The Discursive Contruction of Sight in the History of Philosophy.

First Edition. Original cloth. Near Fine, in near fine dust jacket. "In recent years scholars from many disciplines have become interested in the 'construction' of the human senses--in how the human environment shapes both how and what we perceive. Taking a very different approach to the question of construction, Sites of Vision turns to language and explores the ways in which the rhetoric of philosophy has formed the nature of vision and how, in turn, the rhetoric of vision has helped to shape philosophical thought. The central role of vision in relation to philosophy is evident in the vocabulary of the discipline--in words such as 'speculation,' 'observation,' 'insight,' and 'reflection'; in metaphors such as 'mirroring,' 'perspective,' and 'point of view'; and in methodological concepts such as 'reflective detachment' and 'representation.' Because the history of vision is so pervasively reflected in the history of philosophy, it is possible for both vision and thought to achieve a greater awareness of their genealogy through the history of philosophy. The fourteen contributors to Sites of Vision explore the hypothesis that the nature of visual perception about which philosophers talk must be explicitly recognized as a discursive construction, indeed a historical construction, in philosophical discourse. The essays begin with the work of Aristotle and extend through Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz, Berkeley, Vico, Hegel, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Dewey, Benjamin, and Arendt to Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze, the recent French philosophers who have focused so intently on sight. Together they constitute a new way of looking at the history of philosophy" (MIT Press Web site). Contributors: Margaret Atherton, Peg Birmingham, Rebecca Comay, William James Earle, Yaron Ezrahi, David Michael Levin, Sandra Rudnick Luft, Dorothea Olkowski, James I. Porter, Mary Rawlinson, John Russon, John H. Smith, P. Christopher Smith, Catherine Wilson.…