•  940
    Imagining the Past: on the nature of episodic memory
    In Fiona MacPherson Fabian Dorsch (ed.), Memory and Imagination, Oxford University Press. 2018.
    What kind of mental state is episodic memory? I defend the claim that it is, in key part, imagining the past, where the imagining in question is experiential imagining. To remember a past episode is to experientially imagine how things were, in a way controlled by one’s past experience of that episode. Call this the Inclusion View. I motive this view by appeal both to patterns of compatibilities and incompatibilities between various states, and to phenomenology. The bulk of the paper defends the…Read more
  •  739
    Aesthetics, experience, and discrimination
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (2). 2005.
    Can indistinguishable objects differ aesthetically? Manifestationism answers ‘no’ on the grounds that (i) aesthetically significant features of an object must show up in our experience of it; and (ii) a feature—aesthetic or not—figures in our experience only if we can discriminate its presence. Goodman’s response to Manifestationism has been much discussed, but little understood. I explain and reject it. I then explore an alternative. Doubles can differ aesthetically provided, first, it is possi…Read more
  •  630
    This paper summarises the main claims I have made in a series of publications on depiction. Having described six features of depiction that any account should explain, I sketch an account that does this. The account understands depiction in terms of the experience to which it gives rise, and construes that experience as one of resemblance. The property in respect of which resemblance is experienced was identified by Thomas Reid, in his account of ‘visible figure’. I defend the account against ce…Read more
  •  72
    Sculpture and Perspective
    British Journal of Aesthetics 50 (4): 357-373. 2010.
    In every picture there is a perspective: the picture represents its object from a point (or points) of view. Is the same true of sculpture, and in particular is it true of the purest form of sculpture, sculpture in the round? I address this issue in two ways. First, I explore the prospects for reasoning that perspective forms part of the content of some sculptures by adapting an argument from M. G. F. Martin for the parallel claim in the case of visualizing. I conclude that the argument does not…Read more
  •  76
    Pictures, Phenomenology and Cognitive Science
    The Monist 86 (4): 653-675. 2003.
    This paper argues that an account of picturing in terms of the experience it sustains, in particular an experience of resemblance in outline shape, is superior to Dominic Lopes’, view, on which pictures engage our recognitional capacities for the objects they depict. Lopes’ position fails to do the work proper to a philosophical theory of picturing. Lopes argues that the experienced resemblance view pays insufficient attention to empirical work, and that it incurs unwelcome empirical commitments…Read more
  •  196
    Molyneux’s Question
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 35 (3): 441-464. 2005.
    What philosophical issue or issues does Molyneux’s question raise? I concentrate on two. First, are there any properties represented in both touch and vision? Second, for any such common perceptible, is it represented in the same way in each, so that the two senses support a single concept of that property? I show that there is space for a second issue here, describe its precise relations to Molyneux’s question, and argue for its philosophical significance. I close by arguing that Gareth Evans …Read more
  •  374
    What is special about photographs? Traditional photography is, I argue, a system that sustains factive pictorial experience. Photographs sustain pictorial experience: we see things in them. Further, that experience is factive: if suchandsuch is seen in a photograph, then suchandsuch obtained when the photo was taken. More precisely, photographs are designed to sustain factive pictorial experience, and that experience is what we have when, in the photographic system as a whole, everything works a…Read more
  •  50
    With sight too much in mind, mind too little in sight?
    Philosophical Books 47 (4): 293-305. 2006.
    This is a critical notice of Colin McGinn's 'Mindsight'.
  •  3855
    What is it for a film to be realistic? Of the many answers that have been proposed, I review five: that it is accurate and precise; that is has relatively few prominent formal features; that it is illusionistic; that it is transparent; and that, while plainly a moving picture, it looks to be a photographic recording, not of the actors and sets in fact filmed, but of the events narrated. The number and variety of these options raise a deeper question: what is realism, if these are all to count as…Read more
  •  144
    Touching pictures
    British Journal of Aesthetics 40 (1): 149-167. 2000.
