The following reflections are intended as a preliminary to a more extended and in-depth series of case studies, focused analyses of actual artworks, and the issues arising from their particularity within what will be described here as a Heideggerian post-aesthetic aesthetics. The essay is not written from the perspective of a professional or academic philosopher or of a practising artist (even though I am one), neither fields of which have sufficiently engaged with the existential and aesthetic predicament sketched out below. (...) Thus, the attraction of both Heidegger and Blanchot is not just related to their well-known discussions of inbetween-ness, but, more essentially, to the peculiarly in-between location of their own thought and trajectory of thinking: Heidegger from "out of" philosophy "drawn" towards art; Blanchot from within the space ofliterature towards the exteriority of ontological thinking. The intention is to identify similarities and differences in their thought, but this is only perceived as relevant to the extent that it allows an initial reassessment of a de-subjectivized existential and aesthetic mode of thinking that has been largely abandoned by academic philosophy and art practice alike (albeit for very different reasons). If nothing else, the hope is that a different voice might be heard in the clamorous exchange between philosopher and artists, one that is sensitive to the complex predicament of the artist in a post-Heidegerrian world, and which above all remains faithful to the project of the artist and the artwork in the face of the philosophical valorization of "Art". Las siguientes reflexiones se presentan como preliminares a una serie de estudios de caso mas extensos y profundos, analisis focalizados de obras de artes reales, y los temas que surgen de sus particularidades dentro de lo que se describira aqui como una estetica heideggeriana post-estetica. El ensayo no esta escrito desde la perspectiva de un filosofo profesional o academico ni de un artista operante (aunque yo lo soy), ninguno de cuyos campos se ha comprometido suficientemente con el dilema bosquejado mas adelante. Asi pues, la atraccion de Heidegger y Blanchot no solo tiene que ver con sus bien conocidas discusiones sobre la inbetween-ness, sino, mas esencialmente, con la ubicacion particularmente in-between de su propio pensamiento y trayectoria del pensar: Heidegger desde "fuera de" la filosofia "sacado" hacia el arte; Blanchot desde dentro del espacio de la literatura hacia la exterioridad del pensar ontologico. La intencion es identificar similitudes y diferencias en su pensamiento, pero esto solo es percibido como relevante en la medida en que permite una reevaluacion de un modo de pensar existencial y estetico des-subjetivado, que ha sido ampliamente abando-nado por la filosofia academica y la practica del arte (aunque por razones distintas). Sin mas pretensiones, la esperanza es que se pueda escuchar una voz diferente en el intercambio clamoroso entre el filosofo y los artistas; voz que es sensible al complejo dilema del artista en un mundo post-heideggeriano, y que sobre todo permanece fiel al proyecto del artista y a la obra de arte frente a la valorizacion filosofica del "Arte". (shrink)

In a period of high definition, photorealism, and postmodern deconstruction the experience of art making, its theory, and its art itself have drifted away from some understandable connection to the process of art creation as a connection to some psychologically deep inspiration. Abstract art as conceived and practiced by Wassily Kandinsky, which included in his later stage beyond representation or abstractions of representation jumbled gatherings of biomorphs with no connection to representation may be compared to the White Shaman rock (...) art panel with its gathering of seemingly abstract geometric images as well as transformed representational imagery, much like the related Fate Bell Shelter rock art and Three Rivers Petroglyphs. Kandinsky would claim his expressed abstractions are prompted by his psyche. The artist or artists of the White Shaman panel of the lower Pecos River operated under transformed consciousness and Shamanism. Kandinsky’s “unconscious, spontaneous expression” and “expression... of inner feeling” may be compared to the probably hallucinogenic connection to the other world in the White Shaman panel. Such connections and abstractions and transformations could be related to the “total theater” of Diaghilev and the contemporary rave dances in which consciousness is heightened by sensory overload. The cybernetic capacity of the computer age has worked in another direction and even “objectified” consciousness itself. (shrink)

A philosophical anthropology of solitude is presented through the art, literature and music of and around Modernism, Postmodernism. It is presented as an insight into both Modernism and Postmodernism. These movements portrayed and contributed to the lonely alienated worlds of the early-to-mid twentieth century. Culture and society together developed forms of loneliness that were centred on individualist, alienated, guilt and shame, to which a response may be appropriately silent or humorous, living or dead, and sometimes a lewd masochism. Even those (...) who rejected Modernism and Postmodernism help describe – either positively or apophatically – the distinctive forms of lonely solitude in those movements. (shrink)

Like all discourses on the ‘other’, Bataille’s heterology is faced with the problem of conceptualizing the heterogeneous (the other of thought, reason and language), while preserving its alterity, its fundamental resistance to conceptual thought. This paper interrogates the potential parallels between this aspect of Bataille’s notion and some of the prevalent concerns of contemporary and traditional aesthetics. The argument is based on the idea that theories of the aesthetic, akin to Bataille’s heterology, are always inevitably confronted with the paradoxical task (...) of conceptually framing an experience that, per definition, resists philosophical or political appropriation. In relation to this my paper traces a development in Bataille’s thinking from an initial rejection of art and the aesthetic to their later reconfiguration as manifestations of sovereignty. Here I show how Bataille’s notion of sovereign art presents an implicit attempt to overcome some of the aporias to have surfaced in his earlier account of heterology. This development in Bataille’s thought is analysed in the context of his changing relationship with Surrealism. (shrink)

In What Is Philosophy? we find philosophy devised as that power of thinking and creating which, in a division of labour with science and art, creates the concept. This division of labour points to the free interplay of Reason, Understanding and Imagination in Kant's Critique of Judgement and enables us to affirm, without obliterating the differences in kind, the non-hierarchical relationship between the three forms of thought that is asserted by Deleuze and Guattari. However, as powers of thinking and creating, (...) philosophy, science and art do not inscribe themselves in a transcendental subject. Rather, Deleuze and Guattari conceive of them, following Spinoza's ‘creating nature’, as powers that express themselves in an attribute in which every thinking subject participates. (shrink)

Over the past few decades debates in the field of conservation have called into question the suppositions underpinning contemporary restoration theory and practice. Restorers seem to base their choices on implicit ideas about the authenticity, identity and value of works of art, ideas that need to undergo a more systematic theoretical evaluation. I begin by focusing on the question of whether authenticity is fully established in the process of the creation of an artwork: namely, at its initial point of (...) existence. One’s interpretation of what makes an artwork authentic will indeed greatly influence how to go about preserving or restoring it. If the answer to the question is affirmative, one commits to the idea that authenticity is determined by the work’s creator; thus, it is considered a given, exempt from historical flux. If the answer is negative, one takes authenticity to be a combination of initial creation and temporal change; in this sense the work is considered a ‘historical being’. These two conceptions, in turn, come from opposite ontological perspectives on the identity of artworks. Neither of them, however, proves to be truly convincing. I argue that from the point of view of conservation theory we need to consider artworks neither like physical objects nor like living beings, but rather like social objects in Searle’s sense. To this extent, safeguarding authenticity in conservation goes hand in hand with preserving a work’s continuity through enhancing what I call its structural and aesthetic readability. Restoration is thus in its essence a critical act of interpretation which has more to do with the various meanings of an artwork than with its hypothetical original conditions. Rather than just being a win-or-lose affair, authenticity turns out to be the result of a complex set of mutually interacting variables. (shrink)

This article considers Sarah Kofman's interpretation of Molière's Dom Juan in ‘The art of not paying one's debts’. It argues that this neglected text addresses important questions of moral debt and...

In recent years, inter-medial studies have attracted increasing attention in arts theory. The notion of 'inter-mediality' presupposes that each established art - such as theatre, painting, and cinema - indicates the existence of a particular medium, which preserves its distinct features in translations from art to art and, especially, in its combinations with others in single works. Nonetheless, this field of research is presupposed already in the traditional studies of 'ekphrasis', which focus on the verbal accounts of nonverbal works of (...) art; and in Wagner's notion of Gesamtkuntswerk. This renewed interest generated new fields of research, such as (a) the likelihood of the arts reflecting common grounds; (b) the necessity of a shared metalanguage; (b) the possibility of inter-medial translation; and (d) the inter-medial coexistence within a single work of art, without hindering the reading, interpreting and experiencing abilities of receivers. In honor of Eli Rozik, Ph.D., professor emeritus, former head of the Department of Theatre Studies, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Tel Aviv University, this collection provides overviews of all these theoretical issues, and tackles the contemporary practical questions that arise from attempts to transgress the boundaries between the established disciplines of arts studies. Considering first the theoretical aspects of inter-art, inter-mediality, and nonverbal literacy, Exploring the Common Grounds of the Arts goes on to discuss by means of performance analysis; dialogues between the arts within a single work; and correspondences between visual and auditory stimuli in musical contexts. It concludes with a discussion of practical examples of inter-mediality in religious representations, official processions, and public performances. (shrink)

