Real Likenesses

Real Likenesses presents a radical new approach to artistic representation. At its heart is a serious reconsideration of the relationship between medium and content in representational art, which counters current dominant theories that make attention to the former inevitably a distraction from attending to the latter. Through close analysis of paintings, photographs, and novels, Michael Morris proposes a new understanding of the real likenesses we encounter in representational art; what they are, how they are made present to us, and how they are created. The result is an intuitive way of thinking about how these art forms work.

Michael Morris is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex. He has written on the philosophy of language, mind, metaphysics, and art, and has analysed the work of both Plato and Wittgenstein. He is the author of The Good and the True (Oxford, 1992), An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, 2007), and Wittgenstein and the Tractatus (Routledge, 2008).

- Introduction
- 1: The Paradox of Painting
- 2: Painted Things
- 3: Photography and the Real World
- 4: Transparency and Distraction in Photographs
- 5: Paradox and Distraction in Novels
- 6: Real Characters
- Postscript