ABSTRACTAlthough formative of modern value theory, the moral beauty view—which states that moral virtue is beautiful and moral vice is ugly—is now mostly neglected by philosophers. The two contemporary defences of the view mostly capitalize on its intuitive attractiveness, but to little avail: such considerations hardly convince sceptics of what is nowadays a rather unpopular view. Historically, the view was supported by thought experiments; and although these greatly increase its plausibility, they also raise empirical questions, which they leave unanswered. Here, (...) I offer a novel defence of the moral beauty view, capitalizing on empirical evidence and arguing via an inference to the best explanation. (shrink)

There is a tendency in contemporary (analytic) aesthetics to consider- ably restrict the scope of things that can be beautiful or ugly. This peculiarly modern tendency is holding back progress in aesthetics and robbing it of its potential contribution to other domains of inquiry. One view that has suffered neglect as a result of this tendency is the moral beauty view, whereby the moral virtues are beautiful and the moral vices are ugly. This neglect stems from an assumption to the (...) effect that virtues and vices simply cannot be beautiful or ugly. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it develops an account of form, under which, it argues, possession of form suffices for an object’s candidature for beauty and ugliness. Second, it argues that, under the foregoing proposal, the moral beauty view turns out to be a coherent position, and so should be taken seriously in both aesthetics and ethics. (shrink)

The article starts with a brief overview of the kinds of approaches that have been attempted for the presentation of Phenomenology’s view on the emotions. I then pass to Husserl’s unsatisfactory efforts to disclose the intentionality of emotions and their intentional correlation with values. Next, I outline the idea of a new, “normalized phenomenological” approach of emotions and values. Pleasure and pain, then, are first explored as affective feelings . In the cases examined, it is shown that, primordially, pleasure and (...) pain are recordings for our bodily and spiritual states resulting from our confrontation with beings and situations in the world. Delight and distress are, subsequently, approached as the first full-fledged emotive acts that animate or intentionally interpret pleasure and pain in specific ways. The elementary values of agreeableness and disagreeableness appear correspondingly to the latter in relation to the very pleasure or pain and to what has caused them. In other words, agreeable and disagreeable show how what we confront in the world weighs for us, what value it has for the embodied intentional consciousness, for its state and functioning as well as for its existentio-praxial possibilities in the lifeworld. (shrink)

I offer a set of sufficient conditions for beauty, drawing on Parsons and Carlson’s account of ‘functional beauty’. First, I argue that their account is flawed, whilst falling short of...

Ugliness is a neglected topic in contemporary analytic aesthetics. This is regrettable given that this topic is not just genuinely fascinating, but could also illuminate other areas in the field, seeing as ugliness, albeit unexplored, does feature rather prominently in several debates in aesthetics. This paper articulates a ‘deformity-related’ conception of ugliness. Ultimately, I argue that deformity, understood in a certain way, and displeasure, jointly suffice for ugliness. First, I motivate my proposal, by locating a ‘deformity-related’ conception of ugliness in (...) aesthetic tradition, offering examples in support, and rejecting related alternative suggestions. Second, I argue that the proposal boasts considerable merits. Not only does it capture much of what we ordinarily think of as ugly, but it also comprises an objective criterion for ugliness, offers unity and comprehensiveness, and is informative and explanatorily potent. Third, I discuss a number of objections, thereby demonstrating that the proposal withstands reflective scrutiny. (shrink)

Proposes that postmodernist inquiries regarding power and authority have contributed to the adoption by some psychologists of discursive stances that are fundamentally ethical. Two of the most important schools defined by their employment of an ethical logic are feminist psychology and multicultural therapy, both of which offer "ethico-therapeutic" treatment modalities to clients perceived to be suffering from psychological wounds caused by some kind of power inequity. Essential to the success of such therapy for clients is the demand by psychologists for (...) changes not only from clients, but from the general society. The authors conclude that the continued development of ethical discourses within psychology may help to meet many of the challenges to psychological well-being in the postmodern era. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

La publication de trois amphores panathénaïques de la fin du Ve siècle et du début du ive siècle, découvertes à Praisos, fournit l'occasion de remarques concernant les scènes de proclamation des vainqueurs et de remise des prix dans la céramique attique. L'auteur souligne aussi le rôle des joueurs de trompette, met en lumière des exemples de représentation narrative sur des amphores panathénaïques et propose des remarques iconographiques et techniques concernant les vases panathénaïques de cette époque.

