In Art of the Ordinary, Deming brings together the arts, philosophy, and psychology in new and compelling ways so as to offer generative, provocative insights into how we think and represent the world to others as well as to ourselves.

: Believing that philosophy had become a single-minded pursuit of a dead metaphor, Nietzsche constructs his authorial self as a "strong poet," a writer who attempts a new vocabulary and increases flexibility for available discourses. Building on observations by Gilles Deleuze, Sarah Kofman, and others, this article maps the literary register of Nietzsche's thinking, particularly in Beyond Good and Evil, to see the ways that tropes and rhetorical devices drive Nietzsche's textual negotiations. Such literary self-interrogation into how a text might (...) enact its own will to power gives rise—for Nietzsche, the reader, and for philosophy itself—to methods of self-overcoming. (shrink)

Reading a book for a review is not the same as reading for pleasure or research. The voice of the ‘critic’—or the critic one would like to be—muffles the voice of the text. Reviewing a book on reading, written by a writer, is as disconcerting as speaking with an old high school English teacher. I take courage from Emerson. In “The Poet,” an essay to which Richard Deming often returns, Emerson offers: Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say, (...) “It is in me, and shall out.” Stand there, baulked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until, at last, rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power... (shrink)

Recent scientific approaches to aesthetics include evolutionary theories about the origin of art behavior, psychological investigations into human aesthetic experience and preferences, and neurophysiological explorations of the mechanisms underlying art experience. Critics of these approaches argue that they are ultimately irrelevant to a philosophical aesthetics because they cannot help us understand the distinctive conceptual basis and normativity of our art experience. This criticism may seem plausible given the piecemeal nature of these scientific approaches, but a more comprehensive naturalistic framework can (...) help us understand the conceptual basis and normativity of art. In particular, the ecology of art, an understanding of how individuals interact within particular environments, can help us understand the engineered art niches in which we create and experience art. Each niche is associated with a particular deme, or set of individuals that interact within that niche, and a set of cognitive, epistemic, and pedagogical technologies that form the conceptual basis of a niche-dependent normativity. This is to be contrasted with the niche-independent normativity revealed by many of the scientific approaches. This framework, and the conflicting streams of normativity it reveals, allows us to better understand conflicts in normativity and the implausibility of unequivocal and universal normative principles. (shrink)

This Critical Reader provides a new perspective on the work of France's foremost social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, by examining its philosophical import and promoting a fruitful dialogue between Bourdieu and philosophers in the English-speaking world. The contributors include leading philosophers who critically assess Bourdieu's philosophical theories and their significance from diverse philosophical perspectives to reveal which dimensions of his thought are the most useful for philosophy today. These discussions also raise important questions about the current institutional limits of philosophy and (...) how those limits may be overcome through a more robust alliance with the social sciences and the practical social world. The contributions cover Bourdieu's use of central figures in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition; his relationship to analytical philosophy and pragmatism through his concept of habitus; his position in twentieth-century continental philosophy; the political dimension of his work; the function and limits of his notion of "the field"; and the relation of his explanatory models to new directions in the philosophy of science. The book also discusses some of his most recent writing not yet translated into English, and it concludes with a chapter by Bourdieu in which he analyses the diverse structural problems and the transformations involved in importing intellectual ideas from one national field to another. The volume also offers a specially prepared comprehensive bibliography of Bourdieu's publications in French and English from 1958 to 1998. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art and ReligionRichard Shusterman (bio)IArt emerged in ancient times from myth, magic, and religion, and it has long sustained its compelling power through its sacred aura. Like cultic objects of worship, artworks weave an entrancing spell over us. Though contrasted to ordinary real things, their vivid experiential power provides a heightened sense of the real and suggests deeper realities than those conveyed by common sense and science. While Hegel (...) saw religion as superseding art in the evolution of Spirit toward higher forms that culminate in philosophical knowledge, subsequent artists of the nineteenth century instead saw art as superseding religion and even philosophy as the culmination of contemporary man's spiritual quest. Artistic minds as different as Matthew Arnold, Oscar Wilde, and Stephan Mallarmé predicted that art would supplant traditional religion as the locus of the holy, of uplifting mystery and consoling meaning in our increasingly secular society dominated by what Wilde condemned as a dreary "worship of facts."1 By expressing "the mysterious sense... of existence, [art] endows our sojourn with authenticity and constitutes the sole spiritual task," claims Mallarmé.2 "More and more," writes Arnold, "mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry."3Such prophecies have largely been realized. In twentieth-century Western culture, artworks have become the closest thing we have to sacred texts, and art almost seems a form of religion with its prophetic breed of creative artists perennially purveying new gospels and its priestly class of interpretive [End Page 1] critics who explain them to a devotional public. Despite wide recognition that art has an important commercial aspect, art sustains its cultural image as an essentially sanctified domain of higher spiritual values, beyond the realm of material life and praxis. Its adored relics (however profane they strive to be) are sacredly enshrined in temple-like museums that we dutifully visit for spiritual edification, just as religious devotees have long frequented churches, mosques, synagogues, and other shrines of worship.In advocating a pragmatist aesthetics I have criticized this otherworldly religion of art because of the way it has been shaped by more than two centuries of modern philosophical ideology aimed at disempowering art by consigning it to an unreal, purposeless world of imagination. Such religion, I have argued, is the enemy of pragmatism's quest to integrate art and life, a quest exemplified both in the classical Western notion of the art of living and some Asian artistic traditions, where art is less importantly the creation of objects than the process of refining the artist who creates and the audience who absorbs that creative expression.4There is good reason, however, why this sacralization of art should remain so powerfully appealing despite the widespread recognition of art's mercantile dimensions and worldly concerns. The reason, I believe, is that art expresses very deep meanings and spiritual insights that religion and philosophy once most powerfully provided but that they now no longer convey in a convincing way to most of today's secular populations throughout the world. So, in this essay I would like to reconsider the art and religion nexus from a different angle. I wish to explore the idea that art provides a useful, even superior, substitute for religion, one that is free from the latter's many disadvantages and that should be vigorously championed as an alternative that could eventually free our transcultural world from the hostile divisiveness and backward-looking attitudes that religions have inspired and instead lead us toward greater understanding, peace, and harmony.But a contrary yet equally interesting hypothesis likewise demands consideration: that art cannot be separated from religion, that rather than a real alternative, art is simply another mode or expression of religion. Or, to put it in a provocatively suggestive paraphrase, art is simply the continuation of religion by other means. If this hypothesis has merit—indeed, even if there is simply some deeply indissoluble link between art and religion—then we cannot simply look progressively past religion... (shrink)

