This 4000 word essay was selected for a special issue of 'Image & Narrative' (Issue 18, September 2007), on 'Thinking Pictures', guest edited by Hanneke Grootenboer, author of 'The Rhetoric of Perspective' (University of Chicago Press, 2005). 'Image & Narrative' is a peer-reviewed e-journal on visual narratology, with essays reviewed by at least two members of the editorial board. The essay addresses contemporary arguments on spectatorship within the philosophy of art. It examines different ways by which internal and external spectators (...) negotiate painting's two perspectives: the absent scene represented by the picture's marked surface and the external point of view of a beholder, standing in real space. The essay argues that if the imaginative engagement provided by an internal spectator (see Wollheim) renders the picture plane transparent, so that we might enter the virtual space of the painting, then in paintings integrated into their architectural contexts the surface plays a semantic role in both connecting and separating different realms. If the picture surface disappears for the internal spectator, then for works integrated into their architectural settings its status is heightened and negated as a threshold separating spatiotemporal realms. The essay challenges semiotic accounts of painting. While linguistic derived semiotic accounts negate a spatial engagement, in Hubert Damisch's proposal that painting is a form of thinking, structure emerges from within the loop of the perspective paradigm. The essay argues, however, that if certain paintings 'think', they do so only in the sense that thought permeates a phenomenological whole where perception and imagination merge. The essay is a development of 'A spatiality of situation', published by Art In-sight, Filmwaves magazine (no. 31, 2006), guest edited with Adam Kossoff. A related paper, 'Levels of Reality', was given at the 'Real Things: matter, materiality, representation' conference at the University of York, 5-8 July 2007. (shrink)

This article proposes a locative function as a defining feature of situated art. All artworks orient their beholders, but situated art is characterized by this context-sensitive orientation entering the work’s content. In so doing, it facilitates ‘here’- and ‘now’-thoughts, not only towards the “real” situation encountered (the work’s outer orientation) but to the work’s “virtual” or “bracketed” realm (its inner orientation). These orientations overlap, but do not necessarily align; indeed, situated works often construct a tension through a deliberate miscalibration of (...) these orientations. But what is the mechanism by which such works afford indexical thought towards their worlds? Drawing upon Gareth Evans’s account of demonstrative content, I contend that sensory imagination—conceived in Evans’s terms as an additional conceptual component—plays a necessary role in negotiating demonstrative thought towards two (or more) separate spaces conceived as “here.” This is something the beholder brings to the work. (shrink)

How might the supernatural be represented in those religious paintings that imply a continuity between the virtual space of painting and the real space of the beholder? Such an implied continuity, dependent upon an engagement where the beholder imaginatively realigns her frame of reference to that of the picture, might be thought to threaten a necessary distance demanded of religious works. This paper examines how a number of painters exploited innovative displacement devices, utilizing inherent ambiguities as to where a painting (...) is relative to its beholder through the withholding of perspectival distance and positional cues for a discrete section of the work. (shrink)

This article proposes an essential interrelatedness of Vermeer’s strategies of inclusion and exclusion of an implied beholder. I will argue that such strategies mutually reinforce each other, to the extent that the plausibility of one is arguably dependent upon the possibility of the other. This is evidenced by Vermeer’s subtle manipulations of pictorial space, and the article traces a decisive shift in his familiar use of barriers from those aimed at an external presence to those oriented towards an internal beholder. (...) The feasibility of this interdependence rests upon a theory of imaginative engagement with paintings that can accommodate both an internal beholder and the felt lack of occupancy of the imagined situation’s point of view. I argue that the Dependency Thesis, as set out by M. G. F. Martin, can provide plausibility for both kinds of imaginative engagement with paintings, when sensory imagination is conceived as an instance of imagining seeing. These engagements exploit the notorious emptiness of imagination’s necessarily perspectival point of view. (shrink)