Linda Zagzebski recently put forward a new theory, moral exemplarism, that is meant to provide an alternative to theories like consequentialism and deontology, and which proposes to define key moral terms by direct reference to exemplars. The theory’s basic structure is straightforward. A virtuous person is defined as a person like that, where that points to individuals like Leopold Socha, Confucius, Jesus Christ, and so on. A key component of this theory is the function played by the emotions, specifically the (...) emotion of admiration, which helps us identify moral exemplars, inspires our emulation of them, and grounds moral motivation. In other words, admiration tracks persons like that. The aim of this article is to show that unless moral exemplarism recognises and incorporates an aesthetic dimension to morality, as did, for instance, eighteenth-century sentimentalists by recognising the categories of moral beauty and ugliness, the theory suffers important theoretical difficulties, whilst failing to yield some of the theoretical merits that it boasts. To this end, I will cast doubt on the prominent role accorded to the emotion of admiration for morality, arguing that it has to either be qualified as a specific kind of admiration––namely that which takes the beautiful as its object––or be replaced altogether with the affective response to the beautiful, a mark of which is pleasure or delight in the contemplation of an object. In short, an aesthetics of character is necessary in order to properly theorise the affective and motivational components of morality under an exemplarist framework. (shrink)

In this article, we explore whether cross-linguistic differences in grammatical aspect encoding may give rise to differences in memory and cognition. We compared native speakers of two languages that encode aspect differently (English and Swedish) in four tasks that examined verbal descriptions of stimuli, online triads matching, and memory-based triads matching with and without verbal interference. Results showed between-group differences in verbal descriptions and in memory-based triads matching. However, no differences were found in online triads matching and in memory-based triads (...) matching with verbal interference. These findings need to be interpreted in the context of the overall pattern of performance, which indicated that both groups based their similarity judgments on common perceptual characteristics of motion events. These results show for the first time a cross-linguistic difference in memory as a function of differences in grammatical aspect encoding, but they also contribute to the emerging view that language fine tunes rather than shapes perceptual processes that are likely to be universal and unchanging. (shrink)

We’ve all heard people say ‘Beauty is only skin-deep’, or ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’: our culture promulgates a conception of beauty as subjective, superficial, and independent of other values like moral goodness or knowledge and understanding. Yet our taste in beauty affects many aspects of our lives, sometimes playing a decisive––and often detrimental––role in areas as wide-ranging as our identity and self-esteem, our morally salient decisions, and our relationship to the environment. This presents us with a (...) choice: we can either ignore the facts––leaving our conception of beauty unchanged and allowing our taste to influence much in our lives while either not acknowledging such influence, or perhaps seeking to reprimand it; or we can take the power of beauty seriously and seek to harmonise our taste with our values. I argue for the latter option, and propose a way of bringing beauty and taste in line with what matters to us using the notion of functional beauty. Adopting this strategy, I suggest, can have a powerful––and positive––impact on our self-esteem and wellbeing, our relationship to others, as well as our attitudes towards the environment. (shrink)

According to immoralists, some artworks are better aesthetically in virtue of their immorality. A. W. Eaton recently offered a novel defence of this view, seeking to overcome shortcomings in previous accounts, thereby occasioning a reconsideration of immoralism. Yet, as I argue in this paper, Eaton’s attempt is unsuccessful, insofar as it consists partly of inadequately supported claims, and partly—and more interestingly, albeit paradoxically––of covert moralist assumptions that are, eo ipso, incompatible with immoralism. I then turn to a parallel debate in (...) ethics concerning the possibility of admirable immorality, suggesting that a consideration of the state of that debate further supports my argument against immoralism. I close by suggesting some strategies by which immoralists may offer a rejoinder, although I note that their prospects are rather dim, not least because available defences of immoralism and similar positions all seem to share the same flawed pattern. (shrink)

