L’autrice sostiene che l’arte contemporanea etnicamente marcata – arte contemporanea africana, aborigena, nativa – è inclusa nell’arte contemporanea tout court – la categoria non-marcata e dominante – nella forma dell’eccezione agambeniana, ossia secondo quella logica di esclusione inclusiva che caratterizza anche le opposizioni privative in semantica cognitiva e le opposizioni gerarchiche di Louis Dumont (l’englobement du contraire). L’esame di alcuni esempi rivela come il diniego di coevità (Johannes Fabian) riservato agli Altri, prima che alla loro arte, sia tuttora operante (...) e si esprima anche in un certo discorso curatoriale, principalmente attraverso l’applicazione di coppie di opposti categoriali all’arte contemporanea marcata/non-marcata. Questo tipo di discorso, includendo paradossalmente l’arte etnicamente marcata nella contemporaneità proprio in virtù della sua temporalità diversa e disgiuntiva, riafferma surrettiziamente la differenza antropologica che ci divide dai suoi creatori. Un riesame critico delle dicotomie che qualificano il dualismo antropologico noi/altri nel paradigma storico-artistico dominante, conclude l’autrice, sembra premessa necessaria per apprezzare le altre estetiche: estetiche che sono a noi coeve, e che non necessariamente pertengono a ciò che, per noi, è arte. (shrink)

In a vivid re-creation of late sixteenth-century Flemish intellectual life, Mark Morford explores the intertwined careers of one of the period's most influential thinkers and one of its most original artists: Justus Lipsius and Peter Paul Rubens. He investigates the scholarship of Lipsius (1547-1606), whose revival of Roman Stoicism guided his contemporaries during the revolt of the Netherlands from the rule of Spain and whose teaching prepared future leaders in church and state. Maintaining that Lipsius' thought reached Peter Paul Rubens (...) through his brother, Philip Rubens, Morford analyzes the artist's use of Stoic philosophical and political allegory, beginning with his painting The Four Philosophers. This book discusses the revival of Stoicism in northern Europe, focusing on Lipsius' editions of Tacitus and Seneca, his widely read handbooks on constancy and politics, and his interaction with leading scholars and public figures. As his letters reveal, Lipsius was inconsistent in his life and unsuccessful in reconciling Stoicism with Catholic doctrine; Rubens, although at first sympathetic to the doctrines of Lipsius, is shown to have later transcended their limitations. (shrink)

What is the relationship between music and time? How does musical rhythm express our social experience of time? In Groove: An Aesthetic of Measured Time, Mark Abel explains the rise to prominence in Western music of a new way of organising rhythm - groove. He provides a historical account of its emergence around the turn of the twentieth century, and analyses the musical components which make it work. Drawing on materialist interpretations of art and culture, Mark Abel engages with aesthetic (...) arguments, challenging in particular Adorno's critique of popular music. He concludes that groove does not simply reflect the temporality of contemporary society, but, by incorporating abstract time into its very structure, is capable of effecting a critique of it"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

The "art of being free" is an essential part of democracy. It involves, Mark Reinhardt believes, bringing into being the multiple spaces in and practices through which individuals and groups help to constitute their lives, their selves, their worlds. Americans are presently witnessing a contraction of officially sanctioned spaces for citizen action. It is now crucial, Reinhardt argues, to identify ways of opening new spaces for the direct practice of democratic politics. Reinhardt treats the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl (...) Marx, and Hannah Arendt as exemplary sources for an expansion of political possibility. These writers indicate where and how the new spaces can be brought into being, and they reveal acts of making space as some of the prime moments of politics. Reinhardt's extended readings of these writers, never previously treated together, are quite unlike the familiar understandings of their thought. "Taking liberties," he brings the literary and political sensibility usually associated with postmodernism to a sympathetic if critical encounter with eminently modern thinkers. The result is a strong and idiosyncratic book, accessible and stylish, that mixes acute readings of canonical thinkers with more practical applications and illustrations. Reinhardt combines attention to textual detail and nuance with concern for contemporary politics, discussing as an unusually inventive example the AIDS activist group ACT UP. (shrink)

"_The Moment of Complexity_ is a profoundly original work. In remarkable and insightful ways, Mark Taylor traces an entirely new way to view the evolution of our culture, detailing how information theory and the scientific concept of complexity can be used to understand recent developments in the arts and humanities. This book will ultimately be seen as a classic."-John L. Casti, Santa Fe Institute, author of _Gödel: A Life of Logic, the Mind, and Mathematics_ The science of complexity accounts for (...) that inscrutable mix of chaos and order that governs our natural world. Complexity explains how networks emerge and function, how species organize into ecosystems, how stars form into galaxies, and how just a few sequences of DNA can account for so many different life forms. Recently, the idea of complexity has taken the worlds of business and politics by storm. The concept is used to account for phenomena as varied as the behavior of the stock market, the response of voting populations, and the effects of risk management. Even Disney has used complexity theory to manage crowd control at its theme parks. Given the startling development of new information technologies, we now live in a moment of unprecedented complexity, an era in which change occurs faster than our ability to comprehend it. With _The Moment of Complexity_, Mark C. Taylor offers a timely map for this unfamiliar terrain opening in our midst, unfolding an original philosophy through a remarkable synthesis of science and culture. According to Taylor, complexity is not just a breakthrough scientific concept, but the defining quality of the post-Cold War era. The flux of digital currents swirling around us, he argues, has created a new network culture with its own distinctive logic and dynamic. Drawing on resources from information theory and evolutionary biology, Taylor explains the operation of complex adaptive systems in social and cultural processes and captures a whole new zeitgeist in the making. To appreciate the significance of our emerging network culture, he claims, we need not only to understand contemporary scientific and technological transformations, but also to explore the subtle influences of art, architecture, philosophy, religion, and higher education. _The Moment of Complexity_, then, is a remarkable work of cultural analysis on a scale rarely seen today. To follow its trajectory is to learn how we arrived at this critical moment in our culture, and to know where we might head in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