I question the assumption that painting always presents a self-contained world. I use Masaccio’s Trinity to claim that in certain works, integrated into their architectural settings, the internal onlooker is fused with the external spectator. Here the imaginative engagement is situated. I highlight differences afforded internal and external spectators: with the former, the viewer identifies with a spectator who already occupies an unrepresented extension of the ‘virtual’ space; with the latter, the beholder enters that part of the fictive world depicted (...) as being in front of the picture surface, the work thus drawing the ‘real’ space of the spectator into its domain. I claim that this distinction mirrors two distinct types of visualization: where a scene is presented as elsewhere, and where it is juxtaposed with an existing reality. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Might architecture be reconceived as a form of performance? I draw upon Nelson Goodman’s writing on architecture—including his account of architectural notation—and David Davies’s performance theory, which claims that artworks should be considered not as products made by generative performances, but rather as the performances themselves. I tie the exemplification that Goodman identifies as the primary way architectural works ‘mean’ to the role of the architectural ‘score’, recast not as a mere ‘constraint’ but as integral to the creative processes by (...) which architecture establishes an ‘artistic statement’ and a distinctive ‘virtual’ realm. In so doing, I reconcile such a position with an aesthetics of reception, whereby the situated encounter with the physical building is seen as essential to the critical retrieval of any given architectural performance. I test this position against a late work by Sigurd Lewerentz, completed when he was in his eighties, and examine the extraordinary lengths necessitated by his idiosyncratic imperative not to cut any bricks, thereby articulating an artwork every bit as radical as contemporaneous works by conceptual artists. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider Michael Fried’s recent contribution to the debate around the experience of video art, made in relation to the work of Douglas Gordon. Fried speculates that issues of antitheatricality may in fact be key to specifying the medium of video installation. While Fried’s position offers a useful way of framing the relation with the beholder in video art, in a way that pointedly moves beyond tautological notions of activating spectatorship, I question how theatricality is to be (...) thus defined. Referencing the beholding of painting, I distinguish the implicit beholder from the literal spectator, and claim that the distinction has relevance for video art. However, I welcome what seems to be an explicit acknowledgment from Fried that the position of the spectator is a contributory factor in what he terms empathic projection. I argue that video art as a spatial practice offers a distinct mode of reception by positioning the spectator in relation to two-dimensional figurative space to which she is excluded. (shrink)

Intermedial art, as it emerged in the 1960s and 70s, constituted a threat not only to the medium specificity of modernism, but to the artwork as self-contained autonomous object. Both supporters and critics of intermedia drew a contrast between, on the one hand, modernism’s aesthetic engagement with a medium-specific ‘object’, and on the other new non-aesthetic ‘practices’ engaging the ‘literal spectator’ within her own space, such that the space of the gallery is drawn into the situational encounter. In her 2003/12 (...) book Aesthetics of Installation Art Juliana Rebentisch challenges this binary characterization of autonomous/non-autonomous art. She argues that aesthetic autonomy is not something that can be guaranteed by production, but rather is explicable only with reference to the structure of the aesthetic experience. And for Rebentisch, while installation art has not led to fundamentally different conditions of reception, it has led to an ideological rejection of the notion of context-independent art. Aesthetic autonomy is here not abandoned, but rather reconfigured as a dynamic operational with respect to the ethical and political situation where we encounter the artwork. Sympathetic to the broad remit of Rebentisch’s argument, this article investigates the role of the beholder’s share within the context of such situated art. I draw specifically on Wolfgang Iser’s transformation of a negative aesthetics from binaries of negation/affirmation into an enabling structure where the organization of signifiers serve not the designation of a signified object, but rather designate instructions for the production of the signified. This requires work of the situated beholder, who must negotiate access to the work’s content by bringing her orientation into play. Installation art, thus conceived, constitutes a space that while virtualized – removed from functional imperatives – compels acts of imagination/ideation by problematizing our habitual dispositions. (shrink)

This is a peer reviewed chapter in the book The Persistence of Taste: Art, Museums and Everyday Life After Bourdieu, an interdisciplinary analysis of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology. The chapter, ‘The configurational encounter and the problematic of beholding’, is in Part I of the book, entitled ‘Taste and Art’. Engaging the aesthetics of reception as its field of inquiry, the chapter draws upon the literary theorist Wolfgang Iser’s notion of the ‘blank’ as a staged suspension of (...) connectivity, arguing for a reassignment of the aesthetic in terms of a ‘configurational encounter’ that problematizes the work/beholder relation. This constitutes a rare attempt to apply reception aesthetics to contemporary art, a ‘gap’ first highlighted by the art historian Michael Ann Holly in her 2002 article ‘Reciprocity and Reception Theory’, published in A Companion to Art Theory. Utilising concrete examples of practice, the chapter asks whether the shift towards inter- or transmedia art practices, characterising postconceptual art, renders Bourdieu’s characterisation of the ‘autonomous’ artwork superfluous to the contemporary situation, and whether the kinds of judgments of taste associated with the acquisition of cultural capital are no longer relevant. The chapter argues that in revealing material processes, rules, instructions or appropriations – and/or its situated reception and apparatus of display – the configurational encounter problematizes the beholder’s bodily and ideological orientation toward an artwork, revealing our embodied dispositions or ‘habitus’. This counters philosopher Peter Osborne’s suggestion that a change in art’s ‘ontology’ post 1960s renders questions of aesthetics obsolete and reconceives the aesthetic as emerging from the oscillation of spatial and ideational perspective switches resulting from a calculated problematizing of the beholder’s position-taking. (shrink)

