This paper focuses on whether static images can depict motion. It is natural to say that pictures depicting objects caught in the middle of a dynamic action—such as Henri Cartier-Bresson’s (1932) Behind the Gare St. Lazare—are pictures of movement, but, given that pictures themselves do not move, can we make sense of such an idea? Drawing on results from experimental psychology and cognitive sciences, I show that we can. Psychological studies on implicit motion and representational momentum indicate that motion is (...) really perceived in some static images: our visual system is built in order to detect motion, even where it is only implied, and to anticipate the probable outcomes of others’ actions—even when the ‘others’ are only the subject matters of pictures’. I argue that, consequently, a range of popular depiction theories—perceptualist theories of depiction—can accommodate depicted motion. (shrink)

Thoughtful Images: Philosophy Illustrated is the first systematic investigation of how artists throughout the ages have illustrated philosophical texts, ideas, concepts, and theories. The book begins by developing a theory of visual illustrations of philosophical texts and undermining what the author calls "the denigration of illustration." The book then takes a more historical approach, beginning in Ancient Greece and Rome and proceeding through Medieval illuminations and printed broadsides to the frontispieces of philosophical texts. Throughout, attention is paid to how (...) technological developments enable different means for illustrating philosophy. (shrink)

This is a book about the nature of film: about the nature of moving images, about the viewer's relation to film, and about the kinds of narrative that film is capable of presenting. It represents a very decisive break with the semiotic and psychoanalytic theories of film which have dominated discussion. The central thesis is that film is essentially a pictorial medium and that the movement of film images is real rather than illusory. A general theory of pictorial representation is (...) presented, which insists on the realism of pictures and the impossibility of assimilating them to language. It criticizes attempts to explain the psychology of film viewing in terms of the viewer's imaginary occupation of a position within the world of film. On the contrary, film viewing is nearly always impersonal. (shrink)

The eastern Islamic concept of the imaginal realm, which explains how supra-sensory realities present themselves to imaginative perception, can enrich the imagination of film-philosophy. The imaginal realm, in Arabic ‘alam al-mithal, world of images, or ‘alam al-khayal, imaginative world, is part of a triadic ontology of sensible, imaginal, and intelligible realms. Diverging from roots shared with Western thought in the concept of the imaginative faculty, the Islamic imaginal realm is supra-individual and more real than matter. The imaginal realm is (...) a radically pro-image concept, affirming the importance of poetry, art, and images in motion. As developed by the Persian philosopher Sadr al-Dîn Muhammad al-Shîrâzî, known as Mullâ Sadrâ (1571–1640), the imaginal realm flows and intensifies, in a process philosophy we may fruitfully compare with Spinoza, Leibniz, and Whitehead. I sketch the genealogy of the imaginal realm and compare it to contemporary Western film-philosophy. I suggest how this transcendental concept can be made immanent. Finally, I draw from contemporary Muslim thinkers, such as Mohammed Arkoun, who ground a visionary collective politics in the imaginal realm. My central example, the documentary The Lebanese Rocket Society (2012) by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joriege, exemplifies film's imaginal powers. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage a pour objectif d'interroger en profondeur la manière avec laquelle, historiquement, les philosophes ont « pratiqué l'image dans le concept ». Les auteurs s'interrogent sur le recours à la visualité et à la métaphore dans l'élaboration des schèmes philosophiques à travers l'histoire de la philosophie et les rapports que cette dernière entend tisser avec l'histoire du monde. On tâche de cerner les raisons que les philosophes ont pu avoir de mobiliser ou au contraire de rejeter cet opérateur (...) conceptuel, d'assumer sa performativité ou bien de déplorer son caractère résiduel et résistant à toute systématisation de la rationalité. L'ouvrage cherche ainsi à dégager quelques figures centrales du nouage que les philosophes ne cessent d'opérer au sein du chiasme reliant la construction philosophique de l'image et la constitution de la pensée par l'image. Platon, saint Augustin, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Nietzsche, Bergson, Bachelard, Wittgenstein, Fink, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Castoriadis, Simondon et Deleuze sont les auteurs privilégiés dans cet ensemble. (shrink)

