Overview

Portraits of Empiricism reveals how pictures can expose paradoxes at the heart of empiricist philosophy. Although many people believe that knowledge derives primarily from sensory experience, this defining principle brings with it persistent problems: the role of logic in knowledge production, the place of ethics and politics in empirical judgment, and the veil of perception that seems always to stand between observer and world. Engaging these enduring questions, C. Oliver O’Donnell turns to the visual culture of the Anglo-American eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a historical milieu in which empiricism was forcefully articulated. He examines images made in close proximity to canonical figures and texts of the empiricist tradition, showing how they dramatize the tradition’s riddles. Among them are artworks owned and discussed by John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Charles Sanders Peirce; allegorical portraits of David Hume and John Stuart Mill; and satirical illustrations linked to George Berkeley and Ralph Waldo Emerson. By situating these works in their historical contexts and connecting them to the arguments and beliefs of empiricist thinkers, O’Donnell demonstrates how empiricism was inseparable from its problems—and how those problems manifested themselves in visual form. Treating images not as ancillary illustrations but as central evidence in the history of ideas, this book reframes empiricism’s intellectual legacy. It will interest scholars of Anglo-American art history and art historiography, intellectual history, and philosophy.

Full Product Details

9780271100296

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Reviews

“Portraits of Empiricism is a fascinating, relentlessly provocative investigation of the poly vocal conversations between empiricist philosophy and naturalist art. O'Donnell shows how paintings and drawings illustrate, crosshatch, and refocus claims about the basis of knowledge, revealing colonial shadows and logical aporias within seemingly self-evident theories of sensory knowledge and individualism. Packed with bright complication, Portraits unfolds the thinking done by pictures and the images pressing on thought.” —John Tresch, author of The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science

Author Information

C. Oliver O’Donnell is Senior Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of the prizewinning Meyer Schapiro’s Critical Debates: Art Through a Modern American Mind, also published by Penn State University Press.

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