Read more
Emmanuel Alloa retraces the history of Western attitudes toward the visual to propose a major rethinking of images as irreplaceable agents of our everyday engagement with the world. He examines how ideas of images and their powers have been constructed in Western humanities, art theory, and philosophy.
List of contents
Preface to the English Edition
Introduction
1. Between Thing and Sign: The Hubris of the Image
2. Aristotle’s Foundation of a Media Theory of Appearing
3. Forgetting Media: Traces of the Diaphanous from Themistius to Berkeley
4. A Phenomenology of Images
5. Media Phenomenology
Conclusion: Seeing Through Images—for an Alternative Theory of Media
Afterword: Seeing Not Riddling, by Andrew Benjamin
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Emmanuel Alloa is professor of philosophy at the University of Fribourg, where he holds the Chair for Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art. His books in English include Resistance of the Sensible World: An Introduction to Merleau-Ponty (2017), as well as a number of coedited volumes, including, most recently, Dynamis of the Image: Moving Images in a Global World (2020).
Nils F. Schott is a lecturer in the Euro-American Program of the Collège universitaire de Sciences Po, Reims, and coeditor of, among other books, Love and Forgiveness for a More Just World (Columbia, 2015).
Andrew Benjamin is distinguished professor of architectural theory at the University of Technology, Sydney, and emeritus professor of philosophy at Monash University Melbourne. His recent books include Art’s Philosophical Work (2015), Towards a Relational Ontology: Philosophy’s Other Possibility (2015), and Virtue in Being: Towards an Ethics of the Unconditioned (2017).
Summary
Emmanuel Alloa retraces the history of Western attitudes toward the visual to propose a major rethinking of images as irreplaceable agents of our everyday engagement with the world. He examines how ideas of images and their powers have been constructed in Western humanities, art theory, and philosophy.
Additional text
In a lucid reinterpretation of the European tradition, Emmanuel Alloa shows that images are not the seduction or distraction of philosophy but one of its most robust and enduring problems. Here Geistesgeschichte shows itself the royal road to understanding media
