In his Time and Narrative, Ricœur introduces the term of “third time” to designate the middle ground between human and natural time. This time is synonymous with historical time, which is the main source of historical discourse. The third time consists of inscribing human time onto the time of nature. While historiography must strictly follow this structure, works of fiction have the freedom to explore and even create imaginative variations of time. Despite the constraints this seems to impose on historical (...) writing, this article shows that even within the tight structure of historical time, a palette of various colors and shades, akin to imaginative variations, can be observed. Historical time possesses depth and speed; it can contract and relax, motivate or prevent action, or gain various dynamics in relation to the ending it offers. (shrink)

Musica-Colore-Tratto ©· un percorso epistemologico, una volont©¿ di tentare di comprendere la musica non come realt©¿ a s©♭ stante, bens©Ơ in relazione ad altre fonti del sapere che, in qualche modo, le si possano affiancare: sia per la ricerca di un kantiano tutto-insieme-connesso, sia per una pretesa hegeliana di un pensiero umano tricotomico. La volont©¿ di chi scrive ©· quella di far trasparire un'involontaria logica che permea l'idea umana generale (a prescindere da ci©ø in cui essa si cimenti) e di (...) ribadire il forte teleo℗Ưlogismo nel quale essa trova i suoi limiti. Pittori o litografi come Kandinsky o Escher ne erano ben consci, se arrivarono, tra i loro aforismi, ad affermare che "il colore ©· come la musica", o "adoriamo il caos perch©♭ amiamo produrre l'ordine". [Testo dell'editore]. (shrink)

Angus Fletcher is one of our finest theorists of the arts, the heir to I. A. Richards, Erich Auerbach, Northrop Frye. This, his grandest book since the groundbreaking Allegory of 1964, aims to open another field of study: how thought--the act, the experience of thinking--is represented in literature. Recognizing that the field of formal philosophy is only one demonstration of the uses of thought, Fletcher looks for the ways other languages (and their framing forms) serve the purpose of certain thinking (...) activities. What kinds of thinking accompany the writing of history? How does the gnomic sentence manage to represent some point of belief? The fresh insights Fletcher achieves at every turn suggest an anatomy of poetic and fictional strategies for representing thought--the hazards, the complications, the sufferings, the romance of thought. Fletcher's resources are large, and his step is sure. The reader samples his piercing vision of Milton's Satan, the original Thinker, leaving the pain of thinking as his legacy for mankind; Marvell's mysteriously haunting "green thought in a green shade"; Old Testament and Herodotus, Vico and Coleridge; Crane, Calvino, Stevens. Fletcher ranges over the heights of literature, poetry, music, and film, never losing sight of his central line of inquiry. He includes comments on the essential role of unclear, vague, and even irrational thinking to suggest that ideas often come alive as thoughts only in a process of considerable distress. In the end he gives us literature--not the content of thought, but its form, its shape, the fugitive colors taken on by the mind as represented in art. (shrink)

Gift of utterance: expanding vocabularies for truth -- Dainty as candle-lights: veiled truths and shadowy lies -- Philomela and the risk of history -- Truth: a muddy sprout -- No auditors in the courtroom of history.

C. S. Lewis reflexionó sobre la filosofía del color de manera accesoria en algunas de sus obras teóricas y les dio cauce narrativo en la Trilogía cósmica. A pesar de ser una cuestión escasamente explorada en la academia, resulta pertinente investigar el valor filosófico y especulativo que concede al color en el ámbito de su teoría de lo real, de inspiración platónica. Esta investigación aspira a analizar e interpretar, desde la cosmología precopernicana, la relevancia ontológica, epistemológica y metafísica del color (...) de las que se hacen eco los tres libros que componen la saga de Ransom a través de una serie de temas recurrentes. El profesor Lewis, además, acompañó estas reflexiones de una interdisciplinariedad que se sustentaba sobre el simbolismo medieval. En la trilogía, los colores de los mundos del espacio profundo revelan la verdadera realidad inteligible y anticipan el fundamento metafísico del cosmos en el marco de una metanarrativa teísta y trascendente. (shrink)

