This article contains a survey of recent debates in the philosophy of photography, focusing on aesthetic and epistemic issues in particular. Starting from widespread notions about automatism, causality and realism in the theory of photography, the authors ask whether the prima facie tension between the epistemic and aesthetic embodied in oppositions such as automaticism and agency, causality and intentionality, realism and fictional competence is more than apparent. In this context, the article discusses recent work by Roger Scruton, Dominic Lopes, Kendall (...) Walton, Gregory Currie, Jonathan Cohen and Aaron Meskin, Noël Carroll, and Patrick Maynard in some detail. Specific topics addressed include: aesthetic scepticism, transparency, imagination, perception, information, representation and depiction. (shrink)

Environmental aesthetics is a relatively new sub-field ofphilosophical aesthetics. It arose within analytic aesthetics in thelast third of the twentieth century. Prior to its emergence,aesthetics within the analytic tradition was largely concerned withphilosophy of art. Environmental aesthetics originated as a reactionto this emphasis, pursuing instead the investigation of the aestheticappreciation of natural environments. Since its early stages, thescope of environmental aesthetics has broadened to include not simplynatural environments but also human and human-influenced ones. At thesame time, the discipline has also (...) come to include the examination ofthat which falls within such environments, giving rise to what iscalled the aesthetics of everyday life. This area involves theaesthetics of not only more common objects and environments, but alsoa range of everyday activities. Thus, early in the twenty-firstcentury, environmental aesthetics embraced the study of the aestheticsignificance of almost everything other than art. Together with thisbroader scope of environmental aesthetics, the twenty-first centuryhas also given rise to renewed and more intense investigations of therelationship between environmental aesthetics and environmentalism aswell as to several new interests and directions. (shrink)

The idea that looking at a photograph is akin to face-to-face perception and that photographs provide genuine perceptual access to the objects they depict was notoriously defended by Kendall Walton in “Transparent Pictures.” Walton’s main thesis is that photographs are transparent in the sense that we can see objects through them. The main goal of this article is to support Walton’s view by providing a full account of photographic transparency. I will argue that the transparency that characterizes photography is not (...) metaphorical but in fact exhibits all the essential properties of transparent materials. To understand how a photograph can be transparent, one must understand the special type of causal connection between a photograph and what it shows. Building on Fritz Heider’s work, I will argue that photography is a visual medium, like air, water, glass, or mirrors, capable of transmitting the visual properties of distant objects to the perceiver. (shrink)

According to the causal theory of photography (CTP), photographs acquire their depictive content from the world, whereas handmade pictures acquire their depictive content from their makers’ intentional states about the world. CTP suffers from what I call the Problem of the Missing Agent: it seemingly leaves no room for the photographer to occupy a causal role in the production of their pictures and so is inconsistent with an aesthetics of photography. In this paper, I do three things. First, I amend (...) CTP with Fred Dretske’s distinction between triggering and structuring causes, thereby overcoming the Problem of the Missing Agent. Second, I argue that CTP so amended in fact illuminates two aesthetic interests that we may take in photographs, focussing on photographic portraiture and street photography. Third, I show how reflection on the aesthetics of photography serves to support aesthetic anti-empiricism: the view that the aesthetic value of artworks consists, at least in part, in achievement rather than sensory pleasure. (shrink)

When I see a tree through my window, that particular worldly tree is said to be ‘in’, ‘on’, or ‘before’ my mind. My ordinary visual link to it is ‘intentional’. How similar to this link are the links between me and particular worldly trees when I see them in photographs, or in paintings? Are they, in some important sense, links of the same kind? Or are they links of importantly different kinds? Or, as a third possibility, are they at once (...) links of the same important kind and also links of importantly different sub-kinds within that kind? This paper takes up these taxonomical questions. After fleshing out (a bit) the characterisation of these different subject-object links, I explain and expand upon an approach to answering the taxonomical questions originally set out by Kendall Walton. I then follow this approach a certain distance, connecting it with the question of how to mark the boundary between perception and cognition. My investigations support the conclusion that the three types of links just described are not importantly different in kind. (shrink)