Engaging with Hans-Georg Gadamer and Edith Stein, this article argues that art offers us a glimpse of the interiority of both the artist and the community of connoisseurs who share in a love of art. By tarrying with the other in the artwork, the other becomes enmeshed in the meaning of that work and herself becomes a facet of how art is meaningful and world-making. This process does not claim to know the entirety of the other. Rather, the other, like (...) the artwork, is seen only in part. A trace of the other’s interiority affirms our suspicion of connection to the other but always maintains her mystery and autonomy beyond our totalizing conceptualization. Né d’une collaboration entre Hans-Georg Gadamer et Edith Stein, cet article soutient que l’art nous offre un aperçu authentique de l’intériorité de l’artiste et de la communauté de connaisseurs qui partagent leur amour de l’art. En s’attardant avec l’autre dans l’art, l’autre commence à s’emmêler sur le sens de cet art et il devient eux-mêmes une facette de la richesse de l’art et de la trans-formation du monde. Ce processus ne prétend pas connaître l’autre dans son intégralité. Au contraire, l’autre, tout comme l’art, est vu seulement en partie. Des réminiscences de l’intériorité de l’autre confirment notre suspicion de connexion à l’autre mais préservent toujours son mystère et son autonomie au-delà de notre conceptualisation totalisante. (shrink)

With the enactment of the Wildemess Act, wildemess solitude has become a major issue in the assessment and designation of wildemess areas. Interpreting this solitude criterion to mean loneliness, federal agencies have judged wildlands according to their “isolation potential.” This perspective is highly inaccurate given the etymological derivation of solitude-“soul-mood.” Wildemess solitude is in fact a communion with wild nature. Philosophically it reflects a wildemess episteme and land aesthetic grounded in organicism. The natural aesthetic categories of Sole-the rare or unique (...) -and the Sublime properly reflect the intent of wildemess solitude in cognitive experience. The result of this experience is an “at-one-ment” with wild nature affirming religious rapture and ecological egalitarianism. Consequently, federal agencies ought to employ wildemess review criteria grounded in natural aesthetic theory. (shrink)

This qualitative research study explores the cultural identity and artistic creation of traditional architecture in the Wuyuan area within the context of China's new rural construction. The research focuses on the reinvention of tradition and its impact on Wuyuan's architectural art, highlighting the conflict and change between traditional culture and modernization. By maintaining the traditional look, Wuyuan's architectural art has become representative of China's rural landscape, embodying rich historical and cultural heritage. The study aims to provide insights on ways (...) to inherit cultural identity in a balanced and sustainable manner under the principle of reinvention of tradition. Through an analysis of architectural art in Wuyuan, the research emphasizes the importance of traditional creations in the context of new rural construction, offering value to all involved parties. The findings of the study contribute to a better understanding of the preservation and innovation of traditional architectural styles, providing theoretical references for rural development policies in the context of China's new rural construction. (shrink)

It is often asserted that Nietzsche's proposal that "there is no truth" is indebted to his views on aesthetics. That is, it is argued both that Nietzsche perceived art as exclusive of truth, and that he viewed the whole of existence as artistic in this sense. In this paper I attempt to supplement this argument by excavating the sense of truth that is available in Nietzsche's thought concerning art. "Dionysian truth" is not a property of objects which represent the world. (...) Rather, it arises in acts of artistic creation. I hope, here, to present a view of truth which is compatible with Nietzsche's attempt to understand the world as a process of conflicting forces rather than a collection of subjects and objects. ;The first chapter is concerned with Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, in which music is offered as an example of Dionysian truth. Music, in this work, enables us to overcome our sense of ourselves as isolated self-consciousnesses, an experience which engenders artistic creativity. The notion of Dionysian truth, however, is not fully disassociated, in The Birth of Tragedy, from the view that music pictures or represents the "world will." ;In the second chapter I argue that Nietzsche's commitment to the Dionysian is apparent in his unique understanding of physiology. The authority of the ego is undermined by exhibiting it as an epiphenomenon of the more fundamental physiological drives. I argue that such an understanding subverts the claim that Nietzsche values art as a means of sublimating the passions, as well as the claim that Nietzsche ultimately identifies truth with that which serves our own self-preservation. ;The third chapter demonstrates how a specific artistic practice,Expressionist Painting, understands itself in Dionysian terms, and suggests reasons why a Dionysian view of art may not offer itself as a means for the evaluation of artworks. Finally, I attempt to show how the understanding of power which is structured by a Dionysian perspective may help us to overcome some of Nietzsche's negative and reactionary suggestions that the powerful are, or should be, cruel and manipulative towards others. (shrink)

We owe our first graphic experiences to Neanderthal Man, who introduced to the cultural baggage of the genus Homo two metaphorical behaviors that are fundamental in terms of their innovation: one concerns the preservation of the bodies of the dead through burial, the other is the making of signs, which in this stage of evolution do not yet represent recognizable subjects but only lines. This attests to the creation of a graphical tool that materializes and makes visible that which (...) exists in the mind, something that is other than itself, thus providing signs of a communication that unfortunately today we cannot define semantically. We cannot say whether these linear marks are a sort of «brand» or if they are carriers of meanings, however, we can observe that, with the Neanderthals, a conceptual, projectual plan exists that enables the measurement of space and the configuration of a regular rhythm, creating an original condition of movement and an association of potentially dynamic lines. (shrink)

We can see personhood as a philosophical and historical struggle between positive and negative forms of ‘being at one’, a struggle most succinctly described by Hölderlin, a central figure in Romanticism and in German idealism through his close friendship and collaboration with Schelling and Hegel. For Hölderlin, ‘Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the mania / Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth and one way’. This paper is an exploration of (...) a range of forms of aloneness, linked by the family resemblance of a number of such ‘solitude’ terms (loneliness, solitude, solitary, aloneness, lonesome, individual, atonement) to the idea of ‘oneness’. ‘Being at one’ was distinctively articulated in the Romantic period, in philosophy as well as in the arts. Based on this distinctiveness, this article presents an historical account of the developing philosophical anthropology of being at one, dividing the development of ‘being at one’ between the pre-Romantic, Romantic, and post-Romantic eras. (shrink)

Because of their basic level, textbooks show the assumptions and biases of art historians more clearly than does advanced, and therefore more restricted, scholarship. Textbooks are the rock, as it were, within which lie the strata of historical method. They bury, and so preserve for the good and ill of students , not so much individual historical data, which can be picked up or rejected rather easily, as those things which give the appearance of intellectual grasp to historical writing: its (...) generalizations, its interpretations, its sweeping perspectives. The successive editions of Helen Gardner's Art through the Ages can tell us much about the assumptions that have pervaded art historical education in America over the past century. The first edition, published fifty years ago last year, is worth looking at in some detail, because for all its seminal importance in the teaching of art history it is by now little more than a deposit in library stacks. A mere glance will show that it is not ours. Indeed, the distance we have gone since then is exactly measured by the gaucheries it displays. It is half the length of modern surveys, and it makes no pretense either to completeness or to objectivity. It is arranged by period and style until we reach the Renaissance , at which point, in keeping with the interest of an earlier age in national characteristics, each country receives its due chapter. The Italian Renaissance, as befits the central position of the primitives in American taste then, has four chapters to itself. Thereafter, except for a final, brief section on contemporary art, each national school is taken to the period of its decline. This, of course, will vary. France is taken through Cézanne; England through the Pre-Raphaelites and William Morris; Spain, thanks to Goya, into the early nineteenth century; and Dutch and Flemish art only through the seventeenth century, but without Bosch or Bruegel. As for Germany, though the chapter heading promises us "From the Gothic Age to the Nineteenth Century," in fact it is on Durer and Holbein. What fulfills the promise of the title appears in its entirety thus: "After the death of these two masters, largely on account of exhaustion from wars there was very little production, until the second great manifestation of the German people came in the music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."1 No pretense here at dutiful compilation; high points, after all, are high points. · 1. Helen Gardner, Art through the Ages: An Introduction to Its History and Significance , p. 345. Marcel Franciscono is the author of Walter Gropius and the Creation of the Bauhaus in Weimar. He is associate professor of art history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art in Nature and Schools:Nils-UdoYoung Imm Kang Song (bio)IntroductionThe arts are an integral part of our culture, and they invite us to investigate, express ideas, and create aesthetically pleasing works. Of interest to educators is clear scholarship that links the arts to cognitive and intellectual development. The processes of creating art and viewing and interpreting art promote cognitive and skill development.1 Elliot Eisner, who has written extensively on this (...) topic, argues that "Artistic activity is a form of inquiry that depends on qualitative forms of intelligence."2 Eisner suggests that children can use art to question and reflect on sensory information from their daily lives, and from this reflection develop insight, awareness, and critical thinking skills.3 Expanding on this idea, many scholars suggest that sensory perceptions promote learning through reflection, thus affirming the link between sensory perception and cognitive processing.4 Greene also posits that the arts provide a reflective type of learning, in which students learn "new ways of seeing, hearing, feeling and moving."5 This expressiveness develops from the creative nature of art and its ability to encourage students to "[learn] to learn."6This article focuses on how the arts heighten cognitive experience through the use of natural materials and sites and the engagement with the natural world. The arts expose viewers to new ways of seeing, feeling, and thinking about nature; this can lead to greater awareness of and motivation to act on behalf of nature. Arts-based experiences "encourage contemplative, reflective thought, which can extend environmental awareness, an essential basis for environmental understanding."7 Sharpening sensory and perceptive [End Page 96] skills through observation and creation can offer children insights into the mystery and metaphor of nature.8 Such a powerful experience often fosters aesthetic sensitivity and can also motivate students to act. To assist in this process, teachers can offer a context of factual information, creative idea exploration, interdisciplinary tools, and a sense of social awareness.9Eisner notes that simple natural components, such as those encountered in viewing or creating ecological art, can be enormously powerful when considered from an aesthetic perspective.10 He writes,A tree, for example, can be viewed as an investment in the value of one's property, as a species of flora, as a source of shade, or an expressive form that provides a certain quality of experience when one looks through its leaves just before sunset. The tree's aesthetic features become salient when we choose to perceive the expressive features of the tree.11Greene reinforces the idea that aesthetic understanding can be deeply engaging to learners and can highlight things that had previously gone unnoticed, thus providing new insights in the life of the viewer.12 Viewers experience new connections, identify new patterns, and think in entirely different ways that break from a more constricted viewpoint. It is this kind of fresh thinking that is needed in the field of environmental education, and which ecological art may in fact provide. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Nils-Udo, Circle of Calumet Bamboo, Calumet bamboo; 1990, Reunion, Indian Ocean. Photo by Nils-Udo.[End Page 97]In light of these ideas about aesthetics, ecology, and education, several questions are raised. How can an aesthetic experience with the works of an environmental artist lead children to take in more through their senses and to apply such radical openness in any subject that comes up for them? What really makes ecological artworks unique, not only as aesthetic experiences but as learning experiences? How can ecological art in educational settings inform, inspire, and engage students around environmental issues? In this article, I examine the artworks of Nils-Udo, a German artist, by looking at his art-making processes, intentions, and themes. Using illustrations of several of his major works situated in various natural environments, I consider how these artworks could initiate discussions and foster connections to classrooms while providing elementary and middle school students with the opportunities to view and ponder existing artworks, create their own natural artworks, and heighten their ecological awareness.The ArtistIn order to more deeply understand Nils-Udo's life and work, I interviewed... (shrink)