Durch eine Untersuchung der verschiedenen Konzeptionen und Elemente, die im Begriff der ästhetischen Erfahrung angelegt sind, und durch die Unterscheidung der mit ihnen verbundenen Logiken und Ziele versucht der Beitrag, zu einem besseren Verständnis der vielfältigen semantischen und evaluativen Dimensionen dieses Begriffs zu gelangen. Dabei wird zudem für eine Anerkennung der ästhetischen Dimension sexueller Erfahrungen plädiert, die gewöhnlich aus dem Bereich der ästhetischen Erfahrung ausgeschlossen werden.

Advances in neuroscience and its related technologies promise significant forms of cognitive enhancement, chiefly through the development of drugs, genetic engineering and screening, and electronic devices for augmenting brain functions. Such advances, however, raise a complex cluster of ethical questions that should increasingly concern us in the future as these technologies become more prevalent, powerful, and wide ranging in their effects. Most ethical dilemmas and debates about enhanced cognition seem to focus on our relation to others. These ethical controversies typically (...) concern two kinds of issues. The first is whether our enhanced knowledge about others may be unethically used to limit their freedom .. (shrink)

This paper shows that goodman's influential theory of the work of art's identity suffers from what for him is a serious omission, the lack of a nominalistic formulation of his definitions of the works of the various arts. i examine the possible nominalistic translations of goodman's platonistic definitions and show that they would either be unsuitable to goodman's views or unacceptable "simpliciter". among the possibilities considered are type-individuals, superindividuals, and multiply-referential labels.

The growing interest in Africa as well as concerns about negative deviant behaviors and ethnic structures necessitates examination of the effect of ethnic expectations on behavior of employees. In this study we leverage insight from ethnos oblige theory to propose that centralization of ethnic norms moderates the relationship between benevolence expectations and negative deviant behavior. Using a cross-sectional design and data from two countries as well as moderation and cross-cultural analytic techniques, we find support for three-way interactions where the relationship (...) between benevolence and negative deviant behavior is moderated by centralization and culture. We discuss the implications of the findings which support the dynamic perspective of management in Africa. (shrink)

The classical social theorist Emile Durkheim proposed the counterintuitive thesis that crime is beneficial for society because it provokes punishment, which enhances social solidarity. His logic, however, is blemished by a reified view of society that leads to group-selectionist thinking and a teleological account of the causes of crime. Reconceptualization of the relationship between crime and punishment in terms of evolutionary game theory, however, suggests that crime (cheating) may confer benefits on cooperating individuals by promoting stability in their patterns of (...) cooperation. (shrink)

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