The experience of beauty is no less mysterious for the aesthetician today than it was in the Middle Ages. Here I focus on the notion of ‘unseen beauty’ and how certain aspects of medieval philosophizing about the nature of beauty can still be of use for the contemporary aesthetician. I draw a comparison between some concepts that pervade the whole of the Medieval period – that there is a transcendent source of visible beauty, and that visible beauties function as (...) images of the invisible beauty – with a modern conception of aesthetic experience, as it is expressed in authors like Clive Bell. (shrink)

Sound Unseen explores the phenomenon of acousmatic sound-a sound that one hears without seeing its source-and presents a powerful argument for the central yet overlooked role of acousmatic sound in music aesthetics, sound studies, literature, philosophy and the history of the senses.

Seen | Unseen is a richly illustrated, analysis of the interconnections between science and the visual arts as Martin Kemp explores the responses of artists, scientists and their instruments, to the world. From Leonardo, Durer and the inventors of photography to contemporary sculptors, and from Galileo and Darwin to Stephen J. Gould, Kemp considers the way in which scientists and artists have perceived the world and responded to its patterns.

In Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor, Ankhi Mukherjee offers a magisterial work of literary and cultural criticism which examines the relationship between global cities, poverty, and psychoanalysis. Spanning three continents, this hugely ambitious book reads fictional representations of poverty with each city's psychoanalytic and psychiatric culture, particularly as that culture is fostered by state policies toward the welfare needs of impoverished populations. It explores the causal relationship between precarity and mental health through clinical case studies, (...) the product of extensive collaborations and knowledge-sharing with community psychotherapeutic initiatives in six global cities. These are layered with twentieth- and twenty-first-century works of world literature that explore issues of identity, illness, and death at the intersections of class, race, globalisation, and migrancy. In Unseen City, Mukherjee argues that a humanistic and imaginative engagement with the psychic lives of the dispossessed is key to an adapted psychoanalysis for the poor, and that seeking equity of the unconscious is key to poverty alleviation. (shrink)

Professor Morales’ Coss Dialogue Lecture demonstrates the utility of pragmatism for his work as a social scientist across three projects: 1) field research studying the acephalous and heterogenous social order of Chicago’s Maxwell Street Market; 2) nascent research how unseen religious orders animate the lives of im/migrants and their contributions to food systems; and 3) large-scale longitudinal research on farmers markets using the Metrics + Indicators for Impact (MIFI) toolkit. The first two sections of my paper applaud and build (...) upon Morales’ first two projects, and my extremely brief third section raises some questions about positivist specters that may haunt the MIFI project insofar as it is conceptualized, described, and deployed using the terms favored by mainstream social science. (shrink)

In 1875, the geophysicist Balfour Stewart and the mathematician P. G. Tait published the second edition of The Unseen Universe. The book's aim had been 'to overthrow materialism by a purely scientific argument', and its initial success, and the controversy it aroused, prompted this revised edition. The treatise suggests that science and religion could be reconciled, and that by using science, it could be proved that the soul survives after death. The book begins with a historical account of the (...) beliefs about the afterlife of ancient Egypt, the Greeks, Buddhism and Christianity. The authors then refine a Ptolemaic vision of the universe in which the material universe is surrounded by concentric, invisible universes. The Unseen Universe discusses the nature of matter and ether, Newton's laws, and the idea that, through electromagnetism, the soul upon death transfers molecularly from the visible to the invisible universe. (shrink)

In this updated and extended edition of their book, Goodale and Milner explore one of the most extraordinary neurological cases of recent years--one that profoundly changed scientific views on the visual brain. Taking us on a journey into the unconscious brain, this book is a fascinating illustration of the power of the 'unconscious' mind.

