Written over the course of two months in early 2008, Art as "Night" is a series of essays in part inspired by a January 2007 visit to the Velázquez exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, London, with subsequent forays into related themes and art-historical judgments for and against theories of meta-painting. Art as "Night" proposes a type of a-historical dark knowledge crossing painting since Velázquez, but reaching back to the Renaissance, especially Titian and Caravaggio. As a form of formalism, (...) this "night" is also closely allied with forms of intellection that come to reside in art as pure visual agency or material knowledge while invoking moral agency, a function of art more or less bracketed in modern art for ethical and/or political agency. Not a theory of meta-painting, Art as "Night" restores coordinates arguably lost in painting since the separation of natural and moral philosophy in the Baroque era. It is with Velázquez that we see a turning point, an emphasis on the specific resources of painting as a form of speculative intellect, while it is with contemporary works by Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer that we see the return of the same after the collapse of modernism, and after subsequent postmodern maneuvers to make art discursive yet without the austerities of the formal means present in Art as Art. Art as "Night" argues for a nondiscursive form of intellection fully embodied in the work of art – and, foremost, painting. A synoptic and intentionally elusive and allusive survey of painting, through the collapse of the art market in late 2007, Art as "Night" suggests by way of this critique of an elective "night" crossing painting that the art world is an endlessly deferred version of pleroma , a fully synthetic world given to an exploration and appropriation of the given through classical mimesis and epistemology and its complete incorporation and transfiguration in a theory of knowledge and art as pure speculative agency. In effect, Art as "Night" is an incarnational theory of art as absolute knowledge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art as PerformanceMichael WehArt As Performance, by David Davies. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004, 278 pp.If we accepted the claims that David Davies makes in his Art as Performance, we would have to rigorously revise our conception of what kinds of entities artworks are. Art as Performance is a study in the ontology of art, and whereas other well-known theories about the ontological status of artworks say that artworks are (...) to be identified with, forexample, types, classes, or kinds, Davies holds that they are performances that lead to the production of a "focus of appreciation" — the latter being the objects we usually take to be artworks. So according to Davies, a painting presented in a museum or a novel we can buy in a bookshop is in fact not the artwork x.The artwork is rather the performance that cumulated in bringing x into existence.Davies characterizes our "common sense theory" of art as including views about the epistemology, ontology,axiology, and definition of art. It maintains that in order to appreciate an artwork, a direct experiential encounter with it is sufficient; that artworks are those things that are exhibited in our museums or performed on stages; that the value of artworks lies in immediately experiencing them; and that artworks differ from other objects by virtue of possessing aesthetic properties. But the common sense theory conflicts with many, if not most, of the art phenomena of the twentieth century. The puzzlement of audiences in the face of certain contemporary pieces of art is caused by the incompatibility of the common sense theory with those artworks. A philosopher of art can try to solve this problem by either accommodating modern art to the common sense theory or by dismissing the theory as inappropriate. With his performance theory, Davies goes for the [End Page 114] second option, while at the same time constraining his theory to the principle that an ontology of art should not contradict our dealing with art — at least after we have critically revised it — too excessively.Davies's first major step in elaborating his theory is a discussion of whether it is necessary to take contextual properties of artworks into account in order to be able to appreciate and understand them. Defenders of "aesthetic empiricism" (a term coined by Gregory Currie) deny that an artwork's history of production is relevant and would be the philosophical business partners of the common sense theory. According to empiricism, only an artwork's manifest properties matter. The context of an artwork's making is at best of art-historical interest. Building upon the works of Currie, Jerrold Levinson, Arthur Danto, and others, Davies forcefully argues against empiricism in defense of a contextualist epistemology of art. And since he takes an artwork's history of production to be epistemologically indispensable, Davies infers that it also has to be considered concerning the ontology of art.Davies's ontology of art is monistic. He claims that all artworks are not the products of creative activities, but rather "intentionally guided generative performances that eventuate in contextualized structures or objects...or events...performances completed by what I am terming a focus of appreciation" (p. 98). The focus of appreciation, in turn, is defined as "an artistic statement as articulated in an artistic medium realized in a vehicle" (p. 60). Davies understands an artistic medium as a set of social conventions or understandings of how to describe the way an artist articulated his statement — for example by manipulating a physical object. The vehicle can be — as in the case of painting — exactly that physical object, or, for example, an action in the case of conceptual art. The main point is that the focus of appreciation is not the artwork. The focus of appreciation — for example, the object Les Demoiselles d'Avignon — completes the performance that was carried out by the artist, and that performance is the artwork.If artworks are performances, it is clear that artworks possess the properties on whose existence contextualism insists and that are ignored by empiricism. But though Davies emphasizes the role of the properties an artwork has due to its provenance, he is also concerned about the weaknesses of... (shrink)

The Art Meme The supernova that was art, must have imploded sometime back in the late twentieth century; its memes sent hurtling out into the furthest reaches of the universe. Everything appears as art now, although art itself has become a dark matter, a black hole, surrounded by pulsars. The mission of this project has been to track arts trace elements and evaluate its dynamic structure. To this end we have charted the further reaches of the stellar system and probed (...) the dark matter itself, in a bid to quantify its magnetic field. What comes to light is a dynamic quantum, one capable of switching itself on despite adverse conditions. Art it seems is a charmed philosophical particle, which reinvents itself to re-polarise exhausted energy fields. The art meme activates a poiesis/mimesis pivot and, in an insubordinate act of language, serves to table the unsayable. In a duplicious act of double-conceit, art reflects and refracts all predictabilities to affect an existential shift in our electrical fields. Its objective to institute a change into the global matrix, but this can only be affected in a form of language. Art is an epistemology alright - but a weird one.". (shrink)

Connections of beauty to science, whereby scientific truth informs truth about art, is denied by a Humean-Kantian-positivist tradition. Its denial of even scientifictheories being known to be true proceeds pari passu with denying any known truth in the less rigorous sciences such as aesthetics that, for Aristotle, studiesbeauty’s cause. Related to causation is a modern problem of “knowing we know”: knowledge in science presupposes a causal principle whose truth is not known when expressed as a truth-functional conditional. But by conditionals (...) that are modal, among other things, this and other knotty epistemological problems may be resolved – resulting axiologically in claims about art that may be as certifiably true as the truths in biology, psychology and medicine that inform those claims. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show how a sensory approach to visual arts can be relevant for philosophy and how this prism, once brought to philosophy, can give insights on art in return. I will try to demonstrate that the difference between modernity’s two main schools of thought (namely, materialism and idealism) can be understood – thanks to the model of painting as an allegory of the world – as an exclusive preference for one sense: touch for materialism (...) and sight for idealism. Much as the two schools differ, both consider the painting (or the world) a finite picture, whose elements can be juxtaposed in a single homogeneous plane of knowledge devoid of any opacity. This leads to separate both vision and the mind from the body and from the world. As a result, sight and touch end up dissociated. That is why, to challenge this modern paradigm and renew with a holistic relationship to the world and to ourselves, philosophers and artists propose a shift towards a synaesthetic approach to painting. Such an approach will uncover a modality of being where the body, the subject, and the world, as well as sight and touch, can be reunited. Thus, I will show that Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh – that echoes through the paintings of artists who attempt to break free from the frame and engage the observer with all his senses and being, such as Racławice Panorama, Malevich, El Lissitzky, Cézanne or the Navajos’ sand paintings – can offer, thanks to a synaesthetic approach, both a new framework for philosophy and a new understanding of visual arts. (shrink)

The programmatic thrust of Thomasma and Pellegrino [5] is clarified and underscored and is interpreted as an attempt to introduce a fixed point into the ethical dimension of medicine by specifying some regulative principles for the medical profession. Two important features of this type of enterprise are noted: on the one hand, it may lead the profession to distinguish between technically identical actions on the basis of the normative principles it produces, thus excluding some morally permissible actions as duties constitutive (...) of the art. It is argued that the formulation of the grounds for this ethic given by Thomasma and Pellegrino is insufficient. In order to speak to the clinical situation, medical ethics must not be based on merely the living human body alone, but on the patientqua person. (shrink)

