Abstraction in Science and Art: Philosophical Perspectives

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 recent research in biology and neurosciences, invites the reader to reflect on the material lives of abstraction through concrete artefacts, experimental practices and theoretical and aesthetic achievements.

Abstraction in Science and Art will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics, philosophy of science, and epistemology, as well as to historians of science and art, and to practicing artists and scientists interested in exploring foundational questions at the heart of the creative practice of abstracting.

Chiara Ambrosio is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, UCL. Her research focuses on representation in science and art, nineteenth and twentieth-century visual and material culture, and American Pragmatism, particularly the philosophy of Charles S. Peirce.

Julia Sánchez-Dorado is a postdoctoral researcher in the area of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Sevilla (Spain), and a fellow at the ICI Berlin (Germany). She received a PhD from University College London in 2019. Her work focuses on the problem of representation in science and art, modelling practices in the geosciences, and the epistemic value of creativity.