L’ultime œuvre d’art, c’est la planète. John Cage Le paradoxe contenu dans l’affirmation de Cage selon laquelle « l’ultime œuvre d’art, c’est la planète », tient à ce qu’elle assimile deux choses ordinairement tenues pour distinctes : l’œuvre d’art d’une part, et la nature de l’autre, qui s’opposent comme le produit s’oppose au phénomène, la création à la nécessité, l’objet d’une intention au résultat d’un processus aveugle. Comme l’écrivait Aristote, l’art crée des choses « dont le principe...

In this paper, however, I will argue that Kant’s restriction of interest to natural rather than artistic beauty should not be taken as a basic aspect of his aesthetic theory, and thus need not affect our assessment of that theory’s more basic claims. First, I will suggest that Kant’s theory of intellectual interest is not really necessary to explain what we ordinarily mean by an interest in beautiful objects—a desire to preserve them for repeated experience, a motivation for our efforts (...) to see them and our willingness to pay for them, and the like—and that the exclusion of art from a special moral interest thus does not leave our general interest in its objects unexplained. But, I will also argue, Kant’s own theory of art and our response to it actually allows beauties of art to have just as much claim to this intellectual interest as do objects of natural beauty. Kant’s differentiation of natural and artistic beauty with regard to moral interest turns on an ambiguity in the concept of nature itself, as well as on Kant’s assumptions that art, unlike nature, is a product of an intention to produce pleasure through determinately conceived objects, and that our response to art, again unlike that to nature, must be connected to a recognition of its intentionality. But Kant’s own theory of artistic creation—his theory of genius—undermines the force of the first of these assumptions, for it teaches us that art, while indeed the product of intentional activity, also calls upon the use of a natural talent that deserves our admiration as much as any other gift of nature. In other words, Kant’s own view of the complexity of artistic intentions forbids the simple differentiation of art and nature that he employs in §42, and while Kant’s theory of aesthetic response does not clearly preclude the view that our response to art must take into account the intentions with which art is produced, it also hardly entails this view. This may have been obscured from Kant by the indeterminacy of his own key concept of the freedom of the imagination, but, I will suggest, this freedom might actually have to be extended to the case of art if it is to work even in Kant’s paradigmatic case of natural beauty. Thus, on Kant’s own account the beauties of nature and of art are far more intimately connected, both in their own ontological status and in our response to them, than his theory of intellectual interest concedes. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to observe the evolution and evaluate the 'realness' and authenticity in Anatomy Art, an art form I define as one which incorporates accurate anatomical representations of the human body with artistic expression. I examine the art of 17th century wax anatomical models, the preservations of Frederik Ruysch, and Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds plastinates, giving consideration to authenticity of both body and art. I give extra consideration to the works of Body Worlds since the (...) exhibit creator believes he has created anatomical specimens with more educational value and bodily authenticity than ever before. Ultimately, I argue that von Hagens fails to offer Anatomy Art 'real human bodies,' and that the lack of bodily authenticity of his plastinates results in his creations being less pedagogic than he claims. (shrink)

The paper is devoted to the analysis of theurgic aesthetics in relation to the concept of utopia that initiates a different understanding of the philosophy of the Russian diaspora representatives through the prism of utopian theurgy of beauty and art. Introducing the idea of utopian theurgy of beauty and art the authors emphasize its meaningful, axiological component. The authors interpret the utopian theurgy of beauty and art in the Russian diaspora philosophy of the first third of the 20th century as (...) an aesthetically mystical experience of the imperfection of human earthly existence that causes a gap with socio-historical reality with direct co-existence of the creative individual with God who is considered to be the true Beauty, the cosmic Harmony, and the universal Love. The meaning of the utopian theurgy of beauty and art is in achieving the goal of possible union with the deity, as well as in affirming persons actions as a co-creator of the world process. The utopian theurgy of beauty and art of an optimistic nature, associated with the light of hope directed to the transformation of earthly existence is reflected in N.S. Arsenyev's idea of spiritual joy achievable in the mystical experience of "longing for Beauty in God"; in B.P. Vysheslavtsev's reflections about the artistic and creative embodiment of eros as thirst, the birth of the God-Man in beauty, as well as in I.A. Ilyin's philosophy, in which, despite disappointments in social changes, the faith in art as the Mystery, as "a service and a joy" always following sacred traditions is preserved. The aesthetic and pessimistic foundations of utopian theurgy are realized in the aesthetic views of V.V. Weidle, according to which art has lost its orientation to high objective spirituality; in S.L. Frank's idea of unrealized Beauty as a dream of the ultimate transformation of the world that is opposed by the bitter reality of the split of being; as well as in the philosophy of N.A. Berdyaev, who postulates the tragedy of earthly existence caused by the unattainability of the full realization of the cosmic Beauty that considers as the goal of the world process. N.O. Lossky's metaphysics, intuitionism and value system are of particular importance, as the utopian theurgy of beauty and art consists in the following: there always remains a share of the absolute truth in art that is the world of illusions and artists imagination; the absolute value of beauty universally valid for all substantial personalities is affirmed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 126.3 (2005) 461-463 [Access article in PDF] Graham Zanker. Modes of Viewing in Hellenistic Poetry and Art. Wisconsin Studies in Classics. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. xiv + 223 pp. 34 black-and-white ills. Cloth, $39.95. The underlying contention here is that if a Hellenistic poetic description of a person, an animal, the weather, a scene, or an objet d'art adopts a particular way (...) of viewing, we have independent evidence for the habits of viewing that Hellenistic people would have brought to their contemplation of representational art. (4) So Graham Zanker summarizes the thesis of his new book, the most extensive and detailed account of Hellenistic visuality yet published. This is a carefully worded sentence. Zanker's enumeration of poetic descriptions of "a person, an animal, the weather, a scene or an objet d'art" deliberately exemplifies what he takes to be the scope of ekphrasis and hence reproves those who have taken ekphrasis more narrowly as the description of works of art (cf. 6–10). The target of this disapproval turns out to be especially Simon Goldhill, whom he attacks at 82–83 and in a long endnote (184–85, n. 26). Yet the care to be precise in matters of literary definition goes with such large, even lax, social and cultural generalizations as "Hellenistic people" and "representational art." What Zanker must mean by those whose contemplation of art can be evoked through poetic descriptions is a highly literate and educated social elite—perhaps the court itself—that may have played (Marie-Antoinette-like) at shepherds and fishermen (as in the cup of Theocritus' first Idyll) but surely did so from a much narrower social perspective than the totalizing generalism of "Hellenistic people." The weapon of precision is a dangerous one to use, when it may be turned back on the user.There are, moreover, numerous problems with both the notion of "independent evidence" and that of "habits of viewing." While the literary evidence of ekphrasis (not only in poetry) certainly encompasses viewing, its specially wrought and often spectacular cleverness may signal the exceptional, even the perverse, as much as (or more than) the habitual. Does a revolutionary statue like the Aphrodite of Cnidos (not actually Hellenistic, but nonetheless rightly incorporated at some length in Zanker's book) reflect or elicit the habitual gaze? In what sense? And, if so, when? Was the gaze it enticed at its moment of creation "habitual," or did that gaze only become "habitual" in its numerous—within our surviving material archive of examples, mainly Roman-period—versions and replications? More difficult still is "independent evidence." I am not really sure what that could be in a topic created from critical and interpretative explications of complex images and texts that do not themselves draw explicit or simple conclusions about viewing (or anything) beyond what readers may impute to them. How they may collectively constitute evidence about viewing can only come about as the result of argument. I think a compelling argument based on the critical interpretation of images and texts may be taken as evidence, but is that "independent evidence?" What does this mean? And such a complex argument is a very different kind of evidence from what Zanker seems to mean by any particular viewpoint we may find expressed in an ekphrasis. [End Page 461]Again, I do not think it follows that the evidence for viewing we may entice from a poetic description of a person, an animal, or the weather need necessarily be related to the contemplation of a work of art. Indeed, Zanker's use of the term contemplation (with its Kantian overtones) appears to indicate a specifically aesthetic zone of response. Certainly the Hellenistic period explicitly elevated creativity in the visual arts to a new canonical status with its creation of art-historical narratives and histories devolving on the rise of naturalism and on the genius of particular hallowed artists who are preserved for us by the likes of Quintilian and Pliny. That special aestheticism, marked in the choice of works of... (shrink)

