Abstract
When Richard Rorty declared in 1979 that, ‘It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions’ (p. 12), he was echoing Aristotle’s insight, that ‘it is impossible even to think without a mental picture.’ Despite the antiquity of this insight, long-buried root metaphors still must be repeatedly dug up and scrubbed off. Like the uncovering of long-hidden foundations of classic monuments, the discovery of the root metaphors of established notions calls for a reevaluation of the ideas, from the bottom up. To find a concept’s actual significance, Stephen Pepper (1942) said, ‘Trace it back to its root metaphor’ (p. 114). The modern supposition of subjectivity is one such monumental concept, and the common camera obscura is one of its buried root metaphors.
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Bailey, L.W. (1989). Skull’s Darkroom: The Camera Obscura and Subjectivity. In: Durbin, P.T. (eds) Philosophy of Technology. Philosophy and Technology, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2303-4_4
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