Inducing visibilities: an attempt at Santiago Ramón y Cajal's aesthetic epistemology.
In this paper, I consider Santiago Ramón y Cajal's strategy of histological observation and imaging in terms of what I call "induction of visibility" (Fiorentini, 2011). Cajal's strategy of visibility induction drew upon both rational and aesthetic visual sensibility, and considered this interplay to be a constitutive element of knowledge production. I propose to describe Cajal's fundamental attitude towards visually inferred knowledge in terms of an "aesthetic epistemology".
Institute of Art and Visual Studies/Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte - IKB, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Dorotheenstrasse 28, D-10117 Berlin, Germany. erna.fiorentini@hu-berlin.de
Erna
E
Fiorentini
D001154:Art / Q000266:history*; D004954:Esthetics / Q000266:history*; D006653:Histology / Q000266:history*; D049673:History, 20th Century; D019359:Knowledge; D014796:Visual Perception