The value of the arts is often measured in terms of human creativity against instrumental rationality, while art for art's sake defends against a utility of art. Such critiques of the technical and formulaic are themselves formulaic, repeating the dualism of the head and the heart. How should we account for this formula? We should do so by investigating its determination within metaphysical and social relations, ancient and modern, and by comprehending the notion of freedom carried therein. This opens up (...) the value of the arts to a modern metaphysics and modern notion of freedom. This value, and this freedom, find currency in a notion of philosophical and political education, and especially in a modern conception of liberal arts education, where freedom is to learn. (shrink)

Robert H. Holden, in ‘The Public University's Unbearable Defiance of Being’ (2009, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 41:5, pp. 575–591) argues that the public university ought to welcome the infusion of relevant beliefs, including religious ones, in carrying out its research and teaching responsibilities. In this paper, I examine whether he has shown that some opinions are suppressed, whether he has shown that other views are hegemonic, the central argument that lies behind his thinking, and then consider the educational consequences of (...) his position. (shrink)

This paper puts the famous story of Jekyll and Hyde to work for a specific analytic purpose. The question of responsibility for crime, complicated by the divided subjectivity implicit in Mr. Hyde’s appearance, and illuminated by Robert Louis Stevenson’s grasp of contemporary psychiatric, evolutionary and medical thought as promising new technologies for effecting a distinction between criminality and innocence, is key to the interest of the story. I argue that Jekyll and Hyde serves as a powerful metaphor both for specifically (...) late Victorian perplexities about criminality and criminal responsibility, and for more persistently troubling questions about the legitimacy of and practical basis for criminalization. A close reading of the story illustrates the complex mix of elements bearing on criminal responsibility-attribution, and—incidentally—helps to explain what is wrong with the influential argument that, by the end of the nineteenth Century, attributions of responsibility in English criminal law already rested primarily and unambiguously on factual findings about the defendant’s state of mind. Far from representing the triumph of a practice of responsibility-attribution grounded in the assessment of whether the defendant’s capacities were fully engaged, I argue that the terrain of mental derangement defences in late nineteenth Century England helps us to understand that longer-standing patterns of moral evaluation of character remained central to the criminal process. And precisely because ‘character’ remained key to the institutional effort to distinguish criminality and innocence, the ‘terror’ of Stevenson’s story resides in its questioning of whether either scientific knowledge or moral evaluation of character can provide a stable basis for attributions of responsibility. In conclusion, I will also suggest that Stevenson’s tale can help us to make sense of the resurgence of overtly ‘character-based’ practices of responsibility attribution in contemporary Britain and the United States, which themselves reflect a renewed crisis of confidence in our ability to effect a ‘dissociation’ between criminality and innocence. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is methodological. It offers a comprehensive mapping of the theoretical positions on the ethical criticism of art, correcting omissions and inadequacies in the conceptual framework adopted in the current debate. Three principles are recommended as general guidelines: ethical amenability, basic value pluralism, and relativity to ethical dimension. Hence a taxonomy distinguishing between different versions of autonomism, moralism, and immoralism is established, by reference to criteria that are different from what emerging in the current literature. The (...) mapping is then proved capable of (1) locating the various theories that have been proposed so far and clarifying such theories’ real commitments, (2) having the correct relationship with actual art making and art criticism practices, and (3) showing the real weight of the alleged counter-example to a moralist position of a work that succeeds artistically because of its immorality. (shrink)

This thesis presents an examination of the giallo films of Dario Argento from his directorial debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to The Stendhal Syndrome'. In opposition to the dominant psychoanalytical approaches to the horror film generally and Argento's giallo specifically, this thesis argues that the giallo, both textually and meta-textually, actively resists oedipalisation. Taking up from Deleuze's contention in Cinema 1: The Movement Image that the cinematic-image can be consider the equivalent to a philosophical concept, I suggest that (...) Argento's giallo are examples of what Deleuze calls cinema of the "time-image": provoked and extended "philosophical" acts of imagining the world which opens up a theoretical space of thinking differently about questions of gender and genre in horror film, which takes us beyond the fixed images of thought offered by traditional psychoanalytical and feminist paradigms of horror. In the opening chapters of this thesis, I argue that the cinematic-image has to be thought "historically", and that it is only be understanding the emergence of the "giallo" in the 1960s within the wider picture of Italian national cinema, that we can understand Argento's films as specific cultural expressions of thought, which are not reducible to paradigms based upon analyses of the more puritan and fixed American horror film. In my subsequent discussion of Argento's "Diva" trilogy, I consider an assemblage of Deleuzian becoming and poststructuralist feminist thought as a mechanism through which to explore the increasingly feminised and feminist spaces of his later work. This thesis concludes by assessing Argento's critical and creative legacy in films such as Toshiharu Ikeda's Evil Dead Trap and Cindy Sherman's Office Killer. In these terms, a Deleuzian "approach", enables a set of readings, which open up the texts to a more productive consideration of their appeal, in a way which other more traditional approaches do not, and cannot, account for. The close textual and historical analysis demanded by Deleuze is both a reconsideration of the [feminist] politics of Argento's work, and a response to criticisms of misogynism. (shrink)