Past Event! Note: this event has already taken place.
Winter 2022 Colloquium – Anne Eaton
March 4, 2022 at 1:00 PM
| Location: | Online (via Zoom) |
| Audience: | Carleton Community |
| Key Contact: | Lauren Wells-McGregor, Graduate Programs Administrator |
| Contact Email: | lauren.wellsmcgregor@carleton.ca |
Please join us for our upcoming Philosophy colloquium, taking place on Friday, March 4 at 1:00 P.M. (Ottawa time). The Zoom details will be circulated the week of the talk; please register here.
Anne Eaton
Professor of Philosophy, University of Illinois, Chicago
Friday, March 4, 2022
1:00 P.M. EST
“How to do Things With Pictures”
Pictures do more than just depict. Pictures flatter and mock, entice and repel, glorify and condemn, advertise, propagandize, stereotype, and so on. How are we to understand these doings? This talk takes a stab at developing a theory of pictorial pragmatics, by which I mean a theory of pictorial acts beyond the act of depicting.
Pictures may do things in ways that rely on mechanisms that are also open to language, but in this talk I will be concerned principally with the things that pictures do as pictures. This means that while I may appealing to the philosophy of language for help along the way – especially to pragmatics and speech-act theory – my primary analytical framework will come from fields that treat the visual aspect of pictures; fields such as art history, art criticism, visual studies, visual rhetoric, and communications.
I begin by examining various kinds of skepticism about pictorials acts, coming from feminist work on pornography, philosophical work on propaganda, and even from the philosophy of art. In response to this widespread skepticism, I offer a taxonomy of pictorial acts, explain their mechanisms, and support them with a wide range of examples.