Feminist art epistemologies (FAEs) greatly aid the understanding of feminist art, particularly when they serve to illuminate the hidden meanings of an artist's intent. The success of parodic imagery produced by feminist artists (feminist visual parodies, FVPs) necessarily depends upon a viewer's recognition of the original work of art created by a male artist and the realization of the parodist's intent to ridicule and satirize. As Brand shows in this essay, such recognition and realization constitute the knowledge of a well-(in)formed (...) FAE. Without it, misinterpretation is possible and viewers fail to experience and enjoy a full and rewarding encounter with a provocative and subversive work of art. (shrink)

The subject of the study is the epistemological specificity of art through the «prism» of the Paleolithic and modern eras. The focus of the research is aimed at analyzing the phenomenon of «eidetism», which is a link between modern and primitive art. The purpose of the article is to comprehend the epistemological specifics of art, which began with the «psychophysiology» of the primitive world and developed into forms of «practical philosophizing» of the modern era. The research methodology includes a review (...) of literary sources, a dialectical approach to historical and art historical reconstruction, analysis of paleopsychological data, comparative analysis, elements of systems psychology and sociology. An element of novelty is the author's position that already in the lower, early layers of its evolution, the status of art «as one of the most ancient forms of human activity» is enriched by the status of «a form of practical philosophizing». The generalization is made that the art of the XX-XXI centuries, on the one hand, abandoned both mimesis and humanism, on the other – it continued the path of «practical philosophizing» begun in ancient times, based on the perceptual-empirical method of cognition of reality. The evolution of art from its primitive origins through archaic, classical to its modern state is, at the same time, the transformation of human consciousness, and the comprehension through artistic and creative activity of one's being and place in the universe, etc. - the development of its «depth» (the content of art). This is the development of art «in breadth» (the development of artistic form): the proliferation of its types and genres, the growth of stylistic and technological polyphony, etc. As a result, «art has come a long way from its purely psychophysiological hypostasis to «practical philosophizing». Artistic and creative activity itself as a whole continues to be the most important component of the global «mechanism» of mastering reality. (shrink)

Law as Art presents a radical new legal theory, the Law as Art Hypothesis, which conceives law, not as a system of rules, but as a distinctive kind of art work. Law is differentiated as art by the Law as Compound Artistic Type Hypothesis, which uses the heuristic metaphor of the Operatic Music Drama, the most elementally complex compound art form, to develop an idea of legal art as a distinctive empowered text, supported by the arts of drama, painting, sculpture, (...) dress-design, architecture, rhetoric and communication to form an elementally developed yet integrated unitary art work. Part I develops a new realist epistemology to support a contemporary action-type ontology of art, differentiated as art by virtue of its artistic value. Part II opens with a critical review of the arts in legal theory, before detailing the Law as Art and Law as Compound Artistic Type Hypothesis and locating them within contemporary scholarship. Legal philosophical implications are considered and there is an acronym key and glossary, bibliography and index. (shrink)

We explore themes in Nobel Prize–winning economist James M. Buchanan’s work and apply his Ethics and Economic Progress to problems facing individuals and firms. We focus on Buchanan’s analysis of the individual work ethic, his exhortations to “pay the preacher” of the “institutions of moral-ethical communication,” and his notion of law as “public capital.” We highlight several ways people with other-regarding preferences can contribute to social flourishing and some of the ways those who have “affected to trade for the public (...) good” might want to redirect their efforts. We show how Buchanan’s work has considerable implications for business ethics. Just as his economic analysis of politics changed how we understand government, we think his economic analysis of ethics can (and should) change how we understand business. (shrink)

In this paper, I compare aspects of Heidegger’s and Dewey’s thoughts and argue that such a comparison is educationally promising. I make this argument primarily by comparing their understandings of art, which show striking similarities. Both Dewey and Heidegger, indeed, framed art as a favorite noetic experience; both conceived of art as something that not only completes thinking but that is even necessary for thinking to happen. Both philosophers conceived of art as a means of enlarging experience, thereby overcoming the (...) hallmark of Cartesian epistemology, namely, the subject/object distinction. I wish to also argue that, through the lens of art, we can reframe and better understand some aspects of their... (shrink)

