El presente artículo intenta señalar y valorar las ideas comunes que, en torno a la tradición, la modernidad, el arte y la cultura, existen entre los pensamientos de Walter Benjamin y Hannah Arendt. Para esto, se reconstruyen algunos de los aspectos de la visión histórica de ambos pensadores, para después valorar sus comprensiones estéticas en el marco de la sociedad de masas moderna. Los conceptos de autoridad y aura son centrales en este recorrido para entender la forma en que la (...) “ruptura de la tradición” y la tendencia social contemporánea hacia la “reducción de las distancias” ofrecen una nueva circunstancia esencial para la cultura moderna. (shrink)

Between 1918 and 1933, the masses became a decisive preoccupation of European culture, fueling modernist movements in art, literature, architecture, theater, and cinema, as well as the rise of communism and fascism and experiments in radical democracy. Spanning aesthetics, cultural studies, intellectual history, and political theory, this volume unpacks the significance of the shadow agent known as "the mass" during a critical period in European history. It follows its evolution into the preferred conceptual tool for social scientists, the ideal slogan (...) for politicians, and the chosen image for artists and writers trying to capture a society in flux and a people in upheaval. This volume is the second installment in Stefan Jonsson's epic study of the crowd and the mass in modern Europe, building on his work in _A Brief History of the Masses_, which focused on monumental artworks produced in 1789, 1889, and 1989. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 89-93 [Access article in PDF] Richard Shusterman, Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art (New York: Cornell University Press, 2000) Performing Live can be ascribed to post-modern American pragmatism in its widest expression. The author's intention is to revalue aesthetic experience, as well as to expand its realm to the extent where such experience also encompasses areas alien to traditional (...) aesthetics (for example, popular art or the somatic arts of self-improvement), reaching "the art of living" and reclaiming life itself as performance.After the introduction, titled "Aesthetic Renewal for the Ends of Art: An Overture," the text is organized in two main parts: "Aesthetic Experience and Popular Art" and "Soma, Self, and Society." Along with its ambitious title, the book's organization and structure promise a consistency of approach and narrative that somewhat dissolves during the reading. Shusterman recognizes that the stylistic problems that arise from a compilation of articles spanning ten years, mixing newly written and revised articles, but appeals to the reader's appreciation of the "quality of the mix" (11). Despite this feature, he is a lucid and thoughtful communicator and his writing style is excellent.In order to propose new or revitalized alternatives for the ends of art, Shusterman [End Page 89] explores the crisis in traditional visions of art, pointing to the compartmentalization and lack of credibility in current artistic thought and practice. Hegel, Walter Benjamin, Gianni Vattimo, and Arthur Danto provide him with the philosophical arguments accounting for the modern "exhaustion" of art. He supports a dialectical approach, both naturalistic and historicist, and builds a solid case for the possibility of alternatives in aesthetic thought and experience. He proposes two alternatives in his introduction: The two most prominent sites for today's aesthetic alternatives are clearly the mass-media popular arts and the complex cluster of disciplines devoted to bodily beauty and the art of living as expressed in today's preoccupation with aesthetic lifestyles. (7) It is unclear why these alternatives are "clearly" "the two most prominent." The author does not build a case for this assumption or for the "newness" of these alternatives. The "compilation style" mentioned above and this lack of justification for one of the most original elements in the book make this text often read as a philosophical drafting board. Keeping these characteristics in mind and also critically pondering the degrees of success in the enterprise, the reader must give Shusterman credit for taking risks while suggesting concrete examples for an experiential, holistic philosophy. In this sense, he mentions (in a different context) that "all of us [are caught] between conceptual history and futuristic speculation" (145), and he takes to heart this situation and its challenges.The first chapter in Performing Live aims to redeem or revalue the concept of aesthetic experience. For Shusterman, the loss of "felt experience" in art makes the interest in this concept utterly relevant for art's survival. He traces the lineage of this aesthetic philosophy to John Dewey, Monroe Beardsley, Nelson Goodman, and Arthur Danto. Besides focusing on these authors, his analysis revisits some of the main currents of thought in Western philosophy on the topic (for example, Plato, Hume, Kant, Dickie, Adorno, Benjamin, Gadamer). He concludes that a pragmatic approach to aesthetics, applying the concept of aesthetic experience directionally (as a means towards the actual experience rather than as a definable concept), can provide new paths for revitalizing art. Throughout the text this concept is also used expansively. The post-modern justification of the proposed aesthetics, by allowing the extension of aesthetic experience to embrace "the art of living," can leave the reader wondering if Shusterman has not simply turned Kierkegaard's existentialist stages to self-realization upside down.The second chapter is an open defense of popular art, carried out by contesting the main complaints found in current art criticism. Shusterman's defense is not directed to the products of popular art, but against the claim that popular art is aesthetically "worthless." His definition of "popular art... (shrink)

Modern technology plays an important role in our daily lives. Many people use technology for their works, interactions, and special interests such as art. Art as a discipline, which expresses human emotion and creative side, takes a new form for its contextualization with the help of information technology. A neologism for this discipline is “digital art.” Some experts who employ a traditional value in their aesthetical perspective consider this new approach unlikely. Walter Benjamin, an eminent figure from this group, stated (...) that art must have an aura in its production as is the case in paintings. With this aura, the work of art and not artwork has uniqueness of value. However, the problem arises when information technology becomes a predominant tool for the work of art. Digital art does not consider the aura as the core value in defining something as a work of art. Furthermore, digital artists think that art can exist within a digital object and maintain its uniqueness. Parallel with the latter, this article will describe the dispute and make a clear statement that a work of art in the digital age does not require aura. (shrink)

Purpose. The article is devoted to the analysis of corporality as an attribute of plastic art in the Ancient art, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the modernism and the postmodernism. Theoretical basis. The authors consider historical development of the art as a change of paradigms. Within each paradigm a special understanding of art is created, which is characterized both by the act of creativity itself and by the evaluation of its results. Particularly urgent is the task to identify the origins (...) of these changes, to indicate their stages, the direction of the evolution of artistic creativity. In this context, corporality as a paradigm of European plastic art is considered in the article in the concrete historical dimension from the classics to the postmodernism. Originality. Postmodern experiments stimulate blurring the borders between the traditional forms and genres of art. Review of canonical ideas about the creation and destruction, order and chaos in art illustrates conscious reorientation from the classical understanding of artistic creativity to the construction of artifacts-simulacra, which is a characteristic feature in the oeuvre of contemporary artists, ranging from the pop art to the present day. Conclusions. The ideas of postmodern philosophers found their visual embodiment in modern artistic practices. Reconstruction of the body, re-switching of its elements according to the principle of chaotic collage, the interpretation of the human body as a separate substance isolated from the individual him/herself, which is presented as a phenomenon of mass culture, became the basis of the creative method of contemporary plastic art. The ideas of postmodern philosophers have found their visual embodiment in the contemporary artistic practices. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 89-93 [Access article in PDF] Richard Shusterman, Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art (New York: Cornell University Press, 2000) Performing Live can be ascribed to post-modern American pragmatism in its widest expression. The author's intention is to revalue aesthetic experience, as well as to expand its realm to the extent where such experience also encompasses areas alien to traditional (...) aesthetics (for example, popular art or the somatic arts of self-improvement), reaching "the art of living" and reclaiming life itself as performance.After the introduction, titled "Aesthetic Renewal for the Ends of Art: An Overture," the text is organized in two main parts: "Aesthetic Experience and Popular Art" and "Soma, Self, and Society." Along with its ambitious title, the book's organization and structure promise a consistency of approach and narrative that somewhat dissolves during the reading. Shusterman recognizes that the stylistic problems that arise from a compilation of articles spanning ten years, mixing newly written and revised articles, but appeals to the reader's appreciation of the "quality of the mix" (11). Despite this feature, he is a lucid and thoughtful communicator and his writing style is excellent.In order to propose new or revitalized alternatives for the ends of art, Shusterman [End Page 89] explores the crisis in traditional visions of art, pointing to the compartmentalization and lack of credibility in current artistic thought and practice. Hegel, Walter Benjamin, Gianni Vattimo, and Arthur Danto provide him with the philosophical arguments accounting for the modern "exhaustion" of art. He supports a dialectical approach, both naturalistic and historicist, and builds a solid case for the possibility of alternatives in aesthetic thought and experience. He proposes two alternatives in his introduction: The two most prominent sites for today's aesthetic alternatives are clearly the mass-media popular arts and the complex cluster of disciplines devoted to bodily beauty and the art of living as expressed in today's preoccupation with aesthetic lifestyles. (7) It is unclear why these alternatives are "clearly" "the two most prominent." The author does not build a case for this assumption or for the "newness" of these alternatives. The "compilation style" mentioned above and this lack of justification for one of the most original elements in the book make this text often read as a philosophical drafting board. Keeping these characteristics in mind and also critically pondering the degrees of success in the enterprise, the reader must give Shusterman credit for taking risks while suggesting concrete examples for an experiential, holistic philosophy. In this sense, he mentions (in a different context) that "all of us [are caught] between conceptual history and futuristic speculation" (145), and he takes to heart this situation and its challenges.The first chapter in Performing Live aims to redeem or revalue the concept of aesthetic experience. For Shusterman, the loss of "felt experience" in art makes the interest in this concept utterly relevant for art's survival. He traces the lineage of this aesthetic philosophy to John Dewey, Monroe Beardsley, Nelson Goodman, and Arthur Danto. Besides focusing on these authors, his analysis revisits some of the main currents of thought in Western philosophy on the topic (for example, Plato, Hume, Kant, Dickie, Adorno, Benjamin, Gadamer). He concludes that a pragmatic approach to aesthetics, applying the concept of aesthetic experience directionally (as a means towards the actual experience rather than as a definable concept), can provide new paths for revitalizing art. Throughout the text this concept is also used expansively. The post-modern justification of the proposed aesthetics, by allowing the extension of aesthetic experience to embrace "the art of living," can leave the reader wondering if Shusterman has not simply turned Kierkegaard's existentialist stages to self-realization upside down.The second chapter is an open defense of popular art, carried out by contesting the main complaints found in current art criticism. Shusterman's defense is not directed to the products of popular art, but against the claim that popular art is aesthetically "worthless." His definition of "popular art... (shrink)

In this study I focus on the importance of the concept of the apocryphal to understand the work of Antonio Machado in its entirety. The concept of the apocryphal implies a critical position before tradition: the negation-forgetting of the real past, the affirmation reinvention of a possible past. The apocryphal comes to solve, according to Machado, the great crises that modern poetry faced: the loss of the ties that bound humankind and the universe, the relationship between high culture and mass (...) culture, the relationship between the ethical and the aesthetic in the work of art. (shrink)

This thesis is to make sure the art's political possibility especially in the age of the technological reproduction. Since Benjamin declared the death of the 'aura' in the modern art, the concept of the art has been criticized and changed, that of the simulacre which Plato had blamed in his 'republics' newly appeared passing through the post-modern application of Baudrillard. But the simulacre is not negative any more here, even though it was the side effect of the mimesis(the poetic process, (...) so long as it is not oblivious that simulacre is just the fake reality as Plato and Baudrillard said, it was different from the real. The artwork could not be free from the destiny of the dream, for it is available after awakening out of it. In the post-modernism the distinction between the dream and the real disappeared, which could be linked to understanding the fetishism of the technological reproduction widely spreading among the highly industrialized people. The semiology of Saussure could be borrowed to make people isolated of it awakened to the revolutionary subject. That is to say, if the simulacre is like the dreaming, to draw the social revolutionary possibility of it, they need to overcome these fetishism, that is, the learning that this dream is not the reality, and after that they can leap as another subject perceiving the power of that dream. According Freud, the dream is based on the unconscious process of the empty signs. And the teaching of 'the signs of the equivalent differences' in Saussure makes us free from the essentialism of the word(a sort of the fetishism), know that we are so much as the sign or the citizen empty in it, and so get to know that we need another signs, or neighbors even though, and for they are empty, too. The revolutionary subject is not based on the great individual subject but the empty(lost) 'us' that so need to associate each other. And the post-modern art, popular mass art can help us being social subjects. That is what Benjamin had dreamed in post-aura art through 'the artworks in the age of the technological reproduction'. (shrink)

This is a guide to the use of films, television, and other mass media objects as subject matter in the classroom. The unassuming thesis of the book is that the mass media products vary in their excellence, within their genres, and that a responsible teacher should introduce them into the classroom, so that the student may learn better "taste" and acquire generally better critical skills. Apparently, The Popular Arts is written for members of the British educational system. American educators and (...) critics have been succeeding, for several years, with the sorts of curricular innovations these authors desire so strongly. Hall and Whannel are pleading their cause before a less "progressive" cultural establishment, and, in order to dignify the mass media, they feel compelled to undergo elaborate agonies of scholarly definition. In order to distinguish art from kitsch they rely on notions about the purity of the motivation of the creator, and make some elementary aesthetic blunders. This study, by the authors' own admission, is concerned with criticism and not with the vast research into the process and effects of mass communications. This same research, though, is intimately connected with new and experimental techniques in education. As a consequence, The Popular Arts tends to be a manual on the use of exceedingly modern subject materials in a rather old-fashioned classroom.—E. W. (shrink)

Benjamin does not see or does not want to see the new “aura” that makes the art of cinema “art” which stays as the central feature of the totally renewed statute of artistic activity in the age of mechanical reproduction. In his essay of 1936, Benjamin acquires the arguments of all those authors who, between the first and second decades of the Twentieth century, had described this art and his new aura: Paul Valéry, George Duhamel, Léon Pierre-Quint, Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt (...) Brecht, Rudolph Arnheim. It is an art for the mass that has a positive but also negative side in individual perception. Benjamin considers the new man – be it mass-man (the audience) or man-tool – recruitable for a coming revolution, but at the end of the essay he raises a question concerning the whole of contemporary art from the Dada movement to the present time: how could this completely renovated art possibly escape exploitation by those who produce it and drive it since then? (shrink)

Benjamin does not see or does not want to see the new “aura” that makes the art of cinema “art” which stays as the central feature of the totally renewed statute of artistic activity in the age of mechanical reproduction. In his essay of 1936, Benjamin acquires the arguments of all those authors who, between the first and second decades of the Twentieth century, had described this art and his new aura: Paul Valéry, George Duhamel, Léon Pierre-Quint, Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt (...) Brecht, Rudolph Arnheim. It is an art for the mass that has a positive but also negative side in individual perception. Benjamin considers the new man – be it mass-man (the audience) or man-tool – recruitable for a coming revolution, but at the end of the essay he raises a question concerning the whole of contemporary art from the Dada movement to the present time: how could this completely renovated art possibly escape exploitation by those who produce it and drive it since then? (shrink)

The “masses” discourse in modern China was influenced by two western intellectual traditions, i.e., mass psychology and historical materialism. The former regards the masses as a blind, impulsive, and irrational crowd, while the latter thinks that only the people are the real dynamic forces of historical development. As a result, the “masses” discourse in modern China bifurcated into a negative one of “mass psychology” and a positive one of “mass movement”, both of which were employed as effective tools of (...) political mobilization by different political parties and social elites. The concept of the “masses” was either the crystallization of the abstract “people” or the actualization of the ideal “citizenry”. What is embodied in the concepts of the people, the citizenry, and the masses in modern China was actually an ambiguous image of a political subject. (shrink)

What do exotic area rugs, handcrafted steel-string guitars, and fiddling have in common today? Many contemporary tradition bearers embrace complexity in form and content. They construct objects and performances that draw on the past and evoke nostalgia effectively but also reward close attention. In Rugs, Guitars, and Fiddling: Intensification and the Rich Modern Lives of Traditional Arts, author Chris Goertzen argues that this entails three types of change that can be grouped under an umbrella term: intensification. First, traditional creativity can (...) be intensified through virtuosity, through doing hard things extra fluently. Second, performances can be intensified through addition, by packing increased amounts of traditional materials into the conventionally sized packages. Third, in intensification through selection, artistic impact can grow even if amount of information recedes by emphasizing compelling ideas-e.g., crafting a red and black viper poised to strike rather than a pretty duck decoy featuring more colors and contours. Rugs handwoven in southern Mexico, luthier-made guitars, and southern US fiddle styles experience parallel changes, all absorbing just enough of the complex flavors, dynamics, and rhythms of modern life to translate inherited folklore into traditions that can be widely celebrated today. New mosaics of details and skeins of nuances don't transform craft into esoteric fine art, but rather enlist the twists and turns and endless variety of the contemporary world therapeutically, helping transform our daily chaos into parades of negotiable jigsaw puzzles. Intensification helps make crafts and traditional performances more accessible and understandable and thus more effective, bringing past and present closer together, helping folk arts continue to perform their magic today. (shrink)

In a remarkable range of disciplines — from legal studies to architecture, from art history to rock music — there is emerging a paradoxically unified approach to the theory of contemporary cultural dissolution. In the humanities in America, three major post-structuralist philosophic movements may be discerned, each describing a separate facet of traditional disciplinary studies yet all having a remarkable cross-departmental impact. These are the anti-foundationalism of Richard Rorty and other end-of-the-line philosophers in the American pragmatist tradition, the textual deconstructionists (...) who swim about Jacques Derrida, and the revisers of Western Marxism, such as Fredric Jameson, various Parisians, and Terry Eagleton, who dialectically step out of history into its forms to tease the future out of the maw of capitalism. (shrink)

From the time of the earliest self-conscious emergence of modern painting around 1905, there have not been widely accepted criteria by which to judge the artistic significance and value of the abstract and nonobjective styles that displaced the traditions of representational art. This circumstance has made the education of artists problematic. For the arts of literature and music, modernism was a relatively short-lived phase of innovation and experimentation that was played out in works that defied easy appreciation. The attention of (...) readers was soon exhausted by literary works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, as was the attention of listeners exhausted by Arnold Schoenberg’s serialism. Authors returned to writing... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Mapping Beyond Measure: Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity by Simon FerdinandDavid TooheyMapping Beyond Measure: Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity BY SIMON FERDINAND Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019Mapping Beyond Measure is a geographical and theoretical critique of map art and the tradition of modern mapmaking. The book focuses in depth on a few related examples of map art and departs from critical (...) theory and post-Marxist readings of space. Simon Ferdinand emphasizes fine art and art-film as appropriate counterweights to the authoritarian calculation in modern cartography and, unexpectedly, map art’s critique of mapmaking.Mapping Beyond Measure follows the well-trodden path of critiquing a medium, mapping, and map art as irredeemably authoritarian.1 Situated in this approach, Ferdinand argues that map art reproduces modernist cartography’s assumptions even while critiquing mapping. Aiming to subvert this shortcoming, Ferdinand explores Peter Greenway’s semi-abstract map art films that do not prioritize science over artists. Greenway’s films, especially A Walk Through H, are shown as being as close to an idea of mapping beyond calculation as possible. Indeed, for Ferdinand, Greenway’s map art films are an improvement on “postmodern” theorists.Mapping Beyond Measure explores a small, though logically (and practically) related group of map artists. The first three chapters explore differing approaches to map art, from Soviet painting that unintentionally [End Page 126] heralds globalization and map art’s latent desires to dominate the world, to more contemporary map art about looming societal collapse through the death of nature and mass casualties from aerial bombardment of cities. The following two chapters focus on how mapping creates nation-states. These chapters elucidate the tragic inability of map artists to escape globalization and calculation, the latter exasperated by G.I.S. techniques. These map artists serve as an ensemble that spotlights what, to Ferdinand, are inevitable difficulties that ethical practitioners of map art face in escaping the pitfalls of calculation in mainstream mapping.In chapter 6 Ferdinand explains how Greenway’s film A Walk Through H gets as close as possible to challenging map art through semi-abstract, two-dimensional additions to maps and using movie cameras to create an illusion of movement. Thus, the hierarchy of scientists over artists is partially dismantled. Indeed, Ferdinand lauds Greenway for creating alternatives to established political theorists. Interestingly, Ferdinand replaces ontology with the concept of “chorein” suggesting a more fluid conception of mapping that is not available in theories of space or cartographic practices of calculation. Nonetheless, compared to one of the articles referenced, Ferdinand downplays the destructive nature of chorein as a militaristic, colonial use of maritime space to emphasize its creative potential.2Ferdinand’s examples are primarily Eurocentric, even, surprisingly, in the exception: his focus on Japanese map artist Satomi Matoba. Here Ferdinand departs from Eurocentric examples only to focus on Japan—the most privileged nation-state in Asia. Even in this focus on Japan, which also includes Hawai‘i, Ferdinand does not depart from a frame familiar to Europe: World War II. Indeed, the discussion of Pearl Harbor (a U.S. military base) focuses on U.S. foreign policy, not on Hawai‘i. This thematic choice is relevant to other map artists in Ferdinand’s book. Ferdinand’s critique of calculability is based mainly on the consequences of Nazism, as theorized by Stuart Elden. However, Ferdinand’s theoretical interventions on uneven development in maps and map art would have been more substantial with the addition of detailed, localized, narrative accounts of violence suffered by non-white populations in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and various European cities. Instead, we get an anonymous logic of maps that uses the idea of the past and potential [End Page 127] future destruction of cities to assume that everyone suffered to the same extent in World War II.While I am reluctant to criticize a book for not offering a solution to what it critiques, to a certain extent, the solution offered by Ferdinand contradicts his normative critique of calculability. In exploring Alison Hildreth’s map art, Ferdinand praises nuanced, temporally layered artistic explorations of ecological destruction and extinction. Likewise, A Walk Through H, is... (shrink)

The article examines the influence of ancient Chinese philosophical concepts on the formation of modern piano art in China. Ancient Chinese materialistic philosophy is based on such teachings as Wu-xing and Yin-Yang, the Great Limit (Tai Chi), the eight trigrams and others. With the passage of time and the rapid development of science, these philosophical concepts not only did not lose their significance, but also had a powerful influence on the formation of modern Chinese piano creativity, deeply influenced the form (...) and cultural connotation of Chinese music, and also became the theoretical basis for the works of many modern composers. The philosophical and aesthetic Taiji system presented by composer Zhao Xiaosheng, integrated into the modern piano composition system, marked the beginning of a revolution in the field of piano art, combining the theoretical foundations of traditional Chinese philosophy and the principles of modern composition methods. The research methodology is based on philosophical and cultural analysis, musicological analysis, and semantic analysis. Of particular interest is the comparative analysis of the musical and philosophical "Tai chi composition system" by Zhao Xiaoshen, the dodecaphony of A. Schoenberg and the set theory of M. Babbitt and A. Fort, which the Chinese composer considers the sources of his creativity. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that a correlation is proposed between the key categories of ancient Chinese philosophy and modern experiments in the field of musical expression. The authors managed to demonstrate the high degree of influence of Chinese philosophy on music, to clearly show that the basic postulates of ancient Chinese philosophy have been encoded in the basis of traditional Chinese music since ancient times, and in the twentieth century they were the basis of modern Chinese theory of composition, while playing a colossal role in identifying the common foundations of modern composition of the West and East, while preservation of local features of the diverse sphere of these cultures. The emergence and formation of a philosophical and theoretical system of musical composition, based on the concepts of classical Chinese philosophy, organically refracted in the latest achievements of Western music composition, emphasizes the ontological significance of these concepts for both Eastern and Western culture. And the creation of appropriate musical works undoubtedly leads to positive trends in the development of modern Chinese music and classical Chinese philosophy. (shrink)

