This critical note deals with the book The Share of Perspectives (2025) by Emmanuel Alloa, written as a ‘defense of perspectivism in the age of post-truth’. According to the book’s central claim, the structure of perspective implies both division and sharing. I trace Alloa’s remarkable expedition into the history of ‘perspective’, in both the history of painting and the history of thought, and conclude by noting the limitations of Alloa’s primary focus on epistemological issues and by highlighting two different meanings (...) of the term ‘conflict’ in Alloa’s emphasis of the conflictual sharing. (shrink)

Winner of the Fabian Dorsch ESA Essay Prize. David Davies advocates a methodological principle he calls the ‘pragmatic constraint’, according to which ontology of art is answerable to epistemology of art, or ‘those features of our creative, critical, appreciative, and individuative practices in the arts that would withstand rational scrutiny’. This principle, while widely endorsed, has faced scepticism, charges of vagueness, and ambiguity concerning what counts as an instance of its correct application. I propose a similar principle that avoids these (...) problems while doing the work for which the pragmatic constraint is meant, and one that is expanded in scope to apply to philosophy of art generally. Drawing on ideas from classical pragmatism, this new ‘pragmatist principle’ holds that (1) philosophy of art should centrally deal with philosophical problems that could arise for a reflective practitioner in the course of artistic practice, and (2) the solutions offered to those problems should be able to make some positive difference for, or tie back into and inform, future artistic practice, with ‘practice’ here including both art’s creation and its reception. (shrink)

In experiences of visual art, we enter imaginary worlds that consist of phenomenologically distinguishable variations of imagination. In this article, we empirically describe some of these variations and the imaginary worlds of which they are part. Based on phenomenological interviews about intense experiences with visual art, we distinguish between sensory imaginings, imaginings of bodily presence, and situational imaginings, each signifying different imaginary content but all related in a dynamic interplay that shape the coherent imaginary experience. We show how imagination is (...) fundamental to experiences of visual art, and how our imaginary worlds relate to the work of art in different ways. (shrink)

What makes comics comics? The question is difficult. Many answers have been proposed but the debate appears to stagnate, in part because scholars cannot seem to agree about the exact content of the category of comics. In this article, I propose to move the discussion away from the category of comics and instead approach the debate through the category of works that read like comics. After arguing that this change of perspective is relevant and likely to generate more homogeneous views (...) among scholars, I present a series of intriguing works that read like comics, despite not having the characteristics one would probably judge necessary according to the current literature. Doing so, I show that works do not need to have pictures or look like comics to read like comics, that some works read like comics precisely because of the way they look, that a single image can be modified to read like a comic, and that we can create a truly single image that reads like a comic. I discuss how the presented works challenge some common assumptions about the defining features of comics. Finally, I conclude that the category of works that read like comics is useful to further our understanding of comics and to explore what might be the most interesting aspects of the medium. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue that certain figurative paintings – namely, paintings that depict atmospheres, such as Camille Pissarro’s Snowscape in Louveciennes (1872), can elicit multisensory experiences in their viewers. Viewing such pictures under appropriate circumstances will activate the viewers’ sensory imagination in such a way that they enjoy a genuine multisensory experience. Such an experience does not just involve different sensible qualities. Rather, the different sensible qualities are fused together into a new sensible quality that cannot be experienced (...) through a single sense modality or through the mere co-consciousness of multiple sense modalities. (shrink)

This paper extends the reach of the concept of aesthetic personality, as utilized by Uku Tooming in a recent article, ‘Aesthetic Disagreement with Oneself as Another’, published in Estetika (2023). Tooming invokes this concept as part of his solution to a philosophical puzzle concerning aesthetic disagreement with one’s past self. I argue that equivalence (or approximate equivalence) of aesthetic personality in cases in which one disagrees with an aesthetic peer or peers on an aesthetic judgement licenses the revision of one’s (...) aesthetic judgement. This relates to both intra- and interindividual aesthetic peer disagreements. Interestingly, equivalence of aesthetic personality can, at least in certain cases, undermine the appeal of the autonomy principle, which holds that one must exercise one’s own evaluative capacities in producing a legitimate aesthetic judgement, and which Tooming considers a promising ground for not budging in cases of interindividual aesthetic disagreement. (shrink)

In The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality (2022), Grant Tavinor claims that VR is a technologically fancy kind of picturing and, more specifically, that VR headsets elicit proper seeing-in experiences. According to Tavinor, seeing a virtual environment through a stereoscopic headset elicits the same twofold experience as ordinary pictures: users simultaneously perceive the three-dimensional depicted scene – the virtual environment – and the bidimensional surface responsible for displaying such a scene. In this critical note, I argue that this is a wrong (...) characterization of the visual experience VR stereoscopic headsets elicit. I maintain that VR visual experiences are not twofold, but onefold. When using a VR headset, we do not perceive the configuration as an organizational structure; our visual system does not represent, even unconsciously, the properties of the configuration as such. My argument proceeds in two directions: first, through a phenomenological analysis of VR experience, and, second, by corroborating these phenomenological observations with evidence from perceptual psychology. I conclude that, if VR environments are to be considered bona fide pictures, it is not because they elicit a twofold seeing-in experience. (shrink)