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171Aesthetics (edited book)Oxford University Press. 1997.Can we ever claim to understand a work of art or be objective about it? Why have cultures thought it important to separate out a group of objects and call them art? What does aesthetics contribute to our understanding of the natural landscape? Are the concepts of art and the aesthetic elitist? Addressing these and other issues in aesthetics, this important new Oxford Reader includes articles by authors ranging from Aristotle and Xie-He to Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, Michael Baxandall, and Susan Sontag.…Read more
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111Portraits as displaysPhilosophical Studies 135 (1). 2007.Cynthia Freeland’s investigation of four kinds of ‘fidelity’ in portraiture is cut across by more general philosophical concerns. One is about what might be called the expression of persons--the persons or ‘inner selves’ of portrait subjects and of portrait artist: whether either is possible across each of the four kinds of fidelity, and whether these two kinds of expression are in tension. More fundamental is the problem of telling how self-expression is at all possible in any of these forms. F…Read more
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108The Engine of Visualization: Thinking Through PhotographyCornell University Press. 1997.First ever philosophy treatise on photography, analytic in approach but sensitive to photo-history, not confined to aesthetics or art (illus.), Walker Evans photo on cover. Papercover printing, Dec. 2000.
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107The secular icon: Photography and the functions of imagesJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42 (2): 155-169. 1983.'Photo-credit: David Hume': a dialogue showing how application of Hume's three vivacity principles of resemblance, contiguity and causation--even his illustrations of them--not only immediately clarify the main sources of interest in photography, but locate photography in the broad and fascinating history of various functions that images serve us, thereby dispelling ongoing mystification about it. (In the dialogue, Veronica represents our contiguity and causal interests, Miranda [named for a Jap…Read more
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78Arts, Agents, Artifacts: Photography's AutomatismsCritical Inquiry 38 (4): 727-745. 2012.Recent advances in paleoarchaeology show why nothing in the Tate Modern, where a conference on "Agency & Automatism" took place, challenges the roots of 'the idea of the fine arts' (Kristeller) as high levels of craft, aesthetics, mimesis and mental expression, as exemplifying cultures: it is by them that we define our species. This paper identifies and deals with resistances, early and late, to photographic fine art as based on concerns about automatism reducing human agency--that is, mental e…Read more
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73Drawing Distinctions: The Varieties of Graphic ExpressionCornell University Press. 2005.First and still only philosophy treatise on drawing, explaining the bases of meaning in all kinds of drawings, including technical and informational, design, child, and art drawings--depictive and nondepictive, East and West--engaging cognitive and developmental psychology, philosophy, art history and criticism. Ca 290 double-columned pp., 92 illus. Reviews include: Philosophy--David Hills, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 235-237. Aesthetics--Michael Podro, Br…Read more
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68Drawing and shooting: Causality in depictionJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 44 (2): 115-129. 1985.
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62Talbot’S Technologies: Photographic Depiction, Detection, and ReproductionJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47 (3): 263-276. 1989.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…Read more
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62The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to SeuratPerspective as Symbolic FormJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52 (2): 243. 1994.
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57Review of Cynthia Freeland, Portraits and Persons: A Philosophical Inquiry (review)British Journal of Aesthetics 51 (4): 449-453. 2011.
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56Review of James Cutting, Impressionism and its CanonJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 (2). 2007.
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48‘Neuroaesthetics’, Gombrich, and DepictionBritish Journal of Aesthetics 56 (2): 191-201. 2016.For philosophical readers, a review of biology Nobel laureate Eric R. Kandel’s Age of Insight historical thesis, that today’s ‘neuroaesthetics’ is a continuation of Vienna’s great contributions to modernism from 1900 on, becomes a ‘critical study’, by closely examining Kandel’s valuable account of E.H. Gombrich’s psychology, then, broadly, his own case for the validity of ‘neuroaesthetics’. The article much credits Kandel for recognising and explaining—unlike most philosophers, with their episte…Read more
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47Drawing Distinctions IPhilosophical Topics 25 (1): 231-253. 1997.Introduces philosophers to John Willats' effective new drawing systems vocabulary for describing drawings and related images, also stresses topological-space values in pictures, vs psychology's projective tendencies (illus).
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39Review of Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective (review)Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55 (1). 1997.
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37"What Will Surprise You Most": Self-Regulating Systems and Problems of Correct Use in Plato's RepublicJournal of the History of Philosophy 38 (1): 1-26. 2000.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 38.1 (2000) 1-26 [Access article in PDF] "What Will Surprise You Most": Self-Regulating Systems and Problems of Correct Use in Plato's Republic Patrick Maynard University of Western Ontario 1. Republic's Third Wave: "On Philosophers" The title of this paper is taken from a line in Book VI of Plato's Republic that appears to reject not only the accounts of moral justice and other virtues argued in …Read more
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36Review of Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (transl. C.S. Wood), and Martin Kemp, The Science of Art (review)Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52 (2): 84-85. 1994.
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28Wayfinding: Notes on the ‘Public’ as InteractiveReview of Philosophy and Psychology 6 (1): 27-48. 2015.“Public” is here treated by its three extensions: most broadly, from the merely extrasomatic, where users of representations are initially distinguished from makers, through ‘published’ or for the general public, to the governmental, official—where the discussion begins, before turning in its second half to the more common, middle meaning. What is public in these ways, “spatial representation”, also has the different meanings of representation of space or representation by spatial means, and the…Read more
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22Conceptual change (edited book)D. Reidel. 1973.During Hallowe'en of 1970, the Department of Philosophy of the Univer sity of Western Ontario held its annual fall colloquium at London, On tario. The general topic of the sessions that year was conceptual change. The thirteen papers composing this volume stem more or less directly from those meetings; six of them are printed here virtually as delivered, while the remaining seven were subsequently written by invitation. The programme of the colloquium was to have consisted of major papers delive…Read more
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20Introduction to Perspectives on the Arts and TechnologyJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55 (2): 95-106. 1997.
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20What drawings draws on: the relevance of current vision researchRivista di Estetica 47 9-29. 2011.Fifty years ago Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion revolutionized philosophical and scientific study of visual representation by thoughtful -application of research from the modern vision sciences. Since then those sciences – recently including neuroscience – have greatly developed, and it is now common to attempt direct translation of their findings to depiction, even treating its perception as a branch of visual perception.Unfortunately, rather than advancing Gombrich’s project, many of these a…Read more
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16Review of J. Kirk Varnedoe, A Fine Disregard: What Makes Modern Art ModernJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49 (4): 390-392. 1991.
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16What a Little Bird Tells Us: Unamumo, Origami and the Modern WorldThe Fold 51 (March-April 2019). 2019.Recovery and original English translation, with commentary and notes on metaphysical references, of parodic 1902 letter by Miguel de Unamumo, supporting the view that he was a crucial figure in the transformation of isolated, traditional, cultural practices of paperfolding into the modern, international, autonomous, minor artform postwar termed 'origami'.
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14Drawing Distinctions: The Varieties of Graphic ExpressionCornell University Press. 2018."If our procedure is to work steadily in the direction of drawing as fine art, rather than beginning from examples of such art, where shall we begin? One attractive possibility is to begin at the beginning—not the beginning in prehistory, which is already wonderful art, but with our personal beginnings as children. From there it will be the ambitious project of this book to investigate 'the course of drawing,' from the first marks children make to the greatest graphic arts of different cultures.…Read more