Sensory Perception, History and Geology: The Afterlife of Molyneux's Question in British, American and Australian Landscape Painting and Cultural Thought

Sensory Perception, History and Geology: The Afterlife of Molyneux's Question in British, American and Australian Landscape Painting and Cultural Thought
ISBN-10
100909548X
ISBN-13
9781009095488
Category
Political Science
Pages
75
Language
English
Published
2022-01-31
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Author
Richard Read

Description

Wiiliam Molyneux's question to John Locke about whether a blind man restored to sight could name the difference between a cube and a sphere without touching them shaped fundamental conflicts in philosophy, theology and science between empirical and idealist answers that are radically alien to current ways of seeing and feeling, but were born of colonizing ambitions whose devastating genocidal and ecocidal consequences intensify today. This Element demonstrates how landscape paintings of unfamiliar terrains required historical and geological subject matter to supply tactile associations for empirical recognition of space, whereas idealism conferred unmediated but no less coercive sensory access. Close visual and verbal analysis using photographs of pictorial sites trace vividly different responses to the Question from William Hazlitt and John Ruskin in Britain to nineteenth-century authors and artists in the United States and Australia, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Cole, William Haseltine, Fitz Henry Lane and Eugene von Guérard.

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