Ideas II has been the source of several issues in the broader phenomenological literature. Some of these issues focus on the particular aims of that work and its place within the system of transcendental constitutive and genetic Phenomenology. Others are concerned with its significance in the development of Husserl’s thought on the possibility and direction of a phenomenological philosophy of natural science (still under discussion), along with a systematic phenomenological grounding of the human sciences. Furthermore, the manuscript of Ideas II (...) seems to have contributed to the formation of Heidegger’s views on the nature and status of Husserl’s Phenomenology and of Phenomenology in general. Thus, an examination of the actual meaning of the analyses in Ideas II would contribute significantly to the understanding of a variety of important issues in phenomenological philosophy. Husserl’s so-called “transcendental turn” between 1905 and 1907 represents the beginning of the path to Ideas II. From 1907 onwards, Husserl attempted a clear and systematic development of his ideas on the transcendental constitution of intentional beings in their—whatever—actuality. This is a task he undertook in the Ideas I, in which he expounds the general core of the new discoveries that allowed him to go beyond the analyses of the Logical Investigations. Having established transcendental subjectivity as the ultimate ground where “the Mothers” accomplish their constitutive work, Husserl became convinced that he had discovered the source from which all Being (Sein) arises. [...] In Ideas II, inanimate nature is presented as comprising the most basic region and as the fundament for the constitution of all the other ontological regions (or regions of Being or Being-regions). But, in Part I of that work (the English translation reads “Section One”), we find Husserl providing an analysis of the constitution of naturething (Naturding).1 What is Husserl’s conception of nature-things there? How do they relate to inanimate beings in general? How do they relate to the things that are supposed to be given in simple visual perception or in simple sense or sensory experience? Are they the accomplishment of a predicative or of a pre-predicative intentionality? Are they the subject matter of natural science, and in what sense— and, if not, why? The text of the Ideas II generates puzzlement and confusion, much of which is reproduced in the relevant literature. (shrink)

Taking my cue from the longest-standing theory of beauty to date, which identified beauty with formal properties such as order, harmony, and proportion, I argue that wellformedness—understood under a tripartite account comprising abstract, categorial, and functional species—is a necessary condition for beauty, which itself comprises three corresponding species. To this end, I offer a new conception of wellformedness along with a clear taxonomy of both beauty and wellformedness. My account reverses the common tendency to treat species of beauty that are (...) independent of considerations of objects’ functions or kinds as paradigmatic and others as derivative, construing instead all three species as interrelated. In doing so, my proposal sheds considerable light on the concept of beauty, provides a measure of objectivity in our understanding thereof, clarifies the conceptual terrain in the philosophy of beauty, and elucidates some central links between beauty, form, and our interests and values. (shrink)

Considerable progress in personality and social psychology has been largely ignored by philosophers, many of whom still remain sceptical concerning whether the conception of character presupposed by virtue theory is descriptively adequate. Here, I employ the five-factor model of personality, currently the consensus view in personality psychology, to respond to a strong reading of the situationist challenge, whereby most people lack dispositions that are both cross-situationally consistent and temporally stable. I show that situationists rely on a false dichotomy between character (...) traits and situations, and that evidence supports the empirical adequacy of the sorts of character traits presupposed by virtue ethics. Additionally, I suggest that the personality traits of the five-factor model are relevant to virtue theory, in so far as they are malleable, morally salient, and seem to structurally parallel Aristotelian virtues and vices. Thus, contra situationism, the five-factor model supports the descriptive adequacy of a virtue-theoretical framework. (shrink)

The evolution of Husserl’s thought did not follow a linear route. Time and again, crucial changes were taking place in its course. The content of fundamental concepts was shifting; successive discoveries of new thematics were happening; incessant expansions of the ever-under-rework teachings to new fields of application were being developed. The evaluation of Husserl’s work in its entirety becomes, thus, an extremely difficult task. The huge bulk of the writings, the multifariousness of their thematics, and the successive reforms and shifts (...) in it make the understanding of even the overall plan wherein the intermediate findings fall very difficult. One thing, though, is certain. In order to overcome all these obstacles to approaching Husserl’s work, we must first deepen our understanding of his method, the phenomenological method of philosophizing. Whatever is said in Husserl’s Phenomenology makes sense and has its value only to the extent that it is a result of ‘the’ phenomenological reduction. (shrink)