Physicalism claims that colors are physical properties of physical objects. For more than three centuries this philosophical stand has been denied because it was considered not to be “scientifically serious”. In this article we offer a critical review of the history of this accusation to conclude that the apparent incompatibility between the best science and physicalism must be, at least, re-examined.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Coloration of Aristotelian Eye-Jelly: A Note on On Dreams 459b–460aRaphael WoolfThe purpose of this paper is to make a small contribution to a recent lively debate concerning Aristotle’s philosophy of mind. This debate has centered on a paper published by Myles Burnyeat,1 which argued that Aristotle’s philosophy of mind, being hopelessly anachronistic, could not serve as the prototype of any contemporary theory: in particular, it could not be (...) seen as proto-functionalist, as Nussbaum and Putnam had proposed.2 The grounds given by Burnyeat for the anachronism of Aristotle’s philosophy of mind focus mainly on Aristotle’s notion of perceptual awareness. According to Burnyeat, perceptual awareness is for Aristotle a primitives3 and essential4 property of the relevant organ of perception. In Burnyeat’s view, Aristotle’s theory denies that there is any further level of analysis that can be undertaken. When an eye comes to perceive an object, the potentiality of the eye for seeing is actualized, but there is nothing further to be said. In particular, there is no physiological change taking place in the eye, in which the psychological change is realized. Thus, when Aristotle says in the De Anima that the eye becomes “in a way coloured”5 when it sees a coloured object, for Burnyeat this means no more [End Page 385] than that it registers awareness of colour,6 not that it becomes literally coloured itself.On this last point, Burnyeat takes issue with the view of Richard Sorabji,7 who maintains that for Aristotle the eye does undergo physiological change when it does some seeing: in particular, if it sees, for example, a red object, then the jelly inside the eye literally becomes coloured red. On this view, Aristotle does indeed have a theory, congenial enough to modern perspectives, whereby each psychological change is realized physiologically.8There are several large questions which my paper does not attempt to address. Firstly, it offers no view on what implications Burnyeat’s position would have, if correct, for the interpretation of Aristotle as a proto-functionalist. Secondly, it does not offer a view on how necessary the correctness of an interpretation such as Sorabji’s is to the case made by the advocates of Aristotle as a proto-functionalist.9 Thirdly, it makes no adjudication between any of the competing parties’ interpretations of Aristotle’s De Anima, his main work on psychology and the chief textual battleground in the debate I have been outlining.This paper’s aim is a much more modest one. It is to draw attention to a short passage in Aristotle’s work On Dreams, which in my view incontrovertibly suggests that Aristotle did believe that the eye becomes literally coloured during perception of a coloured object. I shall therefore be presenting one piece of evidence in favour of Sorabji’s view; but I shall not be arguing that Sorabji’s view is conclusively the right one (which would require consideration of all the relevant evidence), nor drawing any conclusions about the implications of this evidence for interpretations of Aristotle’s philosophy of mind. It is, however, [End Page 386] reasonable to suggest that if Sorabji’s view is right then Burnyeat’s view is in severe difficulties, since its main underpinning—the claim that psychological change has no physiological counterpart in Aristotle’s theory—will have been removed. The evidence I have to present, then, is, albeit indirectly, support for the view that Aristotle’s philosophy of mind is not hopelessly anachronistic, at least in the way that Burnyeat claims.Here is the evidence from On Dreams (459b23–460a26):That the sense-organs rapidly perceive even slight differences is shown by what happens with mirrors. Indeed, anyone who would give his attention to it might look into that subject too and explore the problem. At the same time, it is clear from this case that, just as the organ of sight is affected by, so too it acts upon, its object. For in extremely clean mirrors, when women look into them during their menstrual period, the mirror surface takes on a sort of blood-red cloud. In fact, if the... (shrink)

This is a Festschrift in honour of Valtteri Arstila, a professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Turku. The book is structured in three sections. The first two—‘Mind and Action’ and ‘Time and Temporal Experience’—include papers focussed on issues particularly close to Arstila's own research specialisation. The final section contains papers on various further philosophical issues. The first section, ‘Mind and Action’, collects together contributions on a variety of topics such as consciousness, content, agency and normativity; encompassing approaches from (...) within analytic philosophy, phenomenology and the history of philosophy. The second section, ‘Time and Temporal Experience’, collects together papers on topics including the nature of time itself; of our experience of time and of historicity and temporality more broadly; approaching these issues from a variety of perspectives including historical approaches. The final section brings together papers that touch on issues within philosophy of science, logic, philosophy of language, political philosophy and more besides. (shrink)

Recent interpreters portray Aristotle as a Protagorean antirealist, who thinks that colors and other perceptibles do not actually exist apart from being perceived. Against this, I defend a more traditional interpretation: colors exist independently of perception, to which they are explanatorily prior, as causal powers that produce perceptions of themselves. They are not to be identified with mere dispositions to affect perceivers, or with grounds distinct from these qualities, picked out by their subjective effect on perceivers (so-called “secondary (...) qualities”). Rather, they are intrinsic qualities of objects, which are in reality just as they appear to be. At the same time, Aristotle rejects any “simple theory of color” according to which the essence and nature of colors is fully revealed in experience. Although the character of perceptibles as they are experienced is “better known to us,” their essence and nature only comes to be known through a correct theory. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes two different uses of the analogy between colors and values, the projectivist and the objectivist. The projectivist use of the analogy has a long history, which goes back to Hume. The objectivist use of the analogy is a fairly recent addition. The core contention of this paper is that the projectivist’s use fails, and that only the objectivist offers a genuine use for the analogy between colors and values.

In earlier work, I predicted that we would probably not be able to determine the colors of the dinosaurs. I lost this epistemic bet against science in dramatic fashion when scientists discovered that it is possible to draw inferences about dinosaur coloration based on the microstructure of fossil feathers (Vinther et al., 2008). This paper is an exercise in philosophical error analysis. I examine this episode with two questions in mind. First, does this case lend any support to epistemic (...) optimism about historical science? Second, under what conditions is it rational to make predictions about what questions scientists will or will not be able answer? In reply to the first question, I argue that the recent work on the colors of the dinosaurs matters less to the debate about the epistemology of historical science than it might seem. In reply to the second question, I argue that it is difficult to specify a policy that would rule out the failed bet without also being too conservative. (shrink)