In New Philosophy for New Media, Mark Hansen defines the image in digital art in terms that go beyond the merely visual. Arguing that the "digital image" encompasses the entire process by which information is made perceivable, he places the body in a privileged position -- as the agent that filters information in order to create images. By doing so, he counters prevailing notions of technological transcendence and argues for the indispensability of the human in the digital era.Hansen examines new (...) media art and theory in light of Henri Bergson's argument that affection and memory render perception impure -- that we select only those images precisely relevant to our singular form of embodiment. Hansen updates this argument for the digital age, arguing that we filter the information we receive to create images rather than simply receiving images as preexisting technical forms. This framing function yields what Hansen calls the "digital image." He argues that this new "embodied" status of the frame corresponds directly to the digital revolution: a digitized image is not a fixed representation of reality, but is defined by its complete flexibility and accessibility. It is not just that the interactivity of new media turns viewers into users; the image itself has become the body's process of perceiving it.To illustrate his account of how the body filters information in order to create images, Hansen focuses on new media artists who follow a "Bergsonist vocation"; through concrete engagement with the work of artists like Jeffrey Shaw, Douglas Gordon, and Bill Viola, Hansen explores the contemporary aesthetic investment in the affective, bodily basis of vision. The book includes over 70 illustrations from the works of these and many other new media artists. (shrink)

In Robust Ethics, Erik Wielenberg criticizes all theistic ethical theories that explain creaturely value in terms of God on the basis that all such formulations of theistic ethics are committed to the denial of the existence of creaturely intrinsic value. Granting Wielenberg’s claim that such theistic theories are committed to the denial of creaturely intrinsic value, this article considers whether theists should take such a denial to be an objectionable commitment of their views. I argue that theists (...) should deny the existence of creaturely intrinsic value, and that such a denial is not an objectionable commitment of theism. (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)

Contemporary ICTs such as speaking machines and computer games tend to create illusions. Is this ethically problematic? Is it deception? And what kind of “reality” do we presuppose when we talk about illusion in this context? Inspired by work on similarities between ICT design and the art of magic and illusion, responding to literature on deception in robot ethics and related fields, and briefly considering the issue in the context of the history of machines, this paper discusses these questions (...) through the lens of stage magic and illusionism, with the aim of reframing the very question of deception. It investigates if we can take a more positive or at least morally neutral view of magic, illusion, and performance, while still being able to understand and criticize the relevant phenomena, and if we can describe and evaluate these phenomena without recourse to the term “deception” at all. This leads the paper into a discussion about metaphysics and into taking a relational and narrative turn. Replying to Tognazzini, the paper identifies and analyses two metaphysical positions: a narrative and performative non-dualist position is articulated in response to what is taken to be a dualist, in particular Platonic, approach to “deception” phenomena. The latter is critically discussed and replaced by a performative and relational approach which avoids a distant “view from nowhere” metaphysics and brings us back to the phenomena and experience in the performance relation. The paper also reflects on the ethical and political implications of the two positions: for the responsibility of ICT designers and users, which are seen as co-responsible magicians or co-performers, and for the responsibility of those who influence the social structures that shape who has power to deceive or to let others perform. (shrink)

For millennia, the enigma of the world of Ideas or Forms, which Plato suggested and advocated, has been challenging the most prominent thinkers of the humankind. This paper presents a solution to this problem, namely, that an Idea in the Platoʼs sense can be interpreted as a scientific object called a structure. To validate this statement, this paper provides rigorous definition of a structure and demonstrates that structures have the basic properties of Platoʼs Ideas. In addition, we describe the world (...) of structures and prove its existence. This allows us to resolve the controversy between Plato and Aristotle concerning Ideas or Forms and to build a scientific interpretation of the metaphor of the Divided Line, which Plato uses in his theory of Ideas. (shrink)

Murray Edelman's work raised significant theoretical and methodological questions regarding the symbolic nature of politics, and specifically the role played by non‐rational beliefs (those that lack real‐world grounding) in the shaping of political preferences. According to Edelman, beneath an apparently functional and accountable democratic state lies a symbolic system that renders an ignorant public quiescent. The state, the media, civil society, interpersonal relations, even popular art are part of a mass spectacle kept afloat by empty symbolic beliefs. However suggestive it (...) is, the weaknesses of Edelman's theoretical and methodological approach, and the relative strengths of more recent research on the politics of cultural symbols, render Edelman's work unable to serve as either model or springboard for the contemporary study of political symbols. (shrink)

The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"--metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them. In (...) this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language. (shrink)

The study of colour has become familiar territory in anthropology, linguistics, art history and archaeology. Classicists, however, have traditionally subordinated the study of colour to form. By drawing together evidence from contemporary philosophers, elegists, epic writers, historians and satirists, Mark Bradley reinstates colour as an essential informative unit for the classification and evaluation of the Roman world. He also demonstrates that the questions of what colour was and how it functioned - as well as how it could be misused (...) and misunderstood - were topics of intellectual debate in early imperial Rome. Suggesting strategies for interpreting Roman expressions of colour in Latin texts, Dr Bradley offers alternative approaches to understanding the relationship between perception and knowledge in Roman elite thought. In doing so, he highlights the fundamental role that colour performed in the realms of communication and information, and its intellectual contribution to contemporary discussions of society, politics and morality. (shrink)

