What role does race play in the moral judgment of character? None, ideally, philosophers insist, contending that the proper assessment of an action requires that we disregard any social values associated with the body performing it. What rightly comes under evaluation, they assert, is the neutral, abstract deed irrespective of the race of the agent. Only under these conditions, presumably, can we gauge true moral worth. Reading together Immanuel Kant and Frantz Fanon on ethics and race, I propose instead that (...) embodied values such as those accorded by race do not distort the portrait of the ethical subject but rather bring that subjectivity into being. Key Words: blackness • embodiment • ethics • Frantz Fanon • Immanuel • Kant • morality • race • value. (shrink)

가다머에게 독서는 내면에 이르는 과정이며 이해와 해석의 기술 문제가 아니라 자기이해의 문제이다. 이해와 해석의 궁극적 목적은 자기이해이다. 독서에서 이해-해석-적용의 해석학적 경험과 실천이 ‘최종적’인 것이 아니듯이 자기이해도 ‘미완결된 과정의 연속’이다. 이와 같은 의미에서 독서는 자기이해를 위한 하나의 통로이며 타자이해-세계이해의 토대이기도 하다. 가다머의 해석학적 관점에서 현재의 교양독서교육은 자기형성으로서의 교양개념과 가다머의 자기이해로서의 독서개념에 입각해 본래의 목적성을 회복해야 한다. 교양 독서교육은 자기형성과 자기이해에 반하는 ‘관리되는 독서’를 지향하며 ‘권장도서 중심 독서에서 자유독서로’, ‘지식과 학습을 위한 독서에서 탐구를 위한 독서로’, ‘독백적 독서에서 공동의 언어를 창조하는 대화와 토론의 (...) 독서’로 교육의 무게 중심을 옮겨야 한다. 가다머의 해석학적 사유에서 열린 독서, 비판적 독서, 문제제기식 독서, 깊이 읽기와 같은 교양독서교육의 이론적 전거와 방향을 찾을 수 있다. (shrink)

To the person unfamiliar with the wide variety of street art, the term “street artist” conjures a young man furtively sneaking around a decaying city block at night, spray paint in hand, defacing concrete structures, ears pricked for police sirens. The possibility of the ethical criticism of street art on such a conception seems hardly worth the time. This has to be an easy question. Street art is vandalism; vandalism is causing the intentional damage or destruction of someone else’s (...) property; causing destruction or damage is wrong. The only remaining question is which of two coarse-grained models of ethical criticism we choose. The ethicist model holds that a work of art that exhibits ethically bad properties is a work that is thereby aesthetically flawed. That is, the work is flawed as a work of art just because of its ethical flaws. Bad ethics make art worse than it otherwise would have been, although it may be aesthetically successful otherwise. The autonomist model, by contrast, holds that the ethical properties of a work of art have no bearing at all on its aesthetic success. One might suppose, therefore, that on either model, a criticism of street art would be relatively easy to undertake. In defacing public property, some street art exhibits and endorses ethically bad attitudes. On the ethicist model, such a work is thereby pro tanto aesthetically flawed because in the process of creating such works, they violate ethical norms concerning the use of public spaces; on the autonomous model, any ethical criticism of the aesthetics of street art would need to be set aside entirely in favor of criticism that focused purely on the aesthetic properties of street art. I will argue in this paper that neither the ethicist nor the autonomist model adequately captures the moral landscape of street art. Street art may indeed be criticized productively on aesthetic grounds for the destruction it does to public spaces, but the existing models of ethical criticism overlook the complex ethical landscape of street art that results from its use of public spaces. In the interplay of various forms of street art we can see the emergence of an ethical criticism of art that is accomplished by the material properties of related artwork, and consists in the creation of a dialogue over the proper use of contested public spaces. (shrink)