Archival art has been discussed so far in spatial terms, as archival installation, emphasizing stability of content and narrativity. Performative archiving is introduced here as intervention practice producing empowered public spheres in the context of a generalized network archival culture. These archiving practices do not produce content, but dispositives that enable the recension of archival data in distributed processes, not unlike oral forms and rituals of transmission of knowledge. Synchronicity of performance, in distant or person-to-person encounters, creates the possibility of (...) contesting co-utterances. Such works experiment on new forms of participation and collective writing, determining the roles and responsibility of subjects during the development of archival time, regulating different levels of interaction among persons, social groups, institutions, practices, thematic areas, media, physical and virtual spaces. They are centrifugal processes that resist the thematization of the archive and its confinement within the discourse of art. Their intervention aims at a different mode of instituting in the world of art, which problematizes the local conditions of social spaces and cultural institutions. They shift our interest away from archival accumulation and preservation, away from the ‘ideology of the trace’, and towards the moment of speech and act that bears the ‘capacity to aspire’. While they are triggered by an intention to actively institute, to organize tactics of action, they insist on the political performance of ‘act and speech’ at the moment when they occur. (shrink)

Phenomenologists are yet another group of philosophers who have also dealt with the problem of values and valuation. What do they have to say about it? Heidegger, to be sure, emphatically warned that we’d better stop approaching serious philosophical problems in terms of valuing and values. It is actually the result of all the efforts to the contrary, he claimed, that has brought nihilism into history and has continued to enhance it along with the accompanying despair. Values and nihilism are (...) in fact the outcome prepared by the dynamics of the traditional metaphysical dichotomy between a positing subject and a posited there-standing object with properties—valuing and values being just one of its latest expressions. Scheler and Hartmann, on the other hand, devoted their lives to the effort of elucidating valuing and values. However, here we will focus on the thoughts that Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological movement, developed regarding this problem. This is necessary if we want to deepen our understanding of the intensity and the breadth of the work that the phenomenologists he inspired developed on the possibility (or impossibility) of a philosophy of values. It is also necessary for an assessment of the real prospects of such a project, which today seems to attract progressively greater attention. To this effect, the structure of the present paper is as follows. In §2, I describe the basic features of the way Husserl carried out phenomenological-philosophical research. I will focus in particular on the meaning of “intentionality,” of “phenomenological method,” and of “intentional constitution.” In §3, I present Husserl’s idea regarding the possibility and meaning of a phenomenological critique of reason in general. The general outline and fundamental orientation of Husserl’s original project for a critique of the axiological and practical reason as well as of his essentialist-normative philosophy of valuing and of values is presented in §4. Section 5 contains an account of Husserl’s approach to emotive phenomena and to value-appearance in the Logical Investigations (1900/01) and in subsequent treatments of the issue along the lines of that original project. In §6, I present the key issue and the key problem in Husserl’s essentialist-normative Axiology. Finally, in §7 I sum up the conclusions and make some further critical remarks. (shrink)

It has already been remarked that Heidegger’s early Kriegsnotsemester of 1919 plays an important role in the development of his project toward a phenomenological Fundamental Ontology, which would elucidate the meaning of “Being as such.” However, both the reason why this happens and why it eventually fails appear to have been poorly understood. In this paper, I initially present the meaning of Heideggers effort, in that ‘semester,’ to build philosophy as a genuinely “primordial science.” Then, I explain the sense in (...) which the neo-Kantian philosophy of values became a crucial constituent of his inspiration. In this direction, Heidegger’s thought experiment with the “African aboriginal” is examined and placed at the right position within his overall search for the “primal something” qua critical “formal indication” in the search and pheno-menologization of “Being as such.” Finally, I present three serious difficulties that make this early attempt by Heidegger phenomenologically flawed and probably lead him to the new orientations of Being and Time. (shrink)

