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 applications – often reductive in nature – involve elementary logical fallacies. (...) These fallacies are mostly due to overlooking Gombrich’s main idea, that image makers – like other technologists – use natural principles for their own purposes, and that their first purpose is to make artifacts, which are perceived as such. With better context, it should be possible to find more constructive directions for recent cognitive research, related to drawing. (shrink)

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, British Journal of Aesthetics 48, no. 3 (July 2008): 346-347. Art history--Svetlana Alpers, Phi Bet (...) Kappa Society Key Reporter (Summer 2006): 14 http://www.pbk.org/documents/tkrpdf/TKRSummer2006.pdf. General--Amy Ione, Leonardo On-line Reviews: http://www.leonardo.info/reviews/jan2007/draw_ione.html . (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Chapter One: Wrong Question, Right Answer -- Exercise 1: Getting right into it -- Exercise 2: Watching your hand -- Exercise 3: Marking practice -- Chapter Two: Realistic Drawing -- Exercise 4: Picking an object to draw -- Exercise 5: Attentive looking -- Exercise 6: Noticing awareness -- Exercise 7: Marking from the sense of sight -- Exercise 8: Simple rendering -- Exercise 9: Try perspective -- Exercise 10: Working inward -- Chapter Three: Systematic (...) class='Hi'>Drawing -- Exercise 11: The circular arrow - a visual mantra -- Exercise 12: Improvising between two points and finding the world in between -- Exercise 13: Thought as art -- Exercise 14: All four pixel images -- Exercise 15: Book of compositions -- Chapter Four: Improvisational Drawing -- Exercise 16: Going outside the box -- Exercise 17: Not-breath awareness -- Exercise 18: Growing improvisation -- Exercise 19: Chasing the Coltrane Effect -- Exercise 20: Drawing to reveal inner conditions -- Exercise 21: Noticing Intuition -- Exercise 22: You are the universe drawing -- Chapter Five: Reading the Drawings -- Exercise 23: An exact physical description -- Exercise 24: Feeling the meaning -- Exercise 25: The story we tell ourselves -- Exercise 26: Connecting our story to a larger story -- Chapter Six: The Search for the Source of Creativity -- Exercise 27: Priming the source -- Exercise 28: Sitting still at the origin -- Exercise 29: Embedded sources -- Exercise 30: Mindful of the path -- Chapter Seven: Meta-Drawing -- Exercise 31: Sharing with yourself -- Exercise 32: Sharing with a trusted friend -- Exercise 33: Sharing with the world. (shrink)

Drawing could be considered the oldest known art form. However, art and its understanding has come to evolve so much that it has derived a multitude of forms that are almost unclassifiable today. The aesthetic discourses of the public, social and political have also been prejudiced and their true essence has been altered. In the present research work, we explore a series of artists who work with art as a language and tool for change and improvement of public life (...) in general. We analyse the messages they address, the aesthetics and material form they use, the methodologies they practice or the social changes they cause. In this regard, through a selection of contemporary projects, we can identify more effective representative artistic characteristics that are consistent with our current world. In conclusion, we emphasize that the practice of public art is more significant and necessary than it seems. (shrink)

Since the Vietnam War, graphic novels about war have shifted from simply representing it to portraying avenues for survivors to establish psychological wellness in their lives following traumatic events. While modern diagnostic medicine often looks to science, technology, and medications to treat the psychosomatic damage produced by trauma, my article examines the therapeutic potential of the comics medium with close attention to war comics. Graphic novels draw trauma in a different light: because of the medium’s particular combination of words and (...) images in sequence, war comics represent that which is typically unrepresentable, and these books serve as useful tools to promote healing among the psychologically wounded. Graphic narratives, both fictional and non-fictional, illuminate the ways that the unseen wounds of traumatic experience affect public health by compromising the ability of communities, individuals, and survivors to create and maintain meaningful relationships with others. (shrink)

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).

A short encyclopedia article focused on drawing, stressing facture, the physicality of three media.