Ce livre traite de l'image, mais aussi, plus generalement, de la copie, du double, de la representation, du calque, du sosie... La philosophie, a juste titre, a mis en garde contres ces si dangereux reflets. Ne doit-on pas preferer ce qui est a ce qui l'imite ou le mime? Mefions-nous des leurres! Cependant, on est revenu sur cette seculaire et injuste condamnation. La technologie moderne a peu a peu sauve celle qu'on avait trop inferiorisee et eloignee. Et quelle victoire! (...) L'image numerique, donc celle de synthese, l'arrache a une servitude que les philosophes classiques et meme plus modernes avaient scellee. L'electro-optique, la tomodensitometrie (scannographie), l'holographie, entre autres, multiplient les prouesses liberatrices. Dans le passe, la photographie, voire la radiographie avaient deja ebranle les anciennes positions. La guerre commencait. L'imagerie deferle donc, ainsi que l'industrie noire des contrefacons, des plagiats, des pseudo-repliques, du pastiche. Les trucages et la fraude. Mais ou situer aujourd'hui le vrai et le faux? Comment distinguer le modele et son equivalent? Les vieilles frontieres, comme on le montrera, s'estompent. Quel branle-bas et quelle fete aussi! On a voulu prendre acte de cette nouveaute. Hatons-nous, malgre le danger de nous y perdre, d'engager la philosophie que nous croyons reticente dans ce tourbillon. (shrink)

An important question facing contemporary philosophy of science is whether the natural sciences in terms of their historical records exhibit distinguishing developmental patterns or structures. At least two philosophical stances are possible in answering this question. The first pertains to the plurality of the individual sciences. From this stance, the various sciences are analyzed individually and compared with one another in order to derive potential commonalities, if any, among them. The second stance involves a general philosophy of science (...) in which a thorough theory of the natural sciences is developed. The latter stance strives to account for more than possible commonalities among the sciences but also to provide a broad-spectrum philosophical framework to account for, or to explicate, the nature of science itself and its progress. In this paper, the second stance is taken in which an evolutionary philosophy of science is proposed. To that end, Thomas Kuhn’s evolutionary philosophy of science is initially discussed and critiqued. An evolutionary philosophy of science is then proposed based on a revision of Kuhn’s evolutionary philosophy of science in terms of George Gaylord Simpson’s various tempos and modes for biological evolution. Next, two historical case studies from the biological sciences are reconstructed to illustrate the robustness of the proposed evolutionary philosophy of science for explicating the progress of the natural sciences. A concluding section discusses the proposed evolutionary philosophy of science with respect to providing a broad-spectrum framework or general philosophy of science for understanding the nature and progress of the natural sciences. (shrink)

In this book van Fraassen develops an alternative to scientific realism by constructing and evaluating three mutually reinforcing theories.

One way in which the characteristic gestures of philosophy and criticism differ from each other lies in their involvements with disillusionment, with the undoing of our naivete, especially regarding what we take ourselves to know about the meaning of what we say. Philosophy will often find less than we thought was there, perhaps nothing at all, in what we say about the “external” world, or in our judgments of value, or in our ordinary psychological talk. The work of (...) criticism, on the other hand, frequently disillusions by finding disturbingly more in what is said than we precritically thought was there. In our relation to the meaningfulness of what we say, there is a disillusionment of plentitude as well as of emptiness. And no doubt what is “less” for one discipline may be “more” of what someone else is looking for.In recent years, metaphor has attracted more than its share of both philosophical and critical attention, including philosophical denials of the obvious, as well as critical challenges to the obviousness of the ways we talk about metaphor. In this paper I discuss a problem of each sort and suggest a complex of relations between them. The particular denial of the obvious that I’m interested in is the claim recently made by Donald Davidson that “a metaphor doesn’t say anything beyond its literal meaning ,” nor is it even correct to speak of metaphor as a form of communication.1 There’s disillusionment with a vengeance; and even if not strictly believable, it is still not without its therapeutic value, as we shall see. 1. Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks , p. 30; hereafter abbreviated “WMM.” Davidson’s view has found supporters among both philosophers and literary theorists. It is, for example, important to the early argument of Richard Rorty’s recent book. See his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity , p. 18. Richard Moran is an assistant professor of philosophy at Princeton University. He is currently working on a book on subjectivity and contemporary concepts of personhood. (shrink)

