The extensive community use of complementary medicine can no longer be overlooked in the practice of hospital medicine. Protocols need to be developed and implemented so that health professionals can deal with the issues surrounding the use of CM. Policy development has generally focussed on the supply of CM in hospital but another approach, which is based on consideration of the ethical and legal context, is presented here. Such an approach demands clarification of institutional policy for individuals who are competent (...) and those who are incapable of self-administration or non-competent. (shrink)

Sir Peter Strawson’s ‘Freedom and Resentment’ was a landmark in the philosophical understanding of the free will problem. Building upon it, I attempt to defend a novel position, which purports to provide, in outline, the next step forward. The position presented is based on the descriptively central and normatively crucial role of illusion in the issue of free will. Illusion, I claim, is the vital but neglected key to the free will problem. The proposed position, which may be called (...) ‘Illusionism’, is shown to follow both from the strengths and from the weaknesses of Strawson’s position. (shrink)

A critical note on Peter Lamarque and Nigel Walter’s ‘The Application of Narrative to the Conservation of Historic Buildings’.

Context plays a crucial role in our propositional attitude reporting practices. A belief-reporting sentence which seems true in one context may seem false in another, as Kripke showed us in ‘A Puzzle About Belief.’ To put it a bit sloppily, may seem true when we are discussing Peter's beliefs regarding Paderewski-the-pianist and false when we are discussing his beliefs regarding Paderewski-the-statesman. Peter believes that Paderewski is a fine musician.A number of recent theorists have taken this contextual variation very (...) seriously, and attempted to provide accounts which accommodate it in one way or another. Salmon and Soames accommodate the variation in pragmatics, arguing that our intuitions about attitude reporting often result from mistaking pragmatic implicatures for semantic content. Other theorists have offered semantic accounts which yield contextually varying truth conditions for belief reporting sentences. I have a great deal of sympathy for the project: I think the contextually varying intuitions do exist, and that they need to be accommodated, in one way or another. I am not so sure, however, that this can be done. (shrink)

The adoption question asks whether there are logical rules that cannot be adopted if one does not already infer in accordance with them. Several philosophers, most famously Saul Kripke and Romina Padró, agree that there are such rules. Accordingly, they agree that there is an adoption problem. However, there is disagreement over which rules are unadoptable. In particular, while most agree that if there is an adoption problem, modus ponens and universal instantiation are in its scope, many would exclude (...) adjunction from the list. In this paper, I argue that adjunction is in the scope of the adoption problem. Then I show that the most straightforward counterargument against adjunction being in the scope of the problem, which tries to reformulate the adjunction rule into a more palatable one, does not work. (shrink)

Saul Kripke's thesis that ordinary proper names are rigid designators is supported by widely shared intuitions about the occurrence of names in ordinary modal contexts. By those intuitions names are scopeless with respect to the modal expressions. That is, sentences in a pair like (a) Aristotle might have been fond of dogs, (b) Concerning Aristotle, it is true that he might have been fond of dogs will have the same truth value. The same does not in general hold for (...) definite descriptions. If one, like Kripke, accounts for this difference by means of the intensions of the names and the descriptions, the conclusion is that names do not in general have the same intension as any normal, identifying description. However, this difference can be accounted for alternatively by appeal to the semantics of the modal expressions. On the account we suggest, dubbed 'relational modality', simple singular terms, like proper names, contribute to modal contexts simply by their actual world reference, not by their descriptive content. That account turns out to be fully equivalent with the rigidity account when it comes to truth of modal and non-modal sentence (with respect to the actual world), and hence supports the same basic intuitions. Here we present the relational modality account and compare it with others, in particular Kripke's own. (shrink)

A response to Saul Fisher’s critical note on Peter Lamarque and Nigel Walter’s ‘The Application of Narrative to the Conservation of Historic Buildings’.