© by Journal of the History of Ideas. Federico Commandino can be considered the personification of the renaissance of mathematics in sixteenth-century Italy. Previous scholars have generally reduced the philosophy of mathematics developed by Commandino in the preface to his translation of Euclid’s Elements to a superficial synthesis of Neoplatonic and Aristotelian elements. Until now, no attention has been paid to Commandino’s use of the sixth-century commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima by John Philoponus. In his article I will argue that, (...) in depicting imagination as a mental drawing board for geometrical figures, Commandino directly relies on Philoponus’s concept of mathematical imagination. (shrink)

The argument set out here provides a new understanding of the methods followed by the Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio for depicting the monuments of classical antiquity—in both his drawings and the plates of his seminal architectural treatises, the Quattro libri dell’architettura. It accepts the now-established view that Palladio’s early studies were frequently copied from the drawings of previous practitioners, but it reasons that his later output was also heavily dependent on past achievements. This is contrary to the claims Palladio made (...) in the Quattro libri, which contend that his drawings were based on surveys he had carried out himself, and to the confirmatory presumptions of modern-day scholars. The article first examines the ancient temples Palladio illustrated in the treatise, and observes that they have numerous features that are unsupported by the archaeological record but are also seen either in Palladio’s earlier copy drawings or in the graphic works of his predecessors or contemporaries. Secondly, it considers Palladio’s drawings of bath complexes, which remained unpublished only because of his death, noting that some of them are still reckoned to be invaluable and reliable records of then-accessible remains that Palladio was able to inspect but no longer exist. The conclusion here, however, is that his reconstructions were again based on earlier surveys that he judged dependable, but which he often then adapted and adjusted in line with his personal preferences. The article then continues with a discussion of his probable debts to older architects such as Michele Sanmicheli and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, and his relationship with his contemporary Pirro Ligorio, whose drawings are often markedly similar to Palladio’s. It concludes by considering whether Palladio’s coverage of ancient architecture reveals the extent of such knowledge at the midpoint of the sixteenth century. (shrink)

This article discusses the epistemology of design as a process, arguing specifically that sketching and drawing are essential modes of thinking and reasoning. It demonstrates that the commonly accepted notion of a spontaneous and intuitive vision in the mind’s eye—encapsulated in the cliché of the napkin sketch—obscures the exploratory inferences that are made while scribbling with a pencil on a sheet of paper. The draughtsperson, along with their work tools, modes of notation, specific techniques, and epistemic strategies as well (...) as the resulting design artefacts form milieus of reflection that facilitate complex processes of exploration. Case studies, including the genesis of the Mini by Alec Issigonis, samples of work by Alvar Aalto, and a reinterpretation of student sketches from a classical design study by Gabriela Goldschmidt, serve to illustrate how drawing inferences with pencil and paper occurs. (shrink)

Theories of culture and action, especially after the cognitive turn, have developed more complex understandings of how unconscious, embodied, internalized culture motivates action. As our theories have become more sophisticated, our methods for capturing these internal processes have not kept up and we struggle to adjudicate among theories of how culture shapes action. This article discusses what I call “productive” methods: methods that observe people creating a cultural object. Productive methods, I argue, are well suited for drawing out moments (...) of shared automatic cognition and resonance. To demonstrate the value of productive methods, I describe my method of asking focus group participants to devise and draw AIDS campaign posters collectively. I then 1) show how this productive method made visible distinct moments of both automatic and deliberative cognition, 2) offer an operational definition of resonance and demonstrate how the process of drawing revealed moments of resonance, and 3) suggest how this method allowed me to investigate the relationship between cognition and resonance and their effect on action. To conclude, I discuss strategies for using productive methods and advocate for their use in measuring culture. (shrink)

Scientific images represent types or particulars. According to a standard history and epistemology of scientific images, drawings are fit to represent types and machine-made images are fit to represent particulars. The fact that archaeologists use drawings of particulars challenges this standard history and epistemology. It also suggests an account of the epistemic quality of archaeological drawings. This account stresses how images integrate non-conceptual and interepretive content.