Literature from the United Kingdom and the United States represents the cultural expression of those peoples' lived experiences. Reading British and American literature may also aid in our understanding of the values, worldview, and ideological underpinnings of western civilization. Therefore, this thesis examines the mythological and religious themes in British and American literature using literary works from both countries. Greek Myth is the source and soil of ancient Greek literature. Ancient Greek and Roman literature is a rich treasure for later (...) generations to understand myths, providing creative materials for later British and American writers. It can be said that myths and religious ideas gave birth to great literary works and some immortal poets. Among them, "_Wuthering Heights_" is the main representative work of 19 th -century literature and occupies an important position in British and American literary history. Based on this, this paper discusses British and American literature's religious and cultural characteristics in "_Wuthering Heights_", mainly from the perspective of environment description and plot shaping. I hope this research can play a role in attracting jade. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Gary Shapiro THE OWL OF MINERVA AND THE COLORS OF THE NIGHT Hegel is known to many readers mainly for a few striking figurative passages which he himself excluded from the central structures of his major texts as extrinsic remarks. His mature system justifies this exclusion by claiming that philosophy operates in the realm of the pure concept, having surpassed the sensuous narrative images of art and religion. (...) Nevertheless, the very forcefulness of the passages themselves indicates that the mature Hegel may never have peacefully aufgehoben the young man who believed in 1796 that philosophy, in order to resume its original role as educator of mankind, must become aesthetic, mythological, and poetic. (I am assuming that Hegel either wrote "the earliest system-program of German idealism" or endorsed its principles.) A reading of the famous elegiac passage in the "Preface" to the Philosophy of Right suggests not only problems of meaning, but of philosophical rhetoric: One more word about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it. As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of formation has been completed. The teaching of the concept, which is also history's inescapable lesson, is that it is only when actuality is mature that the ideal first appears over against the real and that the ideal apprehends this same real world in its substance and builds it up for itself into the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's gray in gray it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.1 The first focus of attention here is usually on the mood of philosophical resignation in which completion of a rational development leaves no room for action or advice. Theory must necessarily give up any Utopian 276 Gary Shapiro277 or activist pretentions it may have harbored once it sees that it can only describe what has been. Despite the fact that Hegelian actuality (Wirklichkeit) is the result of a rational and dialectical process, ascetic renunciation of any relation to action puts Hegel in the strange company of nineteenth century positivists and empiricists; it also establishes a tone fundamentally different from classical European political philosophy of thinkers like Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau, a tone which Marx, provoked by Hegel, was to revive. The statement can also be read on a scale much larger than the political, in which it suggests a resigned acceptance of the completion of Western philosophy and civilization. Hegel is notorious for his view that spirit (Geist), the fundamental reality, has completed itself through the self-knowledge which it attains in his system of philosophy. That he sometimes speaks of his enterprise as a Wissen or Wissenschaft (knowledge, science, or wisdom) suggests how far he has come from the Socratic conception of philosophy as always characterized by a lack of that which it loves. It would be intriguing to explore these themes. Such exploration would involve a more thorough knowledge of what Hegel understands by end, completion, and fulfillment when he speaks of political life and the higher forms of spirit—art, religion, and philosophy. We might even be led by such an inquiry into Hegel's meaning to see his claims as historically and philosophically plausible and to reconsider our own resistance to believing that we live in a deepening twilight. What I wish to do, however, is to call attention to the manner in which Hegel speaks of Minerva's owl and to juxtapose both the manner and the substance of his thought about the twilight of philosophy and civilization with some of Hölderlin's dichterisch and Heidegger's denkerisch meditations on similar themes. For if Hegel has announced the coming of the night, Hölderlin and Heidegger have sought to make the night their very own territory and to comprehend it from within. If Hegel has rather gingerly allowed himself to lapse into that famous figurative discourse of the... (shrink)

Writing the history of anything is a challenge, but endeavoring to write the history of an idea, particularly one as enduring, chimeric, emotive, and misunderstood as “utopia,” is truly a task only to be undertaken by either an intellectual giant or an utter fool. Fortunately for readers, Professor Gregory Claeys, from the University of London, is the former. This relatively large-format book is richly illustrated and printed on glossy “art” paper, ensuring that the rich colors are not (...) lost. The strikingly beautiful cover includes an evocative painting from an 1850 version of Gulliver’s Travels. The liberal inclusion of bright images, and captioned boxes elaborating on a theme or person, is very .. (shrink)

Let’s say that a philosophical theory is white just in case it treats the perspective of the white (perhaps Western male) as objective.1 The potential dangers of proposing or defending white theories are two-fold. First, if not all of reality is objective, a fact which I take to be established beyond doubt,2 then white theories could well turn out to be false.3 A white theory is unwarranted (and indeed false) when it treats nonobjective reality as objective. Second, by proposing or (...) defending unwarranted white theories one thereby treats the perspective of the non-white as faulty, and this in turn serves to perpetuate the distorted representation of whites as superior to non-whites. As David Owen puts it, [whiteness] serves to underwrite perceptions, understandings, justifications and explanations of the social order that perpetuate distortions in the social system that are a legacy of our nation’s history …what is associated with whiteness becomes defined as natural, normal or mainstream.4 In this chapter I will focus on a particular class of philosophical theories, viz. philosophical theories of color. I argue that realist theories of the objectivist variety.. (shrink)

This paper offers an example of what may be called ‘an aesthetic history of legal and political thought’. Such a task engages in theorising historically the features of aesthetic traditions that enable and further normative inquiry, i.e. an exploration of the norms and values that might contribute to the good life and the common good. The three features offered in this paper as useful to identifying such aesthetic traditions are communality and interactivity, experimentalism, and exemplarity. The paper shows how (...) each of these features is present, in particular ways, in one specific aesthetic tradition, namely the declamatory tradition. Tracing the declamatory tradition back to Ancient Rome, and examining its influence in the English Renaissance, especially in Sir Thomas More’s response to Lucian’s declamatory thema, Tyrannicide, the paper argues that the particular ways in which declamatory practice combines the above three features enables those engaged in it to pursue normative inquiry. The paper argues that the integration of these three features is especially visible in one aspect of declamatory practice, namely the introduction and exchange of colores, i.e. changes in the narrative, introduced by declaimers and their audiences, which shed light on the possible motivation of a character, and thereby also invited shifts in affective allegiance and evaluative perspective. The paper argues that it is in large part through such introduction and exchange of colores that the declamatory tradition enables and furthers normative inquiry, and thus also offers a good reason for including the declamatory tradition in ‘an aesthetic history of legal and political thought’. (shrink)

This paper is a article of Pojeo Cho Yik (浦渚 趙翼: 1579~1655)’s point of view related to the book of Doctrine of the Mean (中庸) in the mid-Joseon Dynasty, when Neo Confucianism was overwhelming. At the age of 24, he wrote the Article of Doctrine of the Mean (jung yong seol 中庸說) which was explained the basic lines of the books related to the book of Doctrine of the Mean (中庸) to be written later. He wrote the Indivisual Opinion of (...) Zhongyong (jung yong sa ram 中庸私覽) at 29, and wrote the Hard-earned Zhongyong (jung yong gon deuk 中庸困得) at 37. This paper examines the transitions and consistency of his point of view of the Doctrine of the Mean (中庸) in Korean History of Classical Learning, focusing on the Indivisual Opinion of Zhongyong (中庸私覽) and the Hard-earned Zhongyong (中庸困得). The early research on his scholarship started from the work of clarifying the relationship between Wang Yangming (王陽明) and it has been mistaken as one of the schools derived from the teachings of Wang Yangming, but it turns out to be absolutely irrelevant. His thoughts and arguments are so strong in the colors of Neo Confucianism, whicd is derived from the teachings of Zhu Xi (朱熹). And the scholars who knew him at that time absolutely did not define his study as the study of Wang Yang-ming. We can not say that he is the opposite of Zhu Xi, just because his way of distinguishing sentences of the book of Doctrine of the Mean (中庸) is different from Zhu Xi. Because Zhu Xi had already mentioned it in his other works. And although he had been associated with the Yangming scholars, they had never mentioned him as a Yangming scholar. Cho Yik regarded Zhu Xi as the best person after Confucius, and genuinely admired him. His submission of opinions different from Zhu Xi only added to his meticulousness to further strengthen Zhu Xi’s neo Confucianism. (shrink)

In order to say what one means, and be understood, one needs to know to whom one wishes to communicate, the particular mindset one addresses. Expressing oneself clearly and naturally requires some art. Style, then, is an important component of the message received, or so it is in art history writing according to James Elkins. He attempts to demonstrate that what constitutes art history writing is consequently unanalysable; that art history under analysis becomes something else. ‘The glare (...) of logic’ Elkins claims, ‘bleaches the carefully modulated colors of art history and makes whole stretches of it appear blank’ (225). Art history is shrunk when it becomes the patient of the philosopher, the sociologist, the cultural theorist. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the study of the dynamics of the compatibility of the color designations in the Russian language. The scientific novelty of the study is determined by unexplored valence bonds of color designations in the historical aspect. The relevance of scientific analysis determined a systematic approach to the subject of study, ensures veracity of its results. The work is aimed at identification of trends in the evolution of color designations system of the Russian language through the analysis (...) of the valence bonds of color designations. Two fragments of the lexical-semantic group ‘color‘ in the Russian language of different times were subjected to comparative analysis. The separation of material by centuries is conditioned by its amount and uniqueness. Constitutive method of scientific analysis is historical and comparative. By the analysis of the dynamics of compatibility properties of the color designations, it was revealed that a fundamental role in the development of the color lexical system of the Russian language was played by a group of monovalent and polyvalent color designations. Comparison of the two chronological layers of Russian vocabulary of colors showed a significant increase in number of color terms especially in the group of monovalent words. High word-building activity of monovalent color designations in the history of the language made the group to be ‘the resource base‘ of the color lexical system. When the optimal color designations were selected, ‘insufficient‘ designations consisted the group of archaic members. If the group of monovalent color designations was ‘raw materials‘ for the selection of the most appropriate lexemes, the group of polyvalent color designations formed a stable color dictionary of contemporary Russian language. This word group includes abstract color terms, common words, and words that have undergone specialization of their meaning. The performed analysis of compatibility bonds of color designations in history of Russian language identified trends in the evolution of color lexical system as a whole. It showed that intensification of active generation of words with the color meaning provided with ‘raw material‘ the selection of color designations and the selection and actualization of optimal color designations and their meanings contributed to stabilization of color lexical system. (shrink)

Eight papers followed by a discussion and an epilogue.

In The Empire Strikes Back, African American actor Billy Dee Williams turned the trio into a quartet as Lando Calrissian. Novelist and social activist Alice Walker coined and defined colorism as the “prejudicial or preferential treatment of same‐race people based solely on their color,” according to Kimberly Jade Norwood and Violeta Solonova Foreman. For Norwood and Foreman, colorism is concerned with the lightness and darkness of skin tone, with preference given to whiteness. Colorism in the United States took root during (...) the period of slavery, when “coalescence of needs, beliefs, justifications, and practices had the effect of placing white skin at a premium and dehumanizing black skin.” Jennifer Bloomquist writes that there is “a protracted history of Whites creating Black caricatures,” which includes “underdeveloped Black characters” in American entertainment. Boyega overlooks the presence of culture and the representation of other races and ethnicities throughout the Star Wars films and even throughout the various television series. (shrink)

Extinction deeply colors the way we think about conservation and the role of humans in nature. It is easy to overlook how recently, in fact, it has entered our consciousness. Only in the last two centuries has science sought to critically study life's origins, development, and diversification. Only in the last several generations have we identified and calibrated life's five major extinction events and speculated on their causes and effects. And only in recent decades have we come to appreciate (...) the still‐unfolding fate of life's diversity under the increasing influence of humanity. The story of extinction has continually changed as this monumental process of interdisciplinary synthesis and imagination has unfolded. Geology, paleontology, taxonomy, biogeography, and evolutionary biology have allowed us to comprehend the deep temporal and broad spatial dynamics of the extinction story. Archaeology, cultural anthropology, and environmental and economic history have illuminated the role of humans in altering the trajectory of species, landscapes, and ecosystems over the millennia. Ecology, genetics, population biology, and conservation biology have revealed the more recent patterns in life's vulnerability and resilience. As a phenomenon, extinction is as old as life itself. As a story shaping our consciousness, values, and intentions, it is still new. And it is uncomfortable. (shrink)

Colors, shapes, size, weight, etc., are not floating qualities. They adhere in beings which are usually more persistent and effective than those features could be. Only unattached items are what they are and nothing more, but it is precisely such items which have, but are not qualities.