It seems undeniable that we have many items of modal knowledge. Tradition has it that conceivability is the evidence for possibility that gets us to this modal knowledge. But "conceive" cannot mean think, understand, entertain, suppose, or find believable, because none of these are suited to serve as evidence for possibility, and if it is none of these, it is mysterious what conceivability is, and why it is evidence for possibility. I argue that sensory imagination is the most promising candidate (...) for a source of modal evidence. A theory of imaginative content is developed in Chapter One, one which allows what seems undeniable: that we do imagine the impossible. This raises a challenge to explain why, in the face of our ability to imagine the impossible, we should accept imagination as modal evidence. The predominant response, developed by Saul Kripke, limits the scope of imagination to preserve the link between imagination and what is possible. In Chapter Two I argue that the Kripkean theory is best thought of as an error theory: when we take ourselves to imagine, e.g., water without H2O, or Mark Twain and Sam Clemens in a fistfight, we are mistaken. I articulate and defend an alternative modal epistemology, one that exploits the crucial difference between assigned and basic content of imagining. The evidential value of some imaginings is undermined by independent considerations about the connection between assigned content and ignorance. Instances in which we imagine the impossible are all cases where these independent considerations give us reason to doubt the imagining's value as modal evidence. The conclusions about assigned content are applied in Chapter Three to the first-person imaginings thought to be crucial in philosophy of mind: the imaginability of zombies, and the imaginability of being a disembodied soul. It is argued that such imaginings offer no evidence favoring dualism over materialism. Finally, alternatives to imagination as the source for modal evidence are discussed in Chapter Four. I explore both direct intuition and a priori-based accounts, and conclude that neither offers a genuine alternative to the imagination. (shrink)

Drawing upon Saul Kripke’s discussion of rules, James F. Ross deduces the immateriality of thinking from the metaphysical determinacy of thinking and the metaphysical indeterminacy of any physical process. It has been objected that Ross does not establish the metaphysical indeterminacy of what function a physical process realizes, that Ross does not show the incoherence of a highly deflationary view of our talk about thinking, and that Ross opens up an unbridgeable gulf between sui generis thinking and behavior. Edward (...) Feser has recently defended Ross’s argument from these objections. The present paper explains why Ross’s argument remains vulnerable to all three objections. (shrink)

Peter G. Sobol - Pierre Gassendi's Philosophy and Science: Atomism for Empiricists - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.1 161-162 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Peter G. Sobol Mcfarland, Wisconsin Saul Fisher. Pierre Gassendi's Philosophy and Science: Atomism for Empiricists. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History 131. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2005. Pp. xxviii + 436. Cloth, $172.50. In 1971, Richard S. Westfall described Pierre Gassendi as "the original scissors (...) and paste man": an irrepressibly eclectic compiler whose Syntagma Philosophicum was published only after his death "when the author was finally beyond the possibility of adding and patching." Westfall here echoes Voltaire and Alexandre Koyré who, as quoted in Saul Fisher's.. (shrink)

This paper deals with the historical and philosophical background of the introduction of the notion of branching time in philosophical logic as it is revealed in the hitherto unpublished mail-correspondence between Saul Kripke and A.N. Prior in the late 1950s. The paper reveals that the idea was first suggested by Saul Kripke in a letter to A.N. Prior, dated September 3, 1958, and it is shown how the elaboration of the idea in the course of the correspondence was (...) intimately intervowen with considerations of how to represent indeterminism and of the adequacy of tensed logic in light of special relativity. The correspondence underpins the point that Prior's later development of branching time may be understood as a crucial part of his attempt at the formulating a conceptual framework integrating basic human notions of time and free choice. (shrink)

