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Image and Metaphor in the New Century June 24 2019

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A decisive insight in today’s philosophy of images is that objects of vision are as a rule moving ones, rather than static. Vision and movement are bound up with each other, moving images happen in time. There is an intrinsic connection between how images mean and how time flows. Time cannot be conceptualized except by metaphors, and so ultimately by images, of movement in space. But the concept of the flow of time can be very well expressed in specific visual languages: the languages of deaf communities, the language of gestures. There is every reason to believe, and this is the second decisive insight in today’s philosophy of images, that the language of gestures is the primordial language of humankind. Now once the fact of the historical priority of visual language is accepted, the primacy of visual thinking, too, must be recognized. Metaphors express what they express only by virtue of sensual, mostly visual, images. The era of the linguistic turn has come to an end, the pictorial turn is victorious. The Budapest Visual Learning Lab, during the first ten years of its existence, has visibly contributed to that victory. (*Perspectives on Visual Learning*, vol. 3, back cover text.)
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