Primary, or basic, colors have been discussed for centuries. Over time, three criteria have emerged on their behalf: (a) their physical mixture yielding all other spectral colors, (b) the physiological attunement of receptors or pathways to particular wavelengths, and (c) the etymological history of the color term. These criteria can be applied usefully to taste to clarify issues.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginning comes a “groundbreaking” (Time) approach to understanding and uprooting racism and inequality in our society—and in ourselves. “The most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.”—The New York Times ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—The New York Times Book Review, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Shelf Awareness, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews Antiracism is a (...) transformative concept that reorients and reenergizes the conversation about racism—and, even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. At its core, racism is a powerful system that creates false hierarchies of human value; its warped logic extends beyond race, from the way we regard people of different ethnicities or skin colors to the way we treat people of different sexes, gender identities, and body types. Racism intersects with class and culture and geography and even changes the way we see and value ourselves. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas—from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilities—that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their poisonous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves. Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science with his own personal story of awakening to antiracism. This is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond the awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a just and equitable society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 38.1 (2000) 27-40 [Access article in PDF] Sensible Qualities: The Case of Sound Robert Pasnau University of Colorado 1. Background The Aristotelian tradition distinguishes the familiar five external senses from the less familiar internal senses. Aristotle himself did not in fact use this terminology of 'external' and 'internal,' but the division became common in the work of Arab and Hebrew philosophers, and (...) in the Latin West the distinction is taken for granted.1 I am going to put to one side the obscurities involved in the various internal senses of phantasia, imagination, memory, etc.; I will instead focus on the external senses. These five external senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch—have their familiar counterparts in the external world: color, sound, odor, flavor, and the various tangible qualities. (The tangible qualities, unfortunately, resist being reduced to a single genus, and are typically listed as hot and cold, wet and dry, etc., where this etc. stands in for the complete list that one might or might not be able to give.2 ) These sensibilia (I will simply speak of sensibles) were known as the proper or special objects of the external senses.In addition to these proper objects, the senses were taken to have five common objects—size, shape, number, motion, rest—and also an unlimited variety of incidental objects, the per accidens sensibles—Coriscus, one's enemy, a horse race, etc. These per accidens sensibles are in a way the most interesting and important sense objects of all. They are interesting, first, inasmuch as one of the hardest and most interesting problems about perception is the problem of seeing as, which seems to be precisely the phenomenon at issue [End Page 27] here. They are important, also, inasmuch as genuine perception, as we now think of it, almost always involves the perception of something sensible per accidens. Our everyday sensory experiences revolve around the experience of seeing objects of certain kinds. We can of course step back and decide that what we are really seeing is colors and shapes. But that is not how we ordinarily see things.Despite their interest and importance, I want to put aside these per accidens sensibles, and focus instead on the common and proper sensibles, both of which Aristotle described as sensible per se (kath' hauta). In his classic statement on the objects of sensation, at De anima II 6, 418a7-25, Aristotle suggests that the grounds for distinguishing the per se from the per accidens are that the former sensibles are capable in their own right of making an impression on the senses. Color itself affects the external senses, and so does size. Coriscus, however, considered as Coriscus, does no such thing. He affects the senses only inasmuch as he is colored, perfumed, etc.3 To focus on the per se sensibles, then, is to focus on those things in the world that are suited to make impressions on the external senses.Why are some such sensibles proper, whereas others are common? The well-known rule of thumb here, reflected in how we refer to these sensibles, is that each proper sensible can be perceived by only one of the external senses. The common sensibles are those per se sensibles that fail this test. (Note that, of the common sensibles, only number, movement and rest are truly common to all five of the senses; shape and size are perceptible only by touch and sight.4 ) It is not clear, however, that this is the appropriate criterion for distinguishing the proper from the common sensibles. Albert the Great, for instance, argues that a proper sensible must meet three tests: (1) It is sensed by only one sense; (2) this sense is not capable of error with respect to it; and (3) the organ of this sense is naturally suited to be affected by it alone.5 The last of these tests is problematic, however, for at least two reasons. First, it is problematic for touch, given that the tangible qualities resist being reduced to a single genus. Second, more seriously... (shrink)

The discourse on kitsch has changed tone. The concept, which in the early 20th century referred more to pretentious pseudo-art than to cute everyday objects, was attacked between the World Wars by theorists of modernity (e.g. Greenberg on Repin). The late 20th century scholars gazed at it with critical curiosity (Eco, Kulka, Calinescu). What we now have is a profound interest in and acceptance of cute mass-produced objects. It has become marginal to use the concept to criticize pseudo-art. Scholars who (...) write about kitsch are no longer against it (Anderson, Olalquiaga). And since the 2000s, art students have been telling us that they “love kitsch”. The contemporary concept is strongly attached to certain colors (pink) and materials (porcelain). In this article I aspire to find some keys on how to view the history and contemporary state of the concept. My hypothesis is that the change in the use of the concept has at least partly to do with changes in the concept of art, which has lately, this is my hypothesis, become sufficiently decentralized from its original roots and boundaries (upper class, male, ethnically Central European). (shrink)