In the vast majority of the literature on Kant, the prevailing view is that his conception of analyticity and analytic truths suffers from obscurities and inconsistencies that render it, in the end, unintelligible. In the present paper, I try (i) to underline the meaning of these conceptions of Kant’s, (ii) to bring to the fore a crucial hidden presupposition in his account of analytic truths, and (iii) to present an interpretation that restores an intelligible account of Kantian analyticity and analytic (...) truth. Contrary to the ‘received’ view, I claim that definition is the royal way to Kant’s analyticity and analytic truth, and that the latter cannot be understood apart from a very specific kind of appeal to the intuition of the object falling under the concept being defined. I call this elusive and fragile act “simple intuition,” pointing thus to the medieval notion of apprehensio simplex (and the long history behind it). Then I try to show how this is done with reference to the most suitable species of concepts, the mathematical, and by analogy (and with expectable limitations) to the empirical ones. Of course, the present attempt to reconstruct an intelligible Kantian account of analyticity and analytic truths does not also mean that I endorse it as successful and final in the context of philosophy’s effort to clarify the possibility and kinds of a priori truths. (shrink)

Philosophical aesthetics has recently been expanding its purview—with exciting work on everyday aesthetics, somaesthetics, gustatory aesthetics, and the aesthetics of imperceptibilia like mathematics and human character—reclaiming territory that was lost during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the discipline begun concentrating almost exclusively on the philosophy of art and restricted the aesthetic realm to the distally perceptible. Yet there remains considerable reluctance towards acknowledging the aesthetic character of many of these objects. This raises an important question—partly made salient again by (...) the ongoing expansion of the aesthetic domain, and partly by the fact that many still seem resistant to this aesthetic diversification—which aestheticians seem to avoid: what, if anything, constrains the scope of beauty or the aesthetic? I argue that form, construed as comprising a degree, however minimal, of experienceable complexity, is necessary and sufficient for an object's candidature for the possession of aesthetic properties. Such a condition serves to discriminate between attempts to expand the scope of the aesthetic that are legitimate and those that are not. If correct, my view suggests that the aesthetic realm, though not limitless, is very broad indeed—but this, I think, is as it should be. (shrink)

For Adorno and Horkheimer, rationalism – in fact, a technical rationalism which becomes a rationalism of domination– failed to provide the path to the liberation of man and society. The aftermath, half education of the masses, is not an incomplete education or lack of education, but substantially hostility towards culture and genuine education, decay and involvement of education in individual considerations and benefits, with the contribution of mass dissemination of culture and art. Half education is the spread of culture and (...) art without a living relationship with the consciousness of people, without consequences for their lives. Adorno clarifies that in this context, the relationship between life and production reduces the former into the transitory epiphenomenon of the latter, as life and individual existence are not known in their immediacy, they do not connect directly, but they rather become part of the teaching for of material production. For Ortega y Gasset, a new type of human being has been born, the massman, who becomes isolated, trapped in the irrational feeling that nothing else, apart from his own private welfare, matters, but he also continues to demand as if it were his natural right to do so. Nonetheless, and although he remains an individualist, he does not have real access to the gifts of individuality. Marcuse understands that, ultimately, there is a conflict between production and profit on the one hand and self-determination on the other. As technology spreads its dominance over nature, man conquers man through mass control, diffused through work and culture. In this way, technological rationalism becomes ultimately political rationalism. (shrink)

Thalēs -- Anaximandros -- Anaximenēs -- Hērakleitos -- Anaxagoras -- Archelaos -- Diogenēs Apollōniatēs -- Leukippos -- Dēmokritos.

