Wollheim, Wittgenstein, and Pictorial Representation. Seeing-as and Seeing-in

This collection of essays deals with the complicated issue of double-aspect perception and its relation to pictorial representation. The book is constituted by independent contributions that trace the concepts of seeing-as and seeing-in to their origins in the writings of Wittgenstein and Wollheim. Although most of the contributions engage substantially in textual analysis and quote sources at length, it would be a mistake to regard the book as purely exegetical in character. Most chapters suggest thought-provoking readings of famous passages by Wittgenstein and Wollheim, as well as by other authors—Gombrich, for instance, is an interlocutor who emerges more than once. Some contributions, such as the one by Fabian Dorsch, build on Wollheim’s insights to put forward an account of depiction that could count as a competitor for the other available contemporary accounts, discussed by philosophers such as Robert Hopkins, Malcolm Budd and Dominic McIver Lopes. The book is divided into five parts. One could say, somewhat crudely, that the first three parts are more exegetical, whereas the last two are focused on exploiting Wollheim’s account in order to shed light on open questions in the philosophy of art. The first part, containing only Charles Travis’s contribution, is an ambitious reconstruction of Wittgenstein’s discussion of seeing-as, tracing it back to the Tractatus and aiming principally to determine the objectivity of seeing-as experiences. The issue is discussed by Travis as ‘Frege’s challenge’: the experience of seeing-as cannot take the form of a purely subjective Vorstellung (a representation, in Frege’s sense). Wittgenstein himself repeatedly manifested hostility to the idea that we might make sense of mental life by appealing to ‘inner pictures’, that is, to the sort of private experiences Frege would have called Vorstellungen. In the concluding paragraph of his contribution, Travis claims that seeing-as, as analysed by Wittgenstein, provides additional support to a disjunctivist theory of perception

Aesthetics · Art · Character (mathematics · Depiction · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Mistake · Objectivity (philosophy · Relation (database · Representation (politics · TRACE (psycholinguistics) · Computer Science · Philosophy · Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications