Abstraction in Science and Art: Philosophical Perspectives (Routledge Research in Aesthetics)

This volume explores the roles and uses of abstraction in scientific and artistic practice.Conceived as an interdisciplinary dialogue between experts across histories and philosophies of art and science, this collection of essays draws on the shared premise that abstraction is a rich and generative process, not reducible to the mere omission of details in a representation. When scientists attempt to make sense of complex natural phenomena, they often produce highly abstract models of them.In the history and philosophy of art, there is a long tradition of debate on the function of abstraction, and - more recently - its relation with theories of depiction.Adopting a process-oriented perspective, the chapters in this volume explore the epistemic potential of a diversity of practices of abstracting.The systematic analysis of a wide range of historical cases, from early twentieth-century abstractionist painting to contemporary abstract photography, and from nineteenth-century physics to rec