[full article, abstract in English; only abstract in Lithuanian] Walton’s thesis of transparency of photographs has spurred much dispute among critics. One of the popular objections is spatial agnosticism, an argument that concerns the inertia of egocentric spatial information vis-a-vis a photograph. In this paper, I argue that spatial agnosticism fails. Spatial agnostics claim, for a wrong reason, that a photographic image cannot carry egocentric spatial information. I argue that it is the disjuncture of the photographic world in which the (...) depicted object situated from the space in which the viewer of the photograph resides that renders the photograph spatially agnostic. It is the timeless photographic world rather than the photographic object that renders egocentric spatial information inert. With this new formulation of spatial agnosticism, I propose that spatial agnosticism needs to be coupled with the temporal dimension in the efforts to refute the thesis of transparency of photographs. (shrink)

This article considers the shift currently taking place in philosophical thinking about photography. What I call “new” theory departs from philosophical orthodoxy with respect to when a photograph comes into existence, a difference with far-reaching consequences. I trace this to Dawn Wilson on the “photographic event.” To assess the new theory's newness one needs a grip on the old. I divide this between “skeptical” and “nonskeptical” orthodoxy, where this turns on the theory's implications for photography's standing as art. New theory (...) emerges as a response to skeptical orthodoxy in particular. I divide new theory in turn between “restrictive” and “permissive” responses to skeptical orthodoxy and raise challenges for both. The restrictive version arguably divides what does and does not count as strictly photographic in arbitrary ways; the permissive version rules in images that are not obviously photographs and faces two difficulties individuating photographs. I conclude by noting several questions that need to be addressed before new theory clearly has the upper hand over orthodoxy. These concern its ability to account for photography's epistemic capacities, the extent to which it constitutes an advance over “nonskeptical” orthodoxy, and whether new theorists have yet to be new enough when it comes to photographic agency. (shrink)

I argue that authentic photography is not able to develop to the full as a communicative representational art. Photography is authentic when it is true to its self-image as the imprinting of images. For an image to be imprinted is for its content to be linked to the scene in which it originates by a chain of sufficient, mind-independent causes. Communicative representational art (in any medium: photography, painting, literature, music, etc.) is art that exploits the resources of representation to achieve (...) artistically interesting communication of thought. The central resources of representation are content, vehicle properties, and the interplay between these two. Whereas painting and other representational arts are able to exploit all three to communicate thought, authentic photography can exploit interplay only to a very limited degree. However, the exploitation of interplay is the culmination of communicative representational art: the natural endpoint in its development. (shrink)

The bulk of the literature on the relationship between art and morality is principally concerned with an aesthetic question: Do moral flaws with works of art constitute aesthetic flaws?1 Much less attention has been paid to the ways in which artworks can be morally flawed. There are at least three promising contenders that concern aesthetic education: Artworks can be morally flawed by endorsing immorality, corrupting audiences, and encouraging responses that are bad to have. When it comes to works of fiction, (...) the third suggestion requires what Allan Hazlett calls response moralism—the position that audience reactions to artworks can be morally bad.2 Here, I will put aside issues of aesthetic.. (shrink)

Is it ever bad to take pleasure in the suffering of fictional characters? I think so. I attempt to show when and why. I begin with two powerful objections to my view: (1) engaging with fiction is akin to morally unproblematic autonomous fantasy, and (2) since no one is harmed, it is morally unproblematic. I reply to the objections and defend a Moorean view on the issue: It is intrinsically bad to enjoy evil, actual (past, present, or future) and merely (...) imagined. In support, I offer four examples. Then I argue against Moore's claim that it is equally bad to delight in fictional suffering as it is to enjoy actual suffering. Finally, I argue that even though it is bad to enjoy imagined suffering, the power of fiction is often mitigating. The moral problems are more often with the works of fiction than with the audience. (shrink)

The thesis that in order to genuinely think about a particular object one must be (in some sense) acquainted with that object has been thoroughly explored since it was put forward by Bertrand Russell. Recently, the thesis has come in for mounting criticism. The aim of this paper is to point out that neither the exploration nor the criticism have been sensitive to the fact that the thesis can be interpreted in two different ways, yielding two different principles of acquaintance. (...) One principle uses the notion of content in distinguishing genuine thinking-about things from a merely derivative kind of thinking-about things. The other principle is quiet about content, focusing instead on a distinction between satisfactional and non-satisfactional means of bringing things into thought. Most work has focused on the first, content-based principle of acquaintance. But criticisms of this principle do not apply straightforwardly to the non-content-based principle. I shall argue that the latter principle merits independent assessment as part of the broader effort to account for genuine thinking about particular objects. In the final section of the paper, I will sketch a roadmap for this assessment. (shrink)

It is commonly held, even among non-Bazinians, that photographs are typically perceived as more objective than other forms of depiction. The implications of this putative feature of photographic reception for the fiction film have been relatively ignored. If photos do have an objective purport, it would explain the power of a common device used in horror movies where a monster is selectively revealed through a degraded image, usually an amateur video recording. However, I argue that a better explanation is forthcoming. (...) It is not the objective purport of photographs that accounts for the peculiar power of these scenes, but the power of our imaginations to picture monsters far more terrifying than those that can be readily depicted. This gives us reason to be skeptical of the idea that the objective purport of photographs contributes significantly to the reception of fiction films. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the relationship that exists between two distinct and seemingly incompatible bodies of scholarship within the field of contemporary philosophy of technology. The first, as argued by postmodern pragmatist Barry Allen, posits that our tools and what we make with them are epistemically important; disputing the idea that knowledge is strictly sentential or propositional, he claims instead that knowledge is the product of a performance that is both superlative and artefactual, rendering technology importantly world-constituting. The second, as argued (...) by Heidegger and his inheritors, is that technology is ontologically problematic; rather than technology being evidence of performative knowledge, it is instead existentially threatening by virtue of the fact that it changes the tenor of our relationship with the world-as-given. Despite the fact that these claims seem prima facie incompatible, I argue that they may be successfully reconciled by introducing a third body of scholarship: the philosophy of photography. For it is the case, I argue, that although we, qua human beings, occupy lifeworlds that are necessarily constituted by technology, technology also induces a kind of phenomenological scepticism: a concern that mediated action precludes us from the possibility of authentic experience. Arguing in favour of the sentiment that photographs serve as a kind of phenomenal anchor—a kind of machine for living—I claim that photographic images provide a panacea to this existential concern: despite being epistemically problematic, it is this selfsame epistemic “specialness” of photographs that forces us to phenomenologically recommit, if only temporarily, to the world in a serious way. Consequently, it is my belief that an analysis of our artefacts and the way they function is fundamentally incomplete without an analysis of the epistemic and ontological problems introduced of the photographic image; as I will demonstrate, the photographic image casts an extremely long shadow over the philosophy of technology. (shrink)

An extract from this unpublished article is published in Neill & Ridley (eds.) Arguing about Art (2007).

In Mimesis as Make-Believe, Kendall Walton gave a pioneering account of the nature of fictionality, which holds that what it is for p to be fictional is for there to exist a prescription to imagine that p. But Walton has recently distanced himself from his original analysis and now holds that prescriptions to imagine are merely necessary conditions on fictionality. Many of the alleged counterexamples that have prompted Walton's retreat are drawn from the field of photography, and it is upon (...) these cases that I focus. I argue that once Walton's analysis is properly articulated, we can accommodate the apparent counterexamples by paying careful attention both to the general features of the photographic medium and the specific features of the photographs in question. (shrink)

What aesthetic interest do we have in watching films? In a much debated paper, Roger Scruton argued that this interest typically comes down to the interest in the dramatic representations recorded by such films. Berys Gaut and Catharine Abell criticized Scruton’s argument by claiming that films can elicit an aesthetic interest also by virtue of their pictorial representation. In this article, we develop a different criticism of Scruton’s argument. In our view, a film can elicit an aesthetic interest that does (...) not come down to an interest in the dramatic representation or in the pictorial representation. We will argue that this is a distinctively cinematic interest. In section I we outline Scruton’s argument. In section II we point out an interest in how the cinematic medium presents the portrayed subject as detached from the spectator’s environment. In section III, by referring to Wittgenstein’s account of the contemplation from outside, we contend that the interest in films introduced in section II can count as an aesthetic interest. In section IV we argue that both documentaries and fiction films can elicit this kind of interest. In section V we compare the three different kinds of aesthetic interest that, in our view, a film can elicit. In section VI we describe the corresponding kinds of cinematic achievements. (shrink)

This paper fills a gap in Flusser scholarship by conducting an initial comparison of Flusser with Rudolf Arnheim. After noting their similar approaches – open both to science and phenomenology – it looks closely at each theorist’s respective theory of photography. They differ in that Flusser believes that the photography as a technical apparatus is not objective. However, with some contextualization each can be seen to say complementary things. Reflecting on each theorist’s cautiously optimistic or pessimistic approach to evolving media, (...) the paper concludes with thoughts on how they give helpful ideas on how to flesh out aspects of the other’s thought. (shrink)