Philosophers and artists consider the relevance of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy for understanding art and aesthetic experience. This collection of essays brings together diverse but interrelated perspectives on art and perception based on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Although Merleau-Ponty focused almost exclusively on painting in his writings on aesthetics, this collection also considers poetry, literary works, theater, and relationships between art and science. In addition to philosophers, the contributors include a painter, a photographer, a musicologist, and an architect. This widened (...) scope offers important philosophical benefits, testing and providing evidence for the empirical applicability of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic writings. The central argument is that for Merleau-Ponty the account of perception is also an account of art and vice versa. In the philosopher’s writings, art and perception thus intertwine necessarily rather than contingently such that they can only be distinguished by abstraction. As a result, his account of perception and his account of art are organic, interdependent, and dynamic. The contributors examine various aspects of this intertwining across different artistic media, each ingeniously revealing an original perspective on this intertwining. (shrink)

What elements lie at the core of patriarchal consciousness and give it its particular expressions? Beneath the hatred of women, at its source, is a profound, dissociating fear: the fear of non-being, the Absence beyond Death. In an effort to escape death and non-being, the patriarchs have constructed a conception of existence which is split in two, with eternal life, God, meaning and spirit on one side and bodily death on the other. The masculist association of women with bodies, nature (...) and the birthing-dying cycle places us clearly on the side of death, in the realm of being which is and necessarily must be despised and controlled. Alienation from the rhythms of life, giving rise to a crisis of meaning; the denial of death, which leads paradoxically to an adoration of death; and a hysterical ambivalence to sex and sensuality all coalesce and find concrete expression in the personal and institutionalized hatred of Woman. (shrink)

(2014). Toward Narrative Strategy. World Futures: Vol. 70, Strategy, Story, and Emergence: Essays on Scenario Planning, pp. 5-18.

This essay compares Greek and Chinese conceptions of the origin of the world based on the concept of cosmo-metaphysics, by which I mean a philosophical scheme that addresses at once the law of the universe and the primary cause of substance or being. In regarding God or the first mover as both the cosmic and substantial principle of unity, Aristotle spells out a cosmo-metaphysics in his On the Universe and the Metaphysics. Aristotle’s cosmo-metaphysics, I propose, finds a close parallel in (...) the metaphysical system represented in the Laozi 老子, the Daoist classic, and “The Great Commentary” on the Yijing 易經. Both texts articulate a cosmo-metaphysics that integrates the cosmic and substantial principles of unity through the two concepts of the Dao 道 and being versus nonbeing, the Chinese counterparts of Aristotle’s prime mover and being qua being. Chinese and Western metaphysics share not only a fundamental assumption about the origin of the world but also the hypothesis of an ineffable and inactive first mover. Where Aristotle resorts to analogy and metaphor to name and characterize this elusive and passive mover, Chinese philosophers prefer to leave it unnamed and use natural images to illustrate its nature. Despite the different approaches, however, the fundamental assumption about the prime mover as both a substantial and cosmic principle lies at the root of both Chinese and Western metaphysics. The comparative lens centered on the concept of cosmo-metaphysics thus uncovers a distinctive Chinese metaphysics that corresponds closely to that in the West, a correspondence that calls into question some prevailing presumptions about Chinese philosophy. (shrink)

A co-authored collaboration between a theatre practitioner and a clinical psychiatrist, this paper will examine Rough for Theatre II and Beckett’s demonstration of the way records are used to understand the human subject. Using Beckett’s play to explore interdisciplinary issues of embodiment and diagnosis, the authors will present a dialogue that makes use of the ‘best sources’ in precisely the same manner as the play’s protagonists. One of those sources will be Beckett himself, as Heron will locate the play in (...) its theatrical context through reflections upon his own practice as well as recent studies such as Beckett, Technology and the Body and Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama ; another source will be the philosopher Wilhelm Windleband, whose 1901 History of Philosophy was read and noted upon by Beckett in the 1930s, as Broome will introduce a philosophical and psychiatric context to the exchange. Windelband is now a neglected figure in philosophy; but as one of the key figures of Neo-Kantianism in the late 19th century, his work was an important impetus to that of Rickert, Weber and Heidegger. Specifically, Windelband gives us the distinction between idiographic and nomothetic understanding of individuals, an approach that is of relevance to the psychiatric encounter. This academic dialogue will consider tensions between subjectivity and objectivity in clinical and performance practice, while examining Beckett’s analysis of the use of case notes and relating them back to Windelband’s ideas on the understanding of others. The dialogue took place in 2011 at the University of Warwick, and has since been edited by the authors. (shrink)

Koopman’s book revolves around the notion of transition, which he proposes is one of the central ideas of the pragmatist tradition but one which had not previously been fully articulated yet nevertheless shapes the pragmatist attitude in philosophy. Transition, according to Koopman, denotes “those temporal structures and historical shapes in virtue of which we get from here to there”. One of the consequences of transitionalism is the understanding of critique and inquiry as historical pro...