Arthur Norman Prior (1914-69) was a logician and philosopher from New Zealand who contributed crucially to the development of ‘non-standard’ logics, especially of the modal variety. His greatest achievement was the invention of modern temporal logic, worked out in close connection with modal logic. However, his work in logic had a much broader scope. He was also the founder of hybrid logic, and he made important contributions to deontic logic, modal logic, the theory of quantification, the nature of propositions and (...) the history of logic. In addition, he discussed questions of ethics, free will, and general theology. Prior’s philosophical works comprise about 200 titles. His earliest articles center on philosophical theology and historical studies of Scottish Reformed Theology. This led on to the publication of his first influential work on ethics: Logic and The Basis of Ethics (1949). With the invention of tense-logic in the early 1950s, his focus shifted to investigations into the syntax of tempo-modal logic leading to his seminal Time and Modality (1957), a volume derived from his John Locke Lectures in Oxford in 1956. Furthermore Prior, together with the Irish mathematician and logician C.A. Meredith (1904-76), made important early contributions to the semantics of possible worlds. Prior’s tense-logic provided a strong conceptual framework for problems pertaining to the philosophy of time. In Time and Modality, Prior discussed the philosophical implications of Ruth Barcan’s famous formulae for tense-logic, and in the 1960s he worked on the notion of the present. The most persistent problem running through Prior’s work is his study of the questions surrounding human freedom and divine foreknowledge, and more general philosophical problems emerging from this classical theological question. His thorough analysis of this problem, with the conceptual tools of tense-logic, received a crucial impetus from his correspondence with the young Saul Kripke, when the latter suggested the semantic tool of branching time to Prior. Prior’s development of two solutions based on branching time for the problem of future contingency, the Peircean and the Ockham solution, was most thoroughly developed in Past, Present and Future (1967), the most important work published by Prior. Characteristically for Prior’s methodological approach, the development of these two solutions were at the same time a development of two new systems of tense logic, and vice versa. One of Prior’s significant contributions to logic was his work on world propositions and instant propositions. In the course of developing these notions he also made one of the earliest formulations of hybrid logic. In Papers on Time and Tense (1968), he presented this idea in a more detailed manner in the context of his four grades of tense-logical involvement. (shrink)

In his famous letter to A. N. Prior dated 3 September 1958, Saul Kripke suggested the use of branching time in temporal logic. In this paper, however, it is argued that Prior worked with an idea close to the notion of branching time (‘the big Y’) already the year before he received Kripke’s letter. It is likely that Prior’s findings based on this early study can explain why Prior so quickly accepted the idea of branching time when he received (...) Kripke’s letter. (shrink)

One way to express the most persistent part of the mind-body problem is to say that there is an “explanatory gap” between the physical and the mental. The gap is not usually taken to apply to all of the mental, but to subjective experience, the mind’s “qualitative” features, or what is now referred to as “phenomenal consciousness.” The “gap” formulation is due to Joseph Levine. He acknowledged the appeal of intuitions of separability between physical facts, of any kind we can (...) envisage, and this aspect of our mental lives. Subjective experience seems not to be the sort of thing that is just the physical under another guise. The immediate focus of Levine’s discussion was a family of arguments due to Saul Kripke. Kripke argued that some influential claims of mind-body identity could not be, as materialists claimed, contingent. If these identities are real then they are necessary. But we can clearly conceive that the mental and physical could come apart—an intuition that “identity theorists” conceded. Given that the identity is necessarily present if present at all, from the fact it is not necessary we can see it is absent. Kripke concluded that physicalism is false. Levine wanted to resist this. (shrink)

Saul Kripke’s thesis that ordinary proper names are rigid designators is supported by widely shared intuitions about the occurrence of names in ordinary modal contexts. By those intuitions names are scopeless with respect to the modal expressions. That is, sentences in a pair like (a) Aristotle might have been fond of dogs (b) Concerning Aristotle, it is true that he might have been fond of dogs will have the same truth value. The same does not in general hold for (...) definite descriptions. If we, like Kripke, account for this difference by means of the intensions of names and descriptions, we have to conclude that names do not in general have the same intension as any normal, identifying description. However, the difference in scope behavior between names and description can be accounted for alternatively by appeal to the semantics of the modal expressions. On the account we suggest, dubbed ‘relational modality’, simple singular terms, like proper names, contribute to modal contexts simply by their actual world reference, not by their (standard) intension. The relational modality account turns out to be fully equivalent with the rigidity account when it comes to truth of modal and non-modal sentences (with respect to the actual world), and hence supports the same basic intuitions. Given an alternative definition of consequence for relational modality, and a restriction to models with reflexive accessibility relations and non-empty world-bound domains, relational modality also turns out to be model theoretically equivalent with rigidity semantics with respect to logical consequence. Here we introduce the semantics, give the truth definition for relational modality models, and prove the equivalence results. (shrink)

Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Carlos Almaraz, Robert Arneson, John Baldessari, Lewis Baltz, Robert Bechtle, Jeff Brouws, Laurie Brown, Angela Buenning, Darlene Campbell, Mark Campbell, Gary Carlos, Fandra Chang, Stephane Couturier, Robert Dawson, Joe Deal, Richard Diebenkorn, John Divola, Beth Yarnelle Edwards, Kota Ezawa, William A. Garnett, Jeff Gillette, Joe Goode, Todd Hido, David Hockney, Salomon Huerta, Robert Isaacs, Thomas Lawson, Jean Lowe, Alex MacLean, Richard Meisinger, Jr., Richard Misrach, Rick Monzon, Barrie Mottishaw, Martin Mull, Deborah Oropallo, Bill Owens, Rondal Partridge, (...) John Register, Ed Ruscha, Peter Saul, Mary Snowden, Joel Sternfeld, Larry Sultan, Rudy Vanderlans, Camilo Jose Vergara, Henry Wessel, Amir Zaki. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue against certain criticisms of Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s sceptical argument and sceptical solution, made especially by Baker and Hacker, McGinn, and McDowell. I will show that their interpretation of Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s view is misplaced. According to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s sceptical argument, there is no fact as to what someone means by her words. For Kripke, this conclusion, combined with Classical Realist view of meaning, leads to the Wittgensteinian paradox, according to which there is no such thing as (...) meaning anything by any word. Wittgenstein presents this paradox in paragraph 201 of the Philosophical Investigations. As Kripke reads Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein is in agreement with his sceptic on the sceptical conclusion of the sceptical argument, that is, that there is no fact about meaning, and builds his sceptical solution on an endorsement of that. McDowell, McGinn, and others have objected that Kripke has failed to properly understand Wittgenstein’s main remarks in 201, that is, that the paradox is the result of a misunderstanding of the ordinary notion of meaning. Wittgenstein does not accept such a sceptical conclusion. I will use the distinction George Wilson draws between two different conclusions of the sceptical argument and show that Kripke has respected all of the remarks that Wittgenstein has put in section 201. (shrink)

In this account of his mature thinking, Peter Marshall develops a dynamic and organic philosophy for the coming millennium which he calls liberation ecology. Liberation ecology is holistic in viewing the world as a harmonious whole and all beings and things as interwoven threads in nature's web. It is intuitive in recognizing intuition as the main source of knowledge and the imagination as the great organ of morality. It is ecological in seeing human beings as fellow voyagers with other (...) species in the magnificent odyssey of evolution. Above all, it is libertarian in seeking to release humanity, society and nature from their existing burdens so that they can unfurl and realize together their full potential. Exploring our strengths and possibilities, this book presents the ideas and values needed to ride the winds of change at this crucial stage in our development and in the history of the world. It provides a new philosophy for a new era, an uplifting and inspired vision which combines ancient wisdom and modern insights, reason and feeling, science and poetry, myth and the marvellous. It offers a guide for the future on how to rive in the most fulfilling way and how to create a genuinely free and sustainable society in harmony with nature. (shrink)

Beer, Peter Review(s) of: Meaning and History in Systematic Theology: Essays in Honor of Robert Doran SJ, by John D. Dadosky, ed. (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2009), pp.518.

Preface: What this strange book is about -- Conversation 1: where's the formula? -- Conversation 2: brain and mind -- Conversation 3: logic and intuition -- Conversation 4: how to open the 'third eye' -- Conversation 5: matter and spirit -- Conversation 6: the data -- Conversation 7: synchronicity -- Conversation 8: waves -- Conversation 9: holism -- Conversation 10: the music of the spheres -- Conversation 11: cultural consequences -- Conversation 12: water magic.

Ciceros Philosophie vermittelte im Rom der ausgehenden Republik vielfältige innovative Impulse - insbesondere zu Fragen der Bildung und Religion. Im vorliegenden Band werden besonders Aspekte griechischer und römischer Bildung in Ciceros Werk aus verschiedenen altertumswissenschaftlichen Perspektiven beleuchtet"--Page 4 of cover.