Religious legislation against heretics was an innovation in the Late Roman Empire and its enforcement involved great difficulties. The provincial governors who, except in the period of the persecution of Christians, had tolerated religious diversity, were to implement exclusion laws against pagans and heretical groups. This paper analyzes the form of interaction between bishops, emperors and judges in the issuing and enforcement of the laws against heretics, as well as casting light on the relevance of episcopal intervention as a method (...) of informing and shaping the imperial will. (shrink)

Kuhn uses the distinction between `(simple) seeing', and `seeing as' in order to claim that among competing paradigms there cannot be found any middle (experiential) ground; nothing `same' can be located behind such radically different paradigm-worlds. He claims that scientists do not see a common something as this thing at one time and as that thing at another. Each time scientists simply see what they see. To claim the contrary is to claim that scientists arrive at their paradigmatic experiences of (...) the world due to an interpretation of something `same' beyond the paradigms,and Kuhn rejects this. The question of whether a common ground can be found behind two or more different paradigmatic world-views relates to many issues in philosophy of science and in general epistemology (e.g., realism-idealism, relativism-objectivism, etc.). As a first approach to these, in this paper I examine the presuppositions of Kuhn's claim, its consistency in the exposition, and its overall viability. I conclude that the actual way in which Kuhn refers to the historical examples he examines undermines his explicit thesis. But also the paradox he himself recognizes in his thought that `though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientists afterward works in a different world' can be solved only if we start to think seriously about the necessity and nature of a `same in the different' behind the competing paradigmatic world-experiences. (shrink)

Two seemingly opposing philosophies, Plato’s and Heidegger’s, are brought together by reading the philosophy of politics in the Republic through the existential-analytic lenses of Being and Time and also by using the former in order to explore the philosophico-political potential of the latter. Plato’s thematic of errancy (αμαρτία) is shown to interlock harmoniously with Ηeidegger’s thematic of the fall (Verfall). This provides a single, penetrating interpretation of how philosophy thinks humans are supposed to respond to the predicament of their original (...) condition (painfulness connected with injustice, meaninglessness, etc.). It turns out that in these otherwise antipodean versions of philosophizing, the view emerges, according to which the original difficulty can be fully overcome. The question whether the aforementioned predicament can be actually fully overcome (or rather not) however, would form the basis for a novel phenomenology of the political. (shrink)

Husserl and Cassirer stand, according to their own self-understanding, as key 20th century figures in the cultivation of Enlightenment’s principles and views on humanity, culture, and history. In a word, they both understand European culture and history as a story of progress (§ 1). As I see it, central in a culture and its dynamics is its system of values, and a grounded understanding of the issue of progress presupposes an adequate theory of the standing or constitution as well as (...) of the givenness and transvaluation of values. Neither Husserl nor Cassirer, however, actually advanced any such theory. We are still in need of one in order to account for culture’s formation and dynamics in history. Next, I briefly review Husserl’s and Cassirer’s available problematic views on values (§ 2). Then, in § 3, I examine some of the central problems in the traditional approaches to culture and to values. In § 4, I appeal to Köhler’s very interesting Gestalt theoretical approach to values and pinpoint some of its problems. Next, in § 5, I suggest how we could start the research from below, from the level of the organism, which could eventually shed some new light on the problem of value constitution and givenness. Finally, in § 6, I attempt to sketch an explanation for how we can use this new approach to values in order to understand actual cultural formation and its historicity, in a way that goes further than the whiggish philosophy of history. (shrink)

This is the inaugural volume of the Plato Dialogue Project: it offers the first collective study of the Philebus - a high point of philosophical ethics, containing some of Plato's most sophisticated discussions of human happiness. The contributors work through the text, discussing pleasure, knowledge, philosophical method, and the human good.

Resumen El propósito de este trabajo de carácter exploratorio, basado en los planteamientos de la pragmática sociocultural, es investigar las relaciones que se establecen entre la ironía verbal y las actividades de imagen en los intercambios entre políticos y ciudadanos en Twitter. A través del análisis de dos corpus de mensajes publicados en esta red, tratamos de ahondar en el estudio de la ironía y en la modalidad y direccionalidad de los efectos sociales que esta puede tener sobre la imagen (...) y el rol social de los interactuantes. Asimismo, analizamos los efectos del comportamiento irónico en relación con las categorías de afiliación y autonomía, y de afiliación exacerbada y refractariedad. Los resultados muestran que, en este contexto político-ideológico, la ironía es multidireccional y tiene dos tipos de efectos: negativo o positivo, en función de la afiliación del hablante hacia un determinado grupo ideológico, así como de su rol social en el microblog. (shrink)