This thoughtful, learned, well-written, extensively illustrated, and heavily documented study deserves to be regarded as a landmark in art history. Traditional art history has dealt for the most part with the “fine arts” (chiefly painting, drawing, sculpture, and architecture), whereas other human creations that take physical form (such as furniture, ceramics, textiles, and metal and glass items), whether utilitarian or decorative (or both at once), are considered “craft” or “applied art” and are studied by folklorists, anthropologists, and archaeologists and often (...) displayed in different museums. Cooke wishes to break down this “hierarchical taxonomy,” this “fragmented, hierarchical field,” that emerged from Western Europe's “misunderstanding of art,” which valued “the cerebral over the manual.” His goal, in other words, is to outline “a more inclusive human history of art”— “a connected art history.” This phrase from his subtitle refers not simply to connecting “fine art” with “applied art” but also to crossing temporal and regional boundaries. Still another act of connecting is to examine all parts of an object's life history, and thus the three main divisions of the book deal with the making of objects, their circulation from one person and place to another (and “their ability to transmit ideas” in the process), and their meaning for the persons who possessed or encountered them.Over the years I have repeatedly said that all objects made by human beings are worthy of preservation and study because they bring us into direct contact with the past and, as part of our surroundings, affect our thoughts in the present. Every object, I have argued, including copies of a single printed edition of a book (so-called duplicates), is an independent witness to the past. I am particularly pleased, therefore, to welcome a major book that explores in detail, with a wealth of examples from many centuries and cultures, the place of objects in human history. Cooke's pursuit is “object-driven,” beginning with the nature of the materials and finally coming to “the inherent power of the object itself to influence human thought and action.” (Compare the subtitle of Sherry Turkle's 2007 anthology Evocative Objects: Things We Think With.) Cooke's refusal to separate “materials” from “people,” or “technologies” from “values,” reminds me of John Szarkowski's approach to photographs. In Photography until Now (1989), Szarkowski points out that histories of photography generally treat technical matters separately from artistic ones—a split between the “empirical” and the “intuitive” that he finds indefensible, for “these two ways of knowing meet in the process of making things.” He adds, “The meeting can be cordially symbiotic or aggressively competitive, but its resolution defines the character and meaning of the thing that is made.” This statement has been a favorite of mine as an elegant characterization of the nature of art, and it is one that Cooke would clearly agree with.Cooke does not discuss photography, but he makes clear that he is not attempting a “comprehensive history that charts the complete ebb and flow of objects over time.” Rather, his book is meant to be a “suggestive guide” to the “principles of material literacy,” a “kit of tools for future complex constructions of history.” Even so, I find some of the omissions puzzling. Why, for example, are glass objects not taken up, when he so thoroughly deals with other common materials? More serious, in my opinion, is the exclusion of the fine arts. (Of the 215 illustrations, five are of oil paintings and one is of a Japanese print, but they are present only as the sources for information drawn from their pictorial content; one Hogarth engraving is shown because its image was often reproduced on punch bowls; and there is a very brief passage on the “uneasy relationship” between sculpture and material culture, but no sculptures are illustrated or used as examples for discussion.) Presumably Cooke felt it was unnecessary for his book to encompass the fine arts after demonstrating that functional objects are just as sophisticated artistically and culturally as products of the fine arts are. Yet those products also belong to the universe of “entangled objects” (How could they not?), and it would have been illuminating to see them adduced among the examples Cooke cites. One could argue that by excluding them—and by referring to the makers of the objects he does discuss as “artisans” and “craftspeople”—he comes close to reinforcing the division he wishes to eliminate.Less easy to explain is Cooke's omission of books, for they have been one of the largest and most widely circulated classes of utilitarian objects. Most people never think about books as objects, treating them only as disposable receptacles for transmitting verbal texts in tangible form (which is why so many books are destroyed when their texts supposedly become available in another form). Such people do not realize that texts have connections with their physical embodiments. (For example, books, whether manuscript or printed, often contain clues revealing how their texts were affected by the production process; and readers’ attitudes toward texts can be influenced by their presentation.) Cooke, however, with his deep understanding of the way objects function and his impressive knowledge of the scholarship, cannot be one of these uninformed people. He would obviously be aware of the vast literature devoted to leather and cloth bookbindings and their decoration, as well as to the myriad styles of letters and the varieties of paper and parchment; he would also know how letterforms and binding designs reflect a complex interplay of social, political, and artistic forces. Bibliographers have long studied books as Cooke advocates studying other objects: “working from the inside out,” beginning with the evidence in books themselves for reconstructing the routines that were followed in their creation. And book historians are recognizing the necessity for an international approach like Cooke's, since many of the books circulating in one country originated in other countries. Books would have been a prolific additional source for illustrating Cooke's analyses.My admiration for Cooke's book is not altered by these few disappointments. Even without discussions of paintings, sculptures, and books, it is still exhilarating in its scope and depth. One hopes that art and material-culture historians will pay attention to it. But it ought to have a wider audience, for the daily lives of all of us would be enriched by a greater appreciation of the objects that make up a significant part of our environment. (shrink)

this article seeks to approach the challenge of inventing oneself as a teacher through the eyes of childhood—a human dimension characterized by intensity, full of possibilities, connecting the movement of invention to the challenges encountered in day-to-day learning and teaching in school spaces. From that encounter with childhood, it is possible to create new perspectives and clues that can contribute to the development of eyes capable of seeing, "unraveling", "overturning" the world--in other words, seeing the world from several angles not (...) yet explored, with new childlike lenses. This approach is potent enough potent to bring to life educational activities that provoke the teacher, in the complex art of building or inventing themselves, and developing the capacity to preserve the creativity of children of all ages. This perspective enables the act of thinking to be experienced in infinite and unimaginable ways, not only enriching but also transforming the practices and knowledge that inhabit the time of searching—the time of becoming teacher, becoming learner, becoming school. This paper does not seek to provide answers to the challenges and concerns presented, but, it is intended to be a careful exercise of looking at the issues that directly or indirectly affect the journey of all who venture out and challenge themselves to build educational experiences committed to the transformation and creation of other ways of relating to childhood, with children, with school, in short, with the very invention of the self, as an art of traversing the paths along which one becomes an educatorinvention, childhood, teacher, philosophy. (shrink)

Résumé Règles et programmes définissent les principes de production artistiques et théoriques, attachés depuis le début du xx e siècle à la recherche d’une pragmatique de l’art, susceptible d’inscrire la création dans un système de contraintes. L’article s’intéresse particulièrement à ces questions du côté de la production de l’œuvre. Si elles peuvent trouver leur fondement historique autour du Modernisme, les nouvelles pratiques artistiques des années soixante semblent parfois en poursuivre le projet. Mais l’affirmation de la raison et le refus de (...) toute subjectivité masquent bien souvent le véritable contenu des œuvres. (shrink)