Ciudad sobre ciudad compendia y resume a la perfección el proyecto filosófico de Eugenio Trías: la filosofía del límite. En anteriores libros Trías ha desarrollado separadamente lo que en este libro pretende articular de modo global. Lógica del limite desarrollaba una estética, La edad del espíritu, una filosofía de la religión y de la historia en función de lo que el autor denomina "la cita con lo sagrado, La razón fronteriza, se adentraba en el ámbito de la teoría del conocimiento, (...) Etica y condición humana, expone la naturaleza del ser del límite (el hombre) en su vertiente práctica y en su desarrollo cívico político. Ahora se trata de articular estos cuatro barrios que componen la ciudadela limítrofe, para construir la ciudad ideal, recuperando el proyecto platónico en su vertiente más innovadora... Sobre esos cuatro barrios se proyectan y desarrollan los conceptos fundamentales de la obra del autor: el ser del limite, la razón fronteriza y el suplemento simbólico. Trías desarrolla la ordenación de la ciudad y el despliegue de los barrios que la componen. Con ello consigue dar perfecta coherencia al proyecto de desarrollar la filosofía del límite y de ver las relaciones e interrelaciones que se dan entre esos diferentes barrios o ámbitos del pensamiento. Para desarrollar este proyecto Trías señala que la filosofía antes de ser un producto de la inteligencia, constituye una emoción. Por tanto este desarrollo vendrá marcado por tres emociones filosóficas fundamentales: el asombro, el vértigo y el amor-pasión. Tres elementos esenciales para comprender la noción del hombre como ser del límite, como anhelo de lo estético y de lo religioso en su afán de superar mediante lo simbólico las limitaciones impuestas a la razón por su carácter fronterizo. (shrink)

A humanidade tem sido tomada por angústias tão sutis que, aos poucos, vai se dissolvendo – física e psicologicamente – como se estivesse sendo consumida de dentro para fora. Neste sentido a saída – ainda que imediata e provisória – é propor um jogo de Xadrez com a morte. Não à toa Ingmar Bergman escolhe o Xadrez como a forma da sua personagem desafiar “alguém” tão poderoso. O jogo é um chamamento à razão, à luz capaz de organizar as ideias (...) e dar um rumo à vida. (shrink)

Revendo recentemente o ótimo filme “A Vila”, do diretor indiano M. Night Shyamalan (o mesmo diretor de “O Sexto Sentido”, “Corpo Fechado” e “Sinais”), é possível entender os motivos que levaram os fundadores do vilarejo fictício a criar um mundo à parte para as futuras gerações. O filme, de 2004, é inserido no gênero “suspense” por conta de sua história central em torno de uma lenda sobre criaturas aterradoras que vivem na floresta. Estas são o empecilho para que os moradores (...) cultivem o desejo de deixar o único lugar que conhecem. (shrink)

Desde que foram criados pelos sumérios há mais de 5 mil anos, os livros sempre aterrorizaram os ocupantes do topo de quaisquer formas de poder. Neles estiveram e continuam sendo guardados os sonhos, as ideias, os projetos e as ações da humanidade em todas as vertentes possíveis, sejam eles libertadores e instigantes para as transformações positivas do mundo e do próprio ser humano, sejam eles os caminhos opostos da destruição e da opressão. [...].

Art, as discussed in the third book of Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, plays a double role in his philosophical system. On one hand, beholding an object of aesthetic worth provides the spectator with a temporary cessation of the otherwise incessant suffering that Schopenhauer takes life to be; on the other, art creates an epistemological bridge between ourselves and the world as it really is: unlike science which only studies relations between things, contemplation of art leads to (...) knowledge of that which is “alone really essential to the world, the true content of its phenomena.” (WWR1: 184) It is this second aspect of Schopenhauer's aesthetics that is both appealing and curious: while Schopenhauer's aesthetics and epistemology are both rooted in his picture of the world as Will, which is (taken at face value) deeply counter-intuitive, it yet seems to me that by assigning epistemic value to art, he manages to capture the quality of profundity with which certain works of art strike us – a profundity that is accounted for neither by reference to mere enjoyment nor by reference to paraphrasable, propositional knowledge. (shrink)