Is security seen? Is security seen in images of peace and safety, or is it perceived in the troubled images of the horrors of violence and suffering? Vision has played a crucial role in shaping the modern Western preoccupation with, and prioritisation of security. Historically, security has been visually represented in a variety of ways, typically involving the depiction of its absence. In Medieval and Early Modern Europe especially, security and insecurity were presented as coterminous insofar as each represented separate (...) conditions – their shared boundary envisioned in representations of the temporal threshold separating human mortality from divine salvation. This ocular demonstration of thresholds has been heightened by the ‘war on terror’ conducted by neo-liberal states since 2003. Neoliberalism operates as a discourse of constant global circulations premised on a perpetual anticipation and pre-emption of insecurity. In the neoliberal scheme, security and insecurity are no longer coterminous, but mutually sustaining in perpetuity. In that sense, neoliberal security is ‘sight unseen’ - an uncanny presence that is not there. In the reiterated troubled images of horror amplified by the seemingly endless 'war on terror', neoliberal security operates as a terrifying visual reflex: we cannot see it but in new horrors. (shrink)

Vision, more than any other sense, dominates our mental life. Our visual experience is just so rich, so detailed, that we can hardly distinguish that experience from the world itself. Even when we just think about the world and don't look at it directly, we can't help but 'imagine' what it looks like. We think of 'seeing' as being a conscious activity--we direct our eyes, we choose what we look at, we register what we are seeing. The series of events (...) described in this book radically altered this attitude towards vision. This book describes one of the most extraordinary neurological cases of recent years--one that profoundly changed scientific views on consciousness. It is the story of Dee Fletcher--a woman recently blinded--who became the subject of a series of scientific studies. As events unfolded, Milner and Goodale found that Dee wasn't in fact blind--she just didn't know that she could see. Taking us on a journey into the unconscious brain, the two scientists who made this incredible discovery tell the amazing story of their work, and the surprising conclusion they were forced to reach. Written to be accessible to students and popular science readers, this book is a fascinating illustration of the power of the 'unconscious' mind. (shrink)

In September 2003, we released the first results of a national community attitude tracking study about child abuse and child protection. At that time, we concluded that as a community, violence against children was tolerated. The community did not understand or appreciate the seriousness, size and cost of child abuse in Australia. There was evidence that child abuse was not viewed as an important challenge facing children in Australia. A second study conducted in 2006 found that nothing much had changed, (...) indeed community engagement with the issue of child abuse may have even deteriorated. A third study in 2010 found that the community actively avoids the problem of child abuse rating it less concerning than high petrol prices. In 2021, 18 years after the first report was published, we have concluded again that child abuse remains out of sight and out of mind as a community concern. This article describes the findings of this fourth iteration of our survey and analyses the implications for ensuring that individuals are more engaged and committed to taking action to preventing child abuse and/or protecting children from violation. (shrink)

Social scientists have severed social problems from the study of framing work in social movements. This article proposes to rejoin problems and framing work via attention to the phenomenological structure of social problems. By describing basic 1) temporal, 2) spatial, and 3) experiential features of social problems, we facilitate comparisons of different kinds of movements across distinct historical periods and regions. The approach is demonstrated via the example of “slow violence” (Nixon 2011)—suffering that develops gradually across time and extends across (...) space as well as disproportionately afflicts disempowered people. A comparison of two very different historical cases—environmental justice advocacy in the wake of the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India and consumer activism in early twentieth-century America—illustrates how slow violence presents parallel issues with respect to representing the problem and identifying the culprits. On this basis, the argument demonstrates parallels among disparate social movements by including the analysis of the phenomenological structure of social problems into comparative studies of framing work in movements. As such, this article presents analytical possibilities for incorporating experiences of social problems into the study of framing work and social movements. (shrink)

The Image of the Unseen God develops a novel understanding of God and God's action compatible with the teachings of Jesus, the Christian tradition, and contemporary science.

For children, the collateral damage of the COVID-19 pandemic response has been considerable. In this paper, we use the framework of evidence-based medicine to argue that child abuse is another negative side effect of COVID-19 lockdowns. While it was certain that school closures would have profound social and economic costs, it remains uncertain whether they have any effect on COVID-19 transmission. There is emerging evidence that lockdowns significantly worsened child abuse on a global scale. Low-income and middle-income countries are particularly (...) vulnerable to increases in child abuse. The best available external evidence from systematic research during the pandemic demonstrates an increase in the risk of child maltreatment, an increase in child maltreatment hospitalisations and a concerning decrease in official child maltreatment referrals. The paradoxical phenomenon of increased hospitalisations and decreased reports is unlikely to be explained by a genuine decrease in child abuse. We conclude that lockdowns have an unacceptably high risk of negative side effects for children, as evidenced by child abuse, the true extent of which appears to be masked by lockdown-related disruptions to schools and other surveillance systems. The desire for a sense of security may be a tempting bias towards emphasising the resilience of children, but it is ethically problematic to push children towards abuse in the name of public health. It is our view that the collateral damage of prolonged school closures for society’s most vulnerable members is a powerful ethical consideration against any pandemic response which involves their use. (shrink)

