he introduces some of the fundamental topics and debates about the nature of photography, with the help of photographic (...) images from Paul Strand, Lee Friedlander, James Welling, Jeff Wall, and Gerhard Richter, among others. Tracing the roots of thinking about photography from its discovery, through Nineteenth Century debates about its standing as art, to Twentieth Century Modernism and post-War cultural criticism, Costello identifies the emergence of a powerful "orthodox" view of photography. The features that make photographs compelling documents are precisely those that put pressure on its standing as art; though they provide a wealth of empirical information, they cannot have the unifying vision we look for in art. He draws on the reflections of photographers and theorists, including Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Siegfried Kracauer, Andre Bazin and Stanley Cavell to illustrate this fundamental tension. The view comes to fruition in the work of Roger Scruton and Kendall Walton. Whether pure photography is capable of representing fictions, or always presents a transparent window onto the real world becomes the key question. Recently, the orthodox view has come under increasing pressure from a new generation of philosophers who reject the contrast between machine and hand made images that underwrites it. He concludes by examining photographic agency in a digital age. Written in a clear and engaging style, On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry is essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of photography, aesthetics, art, and visual studies. (shrink)

What is photography? Is it primarily a source of knowledge about the world or an art? Many have said the former, because it records the world automatically, others the latter because it embodies human subjectivity. Can it photography be both or must we choose? In _On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry_ Diarmuid Costello examines these fascinating questions and more. In so doing he introduces some of the fundamental topics and debates about the nature of photography, with the help of photographic (...) images from Paul Strand, Lee Friedlander, James Welling, Jeff Wall, and Gerhard Richter, among others. Tracing the roots of thinking about photography from its discovery, through nineteenth-century debates about its standing as art, to twentieth-century Modernism and post-War cultural criticism, Costello identifies the emergence of a powerful "orthodox" view of photography. The features that make photographs compelling documents are precisely those that put pressure on its standing as art; though they provide a wealth of empirical information, they cannot have the unifying vision we look for in art. He draws on the reflections of photographers and theorists, including Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Siegfried Kracauer, Andre Bazin and Stanley Cavell to illustrate this fundamental tension. The view comes to fruition in the work of Roger Scruton and Kendall Walton. Whether pure photography is capable of representing fictions, or always presents a transparent window onto the real world becomes the key question. Recently, the orthodox view has come under increasing pressure from a new generation of philosophers who reject the contrast between machine and hand made images that underwrites it. He concludes by examining photographic agency in a digital age. Written in a clear and engaging style, _On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry_ is essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of photography, aesthetics, art, and visual studies. (shrink)

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and his devoted fans are not just philosophers, but readers of political and legal theory, sociology, and literary criticism as well. In March 2009, Agamben was invited to speak in Paris' Notre-Dame Cathedral in the presence of the Bishop of Paris and a number of other high-ranking church officials. His resulting speech, a stunningly lucid and provocative look at the history (...) and state of the Church and its role in society, is presented here. The Church and the Kingdom is at once a pointed attack on the institutional structure of the Catholic Church and a theoretical excursus on the concepts of messianic time and economy. Presenting an exegesis of certain key passages in the New Testament, Agamben examines the philology and philosophy at the root of the Church and of its earthly reign. With its examinations of the foundational texts of the Church, which are also the foundational texts of our modern idea of economy, The Church and the Kingdom reveals significant connections and parallel ideologies which are imperative to understanding the current global situation. This edition of Agamben's text is accompanied by photographs by artist Alice Attie. Made from folded and twisted reproductions of paintings culled from Christian iconography, these works of art evoke the restless challenge that well-characterizes Agamben's four decades of philosophy and critique. This book will be welcomed by Agamben's many readers across the disciplines. (shrink)

_Essays on Wittgenstein and Austrian Philosophy_ is presented for the 60th birthday of professor Christoph Nyíri. The essays presented here for the first time are focused on Austrian intellectual history, and on Wittgenstein’s philosophy – the two main areas of Professor Nyíri’s interests. Typically, the contributors are outstanding scholars of the field, including among others David Bloor, Lee Congdon, Newton Garver, Wilhelm Lütterfields, Joachim Schulte, Barry Smith. The volume is of primary interest for Wittgenstein scholars and those studying the 19th (...) and 20th century Austrian intellectual history. As the volume is presented for Professor Nyíri, the papers collected here reflect his interests in Wittgenstein and Austrian philosophy. Beginning with an introductory chapter on Nyiri’s achievements in this field of scholarship, the volume is in four parts. The first part contains essays on Austrian philosophy broadly understood, more precisely on its socio-historical context (Barry Smith and Wolfgang Grassl), on the relation between Marxism and Arnold Hauser’s philosophy and sociology of art (Lee Congdon), and Neurath’s connection to naturalistic epistemologies (Thomas Uebel). The second part presents Wittgenstein's philosophy in context. Jaakko Hintikka’s paper argues that Wittgenstein’s probable dyslexia can be seen as an external influence on and a source of his philosophy. David Bloor discusses Wittgenstein’s philosophy in the context of Edmund Burke’s conservatism, which can be read as a background of Nyiri’s influential interpretation of Wittgenstein as a conservative philosopher. Newton Garver also touches on the problem of conservatism while discussing passages of _On Certainty_ in the context of Kant, Moore, and T.S. Eliot. Klaus Puhl’s essay connects Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following to Freud’s concept of retroactivity, and argues that rules emerging from empirical regularities can be seen as retroactive constructions. The papers in the third part of the volume offer close readings of Wittgenstein’s works. Rudolf Lüthe offers two readings of Wittgenstein’s criticism of philosophy in the _Tractatus_ can be read in two ways with different consequences, among them is the appearance of philosophy inspired by art rather than the sciences. Joachim Schulte offers an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s use of ’natural history’ that can accommodate all of his remarks containing this concept. Herbert Hrachovec discusses the relation of pictorial and linguistic representations in Wittgenstein’s _Nachlass, _arguing that there is no pronounced opposition between the two. The forth part of the book, containing three papers in German, continues the close inspection of Wittgenstein’s later works. Wilhelm Lütterfelds reconstructs Wittgenstein’s philosophy of time as pointing out memory being the very source of time. Katalin Neumer inspects Wittgenstein’s frequent references to photographs in the context of aspect-seeing and compares them with other remarks on theatre, painting, and music. She concludes that there are no philosophically important structural differences between them. Peter Keicher’s paper offers a comprehensive view on Wittgenstein’s prefaces in the context of his various book-projects. The volume ends with a select bibliography of Professor Nyiri’s works. (shrink)