Publicado por primera vez en 1982 y merecedor del Premio Nacional de Ensayo en 1983, Lo bello y lo siniestro es un texto imprescindible para comprender la historia de las ideas estéticas y de la teoría del arte. Mediante el análisis de obras diversas -desde las pinturas renacentistas de Sandro Botticelli hasta la célebre película Vertigo de Alfred Hitchcock- el genial filósofo valora la evolución histórica de dos categorías estéticas opuestas, lo bello y lo siniestro, para descubrir lo que ambas (...) tienen de sublime. Eugenio Trías persigue y consigue incansablemente para ofrecer al lector uno de los ensayos más descollantes de nuestro tiempo. (shrink)

Discusses about selective engagement as the most desirable strategy for contemporary America, stating that it is the one that seeks to forestall dangers, not simply to react to them; that is politically viable; at home and abroad; and that protects US interests.

Ainda que possa ser visto como clichê sob diversos aspectos, o filme “O Céu da Meia-Noite” (dirigido e protagonizado por George Clooney para a Netflix) traz temas reflexivos na perspectiva existencial. Lançado em dezembro de um ano doloroso para a humanidade, ele teve as suas gravações encerradas pouco antes do início da pandemia, ainda que traga uma atmosfera tão soturna quanto a deste momento histórico.

O início da terceira década do século 21, tão marcado pela globalização tecnológica e virtualização das relações humanas, ainda mantém fortes laços com o obscurantismo religioso da Idade Média. Com outra roupagem, o fanatismo de muitos cristãos das mais variadas igrejas eterniza sentimentos e ações que acreditávamos superados há séculos. A intolerância religiosa, normalmente carregada de outras tantas intolerâncias na pauta moral, revela com clareza que a caça às bruxas nos tempos da chamada Santa Inquisição foi atualizada com sucesso. O (...) Brasil, por exemplo, vive um de seus piores momentos históricos neste sentido, principalmente pelos recorrentes ataques furiosos às religiões de matriz africana e crimes de agressão e morte contra as chamadas minorias sociais. (shrink)

Os sentidos da paixão foram originalmente um curso livre que o Núcleo de Estudos e Pesquisas da Fundação Nacional de Arte (Funarte) promoveu no Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Brasília e Curitiba e que atraiu cerca de setecentas a mil pessoas em cada cidade. Prova da fertilidade do curso é este livro apaixonado. Nele, alguns dos mais brilhantes intelectuais brasileiros discutem desde o amor em Platão até a paixão em Pasolini, passando por Freud, Walter Benjamin e Clarice Lispector, o que (...) só comprova a riqueza de um tema que até então não havia sido objeto de um debate como este.ÍndiceApresentaçãoPor que tanta paixão? Adauto NovaesOS SENTIDOS DA PAIXÃOO conceito de paixão - Gérard LebrunSobre o medo - Marilena ChauiPlatão: as várias faces do amor - José Américo Motta PessanhaO CANTO DAS PAIXÕESA glória - Renato Janine RibeiroA inveja - Renato MezanA melancolia de Ulisses - Olgária MatosPaixão da igualdade, paixão da liberdade: a amizade em Montaigne - Sérgio CardosoA paixão dionisíaca em Tristão e Isolda - José Miguel WisnikO lenço e o caos - Jorge ColiPasolini: paixão e ideologia - Michel LahudA paixão de Clarice Lispector - Benedito NunesPoesia: a paixão da linguagem - Paulo LeminskiÉdipo e a paixão - Hélio PellegrinoO Dom de Édipo - Luiz Renato MartinsLou Andreas-Salomé: a paixão viva - Luzilá Gonçalves FerreiraA PAIXÃO REVOLUCIONÁRIAA alegoria da liberdade - Jorge ColiA paixão revolucionária e a paixão amorosa em Stendhal - Renato Janine RibeiroA PAIXÃO SILENCIOSARazão e paixão - Sérgio Paulo RouanetA psicanálise e o domínio das paixões - Maria Rita KehlBenjamin: política e paixão - Katia Muricy. (shrink)