This is the first book to explore the epistemology and ethics of advanced imaging tests, in order to improve the critical understanding of the nature of knowledge they provide and the practical consequences of their utilization in healthcare. Advanced medical imaging tests, such as PET and MRI, have gained center stage in medical research and in patients’ care. They also increasingly raise questions that pertain to philosophy: What is required to be an expert in reading images? How are standards (...) for interpretation to be fixed? Is there a problem of overutilization of such tests? How should uncertainty be communicated to patients? How to cope with incidental findings? This book is of interest and importance to scholars of philosophy of medicine at all levels, from undergraduates to researchers, to medical researchers and practitioners (radiologists and nuclear physicians) interested in a critical appraisal of the methodology of their discipline and in the ethical principles and consequences of their work. -/- . (shrink)

... the first book to examine all the central issues surrounding the vexed relationship between the film-image and philosophy. In it, John Mullarkey tackles the work of particular philosophers and theorists (Žižei, Deleuze, Cavell, Bordwell, Badiou, Branigan, Rancière, Frampton, and many others) as well as general philosophical positions (Analytical and Continental, Cognitivist and Culturalist, Pyschoanalytic and phenomenological). Moreover, he also offers an incisive analysis and explanation of several prominent forms of film theorizing, providing a metalogical account of their (...) mutual advantages and deficiencies that will prove immensely useful to anyone interested in the details of particular theories of film presently circulating, as well as correcting, revising, and re-visioning the field of film theory as a whole. Throughout, Mullarkey asks whether the reduction of film to text is unavoidable. In particular: must philosophy (and theory) always transform film into pre-texts for illustration? What would it take to imagine how film might itself theorise without reducing it to standard forms of thought and philosophy? Finally, and fundamentally, must we change our definition of philosophy and even of thought itself in order to accommodate the specificities that come with the claim that film can produce philosophical theory?"--Publisher's description, p. [4] of cover. (shrink)

The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Under 'things in the broadest possible sense' I include such radically different items as not only 'cabbages and kings', but numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death. To achieve success in philosophy would be, to use a contemporary turn of phrase, to 'know one's way around' (...) with respect to all these things, not in that unreflective way in which the centipede of the story knew its way around before it faced the question, 'how do I walk?', but in that reflective way which means that no intellectual holds are barred. (shrink)

Lambert Wiesing's The Philosophy of Perception challenges current theories of perception. Instead of attempting to understand how a subject perceives the world, Wiesing starts by taking perception to be real. He then asks what this reality means for a subject. In his original approach, the question of how human perception is possible is displaced by questions about what perception obliges us to be and do. He argues that perception requires us to be embodied, to be visible, and to continually (...) participate in the public and physical world we perceive. Only in looking at images, he proposes, can we achieve something like a break in participation, a temporary respite from this, one of perception's relentless demands. Wiesing's methods chart a markedly new path in contemporary perception theory. In addition to identifying common ground among diverse philosophical positions, he identifies how his own, phenomenological approach differs from those of many other philosophers, past and present. As part of the argument, he provides a succinct but comprehensive survey of the philosophy of images His original critical exposition presents scholars of phenomenology, perception and aesthetics with a new, important understanding of the old phenomenon, the human being in the world. (shrink)

These phenomenological studies on the philosophy of the image review contemporary image theory while defending the fundamental insight that images alone make the artificial presence of things possible.

The third issue of the Journal for the Philosophy of Language, Mind and the Arts is centered on a series of questions related to the nature of images. What properties characterize them? Do they exist also in our minds? What relationship do they have with phenomena such as perception, memory, language and interpretation? The authors participating in this issue have been asked to answer these and other questions starting from and in dialogue with the two philosophical perspectives that have (...) most enriched the study of our object of research since the second half of the twentieth century: analytical philosophy and visual culture studies. The first four essays address problems related to ontology (Didi-Huberman, Prinz, Bantinaki, Manzotti). In their pages the question will be asked not only about the nature of images but also about what it means for an image to represent an object or an action realistically. The second part contains discussions related to the topics of perception, appreciation and creation of pictures (Ferretti; Gavaler, Goldberg; Pigoni, Coraci, Carlenzi). The third section goes through the problems related to the very concept of representing by images (Biggs; Weichert; Derby). The last section of the issue is devoted to two cases in which images are used not so much and not only to represent something, but also to convey ethical-political values (Fasnacht; Olesiejuk). (shrink)

Michael Jacovides provides an engaging account of how the scientific revolution influenced one of the foremost figures of early modern philosophy, John Locke. By placing Locke's thought in its scientific, religious, and anti-scholastic contexts, Jacovides explains not only what Locke believes but also why he believes it.

