The Intractable Image

Some have argued that the view that perceptual experiences represent properties over and above those directly transduced by the sensory modalities such as in amodal perception, will constrain how we should think of the metaphysical issue about what material properties serve as the realizers of those phenomenal experiences. For example, Nöe and Thompson develop a version of the extended mind thesis based on the assertion that the embodied and enactive approach to perception is necessary to account for amodal perception, and that this entails that phenomenal qualities are realized by physical properties of external objects. This paper develops a counter-example to the extended mind thesis about perception based on the perception of an impossible figure. The impossible figure is a picture that depicts an object that we represent to have a three-dimensional shape, even though the figure could not possibly be instantiated in three-dimensions. Thus, the paper offers indirect support for the view that narrow properties of the perceiver’s perceptual system are both necessary and sufficient for amodal perception.

_Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image_, 2022

Incomprehensible Certainty presents a sustained reflection on the nature of images and the phenomenology of visual experience. Taking the “image” (eikōn) as the essential medium of art and literature and as foundational for the intuitive ways in which we make contact with our “lifeworld,” Thomas Pfau draws in equal measure on Platonic metaphysics and modern phenomenology to advance a series of interlocking claims. First, Pfau shows that, beginning with Plato’s later dialogues, being and appearance came to be understood as ontologically distinct from (but no longer opposed to) one another. Second, in contrast to the idol that is typically gazed at and visually consumed as an object of desire, this study positions the image (eikōn) as a medium whose intrinsic abundance and excess reveal to us its metaphysical function, namely, as the visible analogue of an invisible, numinous reality. Finally, the interpretations unfolded in this book (from Plato, Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, John Damascene via Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Julian of Norwich, and Nicholas of Cusa to modern writers and artists such as Goethe, Ruskin, Turner, Hopkins, C zanne, and Rilke) affirm the essential complementarity of image and word, visual intuition and hermeneutic practice, in theology, philosophy, and literature. Like Pfau’s previous book, Minding the Modern, Incomprehensible Certainty is a major work. With over fifty illustrations, the book will interest students and scholars of philosophy, theology, literature, and art history.

Logic in Question, 2023

Conceiving of the image’s capacity to negate may be considered to represent a major challenge for any theory of the visual domain; nevertheless, there is no tradition of research on the capacity of the image to negate what it represents. This papers aims at proposing an enunciative point of view of this issue, stating that the image, far from limiting itself to affirmatively assuming what it displays, can modulate the degrees by which it assumes what it represents. Enunciative perspective will enable me to define the image as a non-irenic locus where the figures of enunciator and observer may compete with respect to visibility and knowledge through a conflict of perspectives. This will make me able to show that the image consists not only in presenting something to the eyes but that it can also argument, for example, by denying what it showcases. This approach will be put to the test of semiotic analysis of painting and photography.

1975

In this initial reading, Merleau-Ponty raises the questions that he will try to answer. The first concerns our belief that we see the "things themselves"-i.e., the actual realities that are out there. He writes:

2016

A paper that explores the extent to which images remain resistant to their assimilation by the linguistic and technical systems that society has developed. It uses Damisch´s theory of /cloud/ to comment upon and refract Flusser´s notion of the technical image, proposing a productive incompleteness that the image continually feeds into our relationship to the world. With the image, laterality is as significant as linearity. Its form does not presuppose how it should be approached or understood; the provisionality heralded by /cloud/ and by the nature of the (technical) image can problematise, confound, or even offer an antidote to a systematising drive in the mediated world we inhabit.

According to a widely accepted conception, "an image cannot be seen as such without the paradoxical trick of consciousness, an ability to see something as 'there' and 'not there' at the same time" 1 ; or as Belting paraphrases Walter Benjamin's idea, "what an image is: the presence of an absence" 2 . In my talk, I will examine the roots of this apparent riddle, but I will also suggest it can be eliminated if we take into account the relation between visual perception and the motor component.

I defend a 'twofoldness' thesis as to the inseparability of the perception of a picture and the perception of its subject matter, making use of a recently developed 'inter-pretive' theory of pictorial representation, according to which a picture is represented by its physical vehicle, so that a picture is itself part of the representational content of the vehicle—which picture in turn interpretively represents its subject matter. I also show how Richard Wollheim's own twofoldness thesis, along with related views of his, might be vindicated by reinterpretation along similar lines, and conclude by showing that Ernst Gombrich too may be protected from some standard criticisms of his views—which views are also consistent with those of Wollheim as thus reinterpreted.

1994