The primary aim of this chapter is to outline the consensuses that have emerged in recent philosophical works tackling normative questions about responding to immoral artist’s art. While disagreement amongst philosophers is unavoidable, there is actually much agreement on the ethics of media consumption. How should we evaluate immoral artist’s art? Philosophers generally agree that we should not always separate the artist from the art. How should we engage with immoral artist’s art? Philosophers generally agree that we should not always (...) reflexively turn away from them. In turn, these responses reveal that moral value is not autonomous from aesthetic value, and neither dominates the other. The secondary aim of this chapter is to explore the ramifications of this revelation. I argue that, in addition to an ethics of media consumption, we need an aesthetics of media consumption that is fundamentally social rather than solitary. (shrink)

"Ruskin was the most important aesthetic authority of the 19th century. In his dozens of books and lectures he wrote about the qualities of art. the key figure, the history that connected one to another. In The Stones of Venice, Modern Painters, Seven Lamps of Architecture he developed rules and standards that are amazingly contemporary in their range of sympathies. However, Ruskin wrote thousands of pages of criticism; for the modern reader his thought needs always to be rediscovered. This (...) anthology by Robert Herbert contains the essential thought of Ruskin on theory and practice (creativity, color, compositio, exhibiting workd of art), ("the nature of gothic," Venetian Renaissance, iron and glass as new materials for building), and sculpture and ornament (Greek, Byzantine, Medieval, and Renaissance). Herbert devotes his section on painting to Ruskin's remarks on Giotto, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Michelangelo, the Venetians, Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites, and many others. Ruskin was full of contradictions and quirks, but he is the one 19th-century critic who gave the 20th century many of its most progressive thoughts on architecture, painting, and relationship of art to a social and moral context."--BOOK COVER. (shrink)

What can we expect of literature? And what should the role of criticism be? This collection reflects on developments in criticism and the different modes of knowledge that underwrite literature: a science model and its place in the university versus other ways of conceiving knowledge for which the arts have traditionally been seen as vehicles. Discussion ranges widely with contributions from leading academics as well as those outside the literary academy, including essays by the novelists Doris Lessing (...) and David Lodge. All the essays are concerned with what literature, and therefore criticism, is or aims to be. (shrink)

Peirce was a thinker who claimed that his mind had been thoroughly formed by his rigorous training in the natural sciences. But he was also the author who proclaimed that nothing is truer than true poetry. In making the case for Peirce’s relevance to issues of education, then, it is necessary to do justice to the multifaceted character of his philosophical genius, in particular, to the experimentalist cast of his mind and his profound appreciation for the aesthetic, the imaginative, and (...) (more narrowly) the metaphorical in their myriad guises. My aim in this paper is to go some distance, however small, toward doing such justice to Peirce. (shrink)

Introduction: Adorno and Barthes on the question of the right (di)stance -- The pathos of distances in "a world of banished people" -- George Orwell's critique of sincerity and the obligation of tactlessness -- The inferno of saviors: notes in the margin of Elias Canetti's lifework -- A socialism of distances, or on the difficulties of wise love: Iris Murdoch's secular community -- "The world in me": the distantiality of everyday life -- In search of a whole self: Benjamin's childhood (...) fragments -- Annie Ernaux's diaries of the outside -- Gunter Grass's century -- Damon Galgut on emptying oneself for sleep -- Conclusion. (shrink)

이 논문은 예술작품의 가치, 기법, 상상력 등의 복합적 요소들을 분석하는 비평의 관점, 방법, 구성 등에 대해 살펴보고자 한다. 비평은 작품의 기법이나 가치를 형성하고 있는 사 상적 문화적 배경, 또는 작가가 무심코 행한 예술적 행위도 새로운 측면에서 해석하기 때 문에 또 하나의 창작이라고 말할 수 있다. 이 글에서 말하고자 하는 비평적 분석은 작품 속에 숨겨진 그와 같은 복합성의 요소들을 분석하고 그 열린 구조를 찾아내는 방법이다. 이런 측면에서 이 글은 ‘예술비평은 무엇을 분석하는가’, ‘예술작품을 철학적으로 어떻게 비평할 것인가’ 등에도 주요 초점을 갖고 작품 (...) 및 비평의 의미, 비평의 구성방법과 사례들 을 소개하고자 했다. 그리고 들뢰즈의 예술비평과 그 예시를 통해 작품을 읽고 생각할 수 있는 철학적 비평의 방법을 살펴보고자 했다. 그 결과 우리가 작품을 창의적으로 읽고 이 해한다는 것은 그 복합성을 분석하고 이해할 수 있는 통섭(通涉)의 시선을 필요로 한다는 점을 강조하고자 한다. (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)