Teleosemantics explains mental representation in terms of etiological history: a mental state’s representational contents are the result of natural selection, or some other selection process. Critics have argued that the “swampman” thought experiment poses a counterexample to teleosemantics. In several recent papers, Papineau has argued that a merely possible swampman cannot serve as a counterexample to teleosemantics, but has acknowledged that actual swampmen would pose a problem for teleosemantics. In this paper, I argue that there are real-world cases of (...) swampman-like representation, in the form of functional tetrachromacy. People with functional tetrachromacy are born with four types of cones in each eye, rather than the usual three, and as a result can represent a wider variety of colors than the average person. I argue that the functional tetrachromat’s additional color representations are not the result of a selection process. Functional tetrachromacy is therefore a real-world case of mental representation without an etiological history, and therefore poses a genuine counterexample to teleosemantics. (shrink)

National Book Award Finalist. How did humanity originate and why does a species like ours exist on this planet? Do we have a special place, even a destiny in the universe? Where are we going, and perhaps, the most difficult question of all, "Why?" In The Meaning of Human Existence, his most philosophical work to date, Pulitzer Prize–winning biologist Edward O. Wilson grapples with these and other existential questions, examining what makes human beings supremely different from all other species. Searching (...) for meaning in what Nietzsche once called "the rainbow colors" around the outer edges of knowledge and imagination, Wilson takes his readers on a journey, in the process bridging science and philosophy to create a twenty-first-century treatise on human existence—from our earliest inception to a provocative look at what the future of mankind portends. Continuing his groundbreaking examination of our "Anthropocene Epoch," which he began with The Social Conquest of Earth, described by the New York Times as "a sweeping account of the human rise to domination of the biosphere," here Wilson posits that we, as a species, now know enough about the universe and ourselves that we can begin to approach questions about our place in the cosmos and the meaning of intelligent life in a systematic, indeed, in a testable way. Once criticized for a purely mechanistic view of human life and an overreliance on genetic predetermination, Wilson presents in The Meaning of Human Existence his most expansive and advanced theories on the sovereignty of human life, recognizing that, even though the human and the spider evolved similarly, the poet's sonnet is wholly different from the spider's web. Whether attempting to explicate "The Riddle of the Human Species," "Free Will," or "Religion"; warning of "The Collapse of Biodiversity"; or even creating a plausible "Portrait of E.T.," Wilson does indeed believe that humanity holds a special position in the known universe. The human epoch that began in biological evolution and passed into pre-, then recorded, history is now more than ever before in our hands. Yet alarmed that we are about to abandon natural selection by redesigning biology and human nature as we wish them, Wilson soberly concludes that advances in science and technology bring us our greatest moral dilemma since God stayed the hand of Abraham. (shrink)

“The longer you work, the more the mystery deepens of what appearance is, or how what is called appearance can be made in another medium."—Francis Bacon, painter This, in a nutshell, is the central problem in the theory of art. It has fascinated philosophers from Plato to Wittgenstein. And it fascinates artists and art historians, who have always drawn extensively on philosophical ideas about language and representation, and on ideas about vision and the visible world that have deep philosophical roots. (...) John Hyman’s _The Objective Eye_ is a radical treatment of this problem, deeply informed by the history of philosophy and science, but entirely fresh. The questions tackled here are fundamental ones: Is our experience of color an illusion? How does the metaphysical status of colors differ from that of shapes? What is the difference between a picture and a written text? Why are some pictures said to be more realistic than others? Is it because they are especially truthful or, on the contrary, because they deceive the eye? _The Objective Eye_ explores the fundamental concepts we use constantly in our most innocent thoughts and conversations about art, as well as in the most sophisticated art theory. The book progresses from pure philosophy to applied philosophy and ranges from the metaphysics of color to Renaissance perspective, from anatomy in ancient Greece to impressionism in nineteenth-century France. Philosophers, art historians, and students of the arts will find _The Objective Eye_ challenging and absorbing. (shrink)

Because the visual system cannot process all of the objects, colors, and features present in a visual scene, visual attention allows some visual stimuli to be selected and processed over others. Most research on visual attention has focused on spatial or location-based attention, in which the locations occupied by stimuli are selected for further processing. Recent research, however, has demonstrated the importance of objects in organizing (or segregating) visual scenes and guiding attentional selection. Because of the long history (...) of spatial attention research, theories of spatial attention are more mature than theories of other visual processes, such as object segregation and object attention. In the present paper, I outline a biased competition account of object segregation and attention, following similar accounts that have been developed for spatial attention (Desimone and Duncan, 1995). In my biased competition account, I seek to understand how some objects can be segregated and selected over other objects in a complex visual scene. Under this account, there are two sources of visual information that allow an object to be processed over other objects: bottom-up information carried by the physical stimulus and top-down information based on an observer's goals. I use the biased competition account to combine many diverse findings from the object segregation and attention literatures into a common framework. (shrink)

