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178Picture, Image and Experience: A Philosophical InquiryCambridge University Press. 1998.How do pictures represent? In this book Robert Hopkins casts new light on an ancient question by connecting it to issues in the philosophies of mind and perception. He starts by describing several striking features of picturing that demand explanation. These features strongly suggest that our experience of pictures is central to the way they represent, and Hopkins characterizes that experience as one of resemblance in a particular respect. He deals convincingly with the objections traditionally …Read more
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169Resemblance and misrepresentationMind 103 (412): 421-438. 1994.One problem faced by resemblance views of depiction is posed by the misrepresentation. Another is to specify the respect in which pictures resemble their objects. To isolate the first, I discuss resemblance in the context of sculpture, where the solution to the second is, prima facie, obvious. The point of appealing to resemblance is to explain how the representation has the content it does. In the case of misrepresenting sculptures, this means appealing to resemblance, not between the sculpture…Read more
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162Moving because Pictures? Illusion and the Emotional Power of FilmMidwest Studies in Philosophy 34 (1): 200-218. 2010.Why does cinema exert such power over our emotions? Many have wanted to answer by appeal to the idea that film sustains some illusion concerning the events it narrates. I compare three such views: that film sustains the illusion that those events are before us; that it sustains that illusion, but only partially; and that, though viewers are always fully aware of seeing pictures, those pictures are experienced as the moving photographic record of the narrated events. I identify these positions’ s…Read more
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149Imaginative Understanding, Affective Profiles, and the Expression of Emotion in ArtJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 75 (4): 363-374. 2017.R. G. Collingwood thought that to express emotion is to come to understand it and that this is something art can enable us to do. The understanding in question is distinct from that offered by emotion concepts. I attempt to defend a broadly similar position by drawing, as Collingwood does, on a broader philosophy of mind. Emotions and other affective states have a profile analogous to the sensory profiles exhibited by the things we perceive. Grasping that one's feeling exhibits such a profile is…Read more
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147Painting, sculpture, sight, and touchBritish 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
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144Touching picturesBritish 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
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135Painting, History, and ExperiencePhilosophical 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
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129Perky, phenomenal similarity and photographs: reply to NanayAnalysis 73 (1): 77-80. 2013.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
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124Thomas Reid on Molyneux's questionPacific 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
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87El Greco's eyesight: Interpreting pictures and the psychology of visionPhilosophical 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
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85Pictures and beautyProceedings 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.
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79Speaking through silence : conceptual art and conversational implicatureIn Peter Goldie & Elisabeth Schellekens (eds.), Philosophy and conceptual art, Oxford University Press. 2007.I first try to identify what problem, if any conceptual art poses for philosophical aesthetics. It is harder than one might think to formulate some claim about traditional art with which much conceptual art is inconsistent. The idea that sense experience plays a special role in the appreciation of traditional artworks falls foul of literature. Instead I focus on the idea that conceptual art exhibits a particularly loose relation between the properties with which we engage in appreciating it and …Read more
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76Pictures, Phenomenology and Cognitive ScienceThe 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
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72Sculpture and PerspectiveBritish 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
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66Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception (review)British Journal of Aesthetics 57 (3): 340-344. 2017.
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65What 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
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63Kant, Quasi‐Realism, and the Autonomy of Aesthetic JudgementEuropean Journal of Philosophy 9 (2): 166-189. 2001.Aesthetic judgements are autonomous, as many other judgements are not: for the latter, but not the former, it is sometimes justifiable to change one’s mind simply because several others share a different opinion. Why is this? One answer is that claims about beauty are not assertions at all, but expressions of aesthetic response. However, to cover more than just some of the explananda, this expressivism needs combining with some analogue of cognitive command, i.e. the idea that disagreements over…Read more
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58Reproductive Prints as Aesthetic SurrogatesJournal 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
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50With 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'.
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49Re-imagining, Re-viewing and Re-touchingIn 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
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47A companion to aesthetics (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2009.A COMPANION TO AESTHETICS This second edition of A Companion to Aesthetics examines questions that were among the earliest discussed by ancient philosophers, such as the nature of beauty and the relation between morality and art, while also addressing a host of new issues prompted by recent developments in the arts and in philosophy, including coverage of non-Western art traditions and of everyday and environmental aesthetics. The volume also canvases debates regarding the nature of representati…Read more
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47Pictures and Film; Philosophy and the Empirical Disciplines: A Reply to DeanFilm-Philosophy 3 (1). 1999.Jeffrey T. Dean Getting a Good View of Depiction _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 3 no. 26, June 1999
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46Fictional 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
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40Modeling the meanings of pictures: Depiction and the philosophy of language, by John Kulvicki. Oxford University Press, 2020, ISBN: 9780198847472, £55.00, hbk. 176 pp (review)European Journal of Philosophy 29 (4): 1187-1191. 2021.European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 4, Page 1187-1191, December 2021.
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35Design and syntax in picturesMind and Language. forthcoming.Many attempts to define depiction appeal to viewers' perceptual responses. Such accounts are liable to give a central role in determining depictive content to picture features responsible for the response,design. A different project is to give a compositional semantics for depictive content. Such attempts identifysyntax: picture features systematically responsible for the content of the whole. Design and syntax are competitors. But syntax requires system, in how picture features contribute to co…Read more
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25What 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
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19Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (review)Philosophical Books 35 (1): 73-75. 1994.
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17Mimesis As Make‐Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational ArtsPhilosophical Books 33 (2): 126-128. 1992.
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9Blackwell Companion to Aesthetics (edited book)Wiley. 2009.A COMPANION TO AESTHETICS This second edition of A Companion to Aesthetics examines questions that were among the earliest discussed by ancient philosophers, such as the nature of beauty and the relation between morality and art, while also addressing a host of new issues prompted by recent developments in the arts and in philosophy, including coverage of non-Western art traditions and of everyday and environmental aesthetics. The volume also canvases debates regarding the nature of representati…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Aesthetics |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Aesthetics |