Dipartimento di Filosofia e Scienze dell'Educazione

9.30-10.45

Alberto Voltolini (University of Turin)

Fusion Experiences

Both a meaning experience, an experience of as of understanding a certain expression (Strawson 1994), and the experience of seeing-in, the pictorially relevant twofold experience of discerning a certain subject in another object, typically a picture's vehicle (Wollheim 1980), can be taken to be fusion experiences (Husserl 1913, Briscoe 2017), in the sense that although they are constituted by parts, they amount to a sensory whole (Husserl 1913, Wollheim 1987).
Thus, one may take them to structurally be the same kind of experience: just as one sees a subject in a picture's vehicle, one hears (sees) a meaning, or a thought, in the expression one hears (sees) (McDowell 1998). Yet their similarity notwithstanding, they are not the same kind of experience. Granted, in both experiences the higher-level components depend on their lower-level components: one could not see a subject in a picture's vehicle if one did not already see that vehicle; one could not hear a meaning in an expression if one did not hear that very expression. Moreover, such a dependence is generic: one can hear the same meaning in hearing different (synonymous) expressions; one can see the same subject even if one has a different experience of the vehicle, for the vehicle has changed its colours and shapes. Nevertheless, the relationship between the folds of the seeing-in experience is more intimate than that between the parts of the meaning experience. One can hear an expression, not only in its lower-level auditory qualities but also in its morphosyntactic qualities, and yet hear no meaning in it; moreover, when one also hears its meaning, the previous auditory experience of the expression is not modified. Granted, one can also see a picture's vehicle without also seeing a subject in it. Yet when one sees a subject in it, the experience of the vehicle is modified, for it comes to have an enriched content. This has to do with the fact that, unlike the meaning experience, qua pictorial experience the seeing-in experience is a recognitional experience (Schier 1986, Lopes 1996): in order to recognize a certain subject in a picture, one must experience that picture's vehicle in such a way that grounds that recognition. In this respect, only the seeing-in experience amounts to a proper fusion experience, an experience of a sensory whole that does not coincide with the experiences of its parts. (Stumpf 1890).

10.45-11.00

Coffee break

11.00-13.00

Lambert Wiesing (University of Jena)

Pause of Participation. On the Function of Artificial Presence.

The common foundation of phenomenological image theories is the stance that the perception of images leads to a perception sui generis. In order to capture this distinction of image perception, two paths have traditionally been considered: either The Particular Object of Image Perception or The Unique Origin of Image Perception were described. The lecture wants to explore a third way within the phenomenology of the image by trying to determine the uniqueness of image perception through its peculiar, necessary effects on the perceiver of the image. The thesis is: The person perceiving an image is not a part of the image themself as an image object. Only in the case of image perception, there exists the relief of a pause of participation - the perception of something without the perceiving person being bodily involved in the actions perceived.

15.00-17.00

Regina-Nino Mion (Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn)

Image and Art

Edmund Husserl famously declared: "Without an image, there is no fine art." In my presentation, I ask whether this is true. According to Husserl, the image is something that appears but not every appearance is an image, likewise not every visual object is a work of art. Following this, I will argue that we experience a work of art as an image if two conditions are met: we experience some sensations and these sensations are apprehended - apprehended either as an image about something or as an image representing (depicting) something.

17.00-17.15

Coffee break

17.15-18.45

Federico Vercellone (University of Turin)

Art and Human Practice in the Image Society

Which is the function of art in the universe dominated by the image? This question arises with the rise of aesthetic consciousness after Baumgarten. Aesthetic consciousness is defined as an abstraction, according to the thesis set out by Hans Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method, not only from the conceptual point of view, but also from that of its becoming an autonomous continent based on the traditional media of artistic expression, as attested by the long journey that leads from Batteux to Winckelmann and Lessing.

In this context we are dealing with an abstraction that is first and foremost perceptive. For the means and modes of expression - brush and palette, color, sound, word, etc. -  are referred to a single sense, while ordinary perception constantly has a synaesthetic character. From Romanticism to Avant-garde and Contemporary Art (including augmented reality), we are witnessing an opposite path: that of the reconstruction of perception in its fragrant integrity, as proposed by the "realistic" synergy of the five senses.