This commentary on Edwin Carels’ essay “Revisiting Tom Tom: Performative anamnesis and autonomous vision in Ken Jacobs’ appropriations of Tom Tom the Piper’s Son” broadens up the media-archaeological framework in which Carels places his text. Notions such as Huhtamo’s topos and Zielinski’s “deep time” are brought into the discussion in order to point out the difficulty to see what there is to see and to question the position of the viewer in front of experimental films like Tom Tom the Piper’s (...) Son and its remakes. (shrink)

This research note announces and briefly describes a new five-year project to prepare a census bibliography of the first ten editions of Grotus’s De iure belli ac pacis. The resulting book will be published in 2025, the 400th anniversary of ibp’s first appearance. The project is sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg.

Events often share elements that guide us to integrate knowledge from these events. Integration allows us to make inferences that affect reactions to new events. Integrating events and making inferences are thought to depend on consciousness. We show that even unconsciously experienced events, that share elements, are integrated and influence reactions to new events. An unconscious event consisted of the subliminal presentation of two unrelated words. Half of subliminal word pairs shared one word . Overlapping word pairs were presented between (...) 6 s and 78 s apart. The test for integration required participants to judge the semantic distance between suprathreshold words . Evidence of integration was provided by faster reactions to suprathreshold words that were indirectly related versus unrelated. This effect was independent of the time interval between overlapping word pairs. We conclude that consciousness is no requirement for the integration of discontiguous events. (shrink)

Stanley Kubrick is regarded as a filmmaker of complex imagery. Yet the vitality of his more metaphysical works lies in what is unseen. There is an embodiment to Kubrick’s films that maintains a sense of subjectivity, but one which is unapparent and non-visual. This opens another way into Kubrick’s works, that of conditions of audibility, affectivity, and signs. To think of embodiment from such an audible perspective requires one to subvert film spectatorship and instead enter the reality of the (...) film’s immanent, borderless unfolding as itself. This essay applies Gilles Deleuze’s semiotic concepts of cinema, metaphysics, and subjectivity to conditions of audibility and unseeing, a connection Deleuze largely ignored in his writings. These dual concepts of audibility and unseeing break prevailing analytical norms in cinema discourse that affirm limitations via material, visual, textual, and spatial reification: subjective-objective delineations, the body and the gaze, sound as necessarily spatial/material, and the dominance of images in regard to aesthetics, surveillance, and evidence. Instead, this essay moves through Kubrick’s constructions of milieu that are unseen in the midst of an otherwise visual unfolding, and audible in the midst of an otherwise sonic unfolding. To consider Kubrick’s films through their audible embodiment, one must detach the microphone from its adherence to space, the body from its visual gaze. Here, sounds, images, and objects become secondary to hearing and signs in a temporal unfolding, resulting in a cinema that is experiential rather than representational. This opens to an actuality of spirit within the world of the film, offering new opportunities for creativity in the cinematic form. (shrink)

This article analyzes different pathologies of social affirmation and examines the grounds of social recognition from the point of view of the concept of expression. The red thread of the text is provided by Tove Jansson’s fictional works, and the focus will be on three cases in particular. The article sets out from the phenomenological distinction between the sensible expression, on the one hand, and the expressed content, on the other. By focusing on the three cases, the article distinguishes and (...) analyses the fundamental structures of communal life and explicates different ways in which social affirmation can be one-sided or distorted. (shrink)

This article wants to answer three questions: first, why is not only sensibility but visibility important for modern democracy? Second, why is art or aesthetic experience important for both democracy and visibility? And third, how is it possible that aesthetic experience generates effects that conduce to democracy? Answering these questions aims at highlighting an inner connection between democracy, feelings and aesthetics. For a democratic community, on the one hand, cannot exclude feelings from political discourse, but, on the other hand, cannot (...) accept them in their immediate and absolute form. Feelings need ‘transformation’, and the best popular medium for this is aesthetic experience. (shrink)

