Philosophy
I am a recovering philosopher.
Several years after completing my phd, publishing in journals, and lecturing at University, I am now working out my ideas in film, in paint, creative collaborations, and through our fantastic pop-up philosophy bar (in galleries, bars, and cafes).
I am interested in still images. Our need to make them. The strange ways they represent space and time. And how they seem intimately linked to our capacity for personal recollection, and sleep-dreaming.
But mostly, I find them beautiful to look at.
'Is this the right mode for an argument?'
Talk- Mind Art Knowledge Symposium, Brussels
Vanessa Brassey (KCL)
15th -17th June 2026, KVAB - Rubensauditorium
Philosophy has traditionally advanced through words and formal logic. But in this ‘age of the image’, can or should arguments be made iconically, and if so, when might this be preferable? A familiar criticism is that arguments in this mode are oversimplified and ambiguous. But does this confuse philosophy as entertainment with philosophy as argument? A current BSA-funded project explores these questions by combining novel philosophical research, basic video-making practices, and genuine curiosity, all held together by an attitude of ‘loving attention’, following Murdoch, to test how moving image can improve and communicate philosophical insight.
Philosophy on Film is generously funded by a BSA Small Grant Award.
'Paintings at Time Machines'
Magazine Essay & Talk- Frieze Members & Perediza Connect
Vanessa Brassey (KCL)
published for an event at Shoreditch Arts Club April 17 2026
This talk explores a simple but surprising idea: still paintings are one of the richest human technologies for helping us reflect on our experience of time. Drawing on both philosophy and artistic practice, I look at three ways paintings engage with time: a) they are records of our different conceptions of time b) they raise intriguing puzzles about how we see movement, c) they can impact on the rate at which time seems to pass for us. The talk ends by connecting this last insight to contemporary life. In an age dominated by fast, fragmentary digital media that compress and erode our sense of time, painting offers a striking counter-experience: it slows perception, deepens attention, and, in a very real sense, gives time back to the viewer. By bringing together philosophical ideas about “chronoception” (our perception of time) with reflections from my own journey from philosophy into painting, Pictures as time machines offers an accessible and thought-provoking exploration of why savouring paintings remains uniquely powerful today.
'Dreaming in Candlelight: A Journey Through Time and Imagination'
Programme Essay- Shakespeare's Globe, A Midsummer Nights Dream
Vanessa Brassey (KCL)
Imagine this: firelight flickers in a deep cave, crackling and glinting. On the wall above, a red-ochre bison seems to stir, its flank rippling and its limbs appearing to twitch in the shifting glow. Thousands of years ago, our ancestors made these paintings and experimented with bringing them to life. Even then, people wanted to tell stories, and every story depends on change.
For a scene to become a story, something must happen; one thing leads to another, and feeling follows action. Even the oldest tales can be retold so that whom we blame or applaud for the way things turn out can be revised. So, while a single image can be beautiful to look at, it takes a story to move us. This might be why our ancestors found ways to make still pictures move: they wanted to move our hearts.
Tonight, in candlelight at the Sam Wanamaker Theatre, we too will be moved. The glowing actors will invite us to shift our perspective from one character to another. With each shift, we see a little more of the story unfold...
(full article available by request).
“The Moving Life of Still Images”
Talk- London Aesthetics Forum
Vanessa Brassey (KCL)
22nd January 2026, 16:30-18:30 Senate House, Room 264.
A familiar thought in analytic philosophy is that still pictures are frozen: static images without temporal depth, incapable of anything like the unfolding we find in film, animation, music, or narrative art. On this picture of pictures, temporality enters pictorial representation only with the advent of moving-image technologies. But this assumption is untenable. From Palaeolithic bisons flickering in firelight, to the staged simultaneities of history painting, to the introspections of a Rothko, pictures organise, compress, dilate, and direct temporal experience in ways that standard theories cannot accommodate. In the talk, I’ll suggest that the temporality of pictures is not a defect to be corrected by animation but a constitutive feature of how images mean. Static images generate their own forms of temporal orientation, inviting the viewer into fields of anticipation, memory, and imaginative projection. I will trace several of these modes across different kinds of pictures and consider what follows for broader debates in aesthetics.
Postdoctoral Project
'Time for Beauty'
BSA Fellowship 2022-3
I am thrilled to have been awarded the BSA Postdoctoral Fellowship 2022-3. My project will be to explore the poorly defined concept of time-based aesthetic properties in (still) pictures, which I claim, helps to explain the representation and the expression of sophisticated emotions, such as regret, nostalgia, and euphoria. This challenges a longstanding assumption that expressiveness in a picture (and other aesthetic properties) depends solely on spatial extension - a curve here or a line there – while musical expressiveness depends on temporal properties namely, rhythm, melody, and cadence. However, given that sophisticated emotions such as nostalgia point to the past, it seems that the expressive qualities of at least some (such as nostalgic) pictures are interestingly time based.
PhD Thesis
'What Makes A Painting Sad?'
2020, awarding institution King's College, London.
Here are two claims to be examined in detail in this thesis. The first claim is that whenever we see pictorial content, what we see is mediated by a pictorial perspective. The second claim is that adequately seeing expressive content in paintings mandates imagining a persona occupying the pictorial perspective. In this thesis, I develop an argument to show how these two claims weave together to explain what makes a painting sad.
My thesis, which concerns seeing emotions in paintings, appeals to considerations about perspective-taking that are also relevant to seeing emotions in faces. I challenge the widely held view that ‘emotion’ refers to a state, ‘expression’ to the dynamic effect of that state, and ‘artistic expressiveness’ to the mere presentation of outward characteristics associated with the state. I show how this mistaken way of understanding what expression is, is put to work by theorists to explain how paintings can be expressive while failing to be expressions proper or failing to emanate from the kind of thing that can undergo an emotion. My work draws on a range of foundational issues in philosophy of perception and the philosophy of art to provide an account that corrects a common misconception about how we directly and immediately see emotions. I apply this account to a productive examination of the painterly case.
My proposal is that the phenomenon of expression is explained by invoking a constitutive persona theory. Viewers must or do see the picture from a persona’s emotional perspective. This is what we mean when we call a painting sad and expression cannot get going without it. The arguments in this thesis aim at establishing this conclusion.
