Ancient philosophy is in a bad way. Like all other academic disciplines, it is crushed by the embrace of bureaucracy. Like other parts of philosophy, it is infected by faddishness. And in addition it suffers cruelly from the decline in classical philology. There is no cure for this disease.

En las danzas rurales del norte de España pueden constatarse reminiscencias de carácter pagano. Dotadas de fuertes connotaciones sacras, su prevalencia y el interés de la juventud por secundarlas, sorprende en el entorno secular actual, de gran individualimos e hiperracional. De ahí el interés por entender los conflictos intergeneracionales surgidos en la actualidad, a través del estudio del caso de ‘La Gaita de Cervera del Río Alhama (La Rioja). Una danza que ha sido considerada marcial y que es sin embargo, (...) un conjunto de ritos sagrados de fertilidad, adaptados con la misma vocación pretérita de rito comunitario, petitorio y de tránsito. (shrink)

Scholars of the Middle Ages are reflecting productively on the sound not only of the text, but of the book.1 Formed from the skins of dead animals, parchment pages have a positive and intimate bond with silence in a way that paper does not. And yet the same or similar animal membranes are used for drum skins, tambourines, or the bellows of bagpipes, while the body of the human reader, enveloped in a skin that closely resembles parchment and is (...) near kin to it, is notable for its own resonating surfaces. Hearing ranges over and within these membranes where silence oscillates with sound and pleasure with discomfort, their reverberations alternately welcomed or shunned.In grappling with the question of how to read... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Aspiration to the Condition of TouchChristopher Perricone"The Dance," written by William Carlos Williams in 1944 is one of my favorite poems: I return to it regularly. Williams gives us a feel for that life of the kermess (a carnival) in his poem through Breughel's picture, as it were three times removed from the event itself. Of course, unlike Plato, I would argue that the vitality of the kermess (...) is not lost in the poem; it is actually enhanced by a subtle sleight of hand. The poem isn't primarily about Breughel's picture. It is about dance, about the dancers who go round, their squeal, the crude music, its rollicking measures, the dancers kicking and rolling and swinging, their hips, bellies, and butts. Reading and re-reading this poem, I "see" those ordinary folk of Breughel's great picture. I "hear" their music. I "move" to their dance. The poem seems a condensation, a summary of the fine arts. Perhaps the poem is about poetry's power to reinvigorate imaginatively what we hear and see. Perhaps I think of festivities at which I have danced, how such festivities are essential to the human experience. Perhaps, William Carlos Williams in 1944, World War II coming to a close, was anticipating similar good times. As always, it's best to let the poem speak for itself:In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess,the dancers go round, they go round and around, the squeal and the blare and the tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles tipping their bellies (round as the thick-sided glasses whose wash they impound) their hips and their bellies off balance to turn them. Kicking and rolling about the [End Page 229] Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those shanks must be sound to bear up under such rollicking measures, prance as they dance In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess.The visual, musical, and literary arts do much to educate our senses, especially our senses of sight and hearing. The well-formed visual and auditory sensations we gain from the arts are, as it were, the melody of those experiences. They are the images we store away, the tunes we whistle. However, here, I want to draw attention to an overlooked, although not entirely disregarded, sense, i.e., touch. I want to argue that touch is the bass line to the melody of sight and hearing in the arts, i.e., that touch keeps the work of art coherent and grounded.This is an old idea. Bernhard Berenson had the idea when he was examining the painters of the Italian renaissance. Berenson argued that great painting stimulates touch, which inspires, our "tactile imagination," which produces our "tactile values." Here lay, according to Berenson the genius of Giotto. Tactile imagination and values enchance the "material significance" of a work; they act as a "test of reality." Berenson was on to something not only about painting but about the arts in general. However, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries he lacked the scientific evidence about touch and its role in human relationships to develop his idea of tactile values to any great extent.1Although Berenson had keen intuitions, he didn't know about the biological/psychological nuts and bolts of touch. Thus, he never knew about the detailed nature and extent of our physical contact with other physical things in the world. He didn't know about Merkel's discs, Ruffini and Pacinian corpuscles. He didn't know about hierarchical and parallel levels of brain processing. Berenson didn't know that more brain space in the somatosensory cortex is given to the hand than to any other part of the body, that your fingers especially have a high density of touch receptors compared to other body areas. Today, all this information is standard textbook fare.2 Many neuroscientific details need to be worked. However, a general picture based on hard evidence has begun to emerge.This information adds significant substance to Berenson's ideas. Berenson's "third dimension" is essentially a sense of temperature, pressure, vibration, and texture. And chances are the tactile imagination is inspired most by what is touched by... (shrink)

