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This essay was written as a contribution to a symposium in honour of the distinguished aesthetician Richard Wollheim, and begins with a sympathetic summary of his highly influential account of depiction in terms of the successfully realized intention that viewers have a certain sort ofseeing-inexperience faced with a picture depicting a given subject. While agreeing with the basic thrust of Wollheim's account, which makes a certain sort of visual experience in appropriate viewers criterial of achieved depiction, it differs with Wollheim as to whether that experience is invariably one of seeing in, given the twofold attention to subject and surface that the notion, as Wollheim conceives it, necessarily involves. An alternative account is sketched, Wollheimian in spirit, but closer than most recent proposals to the classic Gombrichian view of depiction as involving something akin to illusion. It is proposed that a picture that depicts a subject is one fashioned so as to yield an experience ofas-if seeingof its subject, but not an experience that engenders the false beliefs typical of illusion.

With some sense of the relation between bare-bones content and fleshed-out content on the table, this chapter answers four important questions. First, why do we flesh out the contents of pictures in the way that we do? Second, what is the source of explicit non-commitment in fleshed-out content? Third, how and why do we flesh out pictures’ bare-bones contents consistently as we change the position from which we view pictures? And finally, anamorphic pictures challenge the answers offered to the first three questions, so how should the current account handle them? This completes the account of pictorial content and picture perception.

This chapter argues that when Mary Magdalene, Peter, and others saw the risen Jesus, their “seeing” was a case of a normal vision. This is the natural way to read the New Testament accounts, especially given the physical detail contained in many of them. Six possible arguments in favor of objective vision are discussed. Two arguments in favor of normal seeing are presented: that the early church interpreted the “seeing” as normal vision, and that it is theologically significant that the “seeing” was normal. It underscores the reality of the incarnation, and places the church in a strong apologetic position.

This chapter examines a question, the most important of the skeptic's questions, not only in but for Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu: is poetic seeing also true seeing, and how can it be if poetic seeing is the seeing of a mirage? It analyzes Proust's use of comma in the sentence “those infrequent moments when we perceive nature as it is, poetically, were what Elstir's work was made of.” It also considers Proust's identification of Elstir's way of seeing as based on an “optical illusion” or a “mirage” and looks at signs of a mercurial and probing intelligence that are to be found almost everywhere at work in the Recherche. Finally, the chapter describes the sparring contest of intellect and impression that it argues runs deeper into a question of “truth.”

This chapter discusses the misleading picture of the inferential perception of persons. It also discusses the connection to the other-minds problem, Goethe on the perception of expressive gestures and characteristics in art and sculpture (the Laocoon group, Leonardo's Last Supper, a Rembrandt etching), the particularly interesting case of acting, Iris Murdoch and ‘the unfrozen past’, aspect-perception and self-interpretation, and the notion of creative self-description. The chapter finishes on seeing the past in a new light.

Part I focuses on the practice of śraddhā, the causes and conditions that lead to its arising and the subsequent behavior that its arising entails. This analysis begins, in chapter 1, with an analysis of the Koṭikarṇa-avadāna, focusing on the close connection between śraddhā and seeing. Seeing and śraddhā are intertwined, and the discourse of the latter necessitates an understanding of the role of the former for moral action. Within this matrix, seeing is believing, seers are authorities, seeing is authoritative, and believing is seeing.

Chapter 2 explores the contrast between śraddhā and bhakti. While bhakti is portrayed in the Divyāvadāna as a false confidence in divine forces, śraddhā is represented as a mental state that arises with regard to trustworthy individuals and with regard to certain “indirect objects” whose truth is professed by those trustworthy individuals. The practice of śraddhā begins with a visual confirmation of the truth of certain objects and phenomena, and it culminates in the making of offerings. This connection between seeing and giving, with śraddhā as the mediator, results in an epistemological and ethical formulation that engages the problem of karmic materialism. The chapter then discusses the idea of a gold standard of the karmic system, a method of conversion between merit and money, and what it means for the Buddhist believer.

Chapter 7 returns to the Koṭikarṇa-avadāna and considers what monastics say about seeing the Buddha and what they do when confronted with the opportunity. The chapter then focuses on two accounts from the Aśoka cycle of stories that address the problem of how to see the Buddha’s physical body after he has passed into final nirvāṇa. The first concerns King Aśoka and the logistics of pilgrimage, and the second involves Upagupta and the veneration of images.

