James Hall
b. 1933 · American
American analytic philosopher and professor of philosophy at University of Richmond specializing in epistemology and philosophy of religion.
In the record
- Affiliation
- University of Richmond — analytic philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of religion
Key works
- Illustrated Dictionary Of Symbols In Eastern And Western Art (1996)
- The Sinister Side. How left-right symbolism shaped Western art (2008)
- The Self-Portrait. A Cultural History (2015)
- Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (2019)
- The Artist’s Studio: A Cultural History (2022)
Sebastian reads Hall
Hall occupies an unusual position in the depth tradition — he is not a clinician or theorist but a visual encyclopedist, and that distinction matters. Where Jung and Hillman read images to hear the psyche’s argument, Hall catalogs them: their range, their historic recurrence, their lateral spread across traditions that rarely spoke to each other. That is a different intellectual gesture, and it is a valuable one. The danger in symbolic dictionaries is always the one this site argues against — the equation, the one-liner, the dream-dictionary move that collapses a living image into a fixed meaning. Hall is not innocent of that tendency. But used critically, his catalogs do something the clinical literature cannot: they show how wide any symbol’s field actually is, how many readings the tradition has generated around a single image before any analyst reached for their preferred one. Turn to Hall when you need the range before you commit to a reading — then leave him and stay with the specific image.