Descartes’s concern with the proper method of belief formation is evident in the titles of his works—e.g., The Search after Truth, The Rules for the Direction of the Mind, and The Discourse on Method of rightly conducting one’s reason and seeking the truth in the sciences. It is most apparent, however, in his famous discussions, both in the Meditations and in the Principles, of one particularly noteworthy source of our doxastic errors—namely, the misuse of one’s will. What is not widely (...) recognized, let alone appreciated and understood, is the relationship between his concern with belief formation and his concern with virtue. In fact, few seem to realize that Descartes regards doxastic errors as moral errors and as sins both because such errors are intrinsically vicious and because they entail notably deleterious social consequences. Reforming the Art of Living seeks to rectify this rather common oversight in two ways. First, it aims to elucidate the nature of Descartes’s account of virtuous belief formation. Second, it aims both (i) to illuminate the social significance of Descartes’s philosophical program as it relates to the understanding and practice not of science, but of religion and (ii) to develop a kind of Leibnizian critique of this aspect of his program. More specifically, it aims to show that Descartes’s project is “dangerous,” insofar as it is subversive not only of traditional Christianity but also of other traditional forms of religion, both in theory and in practice. (shrink)

Abstract…observations of skylfull pylotts is the onlye waye to bring it in rule; for it passeth the reach of naturall philosophy. – Michael Gabriel, 1576 (Collinson, 1867, p. 30)Abstract The tension between empirical data and formal theory pervades the entire history of geomagnetism, from the Middle Ages up to the present day. This paper explores its early-modern history (1500–1800), using a hybrid approach: it applies a methodological framework used in modern geophysics to interpret early-modern developments, exploring to what extent formal (...) conjectures shaped observation and vice versa. A range of pertinent case studies supports classification of this entire period as proto-scientific, characterised by the initial formation of theories being largely disconnected from observational constraints, and their subsequent evolution being advanced primarily by their empirical falsification, and not necessarily associated with the introduction of an alternative. The few exceptional instances of purely data-driven discovery were essentially due to an improved signal-to-noise ratio. (shrink)

Hidden in the cave : the Upaniṣadic self -- Dangerous truths : the Buddha on silence, secrecy and snakes -- A cloak of clever words : the deconstruction of deceit in the Mahābhārata -- Words that burn : why did the Buddha say what he did? -- Words that break : can an Upaniṣad state the truth? -- The imperfect reality of persons -- Self as performance.

The increasing availability of passively observed data has yielded a growing interest in “data fusion” methods, which involve merging data from observational and experimental sources to draw causal conclusions. Such methods often require a precarious tradeoff between the unknown bias in the observational dataset and the often-large variance in the experimental dataset. We propose an alternative approach, which avoids this tradeoff: rather than using observational data for inference, we use it to design a more efficient experiment. We consider the case (...) of a stratified experiment with a binary outcome and suppose pilot estimates for the stratum potential outcome variances can be obtained from the observational study. We extend existing results to generate confidence sets for these variances, while accounting for the possibility of unmeasured confounding. Then, we pose the experimental design problem as a regret minimization problem subject to the constraints imposed by our confidence sets. We show that this problem can be converted into a concave maximization and solved using conventional methods. Finally, we demonstrate the practical utility of our methods using data from the Women’s Health Initiative. (shrink)

We humans are a curious species. Of all the life forms that inhabit the earth, we alone strive to make sense of the world in which we find ourselves. For thousands of years we understood the world through stories. Our ancestors told stories of how the world began, how our people originated and came to be at this place, and how those people across the river or beyond the mountains came to be where they are. Some stories were of animals (...) and plants in our neighborhood, and their powers to help us, feed us, or cure our ailments. But in the last few centuries, starting in Europe and spreading throughout the world, a new way of understanding began competing with storytelling as a means of comprehending our world. Science supplanted storytelling largely because it empowered us to transform the world in ways that were unimaginable to our ancestors. We understand the world scientifically by describing the world instead of by telling stories about it. The stories our ancestors told no longer explain the world, but are data within the world, part of the world that science describes. Our stories have become myths, cultural artifacts that may be interesting and a subject of study, but cannot possibly be true. Yet even in societies that have thoroughly embraced science as a means of understanding the world, myths remain a powerful force. Myth and science exist side by side, often creating confusion and conflict. (shrink)