The contemporary canon of what constitutes ancient political thought was fixed in the course of the nineteenth century by the then newly reigning discipline of the philosophy of history. It made little difference whether this discipline was positivistically or dialectically inclined. Whatever the methodological commitment there was general agreement that the sources of ancient wisdom on the nature and ends of social and political life were to be found in the political and ethical writings of Plato and Aristotle and, (...) to a lesser extent, Cicero. Here Cicero was read, in part, as a repository of a Stoic political wisdom that had not survived in the original texts. According to this tradition, genuine, if not final, political wisdom is to be found in the reflections of these ancient thinkers -- not a totally unexpected conclusion to come from philosophers. For these nineteenth-century practitioners of Geistesgeschichte the essence of ancient experience is distilled in its inner life, its art, literature, religion, and above all in its philosophical speculation, but not, for instance, in its political experience as recorded in its history. (shrink)

With fundamentalists dominating the headlines and scientists arguing about the biological and neurological basis of faith, religion is the topic of the day. But religion, Mark C. Taylor shows, is more complicated than either its defenders or critics think and, indeed, is much more influential than any of us realize. Our world, Taylor maintains, is shaped by religion even when it is least obvious. Faith and value, he insists, are unavoidable and inextricably interrelated for believers and nonbelievers alike. Using scientific (...) theories of dynamical systems and complex adaptive networks for cultural and theological analysis, After God redefines religion for our contemporary age. Taylor begins by asking a critical question: What is religion? He then proceeds to explain how Protestant ideas in particular undergird the character and structure of our global information society—the Reformation, Taylor argues, was an information and communications revolution that effectively prepared the way for the media revolution at the end of the twentieth century. Taylor’s breathtaking account of religious ideas allows us to understand for the first time that contemporary notions of atheism and the secular are already implicit in classical Christology and Trinitarian theology. Weaving together theoretical analysis and historical interpretation, Taylor demonstrates the codependence and coevolution of traditional religious beliefs and practices with modern literature, art, architecture, information technologies, media, financial markets, and theoretical biology. After God concludes with prescriptions for new ways of thinking and acting. If we are to negotiate the perils of the twenty-first century, Taylor contends, we must refigure the symbolic networks that inform our policies and guide our actions. A religion without God creates the possibility of an ethics without absolutes that leads to the promotion of creativity and life in an ever more fragile world. The first comprehensive theology of culture since the pioneering work of Paul Tillich, After God is a radical reconceptualization of religion and Taylor’s most pathbreaking work yet, bringing together various strands of theological argument and cultural analysis four decades in the making. (shrink)

One of the fundamental group rights that belongs to ethnic people is selfdetermination. By this right, ethnic people determine how to control their destiny, life, identity, and resources. This right is often contested especially by modern nation-states as they often see it as a threat to the collective survival of the state. But because of oppression and violation of their group rights ethno-nations often assert their right to self-determination. The peoples in Nigeria’s Niger Delta are at the forefront in campaigning (...) for their right to selfdetermination, not secession. Through a critical analysis and evaluation this right is examined with how it has been championed in the region. The concern here is to argue in support of the right to internal self-determination as only this can guarantee social stability—political peace—and enable the people to flourish and protect their environment that has been damaged by both the Nigerian state and oil multinational forces. The conclusion is that the peoples of the Niger Delta have this right to self-determination and it should be enhanced by the Nigerian state. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 61-72 [Access article in PDF] From Personal to Social Transaction:A Model of Aesthetic Reading in the Classroom Mark A. Pike This article seeks to define more precisely the nature of the individual transaction that occurs between reader and text and the potential for aesthetic reading in literature classrooms by relating knowledge of the way pupils engage in literary transactions to theoretical perspectives (...) that address the issue. The validity of Louise Rosenblatt's transactional theory of the literary work, expounded in Literature as Exploration and The Reader, The Text, The Poem, and its relevance for contemporary educators, particularly in the field of English education, has recently been reasserted by Jeanne Connell in her timely and cogent article in this journal. 1 The present article, however, seeks to refocus debate by problematizing and subsequently developing some aspects of key theories such as Rosenblatt's while examining the individual and social nature of reading in schools. Rosenblatt's view that aesthetic experiences can have both social origin and effect certainly deserves further theorizing if aesthetic experience in school communities and classrooms is to flourish.The influence of John Dewey's Art as Experience upon Rosenblatt is evident as this seminal text conceives of our primary task as the restoration of "continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and everyday events." 2 Such continuity with experience is vital because, for Dewey, "experience is the fulfillment of an organism in its struggles and achievements in a world of things, it is art in germ." 3 Applying such a notion to education in schools, Rosenblatt saw the aim of literature lessons as the growth of experience rather than the acquisition of knowledge. Yet, despite such progress, in the United Kingdom, teachers of English are in the unenviable position of having to deliver an extensive body of knowledge prescribed by the National Curriculum and also to focus explicitly upon the features of certain types of text as they teach the National Literacy Strategy. 4 In Rosenblatt's work the emphasis on our experience of [End Page 61] literary works provides a much needed alternative to positions such as that adopted by New Criticism where "it is never what a poem says which matters, but what it is" because we acknowledge we can only ever gain access to what a poem says as "the sentence that seems to need no interpretation is already the product of one." 5 Clearly, understanding the reader's transaction with texts is where we must begin if we wish to foster aesthetic reading in our classrooms.Transactional theory also appears to be closely related to Martin Heidegger's thought in Being and Time where Dasein (givenness, existence, being) is seen as a distinctive characteristic of the human being as our consciousness projects things of the world and is also subjected to the things of the world which belong to us, in some sense, only as long as our consciousness is projecting them. 6 The validity of Dewey's view, where experience is not separated from art, can be seen when we acknowledge that we can "never adopt an attitude of detached contemplation, looking down on the world as if from a mountain top" for we are "inevitably merged with the very object of our consciousness." 7Such a view reflects Hans-Georg Gadamer's position in Truth and Method in which Heidegger's explanation of situation is applied to literary theory because, for Gadamer, the literary work cannot appear as a packaged and completed artefact in which meaning is neatly wrapped because it is influenced by a particular reader's actions at a particular moment. 8 Rosenblatt's realistic conception that "each reading involves a particular person at a particular time and place" is developed in this article as it seems that, even now, many reader response critics and curriculum designers "write as though people read literature in a vacuum or in a generalized kind of academic setting" which often does not apply... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 61-72 [Access article in PDF] From Personal to Social Transaction:A Model of Aesthetic Reading in the Classroom Mark A. Pike This article seeks to define more precisely the nature of the individual transaction that occurs between reader and text and the potential for aesthetic reading in literature classrooms by relating knowledge of the way pupils engage in literary transactions to theoretical perspectives (...) that address the issue. The validity of Louise Rosenblatt's transactional theory of the literary work, expounded in Literature as Exploration and The Reader, The Text, The Poem, and its relevance for contemporary educators, particularly in the field of English education, has recently been reasserted by Jeanne Connell in her timely and cogent article in this journal. 1 The present article, however, seeks to refocus debate by problematizing and subsequently developing some aspects of key theories such as Rosenblatt's while examining the individual and social nature of reading in schools. Rosenblatt's view that aesthetic experiences can have both social origin and effect certainly deserves further theorizing if aesthetic experience in school communities and classrooms is to flourish.The influence of John Dewey's Art as Experience upon Rosenblatt is evident as this seminal text conceives of our primary task as the restoration of "continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and everyday events." 2 Such continuity with experience is vital because, for Dewey, "experience is the fulfillment of an organism in its struggles and achievements in a world of things, it is art in germ." 3 Applying such a notion to education in schools, Rosenblatt saw the aim of literature lessons as the growth of experience rather than the acquisition of knowledge. Yet, despite such progress, in the United Kingdom, teachers of English are in the unenviable position of having to deliver an extensive body of knowledge prescribed by the National Curriculum and also to focus explicitly upon the features of certain types of text as they teach the National Literacy Strategy. 4 In Rosenblatt's work the emphasis on our experience of [End Page 61] literary works provides a much needed alternative to positions such as that adopted by New Criticism where "it is never what a poem says which matters, but what it is" because we acknowledge we can only ever gain access to what a poem says as "the sentence that seems to need no interpretation is already the product of one." 5 Clearly, understanding the reader's transaction with texts is where we must begin if we wish to foster aesthetic reading in our classrooms.Transactional theory also appears to be closely related to Martin Heidegger's thought in Being and Time where Dasein (givenness, existence, being) is seen as a distinctive characteristic of the human being as our consciousness projects things of the world and is also subjected to the things of the world which belong to us, in some sense, only as long as our consciousness is projecting them. 6 The validity of Dewey's view, where experience is not separated from art, can be seen when we acknowledge that we can "never adopt an attitude of detached contemplation, looking down on the world as if from a mountain top" for we are "inevitably merged with the very object of our consciousness." 7Such a view reflects Hans-Georg Gadamer's position in Truth and Method in which Heidegger's explanation of situation is applied to literary theory because, for Gadamer, the literary work cannot appear as a packaged and completed artefact in which meaning is neatly wrapped because it is influenced by a particular reader's actions at a particular moment. 8 Rosenblatt's realistic conception that "each reading involves a particular person at a particular time and place" is developed in this article as it seems that, even now, many reader response critics and curriculum designers "write as though people read literature in a vacuum or in a generalized kind of academic setting" which often does not apply... (shrink)