My intention, in this paper, is to elaborate a conception of colors as part of a skeptical view of the world. In order to do that, I examine how some of the major skeptics throughout the history of philosophy conceived colors, in relation both to other sensible qualities and to the physical object. Next, in the light of the exchange between Barry Stroud and John McDowell, I describe what seems to me to be the common conception of (...) color, which the skeptic not only accepts, but goes even further claiming that he may know the color of objects through sense-perception. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XXII, Number 2, November 1996, pp. 325-337 Hume's Aesthetic Theism JOHN IMMERWAHR When it comes to religion, Hume's motto is corruptio optimi pessima, "the corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst" (NHR 338,339, SScE 73).1 He warmly endorses what he calls "true religion" and strongly attacks false religion, superstition and priestcraft. Hume's distaste for false religion is obviously sincere, but scholars have sometimes (...) wondered how seriously to take Hume's "veneration for true religion" (DNR 219). Are his favorable comments about true religion honest or is this just one more smokescreen?2 In fact, Hume tells us very little about what he calls "true religion," "true theism" or "genuine piety." At one point Hume even drafted an apology to readers of his History of England for the fact that "the Mischiefs which arise from the Abuses of Religion, are so often mentioned, while so little in comparison is said of the salutary Consequences which result from true & genuine piety."3 In what follows I look at a number of the passages where Hume does discuss true religion, in an attempt to ask what makes true religion true.4 In brief, his answer is that the superiority of genuine theism results from its moral qualities rather than its epistemological warrant.5 Unlike other forms of religion, true religion is based on the calm passions rather than the violent ones and as such it alone is able to perform "the proper Office of religion" which is to reinforce and support morality.6 While Hume never wavers from his position that morality does not require any religious or theological commitment, he does feel that at least this one approach to religion has a positive moral contribution to make. John Immerwahr is at the Department of Philosophy, Villanova University, Villanova PA 19085-1699 USA. Email: [email protected] 326 John Immerwahr True religion in Hume's writings Scattered through Hume's writings are a number of references to a minimalistic religion that is immune from the usual Humean critiques. The exempted form of religion is what Gaskin describes as an "attenuated Deism," which includes a conviction of the existence of God as the cause of order in the universe, together with a commitment to a secular human morality.7 Here are a few passages where this form of religion is mentioned: The Natural History of Religion: The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author; and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion. (NHR 309) History of England: In every religion, except the true, [the diligence of the clergy] is highly pernicious, and it has even a natural tendency to pervert the true, by infusing into it a strong mixture of superstition, folly, and delusion. (HE III 135) Dialogues concerning Natural Religion: Philo: All the new discoveries in astronomy, which prove the immense grandeur and magnificence of the works of Nature, are so many additional arguments for a Deity, according to the true system of Theism. (DNR 165) It is, of course, dangerous to take anything Hume says about religion at face value. On the one hand, Hume's religious works, such as his essay on miracles, were a major force in attracting the kind of literary reputation which he so much desired. On the other hand, he lived with the constant possibility of persecution by the ultra-conservative wing of the Scottish church.8 One of his self-protective techniques is to criticize one religious position only from the framework of another. This allows him a certain "deniability" in that he can always say that he was only criticizing a specific form of religion, not religion generally.9 At least some of what he says about true religion can probably be written off as protective coloration. Nonetheless, if we take seriously what Hume says about the "suitable notions of [God's] divine perfections" (DNR 88) we come up with a model of true religion that is compatible with Hume's overall perspective. The justifiability of true theism What makes true religion true? Hume tells... (shrink)

Recent studies have fruitfully examined the intersection between early modern science and visual culture by elucidating the functions of images in shaping and disseminating scientific knowledge. Given its rich archival sources, it is possible to extend this line of research in the case of the Royal Society to an examination of attitudes towards images as artifacts—manufactured objects worth commissioning, collecting, and studying. Drawing on existing scholarship and material from the Royal Society Archives, I discuss Fellows’ interests in prints, drawings, varnishes, (...) colorants, images made out of unusual materials, and methods of identifying the painter from a painting. Knowledge of production processes of images was important to members of the Royal Society, not only as connoisseurs and collectors, but also as those interested in a Baconian mastery of material processes, including a “history of trades.” Their antiquarian interests led to discussion of painters’ styles, and they gradually developed a visual memorial to an institution through portraits and other visual records. (shrink)

This book explains the background and rationale of the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's notorious attack on Isaac Newton's classic theory of white light and colors. Though the merits of Goethe's color science, as advanced in his massive Zur Farbenlehre, have often been acknowledged, it has been almost unanimously proclaimed invalid as physics. How could Goethe have been so mistaken? In his book, Dennis Sepper shows that the condemnation of Goethe's attacks on Newton has been based on erroneous (...) assumptions about the history of Newton's theory and the methods and goals of Goethe's color science. By illuminating the historical background and the experimental, methodological, and philosophical aspects of Goethe's work, the author shows that his color theory is in an important sense genuinely physical and that, as simultaneously poet, scientist, historian, and philosopher, Goethe managed to anticipate important twentieth-century research not only in the history and philosophy of science, but even in color science itself. (shrink)

When we think of getting older, we know we will slowly lose more and more of our memory—and with it, our sense of where we belong and how we connect to others. We might relax a little if we considered the improvements in computer data storage, which may lead us into a future when the limits of our memory become less constricting. In this book, John Scanlan explores the nature of memory and how we have come to live both with (...) and within it, as well as what might come from memory becoming a process as simple as retrieving and reading data. Probing the ways philosophers look at memory, Scanlan reveals that some argue that being human means having the ability to remember, to see oneself as a being in time, with a past and future. At the same time, he shows, our memories can undo our present sense of time and place by presenting us with our past lives. And in a digital age, we are immersed in a vast archive of data that not only colors our everyday experiences, but also supplies us with information on anything we might otherwise have forgotten—breaking down the distinction between the memories of the individual and the collective. Drawing on history, philosophy, and technology, _Memory_ offers an engaging investigation of how we comprehend recollection and how memory, as a phenomenon, continually remakes everyday life. (shrink)

If we were to pose the question of identifying the most characteristically metaphysical of the teachings of the neopositivists, the reply, in our belief, would have to be: their elaboration of the basic concept of their epistemology, the concept of "logical analysis." This concept has some connection both with the history of the understanding of analysis within the bounds of previous philosophical teachings and — in particular — with its treatment in modern symbolic logic. However, the neopositivists have given (...) this concept a distinctive coloration, which merits examination. (shrink)