For much of its history, philosophy was not merely a theoretical discipline but a way of life, an "art of living." This practical aspect of philosophy has been much less dominant in modernity than it was in ancient Greece and Rome, when philosophers of all stripes kept returning to Socrates as a model for living. The idea of philosophy as an art of living has survived in the works of such major modern authors as Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Each of (...) these writers has used philosophical discussion as a means of establishing what a person is and how a worthwhile life is to be lived. In this wide-ranging, brilliantly written account, Alexander Nehamas provides an incisive reevaluation of Socrates' place in the Western philosophical tradition and shows the importance of Socrates for Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Why does each of these philosophers—each fundamentally concerned with his own originality—return to Socrates as a model? The answer lies in the irony that characterizes the Socrates we know from the Platonic dialogues. Socratic irony creates a mask that prevents a view of what lies behind. How Socrates led the life he did, what enabled or inspired him, is never made evident. No tenets are proposed. Socrates remains a silent and ambiguous character, forcing readers to come to their own conclusions about the art of life. This, Nehamas shows, is what allowed Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault to return to Socrates as a model without thereby compelling them to imitate him. This highly readable, erudite study argues for the importance of the tradition within Western philosophy that is best described as "the art of living" and casts Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault as the three major modern representatives of this tradition. Full of original ideas and challenging associations, this work will offer new ways of thinking about the philosophers Nehamas discusses and about the discipline of philosophy itself. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Healing Powers and Modernity: Traditional Medicine, Shamanism, and Science in Asian SocietiesE. N. AndersonHealing Powers and Modernity: Traditional Medicine, Shamanism, and Science in Asian Societies. Edited by Linda H. Connor and Geoffrey Samuel. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 2001. Pp. xiii + 283. Hardcover.Healing Powers and Modernity: Traditional Medicine, Shamanism, and Science in Asian Societies, edited by Linda H. Connor and Geoffrey Samuel, consists of an Introduction, by (...) the first editor, and eleven case studies. The latter are short ethnographic studies of particular communities or healers in East and South Asian countries. All of these are well-written, detailed accounts of particular healing contexts and behaviors. Several are by first-rate veteran ethnographers, such as Laurel Kendall (writing-as usual-on Korean shamans), Mark Nichter (India), Carol Laderman (Malaya), and Geoffrey Samuel (Tibet). Others are by younger scholars, such as Amanda Harris (the Iban of Sarawak), who are carrying on the great tradition. Other essays by Kalpana Ram (India), Marina Roseman (the Temiar of Malaya), Cynthia Hunter (Indonesia), Sydney White (the Naxi of China), Craig Janes (Tibet), and Vincanne Adams (Tibet) complete the picture. All are fine ethnographic sketches.The unifying theme is a classic anthropological one: traditional, small-scale, indigenous traditions meet international forces of change. Inevitably, the former must accommodate to the overwhelmingly greater wealth and power of the agents of the latter. In the medical arena, nations often push international biomedicine to the exclusion of other modes. In the nations under study here, things are a bit more complex; all have their own elite medical traditions, some much changed by contact with biomedicine (as in the case of China's "Traditional Chinese Medicine," with capital letters; it is a new invention, in spite of the name). So local indigenous healers have to accommodate not only to some much-altered form of biomedicine; they usually have to accommodate also to some much-altered form of their country's elite medicine. They improvise, often with striking success. The spirits of the forest are joined by the spirit of canned sardines (see Roseman's chapter), but spiritual healing practice continues.Naturally, this is confusing, and here the book begins to break down a bit. "Modernity" as a concept is taken over from the writings of Foucault, de Certeau, Homi Bhabha, and the like, which are by no means consistent or clear on its meaning. And the authors of this book are far too sophisticated to think of "modernity" as any one thing or as anything at all simple. They are, perforce, left to say that modernity-especially as written up at enormous length and vagueness in the works of the authorities cited-is too complex to address here. (Someone more irreverent might even suggest that "modernity," if indeed it cannot be tightly defined, is not a concept worthy of much attention.) This leaves the book rather undertheorized.Moreover, the authors follow the aforementioned authorities in leaving out bio-scientific considerations, even from descriptions of local modernizing discourses. One wishes for some biomedical diagnoses of cases, for example, for background data on disease incidence, infant and maternal mortality, nutrition, and other basic health concerns. [End Page 702]A reviewer usually should not complain about what is not treated in a book, but in some cases here, stories really need rounding out. Laurel Kendall speaks of Korean folkloristic interest in shamans, but does not mention the fascinating and hotly debated ideas about shamanism as the fount of Korean morality and fine art. Geoffrey Samuel puts discussion of China's brutal crushing of Tibetans and their culture "beyond the scope of this chapter" (p. 215), which deprives the reader of serious consideration of the most obtrusive force shaping Tibetan medical practice today.Such quibbles are minor. These compelling studies of local healers caught in global currents can stand on their own. [End Page 703]E. N. AndersonUniversity of California, RiversideCopyright © 2006 University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)

The article is devoted to the transformation of traditional folk culture archetypes of wood, stone, thread in modern decorative and applied art, as well as ways of using threads, wood and stone as materials for the manufacture of objects of modern art. The research does not aim to repeat classical ethnographic studies or to refer monographs on the history of culture. The article is an attempt at a comprehensive analysis of the modern practice of decorative and applied art from the (...) point of view of the philosophy of culture and practical aesthetics. This approach is a unique experience in the analysis of jewelry and decorative practices of processing heterogeneous materials of natural origin. The cluster of masters of decorative and applied art in Russia is expanding, there are more and more opportunities and materials for creativity, but the authors of the products themselves are not engaged in stylistic, art criticism or philosophical understanding of their activities. Nevertheless, their works, according to researchers, reflect the oldest mythological images that are the cornerstones of Russian culture and represent the heritage of world culture, transformed by post-culture and man-made trends that have penetrated, among other things, into art. Archetypes of wood, stone, thread, preserved since ancient times, acquire new meanings and new forms of embodiment in the works of modern authors. (shrink)

For much of its history, philosophy was not merely a theoretical discipline but a way of life, an "art of living." This practical aspect of philosophy has been much less dominant in modernity than it was in ancient Greece and Rome, when philosophers of all stripes kept returning to Socrates as a model for living. The idea of philosophy as an art of living has survived in the works of such major modern authors as Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Each of (...) these writers has used philosophical discussion as a means of establishing what a person is and how a worthwhile life is to be lived. In this wide-ranging, brilliantly written account, Alexander Nehamas provides an incisive reevaluation of Socrates' place in the Western philosophical tradition and shows the importance of Socrates for Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Why does each of these philosophers—each fundamentally concerned with his own originality—return to Socrates as a model? The answer lies in the irony that characterizes the Socrates we know from the Platonic dialogues. Socratic irony creates a mask that prevents a view of what lies behind. How Socrates led the life he did, what enabled or inspired him, is never made evident. No tenets are proposed. Socrates remains a silent and ambiguous character, forcing readers to come to their own conclusions about the art of life. This, Nehamas shows, is what allowed Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault to return to Socrates as a model without thereby compelling them to imitate him. This highly readable, erudite study argues for the importance of the tradition within Western philosophy that is best described as "the art of living" and casts Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault as the three major modern representatives of this tradition. Full of original ideas and challenging associations, this work will offer new ways of thinking about the philosophers Nehamas discusses and about the discipline of philosophy itself. (shrink)

Philosophy’s engagement with mass media has often been ambiguous: many critical theorists, from Benjamin to Bourdieu, recognised the emancipatory potential of modern communication technologies, but they also denounced the economic, political and ideological forces at work in the creation and dissemination of public opinion. Looking at different media, these authors emphasised the dialectical tension between the plurality of the public sphere and different forms of control and manipulation. In the present paper, I argue that this line of criticism, albeit important, (...) is no longer sufficient. I claim that contemporary forms of communication, defined by a unique emphasis on interactivity, cannot be analysed simply in terms of the opposition between dominant and marginalised agents or discourses. In its most extreme form, interactivity leads to an implosion of the distinction between the sources and the targets of the information flow, which calls into question the very possibility of a meaningful communicative exchange. To clarify the nature of this phenomenon, I retrace the evolution of modern political communication, from live speeches to digital platforms and social networks, and discuss its implications for recent debates on political authority, participation and representation. (shrink)

In contemporary Chinese art the national traditions and modern trends of the art world are especially relevant. Since the 1980s, in the works of a number of authors, interest began to manifest itself in the techniques of silk work, which was characteristic of ancient and medieval painting on scrolls, which was later replaced by more accessible drawings on paper. At the present stage, such painting has reached its heyday and is highly appreciated in the art market. The most famous masters (...) engaged in silk painting are Mu Yilin and Dong Wenzheng. The analysis of their creations allows us to see how the artists discovered the expressive possibilities of this material, including its transparency, refraction, color and tone saturation. The object of attention is the Chinese tradition of painting on silk, and the subject is the features of its development at the beginning of the XXI century on the example of the work of famous artists and the options they take into account in the compositions of techniques, figurative structure and expressive means of the old masters. The purpose of the article is to identify the main themes and artistic means that modern artists use in their silk works, as well as the option of integrating an ethno-cultural component into their work. (shrink)

