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List of contents
Introduction
1. The Visual Dimension of Metaphors
2. Semantic Theories of Metaphor
3. Cognitivist Theories of Metaphor: a conceptual turn
4. The Advent of the Visual Perspective of Metaphors
5. Metaphors After the Linguistic Turn of Aesthetics
6. Paradigmatic Metaphors
7. Visuality, Paraphrase and Syntactic Productivity
8. Visuality of Language: formalist account
9. Metaphor: A Definition
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Michalle Gal is Professor of Philosophy at the Unit of History and Philosophy and the Interdisciplinary Design Graduate Program, Shenkar. Gal is the author of Visual Metaphors and Aesthetics: A Formalist Theory of Metaphor (2022), Aestheticism: Deep Formalism and the Emergence of Modernist Aesthetics (2015), and Introduction to Design Theory: Philosophy, Critique, History and Practice (2023). She is the editor of the special issues Art and Gesture (2014), Visual Hybrids (2023), and the forthcoming Design and its Relations (2024).
Summary
This book offers a new definition of metaphor—as an ontological and visual construction, whose roots are external visual forms, and its motivation is our attachment to forms. This definition, which Michalle Gal names “visualist,” challenges the ruling conceptualist theory of metaphors and places a new emphasis on how we experience rather than understand metaphors. In doing so, she responds to the visual turn that is taking place in literature and the media, demanding that the visual become a site of philosophical analysis.
This focus on the external visual world allows Gal to employ visual theories to capture the essence of metaphor. She looks beyond conceptual or semantic mechanism, and returns to theories of Arnheim and Gombrich and the current evolution of ideas about the visual or material and embodied cognition. Proposing to see visual metaphors in their basic form, she uses a new externalist terminology of ontology, visuality, composition, affordance, construction, and emergence.
Setting out a new theory that takes into account that humans are visual no less than cognitive creatures, Visual Metaphors and Aesthetics lays the foundation for a new vocabulary to talk about metaphors.
Foreword
A pioneering analytic philosophical exploration of metaphors based on visual theories.
Additional text
Michalle Gal draws on recent developments in visual culture, and on the work of a number of under-appreciated thinkers—Arnheim, Aldrich, and Gombrich, among them—to offer a resourceful, spirited defense of an ambitious new theory of metaphor. Her rich book promises to unsettle widespread assumptions about metaphor as well as the history of philosophical aesthetics.
