Search results for ""Author Jessica Moss""

Plato's Epistemology: Being and Seeming presents an original interpretation of one of the central topics in Plato's work: epistemology. Jessica Moss argues that Plato's epistemology is radically different from our own. Going against the grain of recent scholarship, and drawing on ancient interpretations of Plato, Jessica Moss argues that Plato is not best understood as studying what we now call knowledge and belief. Instead, Moss proposes that the central players in his epistemology, epistêmê and doxa, are each essentially to be understood as cognition of a certain kind of object. Epistêmê is cognition of what Is - where this turns out to mean that it is a deep grasp of ultimate reality. Doxa is cognition of what seems - where this turns out to mean that it is atheoretical thought that mistakes images for reality. The book defends these characterizations by arguing that they explain important features of Plato's epistemology. In particular, it shows that they underlie and make sense of a view which was long attributed to Plato but has recently been deemed "outrageous": that there is no doxa of Forms, and no epistêmê of perceptibles. Finally, Moss contends that Plato's epistemology is so different from modern epistemology because it is motivated by his central ethical and metaphysical views. As the Cave allegory illustrates, he holds that the goal of life is to be in contact with genuine Being, and that the greatest obstacle to this goal is our tendency to rest content with appearances. Therefore, when Plato turns to epistemological investigations, the distinction he finds most salient is that between cognition of what Is and cognition of what seems.

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In 2014, the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago received a generous gift from collectors Lester and Betty Guttman: 830 photographs, created by a total of 414 artists, that cover a time period stretching all the way from the early 1800s into our modern moment. This richly illustrated volume, which accompanies an exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art, offers both an intriguing overview of the collection and, with it, a tour through the very history of photography itself.There Was a Whole Collection Made includes an extensive timeline on the medium’s evolution that notes important dates, exhibitions, and texts. Artists and scholars alike contribute personal reflections on and interpretations of the Guttmans’ photographs, which include images by such artists as William Henry Fox Talbot, Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, and Carrie Mae Weems. A colorful introduction to a key visual resource, There Was a Whole Collection Made crosses time periods and genres to revel in the enduring power of the camera lens.

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