This study explores the religious dimensions of Thai Buddhism through the interplay between ritual and art, and its impact on Thai identity. It investigates how art underpins Thai Buddhist rituals by examining the nature and role of prominent ritual and religious practices. The research focuses on temple art and artistic elements such as murals, statues, and other features that transform ritual spaces into sacred zones during significant festivals like Visakha Bucha and Makha Bucha. Additionally, it includes an analysis of sand (...) mandalas, which symbolize temporality and engage participants in their creation and observation. The study also addresses the ethnoreligious aspects of Thai folk music (Luk Thung) and dance-drama (Khon), highlighting their roles in reinforcing Buddhist institutions and societal cohesion. By examining case studies such as Loy Krathong and the Phuket Vegetarian Festival, the study demonstrates how religious and cultural performances shape Thai identity. Ultimately, the research asserts that Thai Buddhist art functions as both a symbol of religious principles and an active medium for religious representation and performance, thereby affirming and enacting Thai national and sacred identity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Techniques of the Self:Nourishing Life as Art of LivingLi Manhua (bio)Daoism and Environmental Philosophy: Nourishing Life. By Eric S. Nelson. London and New York: Routledge, 2021.This essay proposes an account of the techniques of the self in early Daoism in light of Eric S. Nelson's Daoism and Environmental Philosophy: Nourishing Life (Routledge, 2021). It argues that the techniques of the self involved in nourishing life (yangsheng 養生) are indispensable (...) to the creation of the interdependent human-nature rapport that Nelson considers. Such interdependence does not require a moralistic stance that negates the self or forsakes individual desires in the cause of the environment—as in some of the existing Western ecological discourse—but a new form of self-relation involving the practice of a set of techniques of the self that relates the human to the non-human. The present contribution begins by arguing that the practice of nourishing life entails a series of bodily and spiritual techniques (shu 術) of the self, with the example of Cook Ding. This is followed by my exposition of different categories of such techniques, and why the techniques of nourishing the spirit (shen 神) are prioritized over those of the preservation of the bodily form (xing 形). Finally, I extend my discussion on the specific techniques of nourishing the spirit with regard to his chapter "Emptying Ecology," where Nelson argues that undoing fixations of the self and being responsive (ying 應) to things are attainable through deconstructive, skeptical, and paradoxical communicative strategies (p. 80).To start with, Nelson regards nourishing life as a way of living and speaking that goes beyond the binary opposition or a hierarchical relation between the human and other forms of life in some Western ecological philosophies:In the current crisis conditions, it appears that humans need every motivating ecology available whether it be light or dark green, anthro- or bio-centric, shallow or deep. All of these contending discourses are equalized in a Daoist ecology of shifting perspectives and ways of speaking. A benefit of dao-centric models—that as inflections of the "way" encompass and extend beyond notions of "bios" (specific life) and "zōe" (life in general)—is that they contest the binary oppositions and stratified hierarchies that have dominated recent Western environmental discourses: anthropocentrism/biocentrism, and humanism/posthumanism [End Page 762] (although the latter finds biocentrism still too anthropocentric in positing the very distinction between them).(p. 31, my emphasis)In other words, a non-hierarchical and non-opposing rapport between the human and the non-human lies in a practice of changing perspectives and, more concretely and importantly, adjusting communicative ways. Such a way of perceiving and speaking beyond boundaries between the individual and the general forms of life (sheng 生) is epitomized by the practice of nourishing life of Cook Ding in the third chapter of the Zhuangzi 庄子, titled "The Master of Nourishing Life" (Yangsheng zhu 養生主). When Ding—Lord Wenhui's chef—cuts up an ox, he avoids violent and forced slaughter, slitting through the tender parts of the animal without touching any bone. As such, by concentrating only on the intestines of the ox, his movement is so agile that the knife produces a musical rhythm.More precisely, Nelson regards the example of Ding as "a cultivated and practiced process in which nature can come to be itself" (p. 36). In the context of the Zhuangzi, nature (tian 天) as an extension of the Dao goes beyond the "one-and-many" anthropocentric paradigm wherein humans have exclusive knowledge of the One, namely the unifying principle of reality (Chai 2018, p. 265). In this sense, specific life forms, bios, are undifferentiated from the wholeness of the One in the generic life, zōe. In other words, as the root of all life lies in Dao in terms of the onto-cosmological attunement of nothingness (wuwei 無為), our bodies (shen 身) mirror Heaven or Nature (tian 天) and the Earth (di 地) in the way they attune to the flow of vital energetic dynamics, responding to the myriad things and Heaven and Earth in an organic totality. This is manifest in Ding, as he nourishes life by turning his daily activity into a practice of encountering non-human life forms... (shrink)

The article examines the influence of ancient Chinese philosophical concepts on the formation of modern piano art in China. Ancient Chinese materialistic philosophy is based on such teachings as Wu-xing and Yin-Yang, the Great Limit (Tai Chi), the eight trigrams and others. With the passage of time and the rapid development of science, these philosophical concepts not only did not lose their significance, but also had a powerful influence on the formation of modern Chinese piano creativity, deeply influenced the form (...) and cultural connotation of Chinese music, and also became the theoretical basis for the works of many modern composers. The philosophical and aesthetic Taiji system presented by composer Zhao Xiaosheng, integrated into the modern piano composition system, marked the beginning of a revolution in the field of piano art, combining the theoretical foundations of traditional Chinese philosophy and the principles of modern composition methods. The research methodology is based on philosophical and cultural analysis, musicological analysis, and semantic analysis. Of particular interest is the comparative analysis of the musical and philosophical "Tai chi composition system" by Zhao Xiaoshen, the dodecaphony of A. Schoenberg and the set theory of M. Babbitt and A. Fort, which the Chinese composer considers the sources of his creativity. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that a correlation is proposed between the key categories of ancient Chinese philosophy and modern experiments in the field of musical expression. The authors managed to demonstrate the high degree of influence of Chinese philosophy on music, to clearly show that the basic postulates of ancient Chinese philosophy have been encoded in the basis of traditional Chinese music since ancient times, and in the twentieth century they were the basis of modern Chinese theory of composition, while playing a colossal role in identifying the common foundations of modern composition of the West and East, while preservation of local features of the diverse sphere of these cultures. The emergence and formation of a philosophical and theoretical system of musical composition, based on the concepts of classical Chinese philosophy, organically refracted in the latest achievements of Western music composition, emphasizes the ontological significance of these concepts for both Eastern and Western culture. And the creation of appropriate musical works undoubtedly leads to positive trends in the development of modern Chinese music and classical Chinese philosophy. (shrink)

One might say that Clare is almost by virtue of that label alone a political poet. “Peasant poet” is a contradiction in terms from the perspective of English literary history, or of the longer history of the literary pastoral. The phrase must refer to two different social locations, and as such makes social place an explicit, problematic concern for the middle-class readers of that poet’s work. To Clare’s publisher and patrons in the 1820s, as to his editors in the 1980s, (...) the language, the forms, the sentiments, and even the punctuation of his poetry are further markers of class difference for an audience invited to read him as a peasant poet. In recent collections concerned to recover the politics of English poetry these signs of difference are highly valued.2 They seem to mark Clare’s work as what Fredric Jameson terms “strong” political art, that is, “authentic cultural creation … dependent for its existence on authentic collective life, on the vitality of the ‘organic’ social group.”3At the time his poems were published class difference in English rural life was a political issue sufficiently charged to make publisher and patrons wish to minimize its marks in Clare’s poetry. On the one hand, a clearly understood hierarchy was the form of social stability that rural scenes staged for their urban middle-class audiences. Evidence of class difference confirmed the survival of this hierarchy and the reader’s position in it. Clare’s poetry of place affirmed a system of social as well as geographical differences felt as a traditional—and essential—aspect of English national identity. On the other hand, however, the countryside was precisely where the erosion of the hierarchical relations of deference and responsibility was particularly noticeable, and disturbing, in the years after 1815. Sporadic outbreaks of protest against low wages and unemployment in 1816, 1822, and 1830 realized dramatically for the middle and upper classes what one might call a rural version of the process Marx was later to term alienation: the known and familiar inhabitants of the rural scene—laborers, village artisans—were suddenly made strange to their middle- and upper-class neighbors, so much so that many observers were convinced that they must be strangers, intruders from another pace .4 The elements of difference, or strangeness, in Clare’s poetry—the marks of his identity as rural laborer—thus also risked awaking specific anxieties among his early readers. Clare’s editor and publisher, John Taylor, punctuated, regularized meter, and replaced some of Clare’s unfamiliar local vocabulary. Nonetheless, his two most important early patrons, the evangelical aristocrat Lord Radstock and the middle-class Mrs. Emmerson, objected to some lines as “radical slang” and others as “vulgar.” The language of class risked rejection as politically subversive. Especially in an already politicized rural scene, the peasant poet could not be a neutral figure. 2. Both A Book of English Pastoral Verse, ed. John Barrell and John Bull and The Faber Book of Political Verse, ed. Tom Paulin restore Clare’s original orthography and lack of punctuation to support the label “peasant poet.”3. Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 : 140. Elizabeth Helsinger is associate professor of English and general studies at the University of Chicago and a coeditor of Critical Inquiry. Her Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder was published in 1982. The present essay is part of a book in progress on representations of the rural scene in Victorian England. (shrink)

