Rudolf Arnheim has been known, since the publication of his groundbreaking _Art and Visual Perception_ in 1974, as an authority on the psychological interpretation of the visual arts. Two anniversary volumes celebrate the landmark anniversaries of his works in 2009. In _The Power of the Center_, Arnheim uses a wealth of examples to consider the factors that determine the overall organization of visual form in works of painting, sculpture, and architecture. _The Dynamics of Architectural Form_ explores the unexpected perceptual (...) consequences of architecture with Arnheim's customary clarity and precision. (shrink)

A portrait of scholastic approaches to a qualified disagreement of opinions, focusing on the antagonism of scholastic probabilism and anti-probabilism in the early modern era.

The concept of event provides the essential bridge from the realm of virtuality of the quantum state to real phenomena in space and time. We ask how much we can gather from existing theory about the localization of an event and point out that decoherence and coarse graining—though important—do not suffice for a consistent interpretation without the additional principle of random realization.

Es scheint, als wären wir ein halbes Jahrhundert lang an einem Denker vorbeigegangen, der uns zur Wissens- und Wissenschaftsproblematik mehr zu sagen hatte als mancher, den wir feiern. Gemeint ist der russische Philosoph Semen Ljudvigovic Frank. Auf der Basis seiner Forschungen versucht diese Studie systematisch-kritisch einen Neuansatz, der zu ungewohnten Konsequenzen vor allem in Wissenschaftstheorie, Anthropologie und Religionsphilosophie führt.

Rudolf Arnheim has been known, since the publication of his groundbreaking _Art and Visual Perception_ in 1974, as an authority on the psychologicalinterpretation of the visual arts. Two anniversary volumes celebrate the landmark anniversaries of his works in 2009. In _The Power of the Center_, Arnheim uses a wealth of examples to consider the actors that determine the overall organization of visual form in works of painting, sculpture, and architecture. _The Dynamics of Architectural Form_ explores the unexpected perceptual consequences (...) of architecture with Arnheim's customary clarity and precision. (shrink)

The habit of separating the intuitive from the abstractive functions, as they were called in the Middle Ages, goes far back in our tradition. Descartes, in the sixth Meditation, defined man as "a thing that thinks," to which reasoning came naturally; whereas imagining, the activity of the senses, required a special effort and was in no way necessary to the human nature or essence. The passive ability to receive images of sensory things, said Descartes, would be useless if there did (...) not exist in the mind a further and higher active faculty capable of shaping these images and of correcting the errors that derive from sensory experience. A century later Leibnitz spoke of two levels of clear cognition.1 Reasoning was cognition of the higher degree: it was distinct, that is, it could analyze things into their components. Sensory experience, on the other hand, was cognition of the lower order: it also could be clear but it was confused, in the original Latin sense of the term; that is, all elements fused and mingled together in an indivisible whole. Thus artists, who rely on this inferior faculty, are good judges of works of art but when asked what is wrong with a particular piece that displeases them can only reply that it lacks nescio quid, a certain "I don't know what." · 1. Leibnitz, Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain , bk. 2, chap. 29. Rudolf Arnheim is the author of Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, Toward a Psychology of Art, The Dynamics of Architectural Form, and Visual Thinking. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "On the Nature of Photography" and "A Stricture on Space and Time". (shrink)

While sublimation is not the first word in psychoanalysis, it nevertheless constitutes the final aim of psychoanalytic thought in both its clinical and theoretical orientations. Indeed, if psychoanalysis is primarily a practice whose aim is to alleviate a patient’s sufferings, and if these sufferings are largely the result of a conflict between the exigencies of an individual’s drives and the necessities of a civilized social life, then effective therapeutic action presupposes some knowledge of the way in which such a conflict (...) might be resolved.Yet the concept of sublimation not only exhibits the ultimate horizon, the aim or even the ethical norm of therapeutic action, it also provides a striking outline of the conception which psychoanalytic theory has of the human being. Sublimation cannot be understood without a previous understanding of such key psychoanalytic concepts as the unconscious, drive and desire, sexuality and pleasure, dream and reality. Tying together the ultimate ends of psychoanalytic therapy with the first principles of ‘Freudian metapsychology’, a study of the notion of sublimation invites us not only to take an overall view of psychoanalytic theory, but also to test its coherence.It would not, then, be an exaggeration to say that the value of psychoanalysis as theory and as practice depends essentially on its ability to think sublimation and, more specifically, to think the relation between the economy of a singular libidinal body and the demands of a cultural life accomplished within a symbolic field transcending the individual. (shrink)