Susan Sontag once remarked that since the invention of the camera, photography has “kept company with death.” And indeed, images of suffering human beings and devastated landscapes appear regularly in the popular media and even in contemporary art. This volume explores these painful images from the past few decades of photography, weighing in on the intense critical debate that has arisen in recent years around depictions of acute human suffering—especially those that are beautifully rendered. Drawing on works from advertising, (...) photojournalism, art photography, and conceptual art, Beautiful Suffering features reproductions of all the pieces in the Williams College Museum of Art exhibition that shares its name—including portrayals of AIDS sufferers, Abu Ghraib prisoners, refugees, and casualties of war. It also includes five critical essays that engage the works themselves as well as the larger issues the exhibition confronts: Is it inherently problematic to seek aesthetic pleasure in a rendering of pain? And if so, why? These essays, composed by scholars in fields as diverse as art history and political science, are perfect complements to the powerful images of suffering that probe some of the most pressing issues we face today. (shrink)

One tolerably clear statement of Determinism has it that all events are caused. Expanded upon, this thesis has been taken as the claim that the existence of any event E1, has a set of events, E2 … En which antedate E1, and which are causally sufficient for the occurrence of E1. That is, given the occurrence of E2 … En, E1 is causally necessary. I would hardly wish to claim that this is the only plausible statement of the doctrine of (...) Determinism; nonetheless it is a common one, and the one that I’ll use as definitive. Some have believed both that this premise is true and that it inevitably leads to a denial of free actions. While remaining neutral as to the merits of the Hard Determinist position, what I wish to show is that the consequences of the argumentation that has led them to such a position have been neither fully nor adequately understood. (shrink)

Although Michel Foucault never wrote of dance as an example of a bodily discipline in the classical age, he did affect the art of contemporary ballet through his influence on the work of William Forsythe. This article interprets Foucault’s influence on Forsythe up until the early 1990s and also examines how Forsythe’s choreography ‘responded’ to issues of agency, inscription and discipline that characterize Foucault’s thought on corporeality. Ultimately, it asks whether Forsythe’s use of Foucauldian theory leads to a reinterpretation (...) of inscription in Foucault. (shrink)

This book is about the ways we make sense of the constant changes and interchanges of webs of meaning and being to which we are all connected. Working from textual, visual, historical, and contemporary fieldworks, each chapter presents a unique exercise on challenges of thinking through the figurations of imaginaries into their aesthetic forms.