Digital media presents an array of interesting challenges adapting new modes of collaborative, online communication to traditional writing and literary practices at the practical and theoretical levels. For centuries, popular concepts of the modern author, regardless of genre, have emphasized writing as a solo exercise in human communication, while the act of reading remains associated with solitude and individual privacy. "The Community and the Algorithm: A Digital Interactive Poetics" explores important cultural changes in these relationships thanks to the rapid development (...) of digital internet technologies allowing near-instantaneous, synchronous, multimedia interaction across the globe. The radical shift in how we author and consume media as an online, electronic transmission effectively resituates the writing process across the liberal arts as less a solitary act of individual enquiry and reflection, and more an ongoing, collaborative process of creative interaction within a multimedia environment or network. Contributions in this anthology demonstrate a robust history and equally diverse contemporary approach to multimedia interaction for literary and artistic ends. Central to all media formats, computation is explored throughout this volume to critically examine how algorithmic procedures in writing help bring forward many key concepts to building creative communities in a digital environment. Each chapter in this book accordingly introduces readers to various new collaborative experiments using a broad range of different digital media formats, including VR, Natural Language Generation (NLG), and metagaming tools. This book will appeal broadly to students, instructors, and independent artists working in the digital arts, while its emphasis on social interactivity will interest theorists and teachers working in theatre, social media, and cyberpsychology. Its secondary focus on computation and media programming as a site of artistic experimentation will also interest programmers and web designers at various professional levels. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reply to CriticsBethany Henningplato knew that philosophy is not something we write; it is something we live. As Deweyans, we know philosophy is an ideal that emerges within experience as the highest possibility for dialogue. Insofar as a book appears as an extended monologue, it obscures the qualitative and transactive dimensions of philosophy as it is practiced. But sessions like these reveal that books are moments in a conversation, (...) "perchings" in a dialogue that is forever in media res. I am deeply grateful to Bill Myers for organizing this panel, and for the generosity of Frank Ryan, Gregory Pappas, and Jim Garrison for having taken the time to read and think about this book. Each of them has served as a model for philosophical scholarship, and I am humbled and honored to have the opportunity to engage with them directly. They have challenged me in three distinct ways and have engaged with what I have written on separate plateaus of thought, at times revealing layers of which I was not fully aware. So I will do my best to respond to their concerns and develop our shared inquiry in their light. I will also own that my reading of Dewey is selective, and it is my attempt to work through a problem that materialized, as all problems do, in the course of ordinary lived experience.At Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where I attended graduate school, we offered a course called "The American Mind." The title was a provocation, so I applied to teach it one semester. It was a fantastic challenge to try to curate a selection of texts that would serve as an encounter with an intellectual tradition that eludes me as much as it informs me—after all, prior to college, I only knew that a "philosopher" is what becomes of the loser in the board game called Life. I did not know that there was something called "American philosophy" until I applied to study at SIUC.If philosophy is the way that a culture reflects upon itself, then in this book, I have tried to invite the American mind to lie down on the couch. [End Page 95] Or, it might be more accurate to say that I have asked John Dewey, as the representative of American philosophy, how he might psychoanalyze such a mind. My hypothesis is that Dewey's theory of aesthetic experience, and the art that communicates and preserves such moments of intensified vitality, touches the deepest, but unspoken meanings that human beings encounter. This is where quality, the character of an event as a singular whole, the immediate aspect of an event that we feel rather than know, can be stabilized and communicated. If an interpretation can be made of the deep conflicts that have left philosophy at the margins of American life, I believe we would be wise to begin with our "dreams," with the creations of our imagination, the artistic products that reveal the felt dimension of our shared world.Many readers of Dewey choose to focus on his theory of inquiry, his recasting of the scientific method, and his instrumentalism as forming the core of his thought. This is an understandable approach; his work here is novel and corrects bad intellectual habits. However, for the purposes of this book, I have emphasized aesthetic experience, the role of the qualitative, and pursuit of meaning over the correction of practice in my interpretation. This is a controversial choice since it courts the irrational and the vague, but I believe that our neglect of these portions of experience prevents philosophy from reconnecting with American life.Response to Frank RyanFrank Ryan is concerned about the extent to which I have cast the organism as porous, and that I have identified aesthetic experience as unconscious. I agree with Dr. Ryan's assessment that defining aesthetic experience as wholly unconscious would be a grievous error—and I hope not to have made it. There is a misleading ambiguity in the title of the book that might predispose the reader to suspect that I am claiming an equivalence, but what I intended to argue was not that aesthetic experience itself is unconscious, but rather... (shrink)

This volume investigates the intersection of phenomenology and posthumanism by rethinking the human and nonhuman specifically with regard to boredom, isolation, loneliness, and solitude. By closely examining these concepts from phenomenological, philosophical, and literary perspectives, this diverse collection of essays offers insights into the human and nonhuman in the absence of the Other and within the postapocalyptic. Topics of interest include modalities of presence and absence with regard to body, time, beast, and things; the phenomenology of corporeity; ontopoiesis and the (...) sublime; alienation, absurdity, and phenomenology of existence; memory, posthistoricity, posthuman nihilism, and posthumanity; speculative cosmology, cosmic holism, and consciousness; ecophenomenology; and the philosophy of the aesthetic. These essays parse and probe distinct aspects of the posthuman condition and what it means to exist in a posthuman world, thereby furthering the vast, rich scope of phenomenological research and study. This text appeals to students and researchers working in these topics and fields. (shrink)

This paper proposes an alternative approach towards ethical leadership. Recent research tells us that socioeconomic and cultural differences affect moral intuition, making it difficult to locate a guiding organizational principle. Nevertheless, in this paper I attempt to open an alternative path towards an ethics that might serve as a guide for leaders – especially leaders who are leading a highly professionalized workforce. Using the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño and the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze as points of reference, I develop an (...) ethical form of leadership that is based on a continuous ‘poetic’ dialogue between creation and affirmation. The nature of this dialogue requires a leadership approach that plays both a courageous and imaginative role in liberating its workforce. Last, I develop a frame which provides the constituent principles of leading in the direction of an ethical organization. (shrink)

Mythological art of the world population variously demonstrates the appearance and interaction of sexes. But more often it is connected with the beginning of the world from the world egg. Religions views tell about the creation of a first single man by God. The latest biological studies have not yet solved this problem,the idea of dividing vegetable and animal kingdoms being disputable enough. To outline ways of solving this problem was made possible from the dualism point of view. The (...) origins of sexes are found on the base of multicellularity, on the border of vegetable and animal kingdoms, The appearing of sexual reproduction results in a new quality and unity of opposites, preserving its further inner contradiction. The main direction of development – changeability is fixed by the male, while unchangeability is fixed by the female. The understanding both of historical direction in the development of each sexes and its inner contradiction will allow to build proper gender relations in the society. The problem of selecting strategy of gender research still remains disputable. (shrink)

Introduction -/- 1 Précis -/- 2 Methodology: Introducing digital humanities to the history of philosophy 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Core constructs 2.3 Operationalizing the constructs 2.4 Querying the Nietzsche Source 2.5 Cleaning the data 2.6 Visualizations and preliminary analysis 2.6.1 Visualization of the whole corpus 2.6.2 Book visualizations 2.7 Summary -/- Nietzsche’s Socio-Moral Framework -/- 3 From instincts and drives to types 3.1 Introduction 3.2 The state of the art on drives, instincts, and types 3.2.1 Drives 3.2.2 Instincts 3.2.3 Types 3.3 (...) The semantic neighborhood of drive, instinct, and type 3.4 A theory of (the relations among) instincts, drives, and types 3.4.1 Drives are act-directed rather than outcome-directed dispositions 3.4.2 The reflexive turn in Nietzsche’s drive psychology 3.4.3 Triggers of drive-displacement 3.4.4 Instincts are innate drives 3.4.5 Types are constellations of instincts and other drives 3.4.6 To what extent are types, instincts, and drives fixed? 3.5 Summary -/- 4 From types to virtues 4.1 Introduction 4.2 The state of the art on virtues and values 4.2.1 Virtues 4.2.2 Values 4.3 The semantic neighborhood of virtue and value 4.4 On (the relations among) instincts, drives, types, values, virtues, and values 4.4.1 Virtues are well-calibrated drives 4.4.2 Nietzsche’s type-relative unity of virtue thesis 4.4.3 The type of the criminal 4.4.4 Nietzschean exemplarism and his ad hominem attacks 4.5 Summary -/- 5 Socializing Nietzschean virtues 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Higher-order types 5.2.1 Social character construction 5.2.2 Reflexive character construction 5.3 Eponymous trait terms and Nietzschean summoning 5.3.1 Eponymous trait terms 5.3.2 Nietzschean summoning 5.4 Summary -/- Nietzschean virtues -/- 6 Curiosity 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Curiosity in virtue epistemology 6.3 Curiosity and its affiliated emotions 6.4 Curiosity, perspectivism, and inquiry 6.5 Curiosity as a virtue 6.5.1 A preliminary characterization 6.5.2 Curiosity in the middle through late works 6.6 Summary -/- 7 Courage 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Intellectual courage in contemporary virtue epistemology 7.3 Courage as a virtue 7.3.1 A preliminary characterization 7.3.2 Courage in the middle through late works 7.4 Summary -/- 8 Pathos of distance 8.1 Introduction 8.2 Contempt and disgust in contemporary moral psychology 8.3 The semantic neighborhood of contempt, disgust, and the pathos of distance 8.4 Nietzsche on contempt 8.4.1 Spernere mundum 8.4.2 Spernere neminem 8.4.3 Spernere se ipsum 8.4.4 Spernere se sperni 8.4.5 Nietzsche aims to induce what he considers fitting contempt in receptive readers 8.5 Nietzsche on disgust 8.5.1 The use of disgust: detaching from an ideal 8.5.2 The danger of disgust 8.6 The pathos of distance 8.7 Prospects for a Nietzschean democratic ethos 8.8 Summary -/- 9 Sense of humor 9.1 Introduction 9.2 The semantic neighborhood of laughter, humor, and comedy 9.3 The Nietzschean sense of humor and its functions 9.3.1 From episodic laughter to the sense of humor 9.3.2 Affirmation and inquiry 9.3.3 Negation and inquiry 9.3.4 Affiliation with like-minded inquirers 9.4 Summary -/- 10 Solitude 10.1 Introduction 10.2 Solitude in virtue theory and Nietzsche scholarship 10.3 The semantic neighborhood of solitude 10.4 An account of Nietzschean solitude 10.5 Summary -/- Conclusion -/- 11 Conscience & integrity 11.1 Introduction 11.2 Conscience and integrity in contemporary moral psychology and Nietzsche scholarship 11.2.1 Conscience and integrity in contemporary moral psychology 11.2.2 Conscience and integrity in Nietzsche commentary 11.3 The semantic neighborhood of conscience and integrity 11.4 Distinguishing conscience, good conscience, bad conscience, and intellectual conscience 11.4.1 Conscience 11.4.2 Good conscience 11.4.3 Bad conscience 11.4.4 Intellectual conscience and integrity 11.5 Summary -/- 12 Prospectus 12.1 Future directions in moral psychology 12.2 Future directions in Nietzsche scholarship 12.3 Future directions in digital humanities and the history of philosophy . (shrink)

Although it might seem to elicit only a marginal interest for philosophical inquiry, in 20th century continental philosophy the experience of solitude and loneliness were shown to have unexpected importance and gravity. For philosophers such as M. Heidegger, H. Arendt, H.-G. Gadamer or P. Sloterdijk, solitude and loneliness are to be seen, on the one hand, as an ontological determination of our Being and, on the other, as a cause for some of the most worrisome problems of our times such, (...) as the birth of totalitarianism or the phenomenon of self-alienation wide-spread in the Western bureaucratic societies. But none of the philosophers dealing with these matters offers us a clear positive understanding of what solitude and loneliness actually are nor what the task of philosophy should be with regard to these experiences even though they give us to understand that philosophy has one. The present paper tarries upon this question, approaching it from the other end though an investigation of the status of alterity in Heidegger and Gadamer’s philosophy. (shrink)

Ce livre prend position sur les enjeux et les visées des oeuvres d'art en matière de vérité et de morale : il répond, par un retour sur l'époque des Lumières, aux questions contemporaines sur l'idée d'un perfectionnement moral de l'individu (S. Cavell, M. Nussbaum, S. Laugier). Car les Lumières ont remis au coeur de la création artistique les émotions, les affects et les sentiments, mues par la conviction de l'efficacité d'une éducation esthétique de l'homme, d'une éducation sensible par le sensible, (...) en l'occurrence par les oeuvres. La vérité a-t-elle un sens en matière artistique? Notre besoin d'art est-il lié à notre conviction qu'elles nous rendent meilleurs et nous font mieux connaître le monde? L'autonomie de l'oeuvre, la liberté du créateur, la dévaluation de tout canon au nom d'un global turn qui contraint au relativisme rendent aujourd'hui difficile l'affirmation d'une vérité. (shrink)

Although very numerous ethical issues in the market of famous paintings are commented on, those aspects of auctions, Freedom of creation and preservation of cultural assets were picked up in this study to discuss, for the 3 aspect are the objects involved in legal problems, not to mention moral problems causing problems even between the nations. First, Auction related ethical issues include forgeries, appraisal and auctions. Forgeries include the coping or cribbing of the whole of an original Work, division (...) of an original work, completion of an incomplete original work and selling of work for education, etc. The appraisal distinguishing imitation from an original is conducted in 2 ways, one of which is to identify genuine and fake, and the other is price appraisal. However, our country is lack of appraisers and appraisal organizations, along with incomplete appraisal system and appraisal procedures. Appropriate appraisal distinguishing imitation from an original will enable transparent trade of famous paintings contributing to the revitalization of their market. Auction is contributing to the legalization of the trade in various great paintings heightening the public confidences for the great works of art. However, the participants in the trade through action are required high ethics not to use it as a means of tax evasion. Together with the rise in ethics of the people running art museum to preserve and exhibit the great works of art. The ethical issues relating to the freedom of creation include the production and censorship of licentious pictures and pornographies. Those who claim for the freedom of creation take a stand that the making of licentious pictures and pornographies should also be permitted acknowledging their artistic values, and making censorship unnecessary, for sexual amusements are also a part of human life. On the other hand, people on the opposite side insist that the freedom of creation need to be limited from the moral and educational views tightening the censorship. Some of the licentious pictures in the Chosen Dynasty hold artistic values and used for education purposes. However, the social conditions of today that stressing the merchantable quality of the famous paintings make them unfree from the issue of pornography censorship. The cultural assets related ethical issues are involved in thefts, plunders, returns, destructions and preservations of the cultural assets of great works of art. Such issues sometimes become the causes for diplomatic conflicts between the nations. What is important in this matter is our peoples' high ethics in culture. Nationwide and pan-national concerns for the movement of repatriating cultural assets of the great works of Art are required. The destructions of the famous paintings are done by artificially ways and natural disasters. Either way is in need of our ethics to prevent any destruction of cultural assets and strong sense of obligations of the people involved in cultural assets restoration. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.2 (2004) 53-66 [Access article in PDF] Art Selection, or the Preservation of Artworks in the Struggle for Art Christopher Perricone The argument of George C. Williams's book Adaptation and Natural Selection is against what biologists call the group selectionist view — that individuals will act on behalf of their species, or at least on behalf of the group to which they belong.1 Williams (...) showed, and now most biologists agree, "no creature could ever evolve the ability to help its species at the expense of itself. Only when the two interests coincided would it act selflessly."2 According to Matt Ridley, Williams is one of the towering figures in contemporary biology. Williams helps us to understand better what natural selection is and consequently helps us to understand better our place in the world. Williams claims that when we are dealing with life, "we are forced to invoke natural selection to achieve a complete explanation of an observed system."3 Physics and chemistry alone are not sufficient to explain life. Williams gives the example of a falling apple. If one has to explain the trajectory of the apple, the principles of mechanics are sufficient for providing an adequate explanation of the phenomenon. If, however, we were asked how the apple acquired its various properties, and why it has these properties instead of others, we would need the theory of natural selection, at least by implication. Only thus could we explain why the apple has a waterproof wax on the outside...why it contains dormant embryos....We would find that an impressive list of structural details and processes of the apple can be understood as elements of a design for an efficient role in the propagation of the tree from which it came."4Of course, a little over a hundred years before Williams published his book, Charles Darwin published Origin of Species, in which natural selection is the linchpin of his theory of evolution. Natural selection for Darwin not only helped to explain the competitive climate of the living world but its luscious fecundity as well. Natural selection works like this: Let's say you [End Page 53] have a population of large beaked and small beaked birds. The environment in which the birds live provides them with an abundant and nutritious supply of both large and small seeds. Typically the small beaked birds eat the small seeds. The large beaked birds are capable of eating both small and large seeds. However, a blight occurs killing off all the small seed producing trees causing the food supply of the small beaked birds to diminish to virtually nil. Given that the small beaked birds are unable to feed on the continued supply of large seeds, they are selected out or eliminated from that environment: either they must seek out another environment, or they die. The large beaked birds, however, are in this case more adaptable to the environment because they can eat large seeds, survive, and pass on their largebeaked traits to the next generation. Darwin characterizes this process as "the struggle for life." He says: Owing to this struggle, variations, however slight and from what ever cause proceeding, if they be in any way profitable to the individuals of a species, in their infinitely complex relation to other organic beings and to their physical conditions of life, will tend to the preservation of such individuals, and will generally be inherited by the offspring. The offspring, also, will thus have a better chance of surviving, for, of the many individuals of any species which are periodically born, but a small number can survive. I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection, in order to mark its relation to man's power of selection. But the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.5Darwin sums up his discussion of natural selection by saying that the idea explains... (shrink)