    Congenitally blind people can make and understand ‘tactile pictures’ – representations form of raised ridges on flat surfaces. If made visible, these representations can serve as pictures for the sighted. Does it follow that we should take at face value the idea that they are pictures made for touch? I explore this question, and the related issue of the aesthetics of ‘tactile pictures’ by considering the role in both depiction and pictorial aesthetics of experience, and by asking how far the exp…Read more
  •  58
    Reproductive Prints as Aesthetic Surrogates
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73 (1): 11-21. 2015.
    Reproductive prints allow us to engage with the aesthetic/artistic character of the pictures that are their sources. But prints clearly differ from their sources in various striking ways. How, then, are they able to make engagement possible? I consider various answers. Most treat prints as acting as surrogates for the source: in sharing its aesthetic properties, in resembling it in overall aesthetic character, in being aesthetically transparent to it, or in allowing us to imagine its aesthetic c…Read more
  •  371
    Perspective, Convention and Compromise
    In Heiko Hecht, Margaret Atherton & Robert Schwartz (eds.), Looking Into Pictures: an interdisciplinary approach to pictorial space, Mit Press. pp. 145-165. 2003.
    What is special about picturing according to the rules of perspectival drawing systems? My answer is at once both radical and conciliatory. I think that depiction essentially involves a distinctive experience, an experience of resemblance. More precisely, the picture must be seen as preserving what Thomas Reid (Enquiry 1764) called the "visible figure" of what is represented. It follows from this, and from some other plausible premises, that if a picture is to depict detailed spatial arrangement…Read more
  •  3488
    Explaining depiction
    Philosophical Review 104 (3): 425-455. 1995.
    An account of depiction should explain its key features. I identify six: that depiction is from a point of view; that it represents its objects as having a visual appearance; that it depictive content is always reasonably detailed; that misrepresentation is possible, but only within limits; and that the ability to interpret depictions co-varies, given general competence with pictures, with knowledge of what the depicted objects look like. All this suggests that picturing works by capturing appea…Read more
  •  218
    What do we see in film?
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66 (2). 2008.
    Many films are made by a two-tier process: the photographing of events which themselves represent the story the film tells. The latter representation is often illusionistic. I explore two consequences. The first concerns what we see in film. I argue that we sometimes see in such films, not events representing the story told, but simply the events composing that story. The way is thereby opened to a unified aesthetic of film, whether made the two-tier way or not. The second consequence is that, s…Read more
  •  820
    Sculpture and Space
    In Matthew Kieran & Dominic Lopes (eds.), Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts, Routledge. pp. 272-290. 2003.
    What is distinctive about sculpture as an artform? I argue that it is related to the space around it as painting and the other pictorial arts are not. I expound and develop Langer's suggestive comments on this issue, before asking what the major strengths and weaknesses of that position might be.
  •  129
    In a recent paper, I argue that Perky’s famous experiments do not show what they are often taken to show. Bence Nanay has criticised my argument on two grounds. I argue against both his lines of objection
  •  85
    Pictures and beauty
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 97 (2). 1997.
    What reasons are there to value pictures? I consider one: that pictures enable us to judge, and more than that to savour, the beauty (if any) of the objects they depict. I clarify and defend this claim, tentatively explore what might explain it, consider how far it might generalize beyond beauty to other features of aesthetic interest, and assess its importance for the aesthetics of pictures.
  •  46
    Fictional Points of View (review)
    Philosophical Review 107 (1): 140. 1998.
    This is a book about literature—about the pleasures and benefits of reading it, the philosophical puzzles it throws up, the nature of literary criticism, and the confusions, as Peter Lamarque sees matters, of much contemporary theorizing about the literary. It is, in essence, a collection of essays on these various topics, twelve in all, of which all but three have been published elsewhere, over a period of some twenty years. Such collections can suffer from being fragmentary or insufficiently e…Read more
  •  25
    What Makes Representational Painting Truly Visual?
    Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 77 131-167. 2003.
    I offer two, complementary, accounts of the visual nature of representational picturing. One, in terms of six features of depiction, sets an explanatory task. The other, in terms of the experience to which depiction gives rise, promises to meet that need. Elsewhere I have offered an account of this experience that allows this promise to be fulfilled. I sketch that view, and defend it against Wollheim's claim that it cannot meet certain demands on a satisfactory account. I then turn to Wollheim's…Read more
  •  534
    Sartre
    In Amy Kind (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Imagination, Routledge. pp. 82-93. 2016.
