This is a recording of the workshop

The New Philosophy of Photography

Friday 13th – Saturday 14th February 2015
Senate House, Deller Hall

A collaboration between the London Aesthetics Forum and the
Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts at the University of Warwick 

This workshop brings together philosophers and theorists from the UK, USA, Canada, France, Belgium and Germany to discuss recent developments in the philosophy of photography. Over the last few years, philosophers have belatedly begun to consider the challenge that artists’ use of photography may present for standard philosophical conceptions of photography as a ‘purely causal’ process ensuring ‘belief independent feature tracking’ or ‘natural counter-factual dependence’ of photographs on what they are photographs of. These challenges can no longer be accommodated by ad hoc extensions to existing theories, or by treating artistic uses of photography as a special case. Moreover, it is not only philosophy that is implicated by taking photographic art seriously: such core art theoretical notions as ‘indexicality’ are similarly put into question. This workshop considers philosophers’ attempts to address such problems to date, and asks whether a fundamental re-conception of the field is now required.

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The London Aesthetics Forum is an initiative of the Institute of Philosophy.
(http://philosophy.sas.ac.uk)