This article addresses the portrait as a philosophical form of art. Portraits seek to render the subjective objectively visible. In portraiture two fundamental aims come into conflict: the revelatory aim of faithfulness to the subject, and the creative aim of artistic expression. In the first part of my paper, studying works by Rembrandt, I develop a typology of four different things that can be meant when speaking of an image's power to show a person: accuracy, testimony of presence, emotional characterization, or revelation of the essential ''air'' (to use Roland Barthes' term). In the second half of my paper this typology is applied to examples from painting and photography to explore how the two media might differ. I argue that, despite photography's alleged 'realism' and 'transparency,' it allows for artistic portraiture and presents the same basic conflict between portraiture's two aims, the revelatory and the expressive. My paper will address the portrait, a genre that is surprisingly under-examined in aesthetics-especially in relation to its importance in art history. I find such neglect odd, because the more I think about portraiture, the more philosophical problems the genre seems to raise. Our discipline is still struggling with the notorious mind/body problem, something portraiture promises to resolve through its very nature: rendering the subjective objectively visible. Hence this would appear to be a thoroughly philosophical form of art.It has often been observed that portraiture has two fundamental aims that can conflict: a revelatory aim, requiring accuracy and faithfulness to the subject, and a
This essay explores the central place of Aristotle’s views of the sense of touch within his empiricist epistemology and general physical theory. It argues that Aristotle was not committed to a ‘literalist’ view of the nature of sensory representation, according to which an organ literally becomes ‘like’ the said object. It suggests an interpretation of Aristotle’s defence of the objectivity of tactile representation, which shows a deep and complex link between his theory of sense-knowledge and his project of scientific explanation.
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