    In The Imaginary Sartre offers a systematic, insightful and heterodox account of imagining in many forms. Beginning with four ‘characteristics’ he takes to capture the phenomenology of imagining, he draws on considerations both philosophical and psychological to describe the deeper nature of the state that has those features. The result is a view that remains the most potent challenge to the Humean orthodoxy that to this day dominates both philosophical and psychological thinking on the topic.
  •  124
    Thomas Reid on Molyneux's question
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 86 (3): 340-364. 2005.
    Reid’s discussion of Molyneux’s question has been neglected. The Inquiry discusses the question twice, offering opposing answers. The first discussion treats the underlying issue as concerning common perceptibles of touch and vision, and in particular whether in vision we originally perceive depth. Although it is tempting to treat the second discussion as doing the same, this would render pointless various novel features Reid introduces in reformulating Molyneux’s question. Rather, the issue now…Read more
  •  49
    Re-imagining, Re-viewing and Re-touching
    In Fiona McPherson (ed.), The senses: classic and contemporary philosophical perspectives, Oxford University Press, Usa. pp. 261. 2011.
    One strategy for working out how to individuate the senses is to pursue that task in tandem with that of individuating the sensory imaginings. We can tackle both, at least for the spatial senses of sight and touch, if we appeal to the idea that, while both modes represent their objects perspectivally, different forms of perspective are involved in each. This cannot, however, exhaust the differences between tactual and visual. Tactual experience is tied to bodily awareness as visual is not. I exp…Read more
  •  135
    Painting, History, and Experience
    Philosophical Studies 127 (1): 19-35. 2006.
    Two themes run through Wollheim’s work: the importance of history to the practice and appreciation of the arts, and the centrality of experience in appreciation. Prima facie, these are in tension. Reconciling them requires two steps. First, we should follow Wollheim in adopting a notion of experience on which features can be experienced even if we must have experience-independent access to the fact that the work exhibits them. Second, we need to state what makes a particular experience appropria…Read more
  • Lyas, C.-Aesthetics (review)
    Philosophical Books 40 79-79. 1999.
  •  87
    El Greco's eyesight: Interpreting pictures and the psychology of vision
    Philosophical Quarterly 47 (189): 441-458. 1997.
    There is a common assumption about pictures, that seeing them produces in us something like the same effects as seeing the things they depict. This assumption lies behind much empirical research into vision, where experiments often expose subjects to pictures of things in order to investigate the processes involved in cognizing those things themselves. Can philosophy provide any justification for this assumption? I examine this issue in the context of Flint Schier's account of pictorial represen…Read more
  •  65
    What makes representational painting truly visual?
    Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 77 (1). 2003.
    I offer two, complementary, accounts of the visual nature of representational picturing. One, in terms of six features of depiction, sets an explanatory task. The other, in terms of the experience to which depiction gives rise, promises to meet that need. Elsewhere I have offered an account of this experience that allows this promise to be fulfilled. I sketch that view, and defend it against Wollheim's claim that it cannot meet certain demands on a satisfactory account. I then turn to Wollheim's…Read more
  •  200
    Seeing-in and seeming to see
    Analysis 72 (4): 650-659. 2012.
    When we see something in a picture, do we enjoy visual experience as of the depicted object? Gombrichians say yes: when viewing ordinary pictures we simultaneously see the picture and seem to see its object. But why, then, isn’t seeing-in contradictory, and how are these two elements somehow integrated into a single experience? Gombrichians’ attempts to answer appeal either to our awareness of the picture’s design, or to the idea that picture and object are not given as in the same place. I argu…Read more
  •  147
    Painting, sculpture, sight, and touch
    British Journal of Aesthetics 44 (2): 149-166. 2004.
    I raise two questions that bear on the aesthetics of painting and sculpture. First, painting involves perspective, in the sense that everything represented in a painting is represented from a point, or points, within represented space; is sculpture also perspectival? Second, painting is specially linked to vision; is sculpture linked in this way either to vision or to touch? To clarify the link between painting and vision, I describe the perspectival structure of vision. Since this is the same s…Read more
  •  47
    Jeffrey T. Dean Getting a Good View of Depiction _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 3 no. 26, June 1999