Sand drawings are introduced in relation to the fieldwork of British anthropologists John Layard and Bernard Deacon early in the twentieth century, and the status of sand drawings as mathematics is discussed in the light of Wittgenstein’s idea that “in mathematics process and result are equivalent”. Included are photographs of the illustrations in Layard’s own copy of Deacon’s “Geometrical Drawings from Malekula and other Islands of the New Hebrides” (1934). This is a brief companion to my article “Wittgenstein on string (...) figures as mathematics” (2022), published in the journal Philosophical Investigations. (shrink)

There are as many meanings to drawing and painting as there are cultural contexts for them to exist in. But this is not the end of the story. Drawings and paintings are made, and in their making embody unique meanings that transform our perception of space-time and sense of finitude. These meanings have not been addressed by art history or visual studies hitherto, and have only been considered indirectly by philosophers. If these intrinsic meanings are explained and further developed, (...) then the philosophy of art practice is significantly enhanced. The present work, accordingly, is a phenomenology of how the gestural and digital creation of visual imagery generates self-transformation through aesthetic space. (shrink)

Physics says that it cannot deal with the mind-brain problem, because it does not deal in subjectivities, and mind is subjective. However, biologists still claim to seek a material basis for subjective mental processes, which would thereby render them objective. Something is clearly wrong here. I claim that what is wrong is the adoption of too narrow a view of what constitutes objectivity, especially in identifying it with what a machine can do. I approach the problem in the light of (...) two cognate circumstances: the measurement problem in quantum physics, and the objectivity of standard mathematics, even though most of it is beyond the reach of machines. I argue that the only resolution to such problems is in the recognition that closed loops of causation are objective; i.e. legitimate objects of scientific scrutiny. These are explicitly forbidden in any machine or mechanism. A material system which contains such loops is called complex. Such complex systems thus must possess nonsimulable models; i.e. models which contain impredicativities or self-references which cannot be removed, or faithfully mapped into a single coherent syntactic time-frame. I consider a few of the consequences of the above, in the context of thus redrawing the boundary between subject and object. (shrink)

This paper compares three accounts of what can be inferred from a knowledge base that contains conditionals: Lehmann and Magidor’s Rational Entailment; Pearl’s System Z, later extended and refined in collaboration with Goldszmidt; and the present author’s Nonmonotonic conditional logic for belief revision. We show that although the ideas motivating these systems are strikingly different, they are formally equivalent. An explanation of the surprising parallel is offered in terms of the interpretation of conditionals in the context of nonmonotonic reasoning and (...) belief revision. Finally, some common problems with the equivalent systems are outlined, as well as some problems in assessing these problems which indicate that a general definition of dependence between the items in a knowledge base is needed. (shrink)

Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices explores how the changing modes of representation in architecture and urbanism relate to the transformation of how the addressees of architecture and urbanism are conceived. The book diagnoses the dominant epistemological debates in architecture and urbanism during the 20th and 21st centuries. It traces their transformations, paying special attention to Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s preference for perspective representation, to the diagrams of Team 10 architects, to the critiques of functionalism, and the (...) upgrade of the artefactual value of architectural drawings in Aldo Rossi, John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman, and Oswald Mathias Ungers, and, finally, to the reinvention of architectural programme through the event in Bernard Tschumi and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Particular emphasis is placed on the spirit of truth and clarity in modernist architecture, the relationship between the individual and the community in post-war era architecture, the decodification of design process as syntactic analogy and the paradigm of autonomy in the 1970s and 1980s architecture, the concern about the dynamic character of urban conditions and the potentialities hidden in architectural programme in the post-autonomy era. This book is based on extensive archival research in Canada, the USA and Europe, and will be of interest to architects, artists, researchers and students in architecture, architectural history, theory, cultural theory, philosophy and aesthetics. (shrink)

I live on a short street in a small town, Hastings‐on‐Hudson, some fifteen miles up the Hudson River from New York City. Over the past decade a number of families have moved in, with about sixteen children among them. More than a bit housebound now because of old age and watching them romping about, I try to imagine what their world will be like when they have reached my present age, some eighty years from now. But I have a problem. (...) I just can’t imagine it. The demographic changes now appearing on the horizon will force unforeseeable changes. What would it have been like in 1930, when I was born, if someone then had to project the future of aging? They could not have guessed.Some momentous changes are now emerging, and they are bound to change the aging picture. What’s being done to respond to those growing pressures? (shrink)

This is a fresh and vitally important step past stymied debate on what is arguably the most pressing issue in cross-disciplinary feminist theory.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1864 Edition.