This volume aims to question, challenge, supplement, and revise current understandings of the relationship between aesthetic and political operations. The authors transcend disciplinary boundaries and nurture a wide-ranging sensibility about art and sovereignty, two highly complex and interwoven dimensions of human experience that have rarely been explored by scholars in one conceptual space. Several chapters consider the intertwining of modern philosophical currents and modernist artistic forms, in particular those revealing formal abstraction, stylistic experimentation, self-conscious expression, and resistance to traditional definitions (...) of "Art." Other chapters deal with currents that emerged as facets of art became increasingly commercialized, merging with industrial design and popular entertainment industries. Some contributors address Post-Modernist art and theory, highlighting power relations and providing sceptical, critical commentary on repercussions of colonialism and notions of universal truths rooted in Western ideals. By interfering with established dichotomies and unsettling stable debates related to art and sovereignty, all contributors frame new perspectives on the co-constitution of artworks and practices of sovereignty. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the study of the history of theatrical therapy in the no-si ritual drama. It is shown that, in general, the ritual elements of the no-si drama can be used in modern drama therapy. In addition, dramatic therapy, which is implied by the author in this article, is somewhat different from the modern concept of psychodrama, since it covers large areas of the human psyche. The author believes that it is not necessary to completely ignore this (...) complex area of human culture, because regardless of function or form, dramatic therapy is closely related to the shamanic ritual of healing. The formation of the Chinese national drama took place in the context of the historical development of China. Having originated in the most ancient forms of shamanic rituals, the theatrical performance has evolved into a unique stage genre. Along with other earliest theatrical forms such as ancient Greek theater and ancient Indian drama, Chinese opera originated several centuries before our era, but unlike them it has survived to this day almost unchanged. Now Chinese traditional opera occupies an important place in the list of intangible heritage not only of China itself, but also of the whole world. One of the most important milestones in the development of theatrical art in China was the ritual drama "no-si", which today the ritual drama no-si in China is called a real "living fossil", because it is the oldest cultural form that has come down to us through the centuries. Archaic religious rituals, reflected in modern theatrical performances, testify to the mixing and syncretization of various religious traditions, including no-rituals and no-si drama, and modernity. The current generation is successfully modernizing the tradition of its ancestors in accordance with the times, preserving it in the centuries-old cultural memory of its people. (shrink)

Artistic function within the global society is not more to produce “beauty” instead to acting inside communication. At Baudelaire’s time beauty was the ephemeral and bizarre. Masterpiece, work of art now is rather an open device. At the beginning of the modern era, cinema creates a new kind of spectator as an absent-minded expert, as W. Benjamin said. The new technological condition produces itself a sort of technical aura (so is for radio, cinema, records etc.) But as K. Marx said (...) «production produce consume». So a new condition of aura in communication era lies in the ephemeral artist’s act. Art is now in the era of “gas”, to live the aura is just to breath an atmosphere as Y. Michaud says. Artistic function is to produce relations and public relations. Curators they work as cool hunters or disc jockey and museums are a new kind of mass media for an absent-minded public enjoying in the supermarket of aura. (shrink)

Artistic function within the global society is not more to produce “beauty” instead to acting inside communication. At Baudelaire’s time beauty was the ephemeral and bizarre. Masterpiece, work of art now is rather an open device. At the beginning of the modern era, cinema creates a new kind of spectator as an absent-minded expert, as W. Benjamin said. The new technological condition produces itself a sort of technical aura (so is for radio, cinema, records etc.) But as K. Marx said (...) «production produce consume». So a new condition of aura in communication era lies in the ephemeral artist’s act. Art is now in the era of “gas”, to live the aura is just to breath an atmosphere as Y. Michaud says. Artistic function is to produce relations and public relations. Curators they work as cool hunters or disc jockey and museums are a new kind of mass media for an absent-minded public enjoying in the supermarket of aura. (shrink)

Addressing the western understanding of the status and nature of animals and the relation of animals to the question of life, this book provides a discourse on animality through an interdisciplinary investigation into various areas of humanities. The nature of animals is explored by drawing on materials from literature, art, religion, philosophy, and political science, focusing on discussions of animality about the classical culture of ancient Greece, metaphysics and its application to debates on life, Martin Heidegger's philosophical theories, and biopolitics. (...) Although the distinctive difference between human beings from animals has long been emphasized, the author argues that they are inseparable from one another to achieve understanding. The interrogation of animality, therefore, provides a new perspective on the nature of human beings in this postmodern era. Academics in western literature, literary theory, literary criticism, and comparative literature will find this work an insightful addition to debates in their respective fields, while it will also help senior university students pursuing their studies. (shrink)

As the title suggests, we are here addressing the most fundamental questions: Who is man? What is art? What is the bond that unites man, nature and art? The argument at the heart of this book is that what should be common to all men and women-a natural affinity with the sacred that holds out the promise of spiritual experience in everyday life- is in fact made all but impossible by the very nature of modern society. For what the modern (...) world has set in place is nothing other than a pattern of life that prevents us from being what we truly are. The destruction of man that is part and parcel of the scientific, industrial view of our destiny cannot do otherwise than in turn destroy those values and meanings that have always been the bedrock of normal human existence. At a time when the inadequacy of modernism has become apparent, the author returns to the challenge of the English radical tradition of thought (Blake, Cobbett, Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, Gill and others), with its critique of the industrial-now post-industrial-way of life. Through a series of highly original studies of several major English artists and craftsman, and by addressing key themes that relate to the spiritual, cultural and environmental crisis that now confronts us, the author offers a positive development of the radical perspective. Can modern man survive the process of self-mutilation he has embarked upon? In this unique study of our present predicament, the author suggests we cannot do so by turning our back on the perennial wisdom that has always informed the wisest philosophies of life, with their intuition of the sacred nature of reality. (shrink)

In The Art of Humane Education, Donald Phillip Verene presents a new statement of the classical and humanist ideals that he believes should guide education in the liberal arts and sciences. These ideals are lost, he contends, in the corporate atmosphere of the contemporary university, with its emphasis on administration, faculty careerism, and student performance. Verene addresses questions of how and what to teach and offers practical suggestions for the conduct of class sessions, the relationship between teacher and student, the (...) interpretation of texts, and the meaning and use of a canon of great books.In sharp contrast to the current tendency toward specialization, Verene considers the aim of college education to be self-knowledge pursued through study of all fields of thought. Education, in his view, must be based on acquisition of the arts of reading, writing, and thinking. He regards the class lecture as a form of oratory that should be presented in accordance with the well-known principles of rhetoric. The Art of Humane Education, styled as a series of letters, makes the author's original and practical ideas very clear. In this elegant book, Verene explores the full range of issues surrounding humane education.On the humanities: "Despite Descartes, the study of humane letters has remained, but it is always in danger of passing out of the curriculum. It remains a beggar who will not quite leave the premises."On teaching: "Like oratory, teaching requires a natural gift, but it is also an art which, like all the other humane arts, can be learned only mimetically.... As some are born tone-deaf and cannot be musical, there are those who can never teach. But most if they wish have some aptitude for it, and this aptitude can be developed into an art."On teachers: "Teachers motivated by eloquence attempt to speak wholly on a subject, since the whole is where its life is. Teachers not motivated by eloquence tend to be either dull or comedic. The dull teacher may have knowledge but have no true language for it.... The comedic teacher is shallow and a menace to the subject matter."On administrators: "Administration is never content simply to concern itself with the pure business of the university, paying its bills, maintaining its buildings. It sees itself as necessary in order for the process between teacher and student to go on. But it is a process that it constantly interrupts.... Administrators, however, should not be taken too seriously."Although sharply critical of many aspects of the modern university and of many currents within the humanities, The Art of Humane Education remains at heart a ringing endorsement of the high humanist tradition and its continuing relevance to the institutions of teaching and learning. (shrink)