Michael Fried’s unexpected contribution to defining the ontological status of video art includes an intriguing claim that projective art is particularly suited to the ‘staging’ of empathic projection. Fried applies Stanley Cavell’s notion of empathic projection, developed in relation to skepticism of ‘other minds’, to moving image installations that not only exploit the beholder’s capacity for empathically projecting, but do so in such a way as to reveal the mechanism at play. In developing this claim, I compare Fried’s key example (...) of Douglas Gordon’s Play Dead; Real Time with Bill Viola and Kira Perov’s Martyrs, a work that likewise elicits an emotional response but without a compensatory foregrounding of the underlying structuring mechanism. However, the comparison suggests that the staging of empathic projection should not be interpreted as an anti-theatrical strategy, but rather as an exemplary manifestation of what I am calling the configurational encounter – a revealing of the artwork’s conditions of existence. I reference Paul Sharits’s Epileptic Seizure Comparison, an important precursor to Gordon’s staging of empathic projection. Finally, I consider Chris Welsby’s landscape films in the light of the capacity of technology to reveal psychological mechanisms of projection, tracing such processes of projection to early childhood experiences of differentiating the human from the non-human. (shrink)

This is a short introduction to the "Installation Art" Symposium published on JAAC, which presents papers by Gemma Argüello Manresa, Eleen Deprez, Ken Wilder, and myself.

The topic of moral repair in the aftermath of breaches of trust and harmdoing has grown in importance within the past few years. In this paper, we present the results of a qualitative study that offers insight into a series of key issues related to offender efforts to repair interpersonal harm in the workplace: What factors motivate offenders to make amends with those they have harmed? In what ways do offenders attempt to make amends? What outcomes emerge from attempts to (...) make amends? Drawing from the findings, we build an inductive model intended to guide future business ethics and management inquiry and research in this area. (shrink)

Concerning challenges with the social inclusion of children with special educational needs, it is imperative to evaluate teacher interventions that promote social inclusion. This study aimed to investigate the effects of cooperative learning intervention on social inclusion. In addition, it was investigated to what degree CL implementation affected the outcomes. Fifty-six teachers of 958 fifth-grade children were randomly selected to intervention and control groups upon recruitment to the study. The intervention teachers received training and coaching in CL and implemented this (...) approach three to four times a week for 15 weeks. The results showed a significant but small effect of CL on children’s social acceptance, but no significant effect on children’s friendships and perceptions of classroom relationships. The degree of CL implementation had effect on children’s social acceptance, but the effect was not consistent across social acceptance measures as a friend or a groupmate. Thus, it can be concluded that CL, conducted with the length and intensity of this study, may not lead to substantial changes in the social inclusion of children with SEN. In future studies, more focus needs to be devoted to teacher implementation of the CL approach. (shrink)

Purpose:This experimental cross-sectional research study examined the emotional reactivity and emotion regulation in preschool-age children who do (CWS) and do not stutter (CWNS) by assessing their psychophysiological response during rest and while viewing pictures from the International Affective Picture System (Lang et al.,2008).Method:Participants were 18 CWS (16 boys and two girls; mean age 4 years, 5 months) and 18 age- and gender-matched CWNS. Participants' psychophysiological responses were measured during two baselines and two picture viewing conditions. Skin conductance level (SCL) and (...) heart rate were measured to assess emotional reactivity. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) was measured to assess emotional regulation. Participants' shyness and executive function were assessed via parent report and considered for their effects on participants' psychophysiological responses.Results:First, CWNS and CWS did not differ in their initial baseline SCL, heart rate, or RSA, but all participants had higher SCL and lower RSA in the second baseline, subsequent to the first challenge condition, compared to the first baseline. Second, during the challenge conditions, CWS did not differ from CWNS in their SCL, but showed a significantly higher heart rate than CWNS. Third, CWS exhibited a significantly lower RSA during the challenge conditions compared to CWNS. Lastly, the temperamental quality of shyness was associated with preschool-age children's SCL, such that participants who were rated higher in shyness had a higher SCL during the challenge conditions. Participants' executive function had a marginally significant effect on the RSA, such that the participants who had higher executive function composite scores exhibited lower RSA during the challenge conditions.Conclusions:Our findings suggest that CWS and CWNS did not differ in their emotional reactivity and emotional regulation abilities at rest. During challenge conditions, however, CWS tended to be more emotionally reactive, as indicated by a higher heart rate, and also employed more emotional regulation, indexed by a greater decrease in RSA, compared to CWNS. Preschool-age children's behavior is largely dominated by reactivity, but there is the emergence of regulation, which can help children adjust to various contextual demands. For CWS who are more emotionally reactive, regulatory skills may be particularly critical to their prognosis and treatment. (shrink)

Marxism came to China along with the Russian Revolution. Many Chinese scholars and students became interested in Marxism, which was interpreted in terms of patriotism and as an anti-imperialist movement. As a leader of the Christian Youth Student Fellowship of YMCA in Shanghai, YT Wu was deeply concerned with the nature of current thought on campus, and sought dialogue between Christianity and materialism. This article analyzes Wu's thought, especially his proposal of a Christian materialism which would reconcile the two. Like (...) Marxist thinkers in the West, Wu was highly critical of the modernity that was also influencing China. Wu finds the key to theology in an interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount, which he understands as a depiction of Christian materialism. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, EarlyView.

