Gallery: The Philosophers

This one came out of nowhere. I was doing a shallow dive this afternoon into some of the major philosophical disciplines, and I had an idea for a quick art project. These are my imagined personas for Aesthetics, Metaphysics, Ethics, Epistemology, and Logic.

I wanted it to look like a faculty portrait at a university. I started with an initial version, then did detail portraits of the five individually, and then I used those individual portraits to revise the original (which is what you see above).

Aesthetics was the easiest. A beautiful woman, well aware of style and the finer things in life. She carries a paintbrush and a mirror. Her motto is, "What is beauty?"

Ethics seemed fairly straightforward. The inspiration from Lady Justice is clear, the blindfold, the sword, and the scales of judgment all make it pretty obvious. I wanted to give her some age though, hence the gray hair. Her motto is, "What is right?"

Metaphysics turned out really well, in my opinion. I love the reality distortion and glitching effects, it translated to visual nicely. His eyes glow, he has stardust on his lapels. and just looks out of this world. His motto is, "What is?"

Epistemology was a bit of an odd duck. I needed to show someone looking for truth, literally trying to see knowledge. His goggles help with that, and his lantern is to hold the light of learning, and he carries scrolls with him. His motto is, "What is true?"

The one that took me the longest to get the "feeling" right was Logic. I wanted to emphasize precision, so his appearance needed to reflect that. He wears black and white, there is no gray area. He has a whiteboard marker, chalk is too messy, but he needs to be able to write proofs on a board. And I gave him a Curta mechanical calculator, because it combines math and precision engineering, and was more interesting than a regular calculator. His motto is, "What follows?" – or, alternately, "What must be?"

I think it might just be because it was harder to express what logic is, compared to the other four, but I had to work harder on Logic's portrait. I'm really happy with the result though.

I hope you enjoy. I wonder what Aesthetics would feel about this.