Titles of modern interviews are studied on the material of German mass media texts. Leading syntactic structures, communicative signs and pragmatical aspects of titles are analyzed. The most attention is paid to titles in form of questions or exclamation, which have the strongest communicative pragmatical effect. Exclamation and questions in the position of titles lose value of incentive and interrogative, incentive or interrogative remain only formally, which makes them quasi-incentive and quasi-interrogative. Exclamation and question functions go by the wayside, in (...) the first place extends forecasting capabilities for the content of subsequent title text. Besides, in article the titles in the form of question containing the address are analyzed. Illocutionary goal of these titles is an invitation to a discussion of the potential reader, and a joint search for common perspectives in this or that activity, for selected search of the most appropriate of all the possible solutions to a problem. They seem to reproduce the process of reflection of the author and cause to think about the issues raised by recipients. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art and ReligionRichard Shusterman (bio)IArt emerged in ancient times from myth, magic, and religion, and it has long sustained its compelling power through its sacred aura. Like cultic objects of worship, artworks weave an entrancing spell over us. Though contrasted to ordinary real things, their vivid experiential power provides a heightened sense of the real and suggests deeper realities than those conveyed by common sense and science. While Hegel (...) saw religion as superseding art in the evolution of Spirit toward higher forms that culminate in philosophical knowledge, subsequent artists of the nineteenth century instead saw art as superseding religion and even philosophy as the culmination of contemporary man's spiritual quest. Artistic minds as different as Matthew Arnold, Oscar Wilde, and Stephan Mallarmé predicted that art would supplant traditional religion as the locus of the holy, of uplifting mystery and consoling meaning in our increasingly secular society dominated by what Wilde condemned as a dreary "worship of facts."1 By expressing "the mysterious sense... of existence, [art] endows our sojourn with authenticity and constitutes the sole spiritual task," claims Mallarmé.2 "More and more," writes Arnold, "mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry."3Such prophecies have largely been realized. In twentieth-century Western culture, artworks have become the closest thing we have to sacred texts, and art almost seems a form of religion with its prophetic breed of creative artists perennially purveying new gospels and its priestly class of interpretive [End Page 1] critics who explain them to a devotional public. Despite wide recognition that art has an important commercial aspect, art sustains its cultural image as an essentially sanctified domain of higher spiritual values, beyond the realm of material life and praxis. Its adored relics (however profane they strive to be) are sacredly enshrined in temple-like museums that we dutifully visit for spiritual edification, just as religious devotees have long frequented churches, mosques, synagogues, and other shrines of worship.In advocating a pragmatist aesthetics I have criticized this otherworldly religion of art because of the way it has been shaped by more than two centuries of modern philosophical ideology aimed at disempowering art by consigning it to an unreal, purposeless world of imagination. Such religion, I have argued, is the enemy of pragmatism's quest to integrate art and life, a quest exemplified both in the classical Western notion of the art of living and some Asian artistic traditions, where art is less importantly the creation of objects than the process of refining the artist who creates and the audience who absorbs that creative expression.4There is good reason, however, why this sacralization of art should remain so powerfully appealing despite the widespread recognition of art's mercantile dimensions and worldly concerns. The reason, I believe, is that art expresses very deep meanings and spiritual insights that religion and philosophy once most powerfully provided but that they now no longer convey in a convincing way to most of today's secular populations throughout the world. So, in this essay I would like to reconsider the art and religion nexus from a different angle. I wish to explore the idea that art provides a useful, even superior, substitute for religion, one that is free from the latter's many disadvantages and that should be vigorously championed as an alternative that could eventually free our transcultural world from the hostile divisiveness and backward-looking attitudes that religions have inspired and instead lead us toward greater understanding, peace, and harmony.But a contrary yet equally interesting hypothesis likewise demands consideration: that art cannot be separated from religion, that rather than a real alternative, art is simply another mode or expression of religion. Or, to put it in a provocatively suggestive paraphrase, art is simply the continuation of religion by other means. If this hypothesis has merit—indeed, even if there is simply some deeply indissoluble link between art and religion—then we cannot simply look progressively past religion... (shrink)

This volume on anthropology and authority in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) offers its reader nineteen timely discussions of two fundamental categories pertaining to the literary, philosophical, and theological production of this prominent 19th century Danish thinker, whose vast influence upon 20th century intellectual life continues to grow as the new millennium approaches. The volume's nineteen contributors - from Canada, Denmark, Great Britain, Holland, Hungary, Italy, and the United States - inquire into such complex problematics in Kierkegaard's oeuvre as (...) the interrelationship between the human, the divine, and the spiritual; between the secular and the Christian; between human and Christian love; between state and church institutions and the single individual of faith; and between this individual's concern for quality in civic and religious life and the quantitative forces of modern society's masses and crowds. Special attention is given to the indisputable authority of God, Christ, and the apostles as opposed to the debatable authority, or non-authority, of the author. Of particular interest is the nexus between Kierkegaard's existential and religious concerns, on the one hand, and his intricate textual conceptions, multifarious poetic strategies, and various means of pseudonymous and indirect communication, on the other. Between the covers of Anthropology and Authority some chapters seek to refine received knowledge of Kierkegaard in such disciplines as theology and moral philosophy. Conversely, other chapters submit rather postmodern critiques of the author's stylistic and rhetorical devices. A summary assessment of the nineteen contributions would fail to recognize this considerable methodological and theoretical diversity. Instead, the reader's access to the smorgasbord of insights has been facilitated by an introduction in which one of the American editors briefly outline the individual contributions on a general historical and intellectual background. Altogether, the probing insights of Anthropology and Authority go to the core of Søren Kierkegaard's authorship. Individual chapters either update previous responses to the many challenges presented by this work, or the chapters face new challenges and/or present critical challenges on their own. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.2 (2004) 116-120 [Access article in PDF] Art History in the Age of Bellori: Scholarship and Cultural Politics in Seventeenth-Century Rome, edited by Janis Bell and Thomas Willette. Cambridge: Cambridge Universtiy Press, 2002, 396 pp. Giovan Pietro Bellori is a name familiar to all who have studied seventeenth-century Italian art. His magisterial book, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (Le vite (...) de' pittori, scultori, ed architetti moderni), published in Rome in 1672, continued in the grand tradition of artists' biographies established by Giorgio Vasari in the sixteenth century, while at the same time espousing a classical theory of artistic creation that has often been seen as the foundation of academic classicism, popular well into the nineteenth century. He is, in other words, an immensely significant figure, as a source of information on artists' lives, and, more importantly, as a cogent, early spokesperson for one of the dominant aesthetic modes of Western European culture.Given this importance, the relative dearth of publications dedicated toBellori, especially in the Anglo-American world, is surprising. PerhapsBellori's famously negative assessment of Caravaggio, or his complete avoidance of two of the most successful Italian artists of the seventeenth century, Pietro da Cortona and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, account for the scarcity ofscholarly treatments, or maybe his supposed insistence that all great art should be grounded in rules is to blame. The reasons are hard to pin down, but the volume of essays under consideration here goes some significant way towards rectifying the situation. Stemming from a 1996 conference organized by the Association for Textual Scholarship in Art History and held at the American Academy in Rome, the volume is divided into two roughly equal sections, one on "Bellori and the Republic of Letters in Seventeenth-Century Rome," and the other on "Bellori's Lives: History, Criticism, Theory." It comprises twelve essays, including a long and very useful introduction by Janis Bell, one of the editors of the book. The overall goal of the collection is to treat Bellori's activity as a whole, rather than focus single-mindedly on the Lives. After all, as Bell points out, the preponderance of Bellori's publishing was not dedicated to aesthetic theory, or even artists' biographies, but to antiquarian studies. In this, the present volume is very different from the other major new work on Bellori, a two-volume cataloguepublished in 2000 to accompany anexhibition held at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, L'idea del Bello: viaggio per Roma nel Seicento con Giovan Pietro Bellori. The exhibition did acknowledge Bellori's antiquarian interests, but was aimed principally at something else: making visible his aesthetic theory. Unfortunately, the authors of Art History in the Age of Belloriwere not able to take into account fully [End Page 116] the conclusions of this important study,although it should be noted that several authors are represented in both publications.The first group of essays in the book, six in number, treats a wide range of themes, with the intention of crafting a context, both literary and political, for understanding Bellori's achievement. Giovanna Perini's essay, the first of section one, describes Bellori's career trajectory, and, more significantly, how this path had an impact on his life as a scholar. Bellori did not come from the wealthiest stratum of society. On the contrary, he was of relatively modest means, which meant that he had to rely on employment income. One implication of being economically beholden to his employers was that his writing had to conform to their political agendas. The Vite, for instance, are famous for lionizing the French artist Nicolas Poussin, of obvious appeal to his Francophile patrons. Diego Velázquez, however, was not included in the Vite, perhaps because he was Spanish and would thus have appealed to the opposing political faction in Rome at the time, which was linked to Spain. At the same time, Perini convincingly argues that Bellori's own voice was not drowned out in the process... (shrink)

The article aims to provide a point of view for understanding the conceptual genesis of ‘post-history’, the key idea of Danto’s theory of contemporary art. To do this, reference is made to an essay from Beyond the Brillo Box which analyzes the various forms the past has assumed in the Western tradition, from the point of view of the influence exerted from narrative structures on artists and their practices. Danto’s argument will be clarified through the notion of ‘regime of historicity’ (...) (Hartog). Based on this, the article discusses three different paradigms of the historicity of art: each is the expression of a specific experienced mediation between the temporal dimensions of the past, present and future. First of all: the relationship of imitative recovery of the past, corresponding to the pre-modern scheme of history understood as exemplary and repeatable. Later, the article focuses the link of transformation/negation of the artistic past, both corresponding to the modern, linear and vectoral view of history. Finally, it will emerge the spatialized exploration of the past, that is, a neutral relationship with it no longer marked by the principle of authority: Danto’s post-history points out a situation in which the historical past of art is an available repertory of styles to be used. (shrink)

_Purpose._ The article aims to analyse the consciousness of masses in the communication system of the 20th century projecting the individual level onto the social one. _Theoretical basis._ In the fields of philosophy and other humanities since the middle of the last century there has dominated an opinion that the category of mass and its communication are second-rate and non-elitist phenomena. Condensing the experience of human history (especially – the nineteenth century – the time of the bourgeois revolutions and the (...) two world wars), such parameters were set by the creators of social psychology Gustave Le Bon and Sigmund Freud in their basic research "The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind", "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego". Since ancient times the masses have really resembled immoral emotional neoformations, which minimized the individual qualities of the components of the whole and showed the features of a predominantly animal nature. It is no coincidence that those masses were called emotional, or just a crowd, regardless of the topos of existence: streets and squares, or the infospace of the first mass media (newspapers, radio, cinema, television). However, analysing the crowd, the scientists noted that this is only an extreme modification of the mass, and, in addition to it, there may be others – quite the opposite in their nature. With the advent of the World Wide Web, the situation has changed: scientists and futurists have been talking about the mass of intellectuals, which seems to be formed and combined in the field of information technology. And it surpasses the traditional elite in many respects. _Originality._ Having analysed the works of classic and modern researchers, we came to the conclusion that in fact the masses, like individuals (according to C. G. Jung), are divided into four types. Correspondingly, each of them has its own behaviour, psychology, philosophy etc. This article focuses on beliefs and ideological positions as the basis for the functioning of emotional, sensory, intuitive and rational masses in the context of 20th century philosophy. The object of our analysis was the philosophical schools of neo-positivism, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, existentialism, pragmatism, anthropology, phenomenology, and others. _Conclusions._ According to our assumption, regardless of the type of mass and direction of modern philosophy as a field of its implementation, rationalism comes to the fore everywhere (as a primary source and theoretical basis or motivation). Thus, it can be concluded that the rational mass now dominates, not emotional (which was thoroughly described by Le Bon and Freud). And this is quite natural in the age of digital technology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Modern Vs. Contemporary Medicine: The Patient-Provider Relation in the Twenty-First CenturyRobert M. Veatch (bio)The revolution in medical ethics of the past quarter century has begun reshaping the patient-provider relation in such a way that it will never be the same. 1 Dramatic changes have occurred at the level of specific decisions such as consent, forgoing treatment, and birth technologies, but the most significant impact will be on the way (...) the relation is conceptualized and the kinds of authority each party in the relation will be assumed to possess. The change is so fundamental that it deserves to be called a change from modern to contemporary medicine.Contrasting Modern and Contemporary MedicineModern MedicineMedicine of the modern period can be said to have had its origins in the sixteenth century with the emergence of the scientific mentality in such figures as Francis Bacon, but it really took off in the enlightenment of the eighteenth century. While intellectuals in medicine up to that time tended to be in conversation with those of philosophy, theology, and the arts, the emergence of medicine as a science changed that communication.The effect of the scientizing of medicine was that physicians tended to lose contact with the humanists. It was as if a physician, if he mastered the medical science, could, without any intervening value judgments, know how to treat the patient. In fact, for some conditions, there was (and still is) so much consensus [End Page 366] on the values that it is as if they were not present at all. If a patient has pneumonia, the most important element in a clinical decision seems to be pharmacological knowledge of whether a drug can produce a cure. The clinician knowledgeable of penicillin seems all that is needed.Upon reflection a suppressed premise becomes obvious: if it is better to live with the penicillin than to die without it, then one ought to take the penicillin. Since almost no one doubts the wisdom of that value judgment, all that seems to be needed is pharmacological knowledge. This view of medicine implies that certain treatments are “medically indicated,” as if the knowledge of the science could demonstrate that certain treatments were appropriate, in fact, were “treatments of choice.”Of course, on rare occasions, someone would question the value presumption. We discovered that certain patients with metastatic cancer who developed pneumonia might not automatically agree that it is better to live with the penicillin. Also Christian Scientists might deny that use of the drug led to the best possible consequences. These were set aside as unusual cases, ethically exotic problems, to be addressed outside the normal bounds of medical science. We still believed that medical science together with competent diagnostic skills were the critical factors in deciding what the appropriate treatment was.Some clinicians spoke as if these decisions could be made with no value judgments at all (except in cases in which outside “religious” or “cultural” influences contravened). Many more sophisticated clinicians, however, understood all along that an implicit value system was built into the medical profession. Some have even claimed that the very concept of medicine contains within it a set of norms or goals or values that are “intrinsic to the practice” (Pellegrino and Thomasma 1988, p. 116). For many those values are encapsulated in the Hippocratic tradition, particularly the core Hippocratic principle that the physician should act always for the benefit of the patient according to his ability and judgment.When physicians began spending their time learning medical science, the richness of their conversation with the philosophical and religious traditions of the day was lost. Clinicians, without a rich knowledge of those traditions, hit upon the Hippocratic ethic, embracing it as the epitome of their goals without real understanding of its implications and potential conflicts with other ethical traditions (cf. Veatch and Mason 1987).Contemporary MedicineThe most critical contribution of the medical ethics of the current generation has been the calling into question of the Hippocratic ethic, especially the presumption that science by itself (or aided by a single, core ethic intrinsic to all practice of medicine) is sufficient to practice medicine. This generation’s medical ethics... (shrink)

As the author of this agreeably written book points out, the Lectures on Aesthetics is a neglected work in English-language Hegel scholarship. Desmond responds to this lack by aiming not at a full commentary but rather at a selective discussion of some central issues. He believes that the result should be of interest not merely to Hegel scholars or philosophers but also to a wider audience, with concerns in art and in modern culture generally.

Sometimes, art theory addresses the same type of image from discursive disparity. This is the case of the portrait, whose imprecise definition complicates its conceptual and formal definition within the limits of the Western culture. Although this text does not intend to resolve doubts about one of the most significant questions in art—even the question of art, if portraits are born with it—it does attempt to show the difficulties in reaching an agreement on the conventions that define it, from its (...) antecedents in Antiquity and its establishment in modern times, up to the advent of its contemporary crisis that some authors attribute to the saturation suffered by the image in mass society, and others, to the new artistic paradigm that is imposed from Impressionism onwards. (shrink)

Since Hegel, the idea of an end of art has become a staple of aesthetic theory. This book analyzes its role and its rhetoric in Hegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno, and Heidegger in order to account for the topic's enduring persistence. In addition to providing a general overview of the main thinkers of post-Idealist German aesthetics, the book explores the relationship between tradition and modernity. For despite the differences that distinguish one philosopher's end of art from another's, all authors treated here (...) turn the end of art into an occasion to thematize and to reflect on the very thing that modernism cannot or should not be: tradition. As a discourse, the end of art is one of our modern traditions. (shrink)

