Art and Entanglement in Strange Tools

What is art? Why does it matter? What does it tell us about ourselves? In this essay, I introduce and in some cases extend the basic account of these matters offered in Strange Tools (New York, Hill and Wang: 2016)

Merleau-Ponty and the Measuring Body

In recent years a growing number of scholars in science studies and related fields are developing new ontologies to displace entrenched dualisms. These efforts often go together with a renewed interest in the roles played by symbolisms and tools in knowledge and being. This article brings Maurice Merleau-Ponty into these conversations, positioning him as a precursor of today’s innovative recastings of technoscience. While Merleau-Ponty is often invoked in relation to his early work on the body and embodiment, this article focuses on his later work, where the investigation of perception is integrated with an ontological exploration. The resulting approach revolves around the highly original idea of the body as a standard of measurement. We further develop this idea by coining the term ‘the measuring body’, which to a greater extent than did Merleau-Ponty accentuates the relative autonomy of symbolisms and tools and their capacity to decentre the perceiving body

Doświadczanie świata w czasie

Objects – even tomatoes – are, in a sense, timeless – they exist, all at once, whole and integrated. Indeed, it is just this fact about objects – their timelessness – that makes it puzzling how we can experience them as we do. In the language of traditional philosophy, objects are transcendent; they outstrip our experience; they have hidden parts, always. When you perceive an object, you never take it in from all sides at once. And yet you have a sense of the presence of the object as a whole at a moment in time

Doświadczenie i eksperyment w sztuce

A significant impediment to the study of perceptual consciousness is our dependence on simplistic ideas about what experience is like. This is a point that has been made by Wittgenstein, and by philosophers working in the Phenomenological Tradition, such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Importantly, it is an observation that has been brought to the fore in recent discussions of consciousness among philosophers and cognitive scientists who have come to feel the need for a more rigorous phenomenology of experience. The central thought of this paper is that art can make a needed contribution to the study of perceptual consciousness. The work of some artists can teach us about perceptual consciousness by furnishing us with the opportunity to have a special kind of reflective experience. In this way, art can be a tool for phenomenological investigation. The paper has three parts. First, I present what I call the problem of the transparency of experience. This is a problem for philosophy, for art, and for cognitive science. Second, I present an alternative conception of experience as a mode of interactive engagement with the environment. Finally, against the background of this conception, I discuss, briefly, the work of the sculptors Richard Serra and Tony Smith

Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion

In this paper I explore a brand of scepticism about perceptual experience that takes its start from recent work in psychology and philosophy of mind on change blindness and related phenomena. I argue that the new scepticism rests on a problematic phenomenology of perceptual experience. I then consider a strengthened version of the sceptical challenge that seems to be immune to this criticism. This strengthened sceptical challenge formulates what I call the problem of perceptual presence. I show how this problem can be addressed by drawing on an enactive or sensorimotor approach to perceptual consciousness. Our experience of environmental detail consists in our access to that detail thanks to our possession of practical knowledge of the way in which what we do and sensory stimulation depend on each other. Traditional scepticism about perceptual experience questions whether we can know that things are as we experience them as being. This paper targets a new form of scepticism about experience that takes its start from recent work in perceptual psychology and philosophy of mind. The new scepticism questions whether we even have the perceptual experience we think we have. According to the new scepticism, we have radically false beliefs about what our perceptual experience is like. Perceptual consciousness is a kind of false consciousness; a sort of confabulation. The visual world is a grand illusion. The new scepticism raises important questions for philosophy, psychology, and consciousness studies. What is the character of our perceptual experience? And who does the sceptic mean by ‘we ’ anyway? Ordinary perceivers? Ordinary perceivers in unusual reflective contexts? Or psychologists and philosophers? These are surprisingly difficult questions. I argue, in what follows, that the new scepticism, and perhaps also the new perceptual psychology it has spawned, rests on a misguided and overly simplistic account of perceptual phenomenology