Beyond Words ─ Pictures, Parables, Paradoxes

Human thinking depends not only on words but also on visual imagery. Visual argumentation directly exploits the logic of the pictorial, while verbal arguments, too, draw on figurative language, and thus ultimately on images. In the centuries of handwritten documents and the printed book, our educational culture has been a predominantly verbal one. Today the challenge of the pictorial is explicit and conspicuous. In the digital world, we are experiencing an unprecedented wealth of images, animations and videos. But how should visual content be combined with traditional texts? This volume strives to present a broad humanities background showing how going beyond the word was always an issue in, and by now has become an inevitable challenge to, pedagogy and philosophy.

Andras Benedek is Professor and Head at the Department of Technical Education, Budapest University of Technology and Economics. He has published several papers on human resource development issues.
Kristof Nyiri is Professor of Philosophy at the same Department. His main fields of research are the philosophy of images and the philosophy of time.