Die Untersuchung gliedert sich in einen allgemeinen und einen besonderen Teil. Der allgemeine Teil, der die ersten neun Kapitel umfasst, hat es mit den Veränderungen zu tun, denen die Funktion des Kunstwerkes in seiner technisch reproduzierten Gestalt unterworfen ist. Die Qualität seiner technischen Reproduktion und die Geschwindigkeit ihrer Herstellung sind seit den einschlägigen Erfindungen des letzten Jahrhunderts in schnellem Wachstum begriffen. Die Zeit, die zwischen der Erfindung der Lithographie und der des Tonfilms liegt, umfasst kaum mehr Jahrzehnte als die zwischen (...) der Erfindung des Holzschnitts und der der Lithographie liegenden Jahrhunderte. Der Film ist die derzeit fortgeschrittenste künstlerische R ‘produktionstechnik. Er bedeutet in der Geschichte der Kunst etwas grundlegend Neues, nämlich die Reproduktion eines auf Reproduzierbarkeit angelegten Kunstwerkes. Der besondere Teil der Untersuchung hat es mit dem Film als der der Kunst in der Epoche ihrer technischen Reproduzierbarkeit spezifischen Form zu tun.Das erste Kapitel der Untersuchung entwickelt den Unterschied zwischen manueller und technischer Reproduktion des Kunstwerkes. Das zweite* umschreibt den jeder Reproduktion entzogenen Bereich der Echtheit, der die Aura des Kunstwerkes bildet. Das dritte bestimmt den Charakter der gegenwärtigen Wahrnehmung als bestimmt durch den Verfall der Aura. Das vierte weist die Fundierung der Echtheit in den Zusammenhängen des Rituals auf. Das fünfte hat es mit dem Unterschied des auf dem Ritual beruhenden Kultwertes des Kunstwerks von seinem Ausstellungwert zu tun. Das sechste zeigt, welchen verschiedenen Entwicklungsstufen der Technik Kultwert und Ausstellungswert des Kunstwerkes entsprechen. Das s'ebte handelt von dem beginnenden Übergewicht des Ausstellungswertes über den Kultwert in der Photographie. Das achte beleuchtet die Sonderstellung der griechischen Kunst durch ihren fast völligen Mangel an technischen Reproduktionsverfahren. Das neunte weist auf die Schwierigkeiten hin, die der überkommenen Aesthetik durch die Photographie und den Film erwachsen.Der zweite Teil der Untersuchung zieht aus den Analysen des ersten Teils die Folgerungen für die Filmtheorie. Er beschäftigt sich mit den Umständen, die aus dem Film dasjenige Kunstwerk machen, an dem die derzeitige Funktionsänderung sich am deutlichsten abnehmen lässt. Diese Funktionsänderung besteht in der Überführung des Kunstwerkes aus der ritualen in die politische Praxis.The investigation is divided into two parts, the first conceived on general lines and the second dealing with one specific aspect of the question. The general part deals with the changes to which the function of a work of art is subjected in its technically reproduced form. The quality of its technical reproduction and the speed with which the same is established have made great progress since the inventions of last century in that sphere. The period of time existing between the invention of lithography and that of the sound film contains scarcely more decades than there are centuries between the invention of the wood-cut and that of lithography. The film, at present, has the most highly developed technic of artistic reproduction. In the history of art the film represents something fundamentally new, namely, the reproduction of a work of art which aims precisely at such reproducibility. The second part of the investigation deals with the film as the specific form of art in the era of technical reproducibility.The first chapter develops the difference between manual and technical reproduction of a work of art. The second delimits the sphere of authenticity which forms the aura of a work of art and which is withdrawn from every reproduction. The third defines the character of modern perception as determined by the deterioration of the aura. The fourth chapter shows that the foundation of authenticity lies in the associations of ritual. The fifth deals with the difference between the cult-value based on ritual and the exhibition-value of a work of art. The sixth shows the various stages in the development of technical art to which the cult-value and the exhibition-value of a work of art correspond. The seventh treats the beginnings of the predominance of the exhibition-value over the cult- value in photography. The eighth throws light on the special position of Greek art due to its being almost completely lacking in methods of technical reproduction. The ninth draws attention to the difficulties which arise for traditional esthetics Through photography and the film.The second part of the investigation draws from the analyses of the first part certain conclusions concerning the theory of film-making. It concerns itself with the circumstances which make the film the work of art from which the modern change of function can be most clearly deduced. This change of function consists in the transference of the work of art from the realm of ritual to that of politics. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to systematize and generalize information about the political right-conservative movement in modern Poland. In the course of the study, the potential for support for right-wing parties exists in every society. It can grow due to two groups of factors. The first concerns issues related to the difficult economic situation, the modernization of societies or cultural aspects, which are called demand-related in the literature. The second large group consists of supply factors: factors of possible political (...) success (structure of political opportunities), electoral rules, inter-party competition, the role of the mass media, the structure of political divisions or the role of the winning ideology. Polish right-wing conservatism and nationalism is characterized, both in the past and in the present, by a powerful influence on the social and political life of the Republic of Poland, acting as a fundamental element of the unification of the Polish people. This movement retains its traditional features, which are reflected in the ideology of the Polish ruling party “Law and Justice”, which adheres to a national-conservative orientation with elements of clericalism, maintains close ties with the Catholic Church and organizations close to it. In the period after coming to power (2015), “PiS” slowly but steadily lost its Christian-democratic character and evolved into a conservative political force. This allowed “PiS” to win elections for a long time, and in 2023, it allows it to maintain leading positions in public opinion polls regarding support for political parties. In the field of international relations, supporters of “PiS” operated with judgments that expressed the ideas of nationalism, presenting the Poles as a strong nation that should occupy an important place among other countries. The process of creating right-wing conservative political parties and associations in Poland continues on an ongoing basis. The strengthening of nationalist movements in Poland takes place with the support of the state authorities of the Republic of Poland and is accompanied by a gradual shift of emphasis on controversial historical issues in the direction of nationalist ideology. Despite official Warsaw providing political support to Kyiv in the international arena in connection with the Russian military threat, the authorities of the Republic of Poland have no intention of blocking anti-Ukrainian activities carried out by Polish national-patriotic right-wing movements. This is due to the preparation of the ruling elite for the celebration of the 80th anniversary of the tragic events in Volyn in 2023, as well as the parliamentary election campaign. In the future, the activation of radical right-conservative formations on the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth may lead to protest actions in Poland, the purpose of which will be the dissemination of information unfavorable to our state in the Polish information space, which will have a negative impact on the formation of the foreign policy vector of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Ukrainian direction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Modernity as Apocalypse: Sacred Nihilism and the Counterfeits of Logos by Thaddeus J. KozinskiMehmet CiftciModernity as Apocalypse: Sacred Nihilism and the Counterfeits of Logos by Thaddeus J. Kozinski (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico, 2019), 231 pp.Whether the names Adrian Vermeule, Fr. Edmund Waldstein, and Sohrab Ahmari provoke anxiety or glee in readers' minds will depend on where they stand on integralism, the brand of Catholic traditionalism that all three have (...) sought to promote through various websites and publications. Presenting themselves as the authentic interpreters of magisterial teachings on church–state relations, the integralists have challenged the long-standing attempt (especially in North America) to combine the Catholic faith with a commitment to political liberalism, natural rights, religious liberty, and state neutrality toward religion. For the integralists, attempting such a combination succeeds only in distorting the Catholic faith and causes us to forget what the Church taught before the Second Vatican Council, which still obliges the assent of Catholics, they claim, and is desperately needed to stand against the onward march of secularism. [End Page 966]Although Thaddeus Kozinski, former professor at Wyoming Catholic College, may not be one of the more well-known integralists, his latest book presents an interesting iteration of Catholic traditionalism that displays both what is valuable and what is most worrying about contemporary traditionalism. Kozinski's previous book was a closely argued critique of John Rawls and Jacques Maritain using the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre. It built up a cumulative case for the impossibility of resolving the political problem of religious pluralism without moving beyond philosophy by making a decision to reject or accept the political importance of the Catholic Church and its teachings.1 Although the author's preference for some sort of confessional state was already clear in that book, he preferred not to defend it, but rather to argue that it is impossible to be agnostic or neutral toward the ideal of church–state union. Now he goes on the offensive, presenting in the twenty brief chapters of Modernity as Apocalypse his "sundry attempts over the past decade to grapple with the question of modernity" (14). More precisely, he is grappling with the questions of what defines modernity, how we arrived at where we are, and what Christians should do while living in it, particularly in the fields of education and politics.The two chapters that form the first part (entitled "Modernity") use Charles Taylor's A Secular Age to argue that modernity's increasingly pluralistic and secular culture creates "an entirely new incapacity to experience the reality of a particular worldview in a naïve way, that is, without the consciousness of there being other viable options" (37). Yet the problem also reveals a blessing. "Encountering reality through the lens of other perennial traditions can serve to expose that false dichotomy in our minds that leads us to interpret other views as nothing more than full-fledged errors and our own personal lenses as nothing less than the whole truth" (21). Anyone who has read what passes for commentary on websites such as Church Militant or Rorate Caeli will find that statement surprising and refreshing.The second part ("Logos") contains four chapters that lucidly discuss contemporary disagreements in ethics between Kantians and virtue-ethicists, between new natural lawyers and MacIntyreans. Chapter 4 makes an effective and moving argument to read Plato "as a precursor to Faith, and a guide along the way home" (50). There are some brief but suggestive remarks drawing on Benedict XVI's Caritas in Veritate in [End Page 967] chapter 6 to argue that an ethics of gift can enable us to express the moral teachings of the New Testament in terms that are potentially convincing to a broader audience. "Metanoia" is the title of the third part, dedicated to education. Chapters 7–8 and 10 give not very original and yet timely arguments for the importance of the liberal arts, the need for Catholic universities to be institutions that can foster, rather than deform, the practice of philosophy, and the need for pedagogy to be rooted in the transmission of a community's tradition.2However, one cannot help but be startled when... (shrink)