Presented are here the crucial presuppositions and building-blocks of a phenomenological philosophy. Inspired by Husserl's critique of scientific objectivism and his claim that the life-world as the world of our experience is the only real world, such a philosophy starts from the breaking of the spell of objective reality as the only and true actuality and the acknowledgment of the appearance-character of all actuality and of objective reality itself. It further requires reinterpretations of the notions of sensitivity, subjectivity and consciousness. (...) Foundational for the sketched idea of phenomenological philosophy is the insight that all conscious life is necessarily determined by interests. (shrink)

The philosopher and historian of culture Wilhelm Dilthey has had a significant and continuing influence on twentieth-century Continental philosophy and in a broad range of scholarly disciplines. This volume is the third to be published in Princeton University Press's projected six-volume series of his most important works. Part One makes available three of his works on hermeneutics and its history: "Schleiermacher's Hermeneutical System in Relation to Earlier Protestant Hermeneutics" ; "On Understanding and Hermeneutics", based on student lecture notes, and the (...) "The Rise of Hermeneutics", which traces the history of hermeneutics back to Hellenistic Greece. All the addenda to this well-known essay are translated here, some for the first time. In them Dilthey articulates three philosophical aporias concerning hermeneutics and projects an ultimate convergence between understanding and explanation. Part Two provides translations of review essays by Dilthey on Buckle's use of statistical history and on Burckhardt's cultural history; an essay "Friedrich Schlosser and the Problem of Universal History;" and a talk recalling his early years as a student of Boeckh, Jakob Grimm, Mommsen, Ranke, and Ritter. It also contains the important historical essay "The Eighteenth Century and the Historical World," in which Dilthey reexamines the Enlightenment to show its significant contributions to the rise of historical consciousness. (shrink)

As practiced, medicine bumps along with the rest of us, doing its level best to cope with the contingencies of this often heartbreaking world. Yet it's a commonplace that much of medicine's self‐image, and a good deal of its cultural heft, come from its connection with the natural sciences and, what's more, from a picture of science that has a touch of the transcendental, highlighting the unmatched rigor of its procedures, its exacting rationality, and the reliability of its results.In contrast, (...) the very idea of “queer” carries with it a little taste of the uncanny. What we're inclined to label queer resists understanding, not so much because it's too complicated, but because it tends to be too slippery to capture neatly in our conceptual nets—that queer ache in your side, for instance, or your partner's queer notion of doing laundry. The outmoded use of “queer,” as a way to refer disparagingly to gay people, carried similar uncanny connotations: the unnatural, the perverse.One might think, then, that the reclamation of “queer” as an umbrella term referring to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender spectrum has a pleasing depth to its irony—not only does it wrench the customary direction of evaluation conveyed by the word from condemnation to celebration, but it also hints that what you find comprehensible depends a good deal on who you are and where you're standing. What from the perspective of many heterosexual and cisgendered people may seem opaque, exotic, threatening—erotic love directed toward someone with the same kind of body you have, lives lived in ways that challenge the immutability of birth‐assigned gender—are to LGBT folk not uncanny at all, but as familiar as breathing.I like this conceit, but alas, it is too simple. It slights the variety of difficulties associated with making sense of queerness that can vex deeply thoughtful people of undoubted good will—as I found out some years ago when I first talked about my efforts to understand my own transgender identity with a ferociously intelligent, highly sophisticated friend. (shrink)

Most available resources for teachers and students in biomedical ethics are based on a notion of medicine and of how to understand and illuminate its ethical problems that is at least two decades old. Meaning and Medicine dramatically expands the repertoire of resources for teachers and students of bioethics. In addition to providing fresh perspectives on both traditional and emerging questions in bioethics, this Reader focuses on questions in social philosophy, epistemology, and metaphysics as they are raised by developments in (...) contemporary health care. A chief aim of this resource is to rekindle interest in seeing health care not solely as a set of practices so problematic as to require ethical analysis by philosophers and other scholars, but as a field whose scrutiny is richly rewarding for the traditional concerns of philosophy. (shrink)

John Donne, poet laureate of the human body, was much troubled by its fate. Scorning Plato's picture of the body as the soul's prison, Donne imagined souls as leaving their bodies reluctantly and as yearning to return to the very one from which they had departed. In poems like “The Ecstasy,” he depicts the union of lovers’ souls, hints at a similar love of souls for bodies, and suggests that it is through the body—“his book”—that the lover comes to know (...) love's spiritual mysteries. John Lantos also thinks bodies important, and that some among their possible fates, anyway, can be troubling. A review of Controversial Bodies: Thoughts on the Public Display of Plastinated Corpses, edited by John D. Lantos. (shrink)