Theories of Seeing. An Introduction

The German book “Theories of Seeing. An Introduction” (Theorien des Sehens zur Einführung) has been written together with Eva Schürmann (under contract with Junius for 2024). In preparing the book, we felt the need to avoid theoretical myopics of disciplines and schools to show how vision can be fruitfully addressed from multiple perspectives, each constituting a theory in its own right. Overall, we will give special emphasis to what we call impure seeing (introduction).

Overview Over the Chapters

We start by addressing the relation of vision to mind and vision to world (cap. 1 and 2). We then walk the reader through some theories of vision that have been part of the cognitive revolution in the cognitive neurosciences before presenting phenomenology and pragmatism as well as 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive) as an alternative to any largely bottom-up, information-processing paradigm of perception (cap. 3 and 4). This will build on theories that show how vision is social and has ethical implication, especially once one focuses on gaze as a concept (cap. 5). Central for both of us are theories that highlight in what ways seeing can have a history and relies on culture as well on different visual media (cap. 6). We end by highlighting the aesthetic-affective nature of vision (cap 7), a topic still underrepresented especially in philosophical theories of seeing.