This article proposes that time is not so much constituted by time-consciousness as given by technical inscriptions of time. The `digital gift' of time that comprises one fundamental mode of this giving of time correlates with Aristotle's conception of time as `the number of movement according to the before and after'; more specifically, it furnishes a minimal form of temporal difference — a minimal before-after structure — that proves useful for exploring how the experience of time has changed today. The (...) article argues that we increasingly live time not, as philosopher Bernard Stiegler argues, through neo-Husserlian temporal objects like the cinema that model the flow of time through our consciousnesses, but rather with the aid of artworks that eschew the objectal in favor of the processual. In works like Wolfgang Staehle's Empire 24/7, Pierre Huyghe's L'Ellipse and Lynn Kirby's Six Shooter, we confront open-ended digital structures that provide us with a technically-specific mediation of the minimal before-after structure and allow us to participate in more heterogeneous enframings of time that move beyond the temporal ratios of human perception. The article closes with a brief discussion of contemporary Chinese art that serves to broaden the proposed `digital aesthetic' of time beyond the `digital' construed narrowly as a concrete technical platform. (shrink)

This article investigates artificial life image-making in relation to and as constituent of the moving image, specifically artificial life visualized in three-dimensional computer-generated space . Of particular interest in this examination is the view or `window', from the virtual camera, into the artificial life computational model or `world' , and how it organizes a dense field of expectations. Analogous to looking through a telescope or microscope, the view into the artificial life world is monocular and often fixed in the world; (...) in this regime we look `at' computer models, which are often referred to as agents, `creatures', `organisms' or `cyberbeasts'. This tactic of looking through the instrumentality of science, the arts of reality, is parallel to looking through André Bazin's `long take' in cinema and documentary film-making in which we look `at' an unmediated view of reality; in other words, in looking `at' an image of artificial life we look `through' a non-intrinsic regime of seeing. This investigation into the interpretative regime provides only a partial account of the intercultural traffic between artificial life and the moving image. I further this discussion by arguing that artificial life screen-based works are a contemporary extension and reworking of the nature film in that they provide accounts of the `natural' world that are familiar and similar to those of their filmic and cinematic predecessors. I contend that artificial life visualizations and the stories that often accompany the images are the latest manifestation of this photographic and filmic tradition. To illustrate my point I discuss the scientific project Daisyworld, the associated narrative that frames the research, and the researchers' attempt to mathematically model an `imaginary planet [with] a very simple biosphere'. This sets the scene to explore artificial life in relation to Disney wilderness and nature films. (shrink)

Contemporary bioethics is a peculiar creature. What was once a subdivision of moral theology and philosophy tended mainly within the confines of schools of arts and sciences or seminaries has now become a quasi-profession whose practitioners come from a wide variety of disciplines. Perhaps still more intriguing is that the of this discipline routinely engage the public at the hospital bedside, in the institutional boardroom, and through public policy consultation. Bioethicists have actively embraced these roles as the natural outgrowth (...) of their research and study. Contemporary bioethics is thus a It is study and research but completes itself in public engagement. (shrink)

If it is true, as one of its founders, George Miller, tells us, that cognitive science was born in 1956, then by human aging standards it is coming upon a mid-life crisis. Crises, as Kuhn has taught us, often precipitate radical change, in science as well as in individuals. It should therefore not be surprising to find that cognitive scientists have begun to look to the future and predict, or hope, that it will include both the beautiful and the good. (...) Thus it is that the neuroscientist, Semir Zeki, has recently declared: “We are at the threshold of a great enterprise” which he calls neuroesthetics. His optimism about that enterprise has been echoed by a number of other researchers; and for the most part, their hopefulness is based on discoveries about how pictures are perceived. So, for example, V. S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein have said that by understanding the neuropsychological principles of picture perception, we may come to understand the very “essence of art”. Indeed, by identifying perceptual principles in the right way, according to David Gilden, we may discover common ground for normative disciplines of all stripes; a theory of “what is sexy, what is virtue, or what is a good buy”. (shrink)

What are the primary characteristics that define what it means to be human? And what happens to those characteristics in the face of technology past, present, and future? The three essays in Image, by leading philosophers of religion Mark Taylor, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, and Thomas Carlson, play at this intersection of the human and the technological, building out from Heidegger's notion that humans master the world by picturing or representing the real.Taylor's essay traces a history of capitalism, dwelling on the lack (...) of humility, particularly in the face of our own mortality, that is the persistent failure of humans, before turning to art as a possible way to bring us back to earth and recover humility before it is too late. Rubenstein zeroes in on the delusions of imaginative conquest associated with space travel. Through a genealogy of the modern "view from space" from the iconic Earth rise photo of 1968 up to the new privatized American space race, Rubenstein provides an analysis of the perils of the one-world and the false unity it projects. In his essay, Carlson takes as his starting point the surveillance capitalism of facial recognition technology. He dives deep into Heidegger to meditate on the elimination of individuals through totalizing gestures and the relationship between such elimination and our encounters with mortality. Each of these essays, in its own way, reflects on the nature of imagination, the character of technological vision in contemporary culture, and the implications of these for the kinds of sociality and love that condition our human experience. (shrink)

Henri Bergson is widely regarded as one of the most original and important philosophers of the twentieth century. His work explored a rich panoply of subjects, including time, memory, free will and humor and we owe the popular term élan vital to a fundamental insight of Bergson's. His books provoked responses from some of the leading thinkers and philosophers of his time, including Einstein, William James and Bertrand Russell, and he is acknowledged as a fundamental influence on Marcel Proust. The (...) Bergsonian Mind is an outstanding, wide-ranging volume covering the major aspects of Bergson's thought, from his early influences to his continued relevance and legacy. 36 chapters by an international team of leading Bergson scholars are divided into five clear parts: Sources and Scene Mind and World Ethics and Politics Reception Bergson and Contemporary Thought. In these sections fundamental topics are examined, including time, freedom and determinism, memory, perception, evolutionary theory, pragmatism and art and aesthetics. Bergson's impact beyond philosophy is also explored in chapters on Bergson and spiritualism, modernism, Proust and post-colonial thought. An indispensable resource for anyone in Philosophy studying and researching Bergson's work, The Bergsonian Mind will also interest those in related disciplines such as Literature, Religion, Sociology and French studies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.2 (2002) 185-206 [Access article in PDF] Machiavelli's Sketches of Francesco Valori and the Reconstruction of Florentine History Mark Jurdjevic... As for the lies of these citizens of Carpi, I can surpass them all, because it has been a long time since I became a doctor of that art... for some time now I have never said what I believed and never believed (...) what I said; and if indeed I do sometimes tell the truth, I hide it behind so many lies that it is hard to find.... Niccolò Machiavelli to Francesco Guicciardini, Carpi, 17 May 1521. 1Is Machiavelli a reliable source for Florentine history? This article addresses that question by focusing on a remarkable discrepancy in Machiavelli's writing: the Florentine secretary's contradictory interpretations of Francesco di Filippo Valori, a major figure in the post-Medicean republican regime and one of the leaders of the Savonarolan movement. In the Discourses, Machiavelli described Valori as an ambitious politician whose quasi-princely power engendered dangerous factional violence. Several years later, in The Natures of Florentine Men, one of the few texts from Machiavelli's literary corpus that has yet to receive any sustained analysis, Machiavelli described Valori as a republican patriot who consistently sought the common good and upheld the republic's laws. Both assessments were written over a decade after Valori's murder (1498). [End Page 185]What caused Machiavelli to alter his initial interpretation? Were both accounts part of a larger single interpretation of the Florentine statesman? If not, which portrait more faithfully conveyed the nature of Francesco Valori's career and its effect upon Florentine political life and what did Machiavelli hope to achieve by the other portrait? Finally, why did Machiavelli praise a man so directly associated with Savonarola and the political party that had excluded Machiavelli from office before 1498? Machiavelli's reputation as an opponent of Savonarola was the cause of his rejection for an office in the Second Chancery in February 1497, during Valori's term as Gonfaloniere di giustizia. It was also a likely cause of his more spectacular success in April 1498, immediately following the downfall of Savonarola and Valori. 2This article examines the political circumstances surrounding the composition of The Natures of Florentine Men, Machiavelli's ties to the Valori family, and contemporary accounts of Valori's personality and career. It argues that The Natures are the preliminary sketches of the unwritten ninth book of the Florentine Histories and that Machiavelli, writing in a Florence of renewed Medici power, rewrote Valori's role in recent history to obscure his own ties to the principal statesmen of the Soderini regime. In particular, arguing from a different set of sources, it confirms Felix Gilbert's cautious and often-forgotten reminder about the impact of politics and political survival on the pioneering historical literature of early sixteenth-century Florence: that Machiavelli and Guicciardini "frequently had political purposes when discussing historical events and thus consciously constructed a historical myth." 3The Valori family played a prominent role in the political and cultural life of Quattrocento Florence. The family had been allied with the Medici since Cosimo de' Medici's political ascent in 1434 and Bartolomeo Valori, as a generous patron of neo-Platonic philosophy, became a close friend of Lorenzo de' Medici and Marsilio Ficino. Francesco, however, dramatically realigned the family's political identity and loyalties along strong anti-Medicean lines. He began his political career as a successful participant in the Medici party, receiving numerous offices and distinctions, including election as Gonfaloniere di giustizia three times (1484, 1489, 1493). When the political tide turned against Piero de' Medici in 1494, however, Valori was among the first ottimati to capitalize on Medici weakness. He participated in the popular revolt against Piero de' Medici and became one of the constitutional founders of the new Republic. His power and ambition became famous, even notorious, after he emerged as one of the most important and powerful political allies (1495-98) of the prophetic friar... (shrink)

If it is true, as one of its founders, George Miller, tells us, that cognitive science was born in 1956, then by human aging standards it is coming upon a mid-life crisis. Crises, as Kuhn has taught us, often precipitate radical change, in science as well as in individuals. It should therefore not be surprising to find that cognitive scientists have begun to look to the future and predict, or hope, that it will include both the beautiful and the good. (...) Thus it is that the neuroscientist, Semir Zeki, has recently declared: “We are at the threshold of a great enterprise” which he calls neuroesthetics. His optimism about that enterprise has been echoed by a number of other researchers; and for the most part, their hopefulness is based on discoveries about how pictures are perceived. So, for example, V. S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein have said that by understanding the neuropsychological principles of picture perception, we may come to understand the very “essence of art”. Indeed, by identifying perceptual principles in the right way, according to David Gilden, we may discover common ground for normative disciplines of all stripes; a theory of “what is sexy, what is virtue, or what is a good buy”. (shrink)

Peter Kivy has a quarrel with “the task that [history] has bequeathed us” of searching for a single definition of art. Kivy’s book breaks down into two parts. In his first two chapters, Kivy traces the search for the definition of art from the Enlightenment until now, and argues the quest has been a failure. In the second half of his work, he analyzes five case studies of failed attempts to define one art in terms of a model appropriate to (...) another. These failures, stemming from inappropriate models, provide Kivy with ways to explore the differences between the arts, and thereby achieve more of a “philosophical understanding of the arts in all their particularity”. Kivy is not arguing the Wittgensteinian position that the search for sameness ought to be abandoned as impossible. His hope is to balance our search for commonality with a study of differences among the arts. For “in looking for differences, the search for sameness is forwarded rather than thwarted”. (shrink)