Although universally recognised as one of the greatest of modern philosophers, Wittgenstein's work in aesthetics has been unjustly neglected. This is the first book exclusively devoted to Wittgenstein's aesthetics, exploring the themes developed by Wittgenstein in his own writing on aesthetics as well as the implications of Wittgenstein's wider philosophical views for understanding central issues in aesthetics. Drawing together original contributions from leading international scholars, this book will be an important addition to studies of Wittgenstein's thought, but its discussion of (...) issues in literature, music and performing art, and criticism will also be of interest to many students of literary and cultural studies. Exploring three key themes - the capacity of the arts to illuminate our lives; the nature of the particular responses involved in understanding and appreciating works of art; the role of theory and principle in artistic and critical practice - the contributors address issues raised by contemporary philosophers of art, and seek to make connections between Wittgenstein's work and that of other significant philosophies of art in the Western tradition. Displaying the best practice of modern philosophical writing - clarity, cogency, respect for but not blind obedience to common sense, argument illustrated with detailed examples, rejection of speculation and pretension - this book demonstrates how philosophy can make a valuable contribution to understanding the arts. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 98 Heft: 2 Seiten: 729-731.

Chapter One INTRODUCTION The Question of Freedom Freedom - personal, political, religious or economic - is a pervasive ideal in our societies. ...

