Mirrors, Windows, and Paintings

Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 1:22-32 (2022)
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Abstract

What do we see in a mirror? There is an ongoing debate whether mirrors present us with images of objects or whether we see, through the mirror, the objects themselves. Roberto Casati has recently argued that there is a categorical difference between images and mirror-reflections. His argument depends on the observation that mirrors, but not paintings, are sensitive to changes in the observer’s prospective. In our paper we scrutinize Casati’s argument and present a modal argument that shows that it cannot establish this conclusion. We suggest that Casati’s line of reasoning suffers from the fact that he does not take dynamic images, i.e., images that change over time, into account.

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Author Profiles

Clotilde Calabi
Università degli Studi di Milano
Wolfgang Huemer
Università Degli Studi Di Parma

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References found in this work

Threefoldness.Bence Nanay - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (1):163-182.
Mirrors and Misleading Appearances.Vivian Mizrahi - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (2):354-367.
False reflections.Maarten Steenhagen - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (5):1227-1242.
What is a painting?Michael Polanyi - 1970 - British Journal of Aesthetics 10 (3):225-236.
Three varieties of visual field.Austen Clark - 1996 - Philosophical Psychology 9 (4):477-95.

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