In recent years, Chinese clothing cultural heritage and knowledge genealogy along the Silk Road have become the research headline attracting public attention. In particular, Kazakh clothing in Northwestern China has become the focus of today's traditional national culture. Kazakh, located at the intersection of the Silk Road, has an important position. The traditional clothing made by various social factors reflects the style and identity integration throughout history in cultures along the Silk Road, taking women's clothing as an example. Kazakh (...) women are good at crafts, which is reflected in their strong grit. They gradually changed their role and traditional values, which has guided their social role. At the same time, it also reflects the awakening of Kazakh women's feminist consciousness to a large extent, and complies with Confucianism, along with the mainstream value of “advanced gender culture” of the world's outstanding civilization achievements. This paper summarizes the form, color, and patterns of Kazakh women's clothing by analyzing the garment, headdress, and footwear in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region Museum, Aksai Kazakh National Museum, and Capital Museum of China. Through the analysis, this paper further probes into the multicultural integration between Kazakh and the regions along the Silk Road and interprets the idea represented by the forms, colors, and patterns in the clothing to promote the inheritance and development of traditional and regional cultures together with ethnic features along the Silk Road. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Vagaries of Exemplarity: Distortion or Dismissal?Michel JeanneretExample is an uncertain looking-glass, all embracing, turning all ways.Montaigne 1Ancients and Moderns: Negotiating CoexistenceDo the Ancients provide the Renaissance with a repertoire of infallible examples? Do they have such absolute authority that their models, whether ethical or aesthetic, retain their relevance in every circumstance? The question is part and parcel of that thinking, which is fundamental to the sixteenth century, on (...) the status of Greco-Roman paradigms in the management of public and private life, or in the methods of science and the arts. Before analyzing two particular responses to classical exemplarity—by Erasmus and Montaigne—we shall set the problem in its general context.Whether lobbying for intense faithfulness to the models or recognizing the need for divergence, whether insisting on continuity or the need for change, on the possibility or impossibility of equaling the masters, everyone in the sixteenth century measured art, knowledge, and moral reflection according to the Greek and Roman norm. Scholars and artists together entered into this exchange on a daily basis and everybody, whatever the extent of their dependence, knew that their work could not be conceived or perceived as anything other than the more or less free modification of a particular vestige of classical heritage. To escape tradition was unthinkable, but to accept it resignedly was absurd. All room for maneuver was therefore in the shifting difference between [End Page 565] old and new, and in the extent of its transformation. 2 It is then predictable, given these conditions, that the transmission of classical examples should be subject to turbulence without, however, undergoing any violent break.The question was even more relevant given that the sense of history, the consciousness of time past being irrevocably lost took on a new resonance now. Recognizing and acknowledging the phenomenon of irreversible development—whether good or bad—counts as one of the most important intellectual acquisitions of the Renaissance. 3 The Middle Ages had been able to maintain the illusion of continuity and, by dressing Antiquity up in the manners and colors of feudal chivalry, had seen itself reflected in it as in a mirror. With the influx of new documents and the perfecting of more rigorous methods of interpretation—the techniques of philology—intellectuals had to acknowledge evident change. The past could no longer be modeled on the present; all imitation would henceforth be witness to the impossibility of any perfect match. At the same time as the classical world was coming to light, it was also getting further away, getting lost. This bereavement sometimes sparked off enough regressive nostalgia to provide matter for many an antiquarian project. In reaction to this loss, most humanists were motivated into salvaging the salvageable by injecting a dose of novelty into the rift created by their awareness of history. The intellectuals of the Renaissance would often have felt as if they were reenacting the famous encounter of the Romans and the Greeks; like the Romans they wanted to be both conquering and conquered, free and faithful, differing and deferring. For them also the antique model will be an ideal simultaneously present and lost, necessary and foreign.Two opposing solutions to this dilemma seemed to offer themselves: on the one hand an unconditional return to the sources minimizing the effects of history, and on the other an exploitation of the eclipses of the past, giving the present a chance to fight it out with the Ancients. We shall sketch out each of these two strategies: both the methods of respectful transmission and those of transformative intervention.Fine-tuned by the humanists, philology was closely linked to the advent of historical consciousness. Since classical civilization had definitively come to an end, the philologist devoted himself to reconstituting and preserving it, in all its original specificity. He removed the layers of interference accumulated over the centuries, reestablished the texts in their authentic versions, maybe even providing commentary on the meaning of the work within its context. Theoretically his intervention stopped there. Acknowledging the difference and [End Page 566] superiority of past authors, he did not touch their works except to restore them to their pristine selves. Soon... (shrink)

At the end of part 3 of Book 1 of his Treatise,1 Hume had given a touchstone by which to judge any account of the human mind, namely that, where other animals appear to display the same cognitive operation that we do, our account applies as well to them as to us.2 He tests his own account of causal inference this way and finds that it comes through with flying colors, since the effects of experience of constant conjunctions on (...) animal minds is just as he has claimed it to be on ours. Some of their actions, such as nest building and sitting on their eggs till they hatch, are "extraordinary instances of sagacity", but on other matters, they, like us, learn from experience, so that the older one. (shrink)

In the seventeenth century, new varieties of flowers were created in Istanbul’s many agricultural spaces. At the same time, new literary genres related to flower breeding appeared: technical “how-to” manuals, which derived from an earlier tradition of agricultural treatises; encyclopedias of the flower varieties created in Istanbul; and biographical dictionaries of Istanbul’s flower breeders. Such texts, which typically bear the designation Şükūfe-nāme (Books on Flowers), attempt to prescribe note-taking habits, agricultural timelines, and observational techniques. Varieties of flowers with various shapes, (...) sizes, and colors are attributed to the work of individual local breeders. This essay explores the role of seeds in this rich textual production in Istanbul. As things that are mobile yet can take root, seeds became objects of study during what was an era of heightened exchange and mobility in seventeenth-century Ottoman Istanbul. In contrast to the view holding that the history of flower seeds unfolded primarily in Ottoman exchanges with Western Europe, the case of Şükūfe-nāme works shows that seeds were technological objects with local histories. (shrink)