This paper examines the relationship between learning and practice, rule and invention, in Japanese art. Drawing on Chinese precedent, learning through the close observation of conventional models for technical mastery or stylistic construction, underpinned training in almost all of the arts and crafts in Japan. The practice of building individually inventive projects was usually developed only after the successful completion of long apprenticeships in studio settings. The pictorial engagements of Edo, today's Tokyo, form the principal focus for this examination of (...) how individually forged learning pathways developed within the formal constraints of Tokugawa period art-training arrangements. This paper... (shrink)

Some things are pervasive and yet elusive. If it can be agreed that the concept of my title and its instances are of this kind, then the observation may serve to justify the present enterprise. The elusiveness of authority is that so often pursued in philosophical enterprise, namely the repeated confident use of a general term by even the unsophisticated, accompanied by the Socratic puzzlement that sets in as soon as a rationale or account of this use is sought. Such (...) puzzlement in the case of the concept of authority is likely to provoke a Cephalitic reaction ). (shrink)

Were Russell alive and still with us, one could apologize to him for the degree of travesty and oversimplification which the present task has involved. But his inspiration is no longer a living one and it is still a live question in the philosophy of logic whether or not it makes sense to apologize to the shades of the departed. Perhaps the author in such a predicament can take some comfort from the possibility that what he has written may interest (...) some reader in that sort of question. (shrink)

How was creativity understood in the distinctive artistic practices of eighteenth-century Japan? How were its artists able to maintain consistently inventive creative pathways over extended periods? Artistic creativity is sometimes assumed to derive from chance, opportune, or accidental events. For early Western creativity theorists like Graham Wallas,1 Alex Osborn,2 or Robert Fritz 3 such fortunate moments of illumination engendered creative innovation. The invention of synthetic dyes,4 Japanese haboku “splashed ink painting,” or Jackson Pollock’s spatters of paint all involved elements of (...) chance. Given favorable conditions and alert minds, serendipity can contribute to... (shrink)