Image Word Action / Bild Wort Aktion / Imago Sermo Actio – serie

Der Ursprung des Bildakts bindet die in den letzten drei Jahrzehnten erzielten Forschungsergebnisse der Vor- und Frühgeschichte kunsthistorisch ein und ist als anthropologische Grundlegung einer Wirkmacht der Form konzipiert. Fossilien-Inklusionen in Faustkeilen erlauben eine materiale und philosophische Bestimmung der «ikonischen Differenz» (Boehm), die für das Verständnis des Bildakts fundamental ist.

Images of chaos cannot truly exist, as they would show the state of the world before its creation. Nevertheless, from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the present day, there have been repeated attempts to visualize what eludes our experience. Interplay with the conceptual history of chaos forces images of chaos to iconic aporias: this book presents a first comprehensive examination of such ideas.From the first depiction of chaos in a provincial Roman mosaic, the field of investigation extends into the 18th century and includes excursions into 19th-21st century art. Chaos images are characterized by entangled pagan and Christian ideas. In the Daoist tradition of China, visual concepts of chaos lead to extremely subtle iconic aporias.

Heavily represented sections of contemporary philosophy subscribe to the notion of "embodiment". However promising this pragmatic turn of events may be, it remains limited in that it interprets the world as a projection of the cognizing "I". By contrast, Image Acts focuses on the counterforce of the form of images. The book subdivides this sphere into three parts: imitation, substitution, and the pure effect of the form. All three parts are contemplated with examples from antiquity through to the present and the iconoclastic controversies of our times. From this reconstruction of the image act springs the element of a new philosophy of affordance.

How relevant is art to science? Few studies to date have succeeded in demonstrating the concrete impact of artworks on scientific theory and its formation. However, this book is a rare exception. K. Lee Chichester shows how biologists’ encounters with works of art have led to the development of new images in biology. She follows in the footsteps of the influential Scottish biologist D'Arcy W. Thompson, who devised a theory of organic form around 1900, based on the artisanal understanding of form and force. His approaches were taken up by younger biologists who, influenced by British Constructivist art and in collaboration with artists such as Barbara Hepworth and John Piper, developed new images for creative processes in organisms.Art and its influences on science in the late 19th and early 20th centuryNew perspectives on the work of Barbara Hepworth and John Piper

This book explores the inner facial feeling as a defining phenomenon for the poetics and theory of Russian painting. From the icon to Suprematism and the facelessness of the Gulag concentration camps, the study traces the face, departing from its inner tactile sensitivity. The face (with its blind skin and its skinless eyes) occupies a liminal space at the intersection of the optic and the tactile senses. We build identity on the imagination of our faces seen on distance by others. At the same time, the face is inseparably bound to the nervous system. It is continuously felt with the interior organs of the head (muscles, tongue, skin), which abolish distance. Thus the face emerges as a thin layer, a stratum that delineates the threshold between interiority and exteriority, between the self and its representation.First study of the tactility of the face in literature and paintingUnique interdisciplinary approach to interaction between image and body in Russian modernismChallenges traditional notions of the portrait in art history

Social enactivism is a philosophical theory which, through the analysis of discursive practice, aims at explaining how high-level cognitive conditions and processes emerge. The fundamental tenets of this theory are based on enactivist and (neo)pragmatist principles. Therefore, the emphasis is not on the purely linguistic understanding of discourse but on its structural interaction with technology, that is created by man himself, in the context of which the discursive performance takes place. This perspective addresses not only a blind spot in the international debate about "situated cognition" but also a current problem in the philosophy of mind.