Cave Art, Perception and Knowledge

Book: Cave Art, Perception and Knowledge
Mats Rosengren (Author)
Hardcover: 192 pages Publisher:
Palgrave Macmillan (November 27, 2012)

In the late 19th century in northern Spain and southern France prehistoric mural paintings and engravings were discovered. Cave Art, Perception and Knowledge inquires into epistemic questions related to images, depicting and perception that this rich and much debated material has given rise to. Focusing respectively on the historical and scientific circumstances and controversies and on the epistemic and perceptual problems and questions the discovery of these paintings and engravings gave rise to, the book traces the outline of the doxa of cave art studies. It criticizes the different ways of trying to make sense of the cave art. Furthermore it suggests, with the help of both Cornelius Castoriadis's concept of technique and Ernst Cassirer's notion of symbolic form, a yet untried way out of the hermeneutical impasse where the interpretation of the paleolithic pictures finds itself today.