Seventeenth-century English virtuoso attitudes to the visual arts have often been contrasted with a putative eighteenth-century culture of connoisseurship, most notably in a still influential 1942 article by Walter Houghton. This essay revisits Houghton's thesis and argues that English virtuoso culture did indeed allow for an incipient notion of artistic connoisseurship but that it did so in a manner different from the French model. The first section details a virtuoso aesthetic in which a modern approach to the (...) cultural heritage of antiquity was central. The instructive ethical and historical attributes of an art work were deemed more important than attribution to a master artist, although one can discern an incipient notion of a virtuoso canon of great artists. The second section examines the social and institutional position of the English virtuosi and argues that the lack of a Royal Academy of Arts in the French manner made virtuoso attitudes to the arts unusually receptive to outside influences such as the Royal Society and other private clubs and academies. It concludes by considering the ways in which some eighteenth-century concepts of taste and connoisseurship defined themselves in contrast to an earlier and wider-ranging virtuosity even if they failed to fully supplant it. (shrink)

The following essay is divided in three parts. First, while sharing in principle Harrison's hypothesis of an affinity between the sixteenth‐century Reformation and early modern science, it questions the connection between the latter and the Weberian “disenchantment of the world.” Second, it suggests a broader group of possible actors than that envisaged by Harrison in referring to virtuoso collectors and their cabinets of curiosities who are rather marginalized in Harrison's narrative. And third, it highlights (in agreement with Harrison) the (...) physico‐theology of the second half of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century and beyond as an important temporary fusion of religion/theology and science at a time when the new science was still striving for social and religious respectability. (shrink)

Dissatisfied with relatively anemic views that in the last thirty years have come to be known as virtue epistemology, we urge the adoption of a robust form of Aristotelianism about the intellect, which we call virtuoso epistemology. We transform virtue into virtuosity by emphasizing persons over principles, expertise over method, and extraordinary achievement over routine performance. While scattered elements of our view can be found in the current literature, none is quite so radical and transformative as ours. We briefly (...) survey the current work in virtue epistemology, point to the failures of this approach, outline the distinctive characteristics of virtuoso epistemology, craft an epitome of the epistemic virtuoso, and conclude with a gesture at the various research programs our approach entails. (shrink)

The following essay is divided in three parts. First, while sharing in principle Harrison's hypothesis of an affinity between the sixteenth-century Reformation and early modern science, it questions the connection between the latter and the Weberian “disenchantment of the world.” Second, it suggests a broader group of possible actors than that envisaged by Harrison in referring to virtuoso collectors and their cabinets of curiosities who are rather marginalized in Harrison's narrative. And third, it highlights the physico-theology of the second (...) half of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century and beyond as an important temporary fusion of religion/theology and science at a time when the new science was still striving for social and religious respectability. (shrink)

This article examines how the seventeenth-century antiquary, Elias Ashmole (1617-1692) used antiquarian techniques to demonstrate the historical veracity of alchemy. Ashmole published three alchemical volumes and collected thousands of pages of alchemical manuscripts. He also wrote several antiquarian treatises and collected manuscripts and printed volumes on astrology, political and ecclesiastical history, heraldry, medicine, devotional treatises. Ashmole's virtuoso perspective allowed him to view knowