According to commentators like Rosalind Krauss, Briony Fer, Caroline Jones, and Michael Fried, Clement Greenberg’s formalist/positivist device of “medium-specificity” debars errant affective aesthetic experiences that are embodied; despite significant differences in how these theorists arrive at this conclusion, one shared point of emphasis is Greenberg’s inheriting Kant’s disinterested conception of pleasure in reflective judgments of beauty. Offering a textualist review of Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful, I seek to demonstrate that neither Greenberg, nor Greenberg’s critics, are correct in their account (...) of Kant’s judgments of beauty.1 Specifically, I argue that Greenberg conflates Kant’s conception of judgments of free beauty (pulchritudo vaga) with merely adherent beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens). In formulating a rejoinder to Greenberg and the misplacement of Greenberg as a Kantian, and following Diarmuid Costello, I hope to save a path for a Kantian aesthetics of the present, much in the spirit of other broadly Kantian art historians and philosophers of art/aesthetics (e.g., Thierry de Duve, Paul Guyer, Ido Geiger, etc.). (shrink)

El presente trabajo postula la indeterminación ontológica del objeto estético. Regresando sobre los orígenes de la estética filosófica, confronta la idea de la belleza como “perfección del conocimiento sensible” que Alexander G. Baumgarten desarrolla en su Aesthetica (1750) con los parágrafos de la Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790) en los que Immanuel Kant deslinda la belleza del concepto de perfección y distingue entre “pulchritudo vaga” y “pulchritudo adhaerens”. Se detiene luego en los ejemplos de "belleza libre" dados por (...) Kant y aborda finalmente la aporía del "objet ambigu" presentada por Paul Valéry en su diálogo Eupalinos, ou l'Architecte (1921) a la luz de los análisis de Hans Blumenberg y Hans-Robert Jauß. (shrink)

Arthur Danto asserts that Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington really embodies the beauty of his meaning. For him, the Memorial’s “internal beauty” is felt and read because she is built as a text by the rhetoric of enthymeme, as a syllogism based on some tacit knowledges and highly probables communplaces. However, the relationship to the Kant’s pulchritudo adhaerens and philosophy of architecture is not an easy one : Danto rejects as unreadable the self-referent formalism of Greenberg’s (...) Modernism and the environmental non-monumentality of Richard Serra’s Minimalism, but the agency of the Memorial’s shared internal beauty is haunted by an unquestioned spectral logic. Actually, the image embodiment in this work can always exceed the rhetoric of reconnaissance supported by the syllogistic rhetoric and disturb the identity framework of the nord-american community. The beholders’ reflecting shape on the Memorial can become, finally, an unreadable and pathetic index, or be perceived as a figural imprint, ephemeral and troubling ; these disembodied pictures can achieve a medial incarnation – e.g. a Verkörperung – of the underworld. (shrink)

Arthur Danto asserts that Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington embodies the rhetoric paradigm of internal beauty’s meaning. However, the relationship to the Kant’s pulchritudo adhaerens is not an easy one: Danto’s recalls against the self-referent formalism of Greenberg’s Modernism and his tacit issues about the environmental non-monumentality of Richard Serra’s Minimalism, are, most importantly, haunted by the unquestioned spectral logic of the image embodiment. The beholders’ reflecting shape on the funeral Wall is, finally, both a pathetic (...) index and a medial incarnation–e.g. a Verkörperung–of the underworld. (shrink)

Kant calls judgements of adherent beauty impure aesthetic judgements because they presuppose the empirical concept of the object and are thus not determined exclusively by a feeling of pleasure. Glossed over in Kant’s account is what kind of universality these judgements have. This article argues that the subjective universality of pure aesthetic judgements and the objective universality of cognitive judgements do not merge in impure aesthetic judgements and that the tension between them reaches also into Kant’s pure aesthetic judgements with (...) their unstable relations between the pleasure of the a priori harmony of the faculties and the empirical object named beautiful. Pleasure, which for Kant is communicable while nonetheless not being discursive, is always to some extent lost for words. (shrink)