(1997). Introduction Domains, Paradigms, and Methods in the Study of Expertise. Thinking & Reasoning: Vol. 3, Expert Thinking, pp. 241-246.

Ever since the publication of his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness, written when he was twenty-three, Ken Wilber has been identified as the most comprehensive philosophical thinker of our times. This introductory sampler, designed to acquaint newcomers with his work, contains brief passages from his most popular books, ranging over a variety of topics, including levels of consciousness, mystical experience, meditation practice, death, the perennial philosophy, and Wilber's integral approach to reality, integrating matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit. Here (...) is Wilber's writing at its most reader-friendly, discussing essential ideas of the world's great psychological, philosophical, and spiritual traditions in language that is lucid, engaging, and inspirational. (shrink)

[Ken Gemes] In some texts Nietzsche vehemently denies the possibility of free will; in others he seems to positively countenance its existence. This paper distinguishes two different notions of free will. Agency free will is intrinsically tied to the question of agency, what constitutes an action as opposed to a mere doing. Deserts free will is intrinsically tied to the question of desert, of who does and does not merit punishment and reward. It is shown that we can render Nietzsche's (...) prima facie conflicting assertions regarding free will compatible by interpreting him as rejecting deserts free will while accepting the possibility of agency free will. It is argued that Nietzsche's advances an original form of compatibilism which takes agency free will to be a rare achievement rather than a natural endowment. /// [Christopher Janaway] This paper aims to distinguish a conception of 'free will' that Nietzsche opposes (that of the pure agent unaffected by contingencies of character and circumstance) and one that he supports. In Human, All Too Human Nietzsche propounds the 'total unfreedom' of the will. But by the time of Beyond Good and Evil and the Genealogy he is more concerned (a) to trace the affective psychological states underlying beliefs in both free will and 'unfree will', (b) to suggest that the will might become free in certain individuals, a matter of having a consistent strong character, self-knowledge, and ability to create values. The paper explores the kind of autonomy required in agents who would 'revalue' existing values. (shrink)

v. 1. The spectrum of consciousness ; No boundary ; Selected essays -- v. 2. The Atman Project ; Up from Eden -- v. 3. A sociable god ; Eye to eye -- v. 4. Integral psychology ; Transformations of consciousness ; Selected essays -- v. 5. Grace and grit : spirituality and healing in the life and death of Treya Killam Wilber. 2nd ed. -- v. 6. Sex, ecology, spirituality : the spirit of evolution. 2nd, rev. ed. -- v. (...) 7. A brief history of everything ; The eye of spirit -- v. 8. The marriage of sense and soul ; One taste. (shrink)

How do we know what an amoeba looks like? How can doctors see the details of our skeletons and internal organs? All of these things are made possible through the innovations of photography. The author provides a primer on the applications of photography to science as she explores the multiple facets of this complex relationship.

Ken Elkins retired as chief photographer of the Anniston Star in 2000, and this selection of his work demonstrates his brilliant eye for finding and capturing images of rural southern lives and landscapes in all their difficulty, candor, and humor. These are unadorned images of a timeless landscape and proud resourceful people, who know well their neighbors, honor their past, and face the tests of daily life with wit and a stoic sense of endurance.

The ethical nature of transformational leadership has been hotly debated. This debate is demonstrated in the range of descriptors that have been used to label transformational leaders including narcissistic, manipulative, and self-centred, but also ethical, just and effective. Therefore, the purpose of the present research was to address this issue directly by assessing the statistical relationship between perceived leader integrity and transformational leadership using the Perceived Leader Integrity Scale (PLIS) and the Multi-Factor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ). In a national sample of (...) 1354 managers a moderate to strong positive relationship was found between perceived integrity and the demonstration of transformational leadership behaviours. A similar relationship was found between perceived integrity and developmental exchange leadership. A systematic leniency bias was identified when respondents rated subordinates vis-à-vis peer ratings. In support of previous findings, perceived integrity was also found to correlate positively with leader and organisational effectiveness measures. (shrink)

McRae, Brown and Elman argue against the view that events are structured as frequently‐occurring sequences of world stimuli. They underline the importance of temporal structure defining event types and advance a more complex temporal structure, which allows for some variance in the component elements.