Adults spend most of their conscious life speaking, comprehending, writing, and reading discourse. It is entirely appropriate for cognitive science to investigate discourse especially as transmitted texts or printed media, such as books, newspapers, magazines, and computers. However, there is another reason why text understanding has been one of the prototypical areas of study in cognitive science: Interdisciplinary work is absolutely essential. As cognitive scientists have unraveled the puzzles of text comprehension, they have embraced the insights and methodologies from several (...) disciplines. (shrink)

What role does race play in the moral judgment of character? None, ideally, philosophers insist, contending that the proper assessment of an action requires that we disregard any social values associated with the body performing it. What rightly comes under evaluation, they assert, is the neutral, abstract deed irrespective of the race of the agent. Only under these conditions, presumably, can we gauge true moral worth. Reading together Immanuel Kant and Frantz Fanon on ethics and race, I propose instead that (...) embodied values such as those accorded by race do not distort the portrait of the ethical subject but rather bring that subjectivity into being. Key Words: blackness • embodiment • ethics • Frantz Fanon • Immanuel • Kant • morality • race • value. (shrink)

Fictionalism confronts the dual epistemological nature of education. In this book, Johan Dahlbeck argues that all education, at bottom, concerns a striving for truth initiated through fictions. This foundational aporia is then interrogated and made sense of via Hans Vaihinger’s philosophy of ‘as if’ and Spinoza’s peculiar form of exemplarism. Using a variety of fictional examples, Dahlbeck investigates the different dimensions of educational fictionalism, from teacher exemplarism to the basic educational fictions necessary for getting started in education in the first (...) place. Fictionalism will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in the philosophical foundations of education. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:Hegel's end-of-art thesis is arguably the most notorious assertion in aesthetics. I outline traditional interpretive strategies before offering an original alternative to these. I develop a conception of art that facilitates a reading of Hegel on which he is able to embrace three seemingly contradictory theses about art, namely, (i) the end-of-art thesis, (ii) the continued significance of art for its own sake (autonomy thesis), and (iii) the necessity of art for robust knowledge (epistemicnecessity thesis). I argue that Hegel is (...) able to embrace all three theses at once through a conception of the work of art as an internally purposive whole (what I call the "IP View" of art). On the IP View, because of the kind of wholes that artworks are, they (i.a) are valuable for their own sake as ends-in-themselves, (i.b) yield valuable experiences because they are valuable for their own sake, and thereby (i.c) are necessary for robust knowledge. Finally, I suggest that not only does Hegel appear to hold the IP View of art, but also that on such a view, there is a very sensible reason for affirming (one reading of) Hegel's end-of-art thesis as an important means to establishing art's actual significance for robust knowledge against soaring, but unsubstantiable, claims about art's potency with respect to robust knowledge. (shrink)

In three volumes, a distinguished group of scholars from a variety of disciplines in the natural and social sciences, the humanities and the arts contribute essays in honor of Robert S. Cohen, on the occasion of his 70th birthday. The range of the essays, as well as their originality, and their critical and historical depth, pay tribute to the extraordinary scope of Professor Cohen's intellectual interests, as a scientist-philosopher and a humanist, and also to his engagement in the world of (...) social and political practice. Science, Mind and Art, Volume III of Essays in honor of Robert S. Cohen focuses on issues in contemporary epistemology, aesthetics, and philosophy of mind as well as on the relations of science and human values in ethical and religious thought. It also has important new work in contemporary metaphysics, as well as in the history of philosophy, and on questions of multiculturalism in science education. Contributors include Paul Feyerabend, Adolf Grünbaum, Joseph Margolis, Joëlle Proust, Erazim Kohak, Elie Wiesel, Miriam Bienenstock, and John Silber, among others. (shrink)

This article introduces the thought of the Romanian philosopher Lucian Blaga on religion as a cultural creation that has value apart from questions of the truthfulness of religious doctrines. According to Blaga, religion has considerable aesthetic and philosophical significance. The article places this insight within the context of Blaga’s metaphysical vision and his analysis of epistemology and illustrates it with a new translation of one of his most famous poems.