The article offers a new approach for the exploration of media and television studies by extracting the television-philosophy implicit in Samuel Beckett’s television play … but the clouds …. The reading focuses on the immanent logic of the play seen as a televisual and an intermedial whole, instead of constructing it as an intertextual tapestry of references. The article argues against a popular interpretation of Beckett as the artist of failure. The reading of …but the clouds… as illustrating the (...) failure of memory and as a comment on the televisual loss of pro-filmic referentiality is subsequently also contested. On the contrary, it is argued that the play in a self-reflexive positive gesture explores both the ontology of the television-image and the ontology of memory as a process of conjuration by presenting a successful emergence of the televisual Image-in-itself. (shrink)

Stanley Rosen's book is the first full-length study of the Sophist in English and one of the most complete in any language. He follows the stages of the dialogue in sequence and offers an exhaustive analysis of the philosophical questions that come to light as Theaetetus and the Eleatic Stranger pursue the sophist through philosophical debate. Rosen finds the central problem of the dialogue in the relation between original and image; he shows how this distinction underlies all subsequent technical (...) themes and analyzes in detail such problems as non-being or negation and false statement. Arguing that the dialogue must be treated as a dramatic unity, he pays careful attention throughout to the setting, the events, the language used, and the relations between the natures of the speakers and the topics under discussion. (shrink)

What is an image? How can we describe the experience of looking at images, and how do they become meaningful to us? In what sense are images like or unlike propositions? Participants of the 33rd International Wittgenstein Symposium--philosophers as well as historians of art, science, and literature--provide many stimulating answers. Some of the contributions are dedicated to Wittgenstein’s thoughts on images while others testify to the important role notions coined or inspired by Wittgenstein--“seeing as”, “picture games” and the dichotomy (...) of “saying and showing”--play in the field of picture theory today. This first volume of the Proceedings of the 2010 conference addresses readers interested in the history and theory of images, and in the philosophy of Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Russo and Williamson (Int Stud Philos Sci 21(2):157–170, 2007) put forward the thesis that, at least in the health sciences, to establish the claim that C is a cause of E, one normally needs evidence of an underlying mechanism linking C and E as well as evidence that C makes a difference to E. This epistemological thesis poses a problem for most current analyses of causality which, in virtue of analysing causality in terms of just one of mechanisms or difference (...) making, cannot account for the need for the other kind of evidence. Weber (Int Stud Philos Sci 23(2):277–295, 2009) has suggested to the contrary that Giere’s probabilistic analysis of causality survives this criticism. In this paper, we look in detail at the case of medical imaging technology, which, we argue, supports the thesis of Russo and Williamson, and we respond to Weber’s suggestion, arguing that Giere’s account does not survive the criticism. (shrink)

There is the tension between, on the one hand, Wittgenstein’s not giving theoretical weight to metaphor, and on the other, his exuberant use of it. On a more fundamental level, there is a straightforward contradiction between Wittgenstein’s claim of the primordial literalness of everyday language, and his stress on the multiplicity and flexibility of language-games. Wittgenstein’s problem was that he did not succeed in making his ideas on metaphor, and indeed his ideas on metaphor and images, converge with the main (...) drift of TS 227 (the so-called ‘Part I’ of the so-called ‘Philosophical Investigations’). It was this divergence, I believe, that prevented him from rounding out his later philosophy. (shrink)

A selection of essays written by one of the leading critics of film over the last two decades, this volume examines theoretical aspects of film and television through penetrating analyses of such genres as soap opera, documentary, comedy, and such topics as 'sight gags', film metaphor, point-of-view editing, and movie music. Throughout, individual films are considered in depth. Carroll's essays, moreover, represent the cognitivist turn in film studies, containing in-depth criticism of existing approaches to film theory, and heralding a new (...) approach. (shrink)

