Prof. Michalle Gal

Michalle Gal is a professor of philosophy at the Unit of History and Philosophy of Art and Design and the Interdisciplinary Design Graduate Program. Gal served as the chair of the Unit of History and Philosophy, the chair of the Thesis program, and is serving as a trustee of the American Society for Aesthetics.

Gal specializes in aesthetics, philosophy of art and design, visual ontology and perception, metaphors theories, modernism and formalism.

Prof. Gal’s current project is entitled “Visualism”: a new externalist, broad version of Formalism in aesthetics,  which endorses the evolving “visual turn” in philosophy. It emphasizes the visual sphere as the correct context for addressing human nature, praxis, and theories of reality, challenges the dominant conceptualist-cognitivist school in philosophy and aesthetics, cognitive studies, and linguistics, and introduces to aesthetics a visualist line of research on design, art, ontology, and the mind.

Selected Publications:

Books

• Introduction to Design Theory:  Philosophy, Critique, History and Practice, 2023, with Prof. J. Ventura, Routledge.
• Visual Metaphors and Aesthetics: A Formalist Theory of Metaphor, 2022, Bloomsbury.
• Aestheticism: Deep Formalism and the Emergence of Modernist Aesthetics , 2015, Peter Lang.

Selected Publications
Special Issues

• Design and its Relations, 2025,, Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics
• Visual Hybrids, 2023, Poetics Today, Duke University Press
• Art and Gesture, 2014,Paragrana, De Gruyter, co-editor

Essays

• 2025. “Is Generative AI in Aesthetics Really New?: The Visualist Perspective”, forthcoming in Journal of Contemporary Aesthetics.
• 2025. “Design, Everydayness and the Illusion of Function”. forthcoming in Elisabetta de Stefano et.al (eds.) Designing Everyday Experience: Objects, Space, Habits. New York: Springer.
• 2025. “Design and Rationalism”. The Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics,  Vol. 48, No. 1, Spring 2025 [75-85].
• 2025. “Design and its Relations, special issue, Introduction”. The Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics,  Vol. 48, No. 1, Spring 2025 [1-5].
• 2024. “Visualism and Illustrations: Visual Philosophy Beyond Language”, Critical Notice of Thomas Wartenberg, Thoughtful Images, Analysis Vol. XX | Number XX 2024 | 1–13, Oxford University Press.
• 2023 , “Visual Hybrids and Non-Conceptual Aesthetic Perception”.  Poetics Today. Duke University Press.
• 2023,  “Ethics in Formalism”, in Oxford Handbook of Art and Ethics, ed. James Harold, Oxford University Press.
• 2022:“Danto and Dickie: Artworld and Istitution”, in Blackwell Companions to Philosophy Series, Companion to Arthur Danto. Editors: Lydia Goehr, Columbia University and Jonathan Gilmore, City University of New York. New York. Wiley-Blackwell.
• 2022. “The Inauguration of Formalism: Aestheticism and the Productive Opacity Principle.” Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Vol. 45, No. 2, Summer 2022 [20-30].
• 2020. “Visuality of Metaphors: a formalist ontology.” Linguistic Cognitive Studies Vol: 7, John Benjamins Press.
• 2019. “Visual Metaphors and Cognition: revisiting the non-conceptual”. in Kristóf  Nyíri, András Benedek (eds.), Perspectives on Visual Learning Series, Vol. 1.  Vision Fulfilled: The Victory of the Pictorial Turn. Budapest Academy of Science.
• 2019. “Vizuális metaforák és kogníció – a nemfogalmi újragondolása”. Magyar Tudomány, Vol. 2019/07, Hungarian Academy of Science.
• 2017. “The Artwork as Object and Concept”. Special volume on Material Culture, Zmanim, Tel Aviv University, Open University, Zalman Shazar Center. (Hebrew).
• 2014, “The Artwork as Gesture”, in Paragrana, De Gruyter
• 2014.“Aestheticism: Philosophical Critique”, The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 2nd Edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• 2014. “Roger Fry”, The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 2nd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University