Visual Thinking

The 35th Anniversary Of This Classic Of Art Theory. Rudolf Arnheim, who is now Professor of Psychology of Art at Harvard, is known throughout the world for his psychological studies of the forms and functions of art; his earlier books have been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and other languages. His new contention, in Visual thinking, is provocative and far-ranging. He asserts that all thinking (not just thinking related to art or other visual experiences) is basically perceptual in nature--an that the ancient dichotomy between seeing and thinking, between perceiving and reasoning, is false and misleading. He shows that even the fundamental processes of vision involve mechanisms typical of reasoning, and he describes problem-solving in the arts as well as imagery in the thought-models of science. Far from being a "lower function", our perceptual response to the world is the basic means by which we structure events, and from which we derive ideas and therefore language. The materials used in Arnheim's argument come from philosophers ancient and modern; from psychological laboratory experiments; from work on the perception and art-work of children; from scientific writings in physics and astronomy. Arnheim's cogent observations keep the discussion tangible and relevant to human experience in real situations. Although intended for the general reader, Visual Thinking is of immediate interest to the educator because of its practical consequences for the function of art in education and more broadly, for visual training in all fields of learning. Theoretical contentions are presented throughout with the lively concreteness that has made Arnheim's earlier Art and Visual Perception an indispensable tool for students and friends of the arts 1. Early Stirrings 2. The Intelligence of Visual Perception (i) 3. The Intelligence of Visual Perception (ii) 4. Two and Two Together 5. The Past in the Present 6. The Images of Thought 7. Concepts Take Shape 8. Pictures, Symbols, and Signs 9. What Abstraction Is Not 10. What Abstraction Is 11. With Feet on the Ground 12. Thinking with Pure Shapes 13. Words in Their Place 14. Art and Thought 15. Models for Theory 16. Vision in Education Asserts that all thinking is basically perceptual in nature - and that the ancient dichotomy between seeing and thinking, between perceiving and reasoning, is false and misleading--Cover