The nature of representation is a central topic in philosophy. This is the first book to connect problems with understanding representational artifacts, like pictures, diagrams, and inscriptions, to the philosophies of science, mind, and art. Can images be a source of knowledge? Are images merely conventional signs, like words? What is the relationship between the observer and the observed? In this clear and stimulating introduction to the problem John V. Kulvicki explores these questions and more. He discusses: the nature (...) of pictorial experience and "seeing in" recognition, resemblance, pretense, and structural theories of depiction images as aids to scientific discovery and understanding mental imagery and the nature of perceptual content photographs as visual prostheses. In so doing he assesses central problems in the philosophy of images, such as how objects we make come to represent other things, and how we distinguish kinds of representation - pictures, diagrams, graphs - from one another. Essential reading for students and professional philosophers alike, the book also contains chapter summaries, annotated further reading, and a glossary. (shrink)

Introduction: why did philosophy go to the movies? -- The analytic-cognitivist turn. The empire strikes back: critiques of "grand theory" -- The rules of the game: new ontologies of film -- Adaptation: philosophical approaches to narrative -- From cognitivism to film-philosophy. A.I.: cognitivism goes to the movies -- Bande à part: Deleuze and Cavell as film-philosophers -- Scenes from a marriage: film as philosophy -- Cinematic thinking. Hollywood in trouble: David Lynch's Inland empire -- "Chaos reigns": anti-cognitivism (...) in Lars von trier's Antichrist -- Song of the earth: cinematic romanticism in Malick's The new world -- Coda: "the six most beautiful minutes in the history of cinema". (shrink)

The philosophical analysis of chemistry has advanced at such a pace during the last dozen years that the existence of philosophy of chemistry as an autonomous discipline cannot be doubted any more. The present paper will attempt to analyse the experience of philosophy of chemistry at the, so to say, meta-level. Philosophers of chemistry have especially stressed that all sciences need not be similar to physics. They have tried to argue for chemistry as its own type of science (...) and for a pluralistic understanding of science in general. However, when stressing the specific character of chemistry, philosophers do not always analyse the question ‘What is science?’ theoretically. It is obvious that a ‘monistic’ understanding of science should not be based simply on physics as the epitome of science, regarding it as a historical accident that physics has obtained this status. The author’s point is that the philosophical and methodological image of science should not be chosen arbitrarily; instead, it should be theoretically elaborated as an idealization (theoretical model) substantiated on the historical practice of science. It is argued that although physics has, in a sense, justifiably obtained the status of a paradigm of science, chemistry, which is not simply a physical science, but a discipline with a dual character, is also relevant for elaborating a theoretical model of science. The theoretical model of science is a good tool for examining various issues in philosophy of chemistry as well as in philosophy of science or science studies generally. (shrink)

Thomas Kuhn's philosophy of science, which he developed by focusing on physics, was later applied by other authors to virtually all areas or disciplines of culture. What interests me here, however, is the movement in the opposite direction: the role that one of these disciplines, history of art, played in the conception of Kuhn'stheoryof science.In a 1969 article, his only published text concerning science and art, Kuhn makes a brief and intriguing observation about The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He (...) says the book was a belated product of his discovery of the parallels between science and art. This is a retrospective assertion about Structure, as well as that of the... (shrink)

The study presents the Russian historical-philosophical process in the context of the discovery of a new object, themes, personae, set of reactions and formation of a product for the intellectual community. The author's reliance on philosophical empirical material and appropriate hermeneutics in its processing allows the author to highlight those factors that influenced individual and collective reception. The author sees as a convenient case study the “discovery” by the Russian philosophical community of the early 20th century of both American (...) class='Hi'>philosophy in general and C.S. Peirce in particular. Since the beginning of the 19th century, Russian thinkers have turned their attention to American philosophy in all the diversity of its manifestations. Russian intellectuals paid special attention to American pragmatism and everything associated with it. In Russia, in addition to translations, numerous reviews of foreign publications on this topic are appearing. Of particular interest to us in the Russian “collective reflection” of American ideas is the system of preferences for ideas, texts, events, and names. The point is that what might have been a priority for a European thinker, for a Russian one turned out to be on the “periphery” of his consciousness, as well as vice versa. While James appeared among the priority figures for Russian thinkers, Peirce was in his “shadow”. Using rich empirical material, the author shows all the stages of Peirce’s image formation in the Russian intellectual community. The research shows that “image” of Peirce, which represents not so much the thinker himself, but characterizes the intellectual community that turned to him. The results of the study may be useful both for contemporary foreign and Russian interpreters of Peirce and for historians of philosophy who are rethinking the past and forming in the present new objects of reception and reflection. (shrink)

