Michalle GAL Visual Metaphors and Cognition: Revisiting the Non-Conceptual The paper analyzes the visual aspect of metaphors, offering a new theory of metaphor that characterizes its syntactic structure, material composition and visuality as its essence. It will accordingly present the metaphorical creating or transfiguring, as well as conceiving or understanding, of one thing as a different one, as a visual ability. It is a predication by means of producing nonconventional compositions – i.e., by compositional, or even aesthetic, means. This definition is aimed to apply to the various kinds of metaphors: conceptual, linguistic, visual, and material. It will thus challenge the definition of metaphor as a conceptual or linguistic phenomenon in nature that is based on its semantic mechanism, broad concepts, and cognitive value. Those definitions have been prevalent since the second half of 20th century, under the influence of the philosophy of language, and later of cognitive studies. Quite a few theories characterized special kinds of image and objects as metaphors – formulated by Richards, Beardsley, Danto, Goodman, Hesse, Peacocke, Langer, Davidson, Rorty, Henle, Aldrich, De Man, Carroll, Arnheim, Mitchell, and Hausman. However, the paper shows that they still focus on the metaphorical meaning, like the conceptual and cognitive theories offered for example by Black, Lakoff and Johnson, Searle or Camp. Doing so they apply definitions of linguistic metaphor on the visual one. My argument takes the opposite theoretical step. Defining the visuality of metaphors as their essence, I will present the visual metaphors as the paradigmatic ones, whose mechanism ought to be applied to the different kinds of metaphors. Metaphorical mechanism is based on its aptness of form, configuration, syntactic arrangement, or material composition. Those terms, though not obvious, were chosen to present the qualitative traits of metaphor, its appearance, the metaphorical medium itself, as its essence. Namely, even a conceptual metaphor is dependent on a structural categorization and perception of seeing or picturing one concept through a different one, which is enabled by the structural possibilities offered by the visual media. The paper will further suggest a stronger argument, logically conditioned upon the former: if metaphor is based on its composition, then it is actually based on its aesthetic qualities. Revealing the visuality of metaphors might have implications on characterizing cultural progress and intellectuality as aesthetically, rather than conceptually, oriented. Dr. Michalle GAL is a senior lecturer in Culture Studies and Master Program, Shenkar College. Her main fields of publications and research include aesthetics and the philosophy of art and design and visual culture. She is the co-editor of Art and Gesture, and the forthcoming Visual Hybrids volumes. She is the author of Aestheticism: Deep Formalism and the Emergence of Modernist Aesthetics (2105, Nature, Science and the Arts series, Peter Lang Press). E-mail: michalle.gal@shenkar.ac.il.