"... are dinosaurs social constructs? Do we really know anything about dinosaurs? Might not all of our beliefs about dinosaurs merely be figments of the paleontological imagination? A few years ago such questions would have seemed preposterous, even nonsensical. Now they must have a serious answer." At stake in the "Science Wars" that have raged in academe and in the media is nothing less than the standing of science in our culture. One side argues that science is a "social construct," (...) that it does not discover facts about the world, but rather constructs artifacts disguised as objective truths. This view threatens the authority of science and rejects science's claims to objectivity, rationality, and disinterested inquiry. Drawing Out Leviathan examines this argument in the light of some major debates about dinosaurs: the case of the wrong-headed dinosaur, the dinosaur "heresies" of the 1970s, and the debate over the extinction of dinosaurs. Keith Parsons claims that these debates, though lively and sometimes rancorous, show that evidence and logic, not arbitrary "rules of the game," remained vitally important, even when the debates were at their nastiest. They show science to be a complex set of activities, pervaded by social influences, and not easily reducible to any stereotype. Parsons acknowledges that there are lessons to be learned by scientists from their would-be adversaries, and the book concludes with some recommendations for ending the Science Wars. (shrink)

Traditional medical ethics and law draw a sharp distinction between allowing a patient to die and helping her die. Withholding or withdrawing life sustaining treatment, such as by abating technological nutrition, hydration or respiration, will cause death as surely as a lethal injection. The former, however, is a constitutional right for a competent or once-competent patient, while the latter poses a risk of serious criminal or civil liability for the physician, even if the patient requests it.

In this article, I analyse line-rendering techniques in drawing and choreography, based on a Deleuzian framework. This pragmatic approach for understanding affect emerges in three distinct formulations. The first engages the coincidence of drawing and choreography at the limit of reach; the second investigates how trace and movement generate different yet mutually resonant versions of semblance. The third framework considers the potential for improvisation in the irreconcilability of contour and surface in the weighted line. These three framings generate (...) an experimental milieu in which I articulate the co-emergence of thought and feeling in relation to relevant concepts of the body and affect. In activating affective intensity in different line-rendering operations, this analysis traces the way that affects help to modulate tendencies of moving, feeling and thinking over a series of operations. (shrink)

Antonin Artaud, words, drawings, and the extreme and traumatic condition of an individual who pushed back the boundaries of history, of his own time, in Europe’s darkest days. Such is my scope in the pages that follow. This essay examines the drawings produced by Artaud between 1944 and 1946. They offer a particularly helpful starting point for a series of reflections on, on the one hand, a concept of identity that had emerged and re-emerged with a new critical awareness following (...) the close of the Second World War, and on the other, how – leaving behind a modernism in which the cracks were clearly showing – it is from madness and suffering that the contemporary notion of the individual is reborn. (shrink)

One of Kant’s famous questions about being human asks, “What may I hope?” This question places individual life within an encompassing horizon of human history and speculates on the possibility of perspectives beyond death. In our time mortality is generally repressed, though the development of personal consciousness is closely linked to realization of one’s finitude. This raises especially urgent questions for children, and they are left to deal with them alone. From the time awareness begins, knowledge that death can occur (...) at any moment is one of the a priori determinants of being alive; that is, life is structured in advance by its future pastness. . According to Max Scheler, death reveals itself as a necessary and manifest constituent of all possible inner experiences in the life process. The cultural and individual interpretations of death’s meaning and consequences derived from this insight opened up an ample space for imagined possibilities of “continued existence,” which affected approaches to life. In our research project “Inochi – The Concept of Life after Death in Children’s Construction of the World. A German-Japanese Comparison,” carried out with German and Japanese research support, we examine concepts developed within the community of inquiry concerning “the individual’s afterlife” as soul, angel, animal, star, etc. In this we want to examine whether a globalized media environment leads to a cultural convergence in children’s ideas, and whether there are differences between views of girls and boys. Relevance of ideas about death is seen in the example of Japanese children who, believing in reincarnation chose “killing oneself” with relative frequency as a problem-solving strategy. Our contribution will present children’s imaginings using the drawings they created within this framework, since these can be interpreted as expressions of “narrative philosophizing,” especially for the Japanese children. Here we follow Mark Johnson who says” Human beings are imaginative synthesizing animals” . These imaginations make up a large part of our understanding, not just our beliefs, but rather our socially constructed way of being in and inhabiting a world. (shrink)