Images of the human is the collective effort of thirteen philosophy professors to address the questions human beings have been asking for centuries. The book presents selections from the major works of eighteen of the best-known philosophers from ancient to modern times. Each chapter focuses on the writings of a different philosopher - from Plato to Nietzsche, Augustine to Sartre - and includes an introduction and critical comentary.

Introduction to edited volume on vitalism and/in the life sciences, 1800-2010.

This volume collects twenty original essays on the philosophy of film. It uniquely brings together scholars working across a range of philosophical traditions and academic disciplines to broaden and advance debates on film and philosophy. The book includes contributions from a number of prominent philosophers of film including Noël Carroll, Chris Falzon, Deborah Knight, Paisley Livingston, Robert Sinnerbrink, Malcolm Turvey, and Thomas Wartenberg. While the topics explored by the contributors are diverse, there are a number of thematic threads (...) that connect them. Overall, the book seeks to bridge analytic and continental approaches to philosophy of film in fruitful ways. Moving to the individual essays, the first two sections offer novel takes on the philosophical value and the nature of film. The next section focuses on the film-as-philosophy debate. Section IV covers cinematic experience, while Section V includes interpretations of individual films that touch on questions of artificial intelligence, race and film, and cinema's biopolitical potential. Finally, the last section proposes new avenues for future research on the moving image beyond film. This book will appeal to a broad range of scholars working in film studies, theory, and philosophy. (shrink)

Gregg Lambert demonstrates that since the publication of _Proust and Signs_ in 1964 Gilles Deleuze’s search for a new means of philosophical expression became a central theme of all of his oeuvre, including those written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. Lambert, like Deleuze, calls this “the image of thought.” Lambert’s exploration begins with Deleuze’s earliest exposition of the Proustian image of thought and then follows the “tangled history” of the image that runs through subsequent works, such as _Kafka: (...) Toward a Minor Literature_, _The Rhizome_, and several later writings from the 1980s collected in _Essays Critical and Clinical._ Lambert shows how this topic underlies Deleuze’s studies of modern cinema, where the image of thought is predominant in the analysis of the cinematic image—particularly in _The Time-Image_. Lambert finds it to be the fundamental concern of the brain proposed by Deleuze in the conclusion of _What Is Philosophy? _By connecting the various appearances of the image of thought that permeate Deleuze’s entire corpus, Lambert reveals how thinking first assumes an image, how the images of thought become identified with the problem of expression early in the works, and how this issue turns into a primary motive for the more experimental works of philosophy written with Guattari. The study traces a distinctly modern relationship between philosophy and non-philosophy that has developed into a hallmark of the term “Deleuzian.” However, Lambert argues, this aspect of the philosopher’s vision has not been fully appreciated in terms of its significance for philosophy: “not only ‘for today’ but, to quote Nietzsche, meaning also ‘for tomorrow, and for the day after tomorrow.’”. (shrink)

Naturalism as a guiding philosophy for modern science both disavows any appeal to the supernatural or anything else transcendent to nature, and repudiates any philosophical or religious authority over the workings and conclusions of the sciences. A longstanding paradox within naturalism, however, has been the status of scientific knowledge itself, which seems, at first glance, to be something that transcends and is therefore impossible to conceptualize within scientific naturalism itself. In Articulating the World, Joseph Rouse argues that the most (...) pressing challenge for advocates of naturalism today is precisely this: to understand how to make sense of a scientific conception of nature as itself part of nature, scientifically understood. Drawing upon recent developments in evolutionary biology and the philosophy of science, Rouse defends naturalism in response to this challenge by revising both how we understand our scientific conception of the world and how we situate ourselves within it. (shrink)