This chapter is an analysis of the reliance of French missionary priests on the Holy See for guidance in the resolution of ecclesiastical conflicts, the evangelization of Catholic and non-Catholic laities, and the institutional development of the Catholic Church in the United States. It is an explanation of why French missionary priests sometimes traded their Gallican predispositions toward episcopal autonomy and collegiality for ultramontane notions of ecclesiastical stability and papal primacy. It was in their practical experiences in the United States that French missionary priests demonstrated just how hard they tried to execute the directives of the Holy See, but also how they were willing to bend the rigors of ultramontane thinking to make sense of local circumstances in American missions.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the illustrates four key steps that the visual system follows in perceiving objects: (1) segmentation of the visual scene into its components, components that are discriminable by virtue of differences in color, luminance, texture, distance, shape, orientation, and motion; (2) assembly of the components derived from Step 1 into units; (3) perception of the units as continuous across space and time; and (4) deduction of the three-dimensional shape of the assembled units from limited views. The chapter presents data that bear principally on development of the second and third aspects of object perception: assembling visual fragments into units, and perceiving continuity across space and time. It posits a strong role for learning in achieving veridical object perception in the first several postnatal months: infants learn by doing (i.e., via development of eye movements) and infants learn by seeing (i.e., via exposure to objects in the environment).

This chapter is a discussion of the polysemy of see, which is concerned with two main questions: how to model polysemy in a default inheritance based theory; and how fine‐grained an analysis of polysemy needs to be in order to understand the differences between examples such as we saw him cross the road and we saw that he was crossing the road. The analysis presents a subtle and detailed account of the polysemy of see, and argues for a model which relies on a theoretical innovation, the sublexeme. The sublexeme allows the model to keep information about a verb's sense and about its argument linking properties tightly bound together.

The aim in this chapter is to provide an intelligible conception of the notion of twofoldness that Richard Wollheim has used in his account of seeing‐in in order to describe the phenomenological character of pictorial seeing or pictorial experience. To this end, it draws on Aristotle's doctrine of the unity of matter and form in compound substances as this is expounded mainly in his Metaphysics. It then explains how Aristotle's account of this unity may give us a way to think of the complex content of a twofold act of pictorial perception, in a way that allows us to account for properties that Wollheim attributed to pictorial experience, and further, to resolve objections raised to the idea that pictorial seeing is twofold.

Everyone recognizes that viewers can see things in art‐grade pictures other than their proper, pictorial subjects. Theories of depiction devise criteria by which ‘correct’ interpretation of pictures sidelines these deviant ‘things’ in favour of the true subject. This chapter looks at such phenomena from a positive angle. First, the ubiquity of openings for justified ‘separation seeing‐in’, as it is called here, is set forth. Two sources are distinguished: (1) the manner in which the pictorial design is executed; (2) the reduction of dimensions from subject to surface design. Attention then shifts to the contribution of separation seeing‐in to pictorial experience. It is argued that any adequate viewing of an art‐grade picture involves recognition of one (or more) ‘separation subjects’ and that giving due attention to that provides fuller access to the content of the picture. In consequence, the latter turns out to be a good deal stranger than is commonly imagined.

The imaging of ancient document papers presents several challenges, the nature of which is determined by the character of the text, the material on which it is written and the state of preservation. This chapter talks about the struggle to read and interpret Latin manuscripts from Roman Britain. These manuscripts come mainly in three forms: texts written in ink on thin wooden leaves, texts inscribed with metal stylus on wax-coated wooden stilus tablets, and texts incised on sheets of lead. This chapter focuses on the problems of imaging and signalling process of the texts found on the Vindolanda stilus tablets. These problems in interpreting ancient texts arise from the two identifiable sources of difficulty. The first one is the problem of seeing and identifying, in abraded and damaged documents what is aimed to be read. The second is the problem arising from the character of the text itself which determines the ability of the reader to decipher and interpret it.

Hearing and seeing is the abstraction of the structured sensory energy that signifies objects out of the ongoing flux. For both, all sensations are understood to belong to objects and are understood with respect to the properties of objects. However, there is always inherent uncertainty about the multiple stimulus properties that define objects due to sensory limitations, memory limitations, or even environmental obstacles. Sensory limitations force us to view the world through a narrow aperture one part at a time, and at the same time limit our ability to resolve different sensory properties. Memory limitations restrict our ability to find correspondences between sensory information at different spatial positions and times. To maximize performance, all sensory systems encode energy at multiple resolutions to make use of several spatial and temporal scales simultaneously.

This chapter discusses the ecclesiastical background to Lanfranc's becoming Archbishop of Canterbury. In a letter probably of early 1073, Lanfranc testified to his long and stubborn resistance in 1070 to accepting the promotion. Two persons were mainly instrumental in overcoming his resistance. The first was Herluin, his sometime abbot at Bec, to whom he acknowledged a lasting obedience; King William used him to assist in persuading Lanfranc. Lanfranc provides evidence that a probably still greater part in overcoming his resistance was played by Pope Alexander II. The chapter also looks at two matters that illustrate Lanfranc's approach and actions: the career and character of his predecessor at Canterbury, Archbishop Stigand; and the standpoint taken with regard to the English church by the apostolic see under Pope Alexander II.