Collecting ethnographic items for the Estonian National Museum has been linked to the practice of buying objects during fieldwork. Often we can find metaphors or expressions connected with trading in the Komi fieldwork diaries. Comparing ethnographers with merchants is a stereotypical way of describing the activities of Estonian researchers in the field. If ethnographers use, in their diaries, metaphors and expressions connected to trading, it may be just a spontaneous phrasing or inter-textual play of words. Inside the community of Estonian (...) ethnologists there exists some kind of discourse style, which is followed in the fieldwork diaries, more or less consciously. This style of narration is also connected to the specific social and historical context in which ethnographers act. At the same time, even satiric inter-textual quotations do not exclude the possibility that some of this discourse is related to a deeper level of human consciousness. (shrink)

Collecting ethnographic items for the Estonian National Museum has been linked to the practice of buying objects during fieldwork. Often we can find metaphors or expressions connected with trading in the Komi fieldwork diaries. Comparing ethnographers with merchants is a stereotypical way of describing the activities of Estonian researchers in the field. If ethnographers use, in their diaries, metaphors and expressions connected to trading, it may be just a spontaneous phrasing or inter-textual play of words. Inside the community of Estonian (...) ethnologists there exists some kind of discourse style, which is followed in the fieldwork diaries, more or less consciously. This style of narration is also connected to the specific social and historical context in which ethnographers act. At the same time, even satiric inter-textual quotations do not exclude the possibility that some of this discourse is related to a deeper level of human consciousness. (shrink)

Bhabha, Georges Didi-Huberman, David Morgan and Lee Siegel, as well as a series of focused contributions by Yve-Alain Bois, Wendy Doniger, Kenneth Frampton, Martin E. Marty, John Hallmark Neff, Annemarie Schimmel, and Helen Tworkov consider how rapture resonate's both in a cultural context and within the experience of a single human being.

In this article I investigate the necessarily interdisciplinary nature of our contemporaneity, from the perspective of works by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Bruno Latour and Michel Serres. While we often find that academia, society and governments push us towards interdisciplinarity, it is also true that those same institutions and powers, distance us from that purpose. Opposing this aporetic situation we come up against the Deleuzian concept of ‘contamination’, or the well-known ‘science of Venus’ concept of Michel Serres. In doing so, (...) we attempt ‘to put the tracing back on the map’, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, and try to see the epistemological becomings that we find in contemporary culture. The main indicators which we use to study these contaminations and hybridisations are cinema and Bio Art. In both cases we observe that the real creative production is closer to ‘contamination’ than to the ‘purification’ and deletion of metabolic and hybrid processes criticised by Bruno Latour. (shrink)

BackgroundCORE (Clarity and Openness in Reporting: E3-based) Reference (released May 2016 by the European Medical Writers Association [EMWA] and the American Medical Writers Association [AMWA]) is a complete and authoritative open-access user’s guide to support the authoring of clinical study reports (CSRs) for current industry-standard-design interventional studies. CORE Reference is a content guidance resource and is not a CSR Template.TransCelerate Biopharma Inc., an alliance of biopharmaceutical companies, released a CSR Template in November 2018 and recognised CORE Reference as one of (...) two principal sources used in its development.MethodsThe regulatory medical writing and statistical professionals who developed CORE Reference conducted a critical review of the TransCelerate CSR Template. We summarise our major findings and recommendations in this communication. We also re-examined and edited the Version 1 CORE Reference Terminology Table that we first published in 2016, and we present this as Version 2 in this communication.ResultsOur major critical review findings indicate that opportunities remain to refine the CSR Template structure and instructional text, enhance content clarity, add web links to referenced guidance documents, improve transparency to support the broad readership of CSRs, and develop supporting resources.The CORE Reference ‘Terminology Table’ Version 2 includes estimand as a defined term and an adaptation of the original ‘worked study example’ to incorporate the recently evolved concept of ‘estimands’.ConclusionsAs TransCelerate’s CSR Template represents an important milestone in authoring CSRs, we offer CSR authors advice and recommendations on its use, similarities, and differences with CORE Reference and advise them to consider shared interpretations between the two.RegistrationCORE Reference is registered with the EQUATOR Network. The TransCelerate CSR Template is not registered with any external organisation to the knowledge of the authors of this paper. (shrink)