L'omniprésence des images dans la société mass-médiatique est corrélative de leur évanescence et du constant renouvellement qui conditionne le processus de leur consommation. Leur omnipotence se réduit ainsi à celle de stimuli destinés à induire des comportements. Or, il convient d'autant plus de revenir d'une telle exténuation de l'image que cette dernière constitue l'une des dimensions essentielles du déploiement de la vie humaine. L'image est traditionnellement rapportée à l'activité imaginante d'un sujet. Mais, s'il est vrai que l'étoffe des (...) hommes et des choses qui se donnent à voir dans le paraître sensible d'une image n'existe pas coupée d'un tel paraître, l'esthétique relève aussi de l'ontologie et sa tâche est de nous ré-apprendre à contempler les images. Au regard de la clarté et de la distinction conférées par la théorie à notre appréhension des choses, la détermination positive des images ne tient-elle pas en effet au fait que c'est dans leur dimension qu'il nous est donné de faire l'expérience vive du paraître de ces choses, jusqu'à l'extrême de l'horreur, du merveilleux et du sacré? (shrink)

In their reviews of The Kuhnian Image of Science: Time for a Decisive Transformation? (2018), both Markus Arnold (2018) and Amanda Bryant (2018) complain that the contributors who criticize Kuhn’s theory of scientific change have misconstrued his philosophy of science and they praise those who seek to defend the Kuhnian image of science. In what follows, then, I would like to address their claims about misconstruing Kuhn’s theory of scientific change. But my focus here, as in the (...) book, will be the evidence (or lack thereof) for the Kuhnian image of science. I will begin with Arnold’s review and then move on to Bryant’s review. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper distinguishes between the theoretical scientific image and the practical scientific image. The popular idea that there is a conceptual clash between the scientific and manifest images of the world is revealed as largely illusory. From the perspective of a liberal naturalism, the placement problem for ‘problematic’ entities or truths is not solved but dissolved. Persons, say, are not posits of any explanatory science, but beings acknowledged as rational agencies in second-personal space. Core elements of the manifest (...) image are more deeply rooted in our conceptual scheme than any version of the scientific image. (shrink)

Roland Barthes remains one of the most influential cultural theorists of the postwar period and Image-Music-Text is his most widely taught work. Ed White provides students with a clear guide to this essential but difficult text. As students are increasingly expected to write across a range of media, Barthes' work can be understood as an early mapping of what we now call interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary study. The book's detailed section-by-section readings makes Barthes' most important writings accessible to undergraduate readers. (...) This book is a perfect companion for teaching and learning Barthes ideas in cultural studies and literary theory. (shrink)

While inheriting from Husserl’s phenomenology, Ricoeur aims at determining a philosophical anthropology. Imagination can then be thought as what makes possible a mediation dealing with the disproportion between sensibility and understanding; it can be seen as one of the guiding threads of Ricoeur’s anthropology before becoming a theme or a field of analysis. But if this philosophy of imagination encompasses the issue of image, to the point of making these two terms mostly interchangeable, it too includes a specific (...) philosophy of image, which must be recovered. In this perspective, one could follow a path going from the most general standpoint (the elaboration of a philosophy of image in the wake of a phenomenology of imagination) to the most particular one (the recognition of the image as a symbol, sign or trace) while determining the role of symbolic mediation related to image. (shrink)

This volume argues for a new image of science that understands both natural and social phenomena to be the product of mechanisms, casting the work of science as an effort to understand those mechanisms. Glennan offers an account of the nature of mechanisms and of the models used to represent them in physical, life, and social sciences.

In this important and impressive book, Gregory Currie tackles several fundamental topics in the philosophy of film and says much of general interest about the nature of imagination. The first part examines the nature of film representation, rejecting the view that spectators are subject to any kind of cognitive or perceptual illusions. Currie also argues against Walton’s transparency claim, which holds that when we look at a photograph we are literally seeing the object photographed. He instead defends perceptual realism, (...) the thesis that photographs resemble the objects they depict, where the resemblance is a matter of photographs triggering the same recognitional response as would the object photographed. He also argues convincingly that films should not be thought of as a language-like form of communication. (shrink)