The philosophy of Immanuel Kant has been important in education theory, especially in the historical context of the Enlightenment and its legacies on contemporary understandings of global education. Particular reference is given to Kant’s writing on Enlightenment thinking and especially to his 1803 Über Pädagogik/Lectures on pedagogy whose groundwork tends to be thought from an empirical anthropology. This paper aims to question education, though from the perspective of a Kantian understanding of aesthetic experience, a perspective developed initially from my (...) reading of Denis J. Schmidt’s Lyrical and Ethical Subjects. In the Critique of Judgement, Kant develops an ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’ that offers transcendental grounds for the possibility of aesthetic experience. In doing so, he discusses, somewhat briefly, training in the fine arts and even more briefly offers, somewhat indirectly, a far-reaching transcendental ground for pedagogy. It is these two brief accounts that form the substance of this paper, requiring a somewhat extended introduction to Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement in order to develop its analysis. From this analysis, two key questions arise: if fine art cannot be learned, and if imitation would ultimately aim at producing an objectively determinable rule—via a determinable concept—for the production of art works, how does one proceed with education in the fine arts? And, secondly, as a corollary, if genius is reserved for precisely what cannot be learned but yet can be conceived and communicated, what possible purpose is served by aesthetic ideas with respect to cognition itself? (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.

Listening After Nature questions the reality of auditory natures. It argues that the line between wilderness and industrial culture is dull, and the natural world is presently a critical construct that entangles humans, animals, sites and technologies. Bringing new insights to the field of environmental sound arts in areas such as field recording, acoustic ecology and soundscape studies, Wright examines contemporary and archival audio works and calls for a 'post-natural' approach to sound. The book propels sounds arts discourse into (...) critical relationship with the environmental humanities and contemporary approaches dealing with the consequences of Anthropogenic change. Critical and imaginative, this is a book that forges urgent debate between sound, ethics, aesthetics and ecology. (shrink)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was described by Paul Ricoeur as 'the greatest of the French phenomenologists'. The essays in this volume examine the full scope of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, from his central and abiding concern with the nature of perception and the bodily constitution of intentionality to his reflections on science, nature, art, history, and politics. The authors explore the historical origins and context of his thought as well as its continuing relevance to contemporary work in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, (...) biology, art criticism and political and social theory. What emerges is a fresh image of Merleau-Ponty as a deep and original thinker whose philosophical importance has been underestimated, in part owing to the influence of intellectual movements such as existentialism and structuralism, into which his work could not be easily assimilated. New readers will find this the most convenient and accessible guide to Merleau-Ponty currently available. (shrink)

The eastern Islamic concept of the imaginal realm, which explains how supra-sensory realities present themselves to imaginative perception, can enrich the imagination of film-philosophy. The imaginal realm, in Arabic ‘alam al-mithal, world of images, or ‘alam al-khayal, imaginative world, is part of a triadic ontology of sensible, imaginal, and intelligible realms. Diverging from roots shared with Western thought in the concept of the imaginative faculty, the Islamic imaginal realm is supra-individual and more real than matter. The imaginal realm is a (...) radically pro-image concept, affirming the importance of poetry, art, and images in motion. As developed by the Persian philosopher Sadr al-Dîn Muhammad al-Shîrâzî, known as Mullâ Sadrâ, the imaginal realm flows and intensifies, in a process philosophy we may fruitfully compare with Spinoza, Leibniz, and Whitehead. I sketch the genealogy of the imaginal realm and compare it to contemporary Western film-philosophy. I suggest how this transcendental concept can be made immanent. Finally, I draw from contemporary Muslim thinkers, such as Mohammed Arkoun, who ground a visionary collective politics in the imaginal realm. My central example, the documentary The Lebanese Rocket Society by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joriege, exemplifies film's imaginal powers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 10.4 (2000) 283-286 [Access article in PDF] Introduction This Issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal focuses on "Aristotelianism in Contemporary Bioethics." It is an unusual topic for this journal as it is seemingly very theoretical. But, I assure the reader that the theoretical topics explored are of the most practical and pressing kind. The questions addressed concern what kind of knowledge (...) and skill there can be in deliberating about particular cases and issues, whether this knowledge is culturally relative, and how bioethics can balance the rights of the individual in making health care decisions with responsibilities to the community.Authors in bioethics, especially those working in clinical ethics, have long sought to address particular problems with the fewest theoretical commitments possible so as to make broad consensus more plausible. Since theoretical foundations are often disputed, keeping the discussion pragmatic has seemed the more likely road to agreement. Similarly, our American heritage has lent the rhetoric of the rights of the individual to the scholarly dialogue in bioethics. Although no one wishes to do away with such language completely, it sometimes has seemed inadequate to the moral phenomena. To address these concerns, the philosophy of Aristotle has been recruited. Aristotelianism in contemporary bioethics has become identified with two claims: (1) there is such a thing as the ability to reason wisely about particular problems and cases, and (2) there is a need to supplement the American emphasis on the individual with a richer notion of the person or a concept of the common good. Both of these claims address concerns arising from the doctrine of informed consent, the fundamental framework of medical decision making.Contemporary American biomedical ethics is now more than 25 years old. It has been marked by some important successes. For instance, it has evolved an ethical and legal consensus that the doctrine of informed consent is the primary way to make operational the value of respect for the patient. And this doctrine extends to all areas of medical treatment and biomedical research. The doctrine is minimalist in that it relies simply on [End Page 283] the right of a competent patient to refuse unwanted interventions. This approach naturally raises questions concerning whether it can adequately settle the more difficult moral questions society faces without recourse to a grander philosophical theory. Similarly, the doctrine of informed consent places the rights of the individual front and center, and this causes us to ask whether bioethics is intrinsically individualistic. Although some might find individualism unobjectionable, many claim that such individualism does not capture the moral phenomenon of the family's role in ethical medical decision making (Nelson and Nelson 1995) or the need to see particular choices in light of the health care schema we wish for society (Callahan 1990).Aristotelianism has not presented itself as just another competing theory among other approaches to bioethics. Through the notions of practical wisdom and the common good, Aristotelianism can be seen as a metaethical way of tying together the methodological progress in bioethics that has resulted from a rich debate among various methods. For instance, bioethics has seen the flourishing of two important methods: the principles approach and casuistry. Virtue theory has also received much attention. The representatives of each have often argued that the philosophical concepts and principles behind ethical decision making in medicine are minimal.Whether one is talking about the four principles approach of Beauchamp and Childress (1994), the case-based approach (casuistry) of Jonsen and Toulmin (1988), or the virtue theory of Pellegrino and Thomasma (1993), one immediately notices that each method is fairly dependent on the judgment or practical wisdom of a competent practitioner of the method in order to be effective. The four principles approach depends upon someone being able to balance or to specify its mid-level principles in difficult cases; casuistry requires the discrimination of a person of practical wisdom to identify relevant features of cases and reason analogically between paradigm cases and their less clear particular instances, and virtue theory places the competent practitioner of the clinical art at the center of its method and makes... (shrink)

