First published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Nietzsche and Heidegger saw in modernity a time endangered by nihilism. Starting out from this interpretation, David Levin links the nihilism raging today in Western society and culture to our concrete historical experience with vision.

This illustrated survey covers what Nicholas Wade calls the "observational era of vision," beginning with the Greek philosophers and ending with Wheatstone's description of the stereoscope in the late 1830s.

"A genuine contribution to the literature . . . important especially to specialists in Continental philosophy but also to historians, literary theorists, and others who read recent European philosophy and who thus would want to think through the problem of the hegemony of vision."—David Hoy, University of California, Santa Cruz

Many people wonder how to solve their challenges and

The philosophy of perception is a microcosm of the metaphysics of mind. Its central problems—What is perception? What is the nature of perceptual consciousness? How can one fit an account of perceptual experience into a broader account of the nature of the mind and the world?—are at the heart of metaphysics. Rather than try to cover all of the many strands in the philosophy of perception, this book focuses on a particular orthodoxy about the nature of visual perception. The central problem for visual science has been to explain how the brain bridges the gap between what is given to the visual system and what is actually experienced by the perceiver. The orthodox view of perception is that it is a process whereby the brain, or a dedicated subsystem of the brain, builds up representations of relevant figures of the environment on the basis of information encoded by the sensory receptors. Most adherents of the orthodox view also believe that for every conscious perceptual state of the subject, there is a particular set of neurons whose activities are sufficient for the occurrence of that state. Some of the essays in this book defend the orthodoxy; most criticize it; and some propose alternatives to it. Many of the essays are classics. Contributors G.E.M. Anscombe, Dana Ballard, Daniel Dennett, Fred Dretske, Jerry Fodor, H.P. Grice, David Marr, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Zenon Pylyshyn, Paul Snowdon, and P.F. Strawson

This book presents the radical architectural strategies and poetic cultural projects developed by OPEN Architecture, and the opportunities and challenges that arise from redefining built forms. Drawing on a series of conversations and site visits to six recent groundbreaking projects, architecture writer Catherine Shaw describes how Beijing-based OPEN Architecture is reinventing and responding to China’s complex and fast-changing cultural landscape with projects that mark a new era for contemporary Chinese cultural architecture. OPEN Architecture was founded in New York in 2003 by Li Hu and Huang Wenjing, while their Beijing office opened in 2008. From a contemporary art gallery buried beneath a sand dune to a sculptural open-air theatre in a remote mountain valley near the Great Wall, co-founders Li Hu and Huang Wenjing re-evaluate conventional Western assumptions about culture and design as they base each pioneering project on the needs and plea-sures of humanity within the context of diverse terrains and climates. In doing so, they not only consider how cultural architecture looks, but how it works. Projects are presented with commentary and contextual information as well as new analyses and archival material, including outstanding color photography, plans and drawings, and exploratory sketches. This book provides a fresh perspective on contemporary cultural architecture and place making, hig-lighting the architects’ sources of inspiration, their challenges, and their construction methods, showing how each impactful project responds to China’s distinctive context.