Loneliness, social isolation, aloneness, and solitude are frequently used interchangeably but are actually different. Loneliness is particularly salient now, due to the international restrictions on social activities imposed as a result of COVID-19, which brought loneliness into open discussion worldwide. The article highlights loneliness as a multidimensional construct and reviews its impact on cognitive, behavioral and affective functioning. In doing so, particular attention is given to loneliness as it manifests through the various life stages, as well as how personal predisposition (...) and contextual factors may exacerbate it. in this article we also review solitude, and a clear distinction between loneliness and solitude is established. Finally, we conclude by addressing the global claims of loneliness during the pandemic and its implications. We offer a point of view which may assist in coping with it. (shrink)

Eli Friedlander reads Rousseau's autobiography, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, as philosophy. Reading this work against Descartes's Meditations, Friedlander shows how Rousseau's memorable transformation of experience through writing opens up the possibility of affirming even the most dejected state of being and allows the emergence of the innocence of nature out of the ruins of all social attachments. In tracing the re-creation of a human subject in reverie, Friedlander is alive to the very form of the experience of reading (...) the Reveries by showing the ways this work needs to--and in effect does--generate a reader, without betraying Rousseau's utter solitude. Friedlander's book provides an afterlife for the Reveries in modern philosophy. It constitutes an alternative to the analytic tradition's revival of Rousseau, primarily through Rawls's influential vision of the social contract. It also counters the fate of Rousseau's writings in the continental tradition, determined by and large by Derrida's deconstruction. Friedlander's reading of the Reveries, a work that has fascinated generations of readers, is an incomparable introduction to one of the greatest thinkers in Western culture. (shrink)

II y a eu des artistes avant que l'art se détache et, pour la pensée, se rende digne d'un examen tout spécial, avant, donc, que l'art s'affirme comme activité sui generis, et il y en a encore, peut-on croire, après ce qu'il est convenu d'appeler " la mort de l'art " et qui n'est peut-être que la fin de son mythe ou le commencement d'une existence strictement profane. L'impossibilité où nous sommes en tout cas de superposer parfaitement, fût-ce pour une (...) période donnée, l'art et l'artiste, est un des aspects du caractère transhistoriquement problématique de cette activité spéciale, ne produisant ses règles que pour les interpréter librement, voire pour les incarner singulièrement. Ce livre se présente comme une synthèse didactique des questions qui occupent les philosophes et les spécialistes d'esthétique. Le personnage de l'artiste est porteur, sinon de masques, du moins de visages qui nous aident à appréhender les différentes facettes de la création artistique. (shrink)

Loneliness and solitude have similar attributes to individuals, but there is a critical variance between the two regarding the impact on the individual. Loneliness is an unpleasant feeling in a broad sense, while according to some philosophers, solitude is regarded as a joyful necessity when one establishes a deep relationship with the outside world. This article aims to develop a sensible account of the difference between solitude and loneliness by looking at some insightful philosophical viewpoints. Importantly, this article aims to (...) explain the dimensions in which solitude is a positive phenomenon. I will analyze the role of solitude in eliminating loneliness from two aspects: self-consciousness and self-knowledge construction. (shrink)

The aim of our paper is to question the problem of artistic creation as a transfiguration of suffering. We will point out that health is always a state to be looked at with the eyes of a convalescent, and how in particular there can be no artistic creation that is not accompanied by a condition of suffering. Our interpretive key will be the faculty of perceiving nuances, a topic that often appears in Nietzsche’s later writings, and the relationship (...) between the nuance and the affirmative power of art. Finally, we will consider whether the taste for nuance is not itself a sign of a profoundly suffering nature, aristocratically devoted to detachment from all that is grossly general. (shrink)

This article deals with Nietzsche’s ethical problem of the constitution of an exceptional character, under two fronts: first, under a negative bias, as opposed to the morality of the herd. Later, on its constructive or affirmative time, properly as creation of self . The leitmotif of this double presentation is the defense of aspects from what we associate with the concept of hypocrisy as a key to an interpretation of that constitution. First, as an art of dissimulation, in the (...) form of an individual's refuge amidst the morality of the herd. Later, as the actor's art, in the practices which Nietzsche associates to the self-constitution. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dei Filius II:On Divine RevelationSimon Francis Gaine, O.P.With chapter 2 of Dei Filius, the First Vatican Council's Constitution on the Catholic Faith moves on from the confession of faith in God, the Creator of all things, to the fact of God's revelation to us human creatures. The chapter covers first natural revelation through creation and the possibility of our natural knowledge of God, then why we also need (...) a further revelation which is supernatural, the presence of that supernatural revelation in Scripture and Tradition, and finally the canonicity, inspiration, and interpretation of the Bible.1The first sentence of the chapter declares that "holy Mother Church holds and teaches that God, the beginning and end of all things, may be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason."2 This sentence, with its affirmation of the possibility of sure natural knowledge of God without the benefit of supernatural revelation, is perhaps the most well-known of the chapter, the most hotly debated at the council itself, and the most discussed in the secondary literature.3 Hardly any comment is [End Page 839] ever made, however, on how the second chapter begins with the statement that the Church "holds and teaches" what follows. This phrase tenet et docet contrasts neatly with how the first chapter began: "The Holy Catholic, Apostolic, Roman Church believes and confesses that there is one, true and living God," and so on. While chapter 1's opening sentence spoke of the Church believing and confessing, chapter 2's opening sentence speaks instead of the Church holding and teaching, employing the verb teneo (hold) in contrast to credo (believe).4One can easily recognize a structural parallel between the two phrases: the inner act of holding in chapter 2 corresponds to the inner act of believing in chapter 1, and the external act of teaching in chapter 2 corresponds to the external act of confessing in chapter 1. I shall say something about the Church's holding and teaching, and its overall contrast as a unit with the earlier unit of believing and confessing, before going on to say something about the wider content of the chapter in that light. I do this partly because this symposium is about not only Vatican I's Constitution on the Catholic Faith, but also theology today. Catholic theology today is familiar with a precise distinction between "believing" and "holding," and while it is closely related to the distinction between believing and holding found in Dei Filius, I do not think the two distinctions are quite the same. So, in order to avoid confusion, I shall say something about the distinction familiar in theology in today, and then say something about the distinction at work in Vatican I. [End Page 840]The Profession of Faith in use in the Church since 1989, after quoting the Nicene Creed, continues as follows: "With firm faith, I also believe everything contained in the word of God, whether written or handed down in Tradition, which the Church, either by a solemn judgment or by the ordinary and universal Magisterium, sets forth to be believed as divinely revealed."5 But to this primary profession of what is usually called theological or divine faith, since it is a response to God's revelation, there is then added the following: "I also firmly accept and hold each and every thing definitively proposed by the Church regarding teaching on faith and morals."6 A third category, which pertains to non-definitive teaching and to which the appropriate response is "religious obedience of will and intellect," need not detain us here.7The Latin of "I accept and hold" is amplector et retineo, and in the 1989 Profession, it is said in definite contrast to faith and belief as an assent distinct from but related to that of divine faith itself. Though officially translated as "hold"—which might also have rendered teneo—retineo seems to connote guarding and preserving something, holding onto it, rather than merely holding it. The difficulty in interpreting such formulas (including terms such as "profess," "hold," and so on) is indicated by the fact that the previous Profession of... (shrink)

As the first President of the Royal Academy of Arts, Joshua Reynolds played a pivotal role in shaping the course of British art in the 18th century. In these discourses, Reynolds reflects on the nature of art, the role of the artist, and the importance of aesthetic education. With insightful commentary on the works of the Old Masters and a wealth of practical advice for aspiring artists, this volume is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of art or (...) art theory. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Returning to the Greek understanding of art to rethink its capacities, Creation and the Function of Art focuses on the relationship between techné and phusis (nature). Moving away from the theoretical Platonism which dominates contemporary understandings of art, this book instead reinvigorates Aristotelian causation. Beginning with the Greek topos and turning to insights from philosophy, pure mathematics, psychoanalysis and biology, Jason Tuckwell re-problematises techné in functional terms. This book examines the deviations at play within logical forms, the subject, and (...) upon phusis to better situate the role of the function in poiesis (art). In so doing, Tuckwell argues that art concerns a genuinely creative labour that cannot be resolved via an ontological or epistemological problem, but which instead constitutes an encounter with the problematic. As such, techné is shown to be a property of the living, of intelligence coupled to action, that not only enacts poiesis or art, but indicates a broader role for creative deviation in nature. (shrink)