Trichoplax adhaerens is more simply organized than any other living metazoan. This tiny marine animal looks like a irregular “hairy plate” (“tricho plax”) with a simple upper and lower epithelium and some loose cells in between. After its original description by F.E. Schulze 1883, it attracted particular attention as a potential candidate representing the basic and ancestral state of metazoan organization. The lack of any kind of symmetry, organs, nerve cells, muscle cells, basal lamina and extracellular matrix originally left (...) little doubt about the basal position of T. adhaerens. Nevertheless, the interest of zoologists and evolutionary biologists suddenly vanished for more than half a century when Trichoplax was claimed to be an aberrant hydrozoan planula larva. Recently, Trichoplax has been rediscovered as a key species for unraveling early metazoan evolution. For example, research on regulatory genes and whole genome sequencing promise insights into the genetics underlying the origin and development of basal metazoan phyla. Trichoplax offers unique potential for understanding the minimal requirements of metazoan animal organization. BioEssays 27:1294–1302, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The subject of this article is the way in which Grotius imitated his Roman model Tacitus in his own Annales. He does this by quotations and allusions, but also, more subtly, by adopting some of Tacitus stylistic peculiarities like brevitas, inconcinnitas and the insertion of sententiae. The imitation of Tacitus is most conspicuous in important sections of the Annales like the opening chapters and the introductions of the main characters. Tacitus is the prime model of Grotius, but not the only (...) one, as is shown by borrowings from Sallust, Pliny the Younger and Vergil. (shrink)

The placozoan Trichoplax adhaerens is a tiny hairy plate and more simply organized than any other living metazoan. After its original description by F.E. Schulze in 1883, it attracted attention as a potential model for the ancestral state of metazoan organization, the “Urmetazoon”. Trichoplax lacks any kind of symmetry, organs, nerve cells, muscle cells, basal lamina, and extracellular matrix. Furthermore, the placozoan genome is the smallest (not secondarily reduced) genome of all metazoan genomes. It harbors a remarkably rich diversity (...) of genes and has been considered the best living surrogate for a metazoan ancestor genome. The phylum Placozoa presently harbors three formally described species, while several dozen “cryptic” species are yet awaiting their description. The phylogenetic position of placozoans has recently become a contested arena for modern phylogenetic analyses and view‐driven claims. Trichoplax offers unique prospects for understanding the minimal requirements of metazoan animal organization and their corresponding malfunctions. (shrink)

The placozoan Trichoplax adhaerens has been bridging gaps between research disciplines like no other animal. As outlined in part 1, placozoans have been subject of hot evolutionary debates and placozoans have challenged some fundamental evolutionary concepts. Here in part 2 we discuss the exceptional genetics of the phylum Placozoa and point out some challenging model system applications for the best known species, Trichoplax adhaerens.

El artículo estudia ciertos aspectos de la noción agustiniana de belleza. Se limita al estudio del nombre latino pulchritudo y sus derivados, dejando de lado otros términos como speciosus, formosus o decorus.

Theological debate about the origin of evil derives from the quest after God’s goodness and justice. This problem can be constructively discussed only within the framework of a universe that has been created good, and within a corresponding anthropology. Anselm’s enquiry proceeds much along these tracks, and is based on the premises of the Platonic‐Augustinian view of evil as the privation of good, yet it concludes with a reference to the domain of the irrational and contradiction in which such a (...) discussion must necessarily harbour. The strength and uniqueness of his approach lies in his well defined hermeneutical and epistemological framework: his definition of theology as fides quaerens intellectum on the one hand, and his concept of ordo et pulchritudo universitatis on the other.The aim of this article is to discuss Anselm’s answer to the origin of evil in a wider context of his definitions of freedom and theology, trying to consider the issue, as Anselm does, from the point of view of the doctrine of Creation by the Word. His argument will be considered from the standpoint of Systematic Theology, which will enable us to contrast it with the thought of modern thinkers. Therefore the goal of this writing is not primarily to show how unique Anselm’s solution is in the history of dogma, but rather to highlight the uniqueness of the manner of his elaboration of this problem within his own theological framework. (shrink)

This article furnishes a systematisation of the Mediaval aesthetic vocabulary. This task is developed by means of the adoption of a dynamic of intersection among the various Aristotelic species qualitatis, which are taken as the basic structural elements of the requested system. Two versions of beauty are established, which will expand into two kinds of aesthetics, one leaded by pulchritudo, with intellectualistic implications and the other leaded by formositas, which will turn into an autonomus aesthetics; both of them have (...) let a strong legacy to contemporaneus aesthetics. (shrink)

Este artículo ofrece una sistematización del vocabulario estético medieval proponiendo como elemento estructural básico una relación de intersección entre las diversas species qualitatis que Aristóteles establece en la lógica de las categorías. Dos versiones de la belleza se desvelan en esta sistematización, versiones que darán lugar a dos estéticas divergentes, una de carácter intelectualista - impulsada por la pulchritudo - y otra - impulsada por la formositas - que anunciará una estética autónoma; cada una de ellas ha legado una (...) herencia conceptual considerable a la estética contemporánea. (shrink)