In three macaque monkeys with unilateral removal of primary visual cortex and in one unoperated monkey, we measured reaction times to a visual target that was presented at a lateral eccentricity of 20o in the normal, left, visual hemifield. When an additional stimulus was presented at the corresponding position in the right hemifield (hemianopic in three of the monkeys), it significantly slowed the reaction time to the left target if it preceded it by delays from 100-500 msec. The most effective (...) delay depended on the particular experimental paradigm and perhaps on the experience of the monkey with the task. The results show that reaction times to seen targets in the normal hemifield of monkeys are influenced by the presentation of ''unseen'' targets in the anopic hemifield, as in some patients with cortically blind visual field defects. (shrink)

On Blindness opens the eyes of the sighted to the world as experienced by the blind, offering a unique opportunity to explore the challenges, frustrations, joys - and extraordinary insights - experienced in the everyday business of discovering the world without sight. What difference does sight or its absence make to our ideas about the world?

Philosophical interest in vulnerability focusses mainly on normative questions concerning its relevance for moral, political and legal theory. However, beneath these questions there lies another one which is epistemological: How do we gain clear knowledge about another person’s pain and suffering? How do we recognize a wounded life? Drawing primarily on the account of Elaine Scarry, the article aims at showing that the difficulties to apprehend and recognize a life as injured are not only grounded in political and cultural frames, (...) as Judith Butler contends, but also in the phenomenological and epistemic features of pain itself. Pain is epistemically fragile. Whereas it is almost impossible to ignore one’s own pain, it is very easy to overlook the pain of others. This epistemic slope has concrete effects on the social and political life. Regarding vulnerability, the normative question of recognition and the epistemic question of recognizability, thus, are closely intertwined. (shrink)

Berkeley’s immaterialism depends on a correct answer to the question whether, in experiencing what is described as hearing a coach in the street, a perceiving subject really only immediately perceives certain sounds, auditory sensible ideas that are partly constitutive of the carriage as a sensible thing, or in immediately experiencing the associated sounds immediately perceives the carriage itself. Much hangs on how the word ‘perceive’ is thought to be propery used, and how wide and deeply penetrating its intentionality is conceived (...) to be, whether we can perceive sensible things like carriages or only carriagey sensible ideas. There are problems with answers on both sides of the inevitable opposition, and hence a number of related dilemmas running through and sometimes across one another in this part of Berkeley’s philosophy. The coach and horse argument in Berkeley’s Three Dialogues affirms radical phenomenalism as the strictly philosophically correct thesis that all perceiving is immediately perceiving sensible ideas, to the exclusion of sensible things as total congeries of sensible ideas. Relevant passages in Berkeley’s text set in an interpretative framework and proper context of philosophical exchange between Berkeley’s dialogue partners reveals the carriage argument as more subtle in structure and more powerfully supportive of a radical idealist phenomenalism in Berkeley’s empiricist epistemology than is exemplified elsewhere in Three Dialogues. (shrink)

When Dan Callahan and Will Gaylin began The Hastings Center, they saw and sought to study the unseen. They were among the very first to recognize that remarkable advances in biomedical technology were generating questions our society had never before faced. As I take the helm of The Hastings Center forty‐plus years later, it's now my job to be sure we see, name, grapple with, and act on today's questions. Over the next two years, the Center will engage its (...) scholars, our Fellows, other bioethicists, scientists, social science and humanities scholars, health care policy‐makers, and key stakeholders such as journalists, educators, and patients in defining today's set of critical questions. (shrink)

Philosophy is mystical. Mysticism is direct insights into the depths as yet unspoken.What things are … refer to depths beyond anything which we can grasp with a clear apprehension.Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.Art and mysticism or negative theology play a central role in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead : they show him the cosmos from the unseen, the unspoken, and the unknowing, and therefore from "the ultimate mystery of the universe,"1 from "supreme Beauty", (...) and from "the infinite [primordial]2 ground"3 of all things. This means that Whitehead is looking at the world not as a philosopher of science but as an... (shrink)