The Art of Being: Poetics of the Novel and Existential Philosophy offers an account of the poetics of the realist novel, based on how the novel reorients philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Beauvoir not only read novels and use novelistic techniques of representation in their work, but also discover a radically new way of thinking about the relation between the form of the novel and the nature of self-knowledge, freedom, and world. Drawing (...) upon a rich archive of existentialists writing on the novel, Ong argues that for these thinkers the poetics of the novel in its classic phase - the nineteenth- and twentieth-century realist novel - discloses the conditions for thinking about the meaning of existence. Bringing together philosophy, novel theory, and intellectual history with groundbreaking readings of the novels of Tolstoy, Eliot, Austen, James, Flaubert, and Zola, this study reveals how the novel engages with philosophically rich notions of freedom, world, and the unfinished character of human life in its very form. (shrink)

This article brings together two prominent topics in the literature over the past few decades—the ethical criticism of art and art interpretation. The article argues that debates about the ethical criticism of art have not acknowledged the fact that they are tacitly underpinned by a number of assumptions about art interpretation. I argue that the picture of interpretation that emerges from the analysis of these assumptions is best captured by moderate actual intentionalism. Reflection upon the nature of ethical (...) criticism, I argue, offers new reasons to prefer moderate actual intentionalism to hypothetical intentionalism. I conclude by arguing for the necessity of broadening our conception of ethical criticism. (shrink)

Opera, maintains the author of this comprehensive and provocative volume, finds itself in an artistic predicament that goes beyond previous generational disruptions and "is our own, and special." Arguing that we cannot solve the problem unless we recognize and define it, and that we cannot hope to envision the artform's future unless we first come to terms with its past, he examines all elements of recent operatic practice as revealed in performance--"Performance," he declares, "is our text." He asserts that with (...) renewal of the repertory long at a virtual standstill, we have tried to substitute auteurial production methods and cultural revisionism in its place, with disastrous results. Accordingly, Opera as Opera draws on performances encountered over an eighteen-year period to first analyze styles and techniques of production (direction and design), and then to trace, in copious detail, the developments in the performing disciplines of conducting, singing, and acting that have loosened our connection to the canon. "The masterworks," it flatly states, "are not before us." In a central section, it also surveys the more general cultural background of this situation, in particular the influence of modern and postmodern philosophy and literary criticism, and the turn away from the master narrative which in the author's view was the principal generating force behind opera's greatest era. Whether the reader's primary interest is musical or theatrical, whether it lies with intellectual and aesthetic matters or with into-the-weeds discussion of the work of the performers who bring opera to life, he or she will find much that will stimulate and challenge in this deeply informed, incisively written book."--Publisher's description. (shrink)

First published in 1991. The arts can only thrive in a culture where there is conversation about them. This is particularly true of the arts in an education context. Yet often the discussion is poor because we do not have the necessary concepts for the elaboration of our aesthetic responses, or sufficient familiarity with the contending schools of interpretation. The aim of _Key Concepts _is to engender a broad and informed conversation about the arts. By means of (...) over sixty alphabetically ordered essays, the author offers a map of aesthetics, critical theory and the arts in education. The essays are both informative and argumentative, with cross-references, a supporting bibliography and suggestions for further reading. (shrink)

First published in 1991. The arts can only thrive in a culture where there is conversation about them. This is particularly true of the arts in an education context. Yet often the discussion is poor because we do not have the necessary concepts for the elaboration of our aesthetic responses, or sufficient familiarity with the contending schools of interpretation. The aim of _Key Concepts _is to engender a broad and informed conversation about the arts. By means of (...) over sixty alphabetically ordered essays, the author offers a map of aesthetics, critical theory and the arts in education. The essays are both informative and argumentative, with cross-references, a supporting bibliography and suggestions for further reading. (shrink)