Over 20 years ago the Programme Director of Greenpeace UK identified the primary challenge facing the modern environmental movement as that of moving beyond the “struggle for proof” to generating effective environmental action. There is a mass of widely-accepted evidence to support environmentalist claims, but effective environmental action is rare, both at governmental and at grass-roots levels. Arguably, the malaise is less a political one than an ontological one. We “know” that environmental problems are “real”, but we fail to grasp (...) them as happening here, to us. It is as if they unfolded in a “media-only reality” (Rose, 1993). This ontological malaise can be understood along Heideggerian lines as a form of world-alienation. Alienation is often understood, following Marx, as estrangement from our true human nature, consequent on interpreting ourselves as mere resources. On Heidegger’s view, however, self and world are inextricably linked. Conscious beings are not trapped inside their own heads, never to bridge the gap to the world outside. Rather, consciousness just is the intentional reaching out to things. Heidegger’s view of the self-world relation implies a modified concept of alienation. Our alienated condition stems as much from interpreting the world around us as a mere resource as it does from interpreting ourselves as mere resources. We may understand the natural systems on which our lives depend in far more detail than our grandparents did; but where those systems are understood as brute agglomerations of objects the resulting knowledge is alienated and alienating. Our very “theory of the real” serves to make the earth unreal for us. This, I argue, is the true import of Heidegger’s concern with the world “conceived and grasped as picture”. It also illuminates his remark in the 1966 Der Spiegel interview: “It is no longer upon an Earth that man lives today.”. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 141-144. This January, while preparing a new course, Robert Seydel was struck and killed by an unexpected heart attack. He was a critically under-appreciated artist and one of the most beloved and admired professors at Hampshire College. At the time of his passing, Seydel was on the brink of a major artistic and career milestone. His Book of Ruth was being prepared for publication by Siglio Press. His publisher describes the book as: “an alchemical assemblage that composes (...) the life of his alter ego, Ruth Greisman— spinster, Sunday painter, and friend to Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp. Through collages, drawings, and journal entries from Ruth’s imagined life, Seydel invokes her interior world in novelistic rhythms.” This convergence of his professional triumph with the tragedy of his death makes now a particularly appropriate time to think about Robert Seydel and his work. This feature contains a selection of excerpts from Book of Ruth (courtesy of Siglio Press) alongside a pair of texts remembering him and giving critical and biographical insights into his art and his person. These texts, from a former student and a colleague respectively, were originally prepared for Seydel's memorial at Hampshire College and have since been revised for publication in continent. For more information on Book of Ruth, please visit the book's page at the Siglio Press website. —Ben Segal draughty R. * Lauren van Haaften-Schick 2011 “The most apt way to order Smithson's library is with the conjunction 'and'; science and religion; modernism and mass culture; what is present and what is missing.” —Alexander Alberro, 248 Robert Seydel's classes on collage and collecting immersed his students in a curious world of cabinets, oddities, exhaustive archives and obscure histories, explored always with critical rigor and a sincere eye for wonder. His office was a compendium of the ancient, mythic, potential and unworldy, where seemingly unrelated references were endlessly pulled, piled and fused in an ecstatic dance of hyper-annotation. The small room and all its contents overflowed with notes tucked in every margin and corner. Books coated the walls like a switchboard, anxious and humming, waiting for infinite links to be activated. William Blake's books of Job and Urizen summoned Greek mythology and the animal as metaphor, leading to 19th century cryptozoology and the cave paintings at Lascaux, Gaston Bachelard's description of the bird in his garden and Robert Rauschenberg's Canyon . Tracking archetypes and following tangential threads, new revelations and ancient narratives were compiled and ordered to form a new text, a bibliography as assemblage, portrait and poem. Robert's library—one of his many collections—is a portrait, an “artifact, collage of time, a token and remnant” (Seydel, 2007) He is humming with it still. The imagination of this room—of Robert—breathes through the pages of Book of Ruth, as every decision and detail unfolds to a cosmos. Allegory, invention, personal and art histories are entangled and leveled, rendering lived, perceived and absorbed experiences indistinguishable. Anonymous scraps discovered on the street or studio floor, careful clippings and drawn figures are chosen and animated through serendipitous destruction and whimsical, delicate positioning. A precise vocabulary of characters and terms erupts and collapses as personas and passers-by wave and whisper, “Every figure reveals aspects of the total form, which is open and green” (Seydel, 2007). The initials R.S. repeat, a nod to Robert's true family tree and further complicating identification. Robt, Robert's sometimes alter-ego, appears in myriad forms as a trickster “half-wit,” mercurial and skittish, or soft and worn thin. Saul is a solemn tinkerer, parsing the world and sometimes blind. Ruth, the speaker of the book, records and translates all, her voice wavering between poetic verse and a cryptic half-speech as complex as it is sparse. The rhythm of frayed edges sets time - the weight of the world and the lightness of paper. Robert wrote of his process, “Material is essential; scuffings carry history, which wanders throughout” (Seydel, 2007). Collectors, assemblers, sway between careful movements of selection and placement as they pull from the found world, mediating calculated and unconscious association to form a lexicon of gestures, symbols and allusion, the “artifacts of a life... the refuse and rejecta of days” (Seydel, 2007). These assembled fragments shift and chatter, at home in their homelessness, actors performing in their own lives, populating an invented world of similar orphans. Such accumulated, severed parts carry the injury of their cutting and retain the evidence of their source, binding loss to creation in a symbiosis of trauma and repair. Mourning and remembrance are deeply embedded in the histories and acts of such practices. Grievance, acceptance, and the fragility of life are conveyed in the 18th century allegorical arrangements of fetal specimens by Frederik Ruysch. A certain melancholy