Professor Jonathan Rée - "Seeing the Unseen: Invisibility and the Visual Arts" March 22, 2006

Jonathan Rée is a writer, historian, philosopher and househusband. He recently gave up a career as a university lecturer "in order to have more time to think", but fortunately came back to academia in his current post as Visiting Professor at Roehampton University and the Royal College of Art. He is a also member of the British Humanist Association.

Born in Bradford, Jonathan Rée was educated at Oxford, where he reacted against the kind of philosophy he was taught.

His interests and writings range from continental philosophy to African philosophy and from literature to science, and he spends much time working at various ways of reconnecting philosophical debate with historical inquiry, and seeking new audiences for it.

His writing is prolific and he is the author of more than a dozen books. His journalism appears in a multitude of publications, including the Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, the Independent, Prospect, Radical Philosophy and the New Humanist.

He also has wide experience as a broadcaster, both on radio and television - appearing frequently on programmes such as 'Journeys In Thought' and 'In Our Time'.

He defines philosophy as "a battle against the tyranny of the obvious...from the moment we are born we absorb masses of words, conventions, habits and notions from our surroundings. Before long they become second nature, the unconsidered framework of our whole approach to life and the world".

He says philosophy is "insisting on asking awkward questions about the self-serving common sense that surrounds us" and "refusing to go along with the smudges and fudges that most of us resort to, most of the time, to try to cover up the gaps and inconsistencies in our everyday thinking"

One of his main aims is to lift the public out of the view that philosophers are oddballs, misfits and cranks, and bring philosophy to our level - saying "A book of ?Lives of the Great Philosophers? would be like a gallery of fusspots and freaks, maniacs and misfits. It might give pleasure to the kind of readers who enjoy smirking at the weakness, inconstancy or triviality of those they are expected to admire; but it would be no use to inquirers hoping to get some excitement, illumination and joy out of the works of the great philosophers..."

Jonathan Rée will give a talk on the following:
'Seeing the Unseen: Invisibility and the Visual Arts' - "The invisible should perhaps be regarded as a dimension of the visible rather than a negation of it: to see something involves being aware that it has aspects that you cannot see. And perhaps this tells us something about how works of art - works of 'visual' art - work".