1/27/2005
   slide 10
Current Academic Writings…
•“The passionate visualist, roaming the labyrinth of the postdisciplinary age, is haunted by the paradoxical ubiquity and degradation of images: everywhere transmitted, universally viewed, but as a category generally despised.” p11 [Stafford1996] •Call to lead images out of Plato’s “ill-lit and second-class hotel for ghostly transients.”p40 [Stafford1996]
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You can say that it’s rather a gothic metaphor (the cave), but fundamentally we still agree today that he had the distinctions right -- but depressing components of the way he suggested it. Stafford is opposing the metaphor not the underlying distinction between images and reality.

Every tool has its appropriate use: language text, mathematics, imagery. You are an optimal tool user if you can recognize both the power and limitations of the tools.

Book cover: [Stafford 1996]