When people talk about religion, most soon mention the major religious traditions of our times, but then, thinking further, most mention as well the religions of Indigenous peoples and of such vanished civilizations as ancient Greece and Egypt and Persia. That is, we have come to understand that there are-and have been-many different religions; anthropologists estimate the total in the thousands. They also estimate that there have been thousands of human cultures, which is to say that the making of a (...) culture and the making of its religion go together: each religion is embedded in its cultural history. True, certain religions have attempted, and variously succeeded, in crossing cultural boundaries to "convert the heathens," but the invaded cultures usually put their unmistakable stamp on what they import, as evinced by the pulsating percussive Catholic masses sung in Africa. In the end, each of these religions addresses two fundamental human concerns: How Things Are and Which Things Matter. How Things Are is articulated as a Cosmology or Cosmos: How the natural world came to be, how humans came to be, what happens after we die, the origins of evil and tragedy and natural disaster and love. Which Things Matter becomes codified as a Morality or Ethos: the Judaic Ten Commandments, the Christian Sermon on the Mount, the Five Pillars of Islam, the Buddhist Vinaya, the Confucian Five Relations, and the understandings inherent in numerous Indigenous traditions. The role of a religion is to integrate the Cosmology and the Morality, to render the cosmological narrative so rich and compelling that it elicits our allegiance and our commitment to its attendant moral understandings. As a culture evolves, a distinctive Cosmos and Ethos appears in its co-evolving religion. For billions of us, back to the early humans, the stories, ceremonies and art associated with our religions-of-origin have been central to our lives. I stand in awe of these religions. I have no need to take on their contradictions or immiscibility, any more than I would quarrel with the fact that Scottish bagpipe ceremonies coexist with Japanese tea ceremonies. And indeed, the failure of Soviet Marxism to obliterate Russian Orthodoxy, and of Maoism to obliterate Buddhism, Confucianism, or Daoism, and of Christianity to obliterate Indigenous understandings, reminds us that projects designed to overthrow religious traditions face strong headwinds. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Place of Touch in the ArtsChristopher Perricone (bio)IntroductionIn Breughel's great picture, The Kermess, the dancers go round, they go round and around, the squeal and the blare and the tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles tipping their bellies (round as the thick- sided glasses whose wash they impound) their hips and their bellies off balance to turn them. Kicking and rolling about the Fair Grounds, swinging (...) their butts, those shanks must be sound to bear up under such rollicking measures, prance as they dance In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess.1"The Dance" written by William Carlos Williams in 1944 is one of my favorites. Williams gives us a feel for that life of the kermess (a carnival) in his poem through Breughel's picture, as it were three times removed from the event itself. Of course, unlike Plato, I would argue that the vitality of the kermess is not lost in the poem; it is actually enhanced by a subtle sleight of hand. The poem is not primarily about Breughel's picture. It is about dance, about the dancers who go round, their squeal, the crude music, its rollicking measures, the dancers kicking and rolling and swinging, their hips, bellies, and butts. Reading this poem, I "see" those ordinary folk of Breughel's great picture. I "hear" their music. I "move" to their dance. The poem seems a condensation, a summary of the fine arts. Perhaps the poem is about poetry's power to reinvigorate imaginatively what we hear and see. Perhaps I think of festivities at which I have danced, how such festivities are essential to the human experience. Perhaps William Carlos Williams in 1944, World War II coming to a close, was anticipating similar good times.Tactile ValuesThe fine arts do much to educate our senses. One need only recall the many essays and books written on art, on how to look and hear, how various [End Page 90] critics draw our attention to the power of imagery and song. The well-formed visual and auditory sensations we gain from the arts are, as it were, the melody of those experiences. They are the pictures we store away, the tunes we whistle. However, here I want to draw attention to an overlooked sense—touch. I want to argue that touch is the bass line to the melody of sight and hearing in the arts, that is, that touch keeps the artwork coherent and grounded.This is an old idea. Bernhard Berenson had the idea when he was examining the painters of the Italian Renaissance. In a sense this article is a resurrection of Berenson's idea of "tactile values." Berenson was on to something both about painting and about the arts in general. However, he lacked the scientific evidence about touch and its role in human relationships needed to develop his idea of tactile values to any great extent.The idea of tactile values is first mentioned at the beginning of the essay "The Florentine Painters." Berenson is discussing the art of Giotto. However, prior to plunging into his subject, he says that we need to know what is essential to figure painting before we can appreciate its real value. What is essential are the "tactile values" we give to our retinal impressions, "a test of reality."2 Painting stimulates touch in order for it to stimulate our "tactile imagination."3 Giotto was a genius in stimulating the tactile imagination. Like other medieval masters, Giotto was a fine story teller and had great compositional skills. However, unlike Giotto, other medieval masters "never painted a figure which has artistic existence."4 Giotto's predecessors crafted "highly elaborate, very intelligible symbols, capable, indeed, of communicating something, but losing all higher value the moment the message is delivered."5 If such medieval symbols communicated anything at all, it was only some residue of what one might touch; whatever reality those symbols might have possessed was virtually eviscerated by the artists' emphasis on form and cognitive content. Giotto's predecessors were driven merely by ideas and, one might add, not altogether consistent and coherent ones. On the contrary, Giotto's work seemed to... (shrink)