This work contains a full, critical translation of Huai Nan Tzu, Book 9, Chu-shu, which is part of "an important compendium of knowledge and philosophical speculation... presented to the Chinese court of Wu Ti during the first century of the Former Han ". Preceding the translation is a dense philosophical analysis of the treatise, and of its place in a painstakingly reconstructed history of ideas, particular to the development of China up to that date. China had already gone through nearly (...) two millennia of history. (shrink)

Hagberg's working assumption is that "any particular conception of meaning to which one subscribes can shape one's beliefs in related fields of philosophy such as... aesthetics". For Hagberg, it seems that one's linguistic preconceptions always have this "shaping" effect upon one's aesthetic theory. Exploring this relation between aesthetic conception and linguistic preconception, Hagberg attempts a "critical-analytical" examination that begins with what he considers to be the highly influential aesthetic theories of Langer, Collingwood, and Ducasse, and ends with an analysis of (...) the contemporary theories of Danto, Dickie, and Margolis. His general line of argument is that faults in linguistic preconception are invariably correlated with analogous faults in one's aesthetic theory. Hagberg's methodological procedure is threefold. First, he shows how certain aesthetic theories presuppose certain philosophies of language. Second, he subjects the presupposed philosophy of language to criticisms based on Wittgenstein's later philosophy of language. Third, he extrapolates Wittgenstein's criticisms from their context in the philosophy of language and applies them to the aesthetic theories with their corresponding analogous faults. (shrink)

This book explores numerous ways in which vulgar language, grotesque appearances, and horrific experiences affect us in our relationships with others and with ourselves. Its compelling case studies and revealing interviews bring together ideas and issues that are a lingering, but unexplored, focus in psychotherapy literature. The grotesque and the vulgar are major inhabitants of the vast unconscious. Their variations and haunting presence are anticipated and reflected in the transactions of everyday life. So too do they manifest themselves in our (...) social institutions, maintaining their presence in the seven lively arts as much as in mental hospitals, rehabilitation facilities, and psychotherapy practices. Most of all, the grotesque and vulgar challenge the contemporary search for meaning and sanity. This book will help the psychotherapist better deal with the rich soil of grotesqueness and vulgarity in the interplay between the psychotherapy patient and the experiential world. Reading it will open new vistas of treatment possibilities. As each contributing author explores the potentialities and obstacles inherent in the competing and complementing forces of the grotesque and socially condoned sensibilities, you will learn about the value of the grotesque in the consultation room. You will further learn how the flaunted and unconscious vulgarities of everyday life enrich the creative vision inherent in therapeutic conversations. Most important, you will be challenged by what it means to abide with the sometimes pesky vulgar and grotesque guises in each of your client's lives. Here's a sample of what you'll find in Inhabitants of the Unconscious: The Grotesque and the Vulgar in Everyday Life: Louis Fierman's recollection of his treatment of a Nazi soldier, which offers fascinating therapeutic possibilities when issues of the grotesqueare at hand an extraordinary analysis of the role of the grotesque in artwork, with special attention paid to the work of Hieronymus Bosch a fascinating look at Sigmund Freud's perspective on the grotesque&#; and what it says about Freud himself the remarkable formative experiences of children with craniofacial difference &#;an exposition that will enrich your therapeutic interventions with children and adolescents who face atypical challenges extraordinary case studies&#;by Robert Marchesani about his therapeutic endeavors with a Vietnam veteran caught in the aftermath of his incestuous past and by E. Mark Stern about a dying woman who was unable to detach from, but ultimately vivified by an unyielding masochistic fixation. (shrink)

This impressive, self-contained, and philosophically rich work is the last of Adams's trilogy about "the upheavals and dislocations in the culture and the resulting human identity crisis occasioned by the rise of modern science and its naturalistic world-view". Continuing the critique of naturalism developed in his Ethical Naturalism and the Modern World-View and Philosophy and the Modern Mind, this book argues that the naturalistic world-view, with its restriction of the intelligible to the factual and existential as grasped by sense perception, (...) consists of a set of false assumptions and incoherent presuppositions about the constitutional principles and powers of the human mind and the categorial structure of the world. The inadequacies of naturalistic categories, Adams contends, systematically lead us into error; we are no longer able to think clearly or well about ourselves or our world. Modernity's embracing of naturalism has undermined the possibility of a healthy culture in which human persons can flourish, and it has resulted in a cultural crisis. That this is so is evidenced, Adams believes, by the widespread sense of malaise and alienation, as expressed in our literature and art; by the steady erosion of the effectiveness of our social, political, and economic institutions; and by the widely perceived loss of purpose and legitimacy of the humanities themselves. The task of reconstructing our culture requires, it is argued, the revitalization of the humanities; it requires the guidance of cultural analysis and criticism grounded in a humanistic philosophy which acknowledges and defends the reality of value, meaning, and mind. (shrink)