In Chapter 3 knowledge from sociocultural psychology is integrated with other disciplines within psychology such as cognitive, social, and neuro psychology, and outside psychology such as sociology, visual studies, and philosophy, to tackle the power of images to influence our seeing, thinking, feeling, and remembering.

Centring the devastating case of five-year-old Michael Komape’s drowning in a pit latrine at school, this chapter discusses the ‘dis/empowerment paradox’ inherent in South Africa’s ‘transformative constitutionalism’. Through the example of the Komapes’ 2018 case against the Minister of Basic Education (2018), it reveals the limitations of transformative constitutionalism rooted in Euro-American liberalism, which resonates with a neoliberal political economy that has failed to relieve the impoverished majority of their dehumanising precarity. While the chapter highlights the failure of the South African government to relate and respond to the suffering of the people it is meant to serve, more profoundly, it exposes the limitations of transformative constitutionalism due to its inability to even ‘see’ (let alone, validate) the world-sense of its majority population as legitimate law-sense. The Komape case thus reveals three key insights: (1) the resistance of private law to transformative ideals, (2) the reluctance of South Africa’s legal culture to embrace decolonial transformation and pluralism, and (3) the tension(s) between the legal consciousness of ordinary South Africans and the dominant legal culture. The case therefore underscores the need for Ntu Constitutionalism: a system grounded in indigenous normative priorities and robustly representative of South Africa’s marginalised communities and their needs.

Chapter 4, ‘The Efficacy of Empirical Vision’, argues that physical sight can and should lead to belief in John. Scholars often cite John 2:23; 4:48; and 20:29 as evidence for John’s own critique of physical seeing as a means of coming to belief. The chapter argues that close reading of John 2:23 and 4:48 reveals human hearts to be the true cause of unbelief and shows that physical sight is the catalyst for all unbelief and all belief. Neither does John 20:29 condemn sight as a means of acquiring belief. Rather, it suggests that mediated seeing – via the text of the Gospel – can be as efficacious for belief as an actual encounter with Jesus. The chapter concludes that sight is complex, but that no critique of the positive relationship between sight and belief exists in John.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, like many of his contemporaries, was drawn as a young man to the lively visual arts scene in London in the 1860s and 1870s. From a family of professional and amateur sketchers and illustrators, he initially considered a career as an artist. What, then, did Hopkins see? What pictures did he look at, and what did he sketch? How did the careful cultivation of his eye, under the formative influence of John Ruskin, shape his later life as a Jesuit poet? How do we get from a visual culture that Hopkins shared with many others of his time and place to the powerful originality of his mature poems? Analyzing evidence from Hopkins’s surviving sketches, letters, and journals, this chapter explores the effects of Hopkins’s visual education on the language, the prosody, and the shaping force of grace in the poems.

This chapter covers Mesoamerican conceptions of knowledge through the image of seeing. Knowledge is a matter not just of accessing stable and mind-independent truths about the world, but also involves an aspect of creativity and construction, according to Mesoamerican views. Knowledge requires sensation, which has a creative and participative aspect. We contribute to sensation as active partners with the world. The chapter discusses seeing, the rituals and texts associated with seeing, and the community of people, such as the daykeepers in the Maya tradition, tasked specifically with generation and transmission of knowledge.

The shape and form of boundary walls around and within Greek sanctuaries, and the impact those boundaries had on the experience of the ritual happening within, have attracted little scholarly attention, especially in comparison to work on the powerful impacts of other elements of sanctuary architecture, and architecture more widely. This article, using the case study of the high temenos walls and those of the Telesterion temple structure of the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore at Eleusis, explores the active impact these walls had on particularly the sight- and sound-scapes engaged with by participants. As such it argues for the crucial importance of these walls at Eleusis in creating the intensity, emotion, power, and conviction of the ritual experience of the Mysteries for participants.

This chapter takes Dickinson as its first case study to examine how figures such as a robin or a pine can map out partial ecological relations that allow for survival. As her poetic and scientific engagement shows, understanding species as figures reveals both their material and speculative potential—what is termed their disjunct specificity since a literary figure can be understood to have both a material or literal ground and a metaphorical meaning. As figures, species are partially empirical matter (as the successive biological reproduction of individuals) and partially subjective concepts (as idealized or defined “types”). The chapter first examines the scientific problem that disjunct species presented, where similar species appeared in widely disparate geographical regions, prompting investigations by scientists such as Asa Gray and Louis Agassiz about whether or how these species could be biologically and spatially related. Moving from their observations to Dickinson’s poetic-empirical observations, the partiality of her gaze reveals a sense of species engaged with current discussions of biological species, but also significantly more diminutive. This “species” reveals ecological relation to be figural and partial, based upon a certain slippage between some material that holds while the earth, sky, and even body shifts, departs, disperses.

Kuhn used the duck–rabbit figure as a metaphor for revolutionary change in science. The two aspects of the drawing stand for two ways of perceiving the world, before and after a revolution, while the drawing itself represents the world that, paradoxically, both changes and remains the same. I argue that Kuhn, aiming to bring about a revolution in philosophy of science, did not want to eliminate the paradox, but rather to exploit and underscore it to challenge what he saw as the dominant epistemological paradigm. I also argue that Kuhn rejected the two-tiered view of perception, first observing and then interpreting raw data, in favour of the theory-ladenness of observation that echoed Wittgenstein’s account of ‘seeing’ rather than Hanson’s assimilation of scientific observation to ‘seeing as’. According to Wittgenstein, ‘seeing as’ is parasitic upon regular seeing and, in that sense, cannot illuminate the general case of perception in science. Finally, I show that the analogy between the dawning of an aspect and novelty in science, informed Kuhn’s views on creativity. In his view, advances in science emerge when a system of beliefs is transformed by new patterns of organization.

This chapter examines Philo's views of exile and eschatology and his use of Israel terminology. The first part of the chapter argues that despite his tendency towards allegory, numerous places in the Philonic corpus suggest that Philo viewed the exile as ongoing and—like Josephus—looked forward to a future restoration of Israel. The second part of the chapter shows that Philo avoids the term "Israel" when referring to his contemporaries, whom he calls Ioudaioi ("Jews"), while "Israel" appears in other contexts and correlates closely with his eschatological statements. Like Josephus, Philo argues that Israel's restoration will come through divine initiative rather than violent revolution, and the first element of that restoration will be a divinely initiated return to virtue and obedience. Remarkably, Philo also suggests that not all Jews are or will be included in "Israel," a view that reflects sympathy with a prophetic or sectarian view of Israel in which Israelite status is contingent on proper obedience to God.

Whereas the rhetoric of new media at the turn of the millennium stressed the evolution from ‘seeing’ to ‘being’, artists who were most involved in the early stages of virtual reality have moved from the overoptimistic and perhaps almost hubristic notion of ‘being’ as an existential condition of virtual reality, to a far more realistic, humble and ecologically oriented notion of ‘being-in-common’. This contribution looks at two artists in particular – Char Davies and Gary Warner – and the focus of their current work.