reverence colors Joseph Cornell's intimately tactile assemblages rendering the universe tangible in miniature, or made in devotion to unrequited loves. Preserved in stasis, these ghosts and idols are kept in a purgatory where fact and fiction, past and present are irrelevant distinctions. Catalogued and contained, the subject of loss is transferred to an artifact. Every thread, scrap and letter may be glued, gathered and placed in a museum, a tomb, a box, a page, ripe and open for possession. Holding on to grief and reveling in disrepair, we opt to be haunted. Forever unbalanced and in flux, the sublime of collage is its resolve to irresolution. For Robert, “Art, as creation and as sign of primary Imagination, is not objects but a state, a kind of fluid” (Seydel, 2007) Reflecting on his work, life, and death, I am drawn to my library and the myriad titles acquired through his inspiration. There is Daniel Spoerri's An Anecdoted Topography of Chance , Susan Stewart's On Longing , various Borges, Barthes, Perec, and especially Life: A User's Manual , which concludes that the perfect puzzle will have no solution. I think of the drawers of miscellaneous swallowed objects at the Mutter Museum, Ray Johnson coding the every day in riddles, Wallace Berman twisting tongues, and Susan Hiller laying every detail to bear. Collectors and makers working in endless cycles of observation, ingestion and display. Every gesture informs and is defined by others, every space is shaped by that which surrounds and fills it, the knot has an inner logic, the gigantic is not so different from the miniature, there is a world in every detail, and “All art is collage” (Seydel, 2011) These thoughts have molded my life, my art, and all the minutia that keep the two so profoundly intertwined; There is no difference between life and what we do with our time. “I write my life. I make me up.” What a gift to share this secret way of knowing the world, and to leave this knowledge for us to do with what we please. “Art begins in admiration” (Seydel, 2011) Lauren van Haaften-Schick is a curator, writer and artist based in New York. Upcoming curatorial projects include "Cancelled" at the Center for Book Arts, and "The Spirit of the Signal" at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York. Recent activities include the workshops "Market, Alternative" and "Alternative Art Economies" at Trade School and Momenta Art, and the e-flux Time/Store, New York. She is the founding director of two arts spaces in Northampton, MA and Philadelphia, PA. She received a BA in Art History and Studio Art from Hampshire college in 2006. Sura Levine on Robert Seydel If early on in his time at Hampshire College I was officially his “mentor,” Robert Seydel quickly became one of my great teachers. Over the years we talked about everything, from art, music, collage, and poetry, to campus politics, this latter far too often. It was always a sublime pleasure, if all too rarely done, to enter his apartment to look at his work in progress, to peruse his bookshelves where, inevitably, there were always new treats to examine. And, while he was working on his Book of Ruth , I was given the opportunity over the course of many meals at the Korean and other restaurants, to talk with him about image and poem ordering. To see how he thought through each comma, each juxtaposition across the gutters of the Book, was to watch a brilliant curator at work. Each day, I walk past his wonderful collaged portrait of Ruth, purchased, after much haggling, as a birthday present, a couple of years ago. And each day, I think how lucky I am to have known Robert as he produced this magnum opus. One of my greatest pleasures in 24 years at the College was to teach “The Collector” with Robert. One of my greatest regrets is that the magic we created together in the classroom will not, and cannot, be duplicated. Its various incarnations, its utter intelligence and magic, were all so deeply Robert’s. His was a mind that put poetry, philosophy, history of science, and history together with art, and art together with music. His intellect and eye were unparalleled. He introduced us to so many artists. He shared his fascination with the cabinets of curiosity of Aldrovandi, of Seba, and Peter the Great’s collection of fetal anomalies, as well as the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. Robert knew them all and so many more. He was a walking encyclopedia, his home a great archive. Arcane knowledge, perhaps, but oh so important for another of Robert’s heroes, the mid-20th century Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers, whose name he invariably mispronounced as “Broadthayers.” In speaking his name, Robert would always look in my direction in a panic, and then he go on and maul it. I absolutely loved his various mispronunciations of French names and terms! “The Collector” was always filled with talented young artists, art historians, philosophers and writers who all came to understand the wondrous obsessions of the figure of the collector. Students in this course created dazzling projects each term. He always moved while looking and speaking. He read deeply, and commented on everyone’s work with wonderful generosity. Robert always found something to praise even in the least developed of projects. Robert inspired and mentored all of his students into making work that far exceeded their expectations—and ours. For those of you who were lucky enough to have been touched by or to have had an evaluation written by Robert, savor it, keep it, reread it, and share it. He loved working with you all; it is somehow fitting that he died while prepping yet another new course. Robert, it’s almost impossible to speak of you in the past tense, even though you left us a month ago. No doubt, if you knew about our gatherings and celebrations of you, you would be embarrassed that we are making a fuss over you; you always placed the focus on others rather than on yourself. This trait is exactly why so many people miss you now. We’re here to love you publicly as we all did privately for the eleven years you were among us. Robert, my very dear friend, you were an extraordinary artist—you were my brother of choice. My heart broke when yours did. I miss you profoundly. —Sura Levine, February 26, 2011 Sura Levine is a professor of art history at Hampshire College. Her field of specialty is 19th century Belgian and French art, particularly realism and impressionism. Having worked in museums for a number of years both prior to coming to the College, and, as guest curator and co-author of exhibition catalogues, she became particularly interested in the history of museum and trends in collecting. It was because of their shared interests that she and Robert Seydel developed their course, The Collector, which they co-taught for many years. (shrink)

Examining a variety of texts ranging from the Ancient Near East to the nineteenth century, this book deals with the inevitable presence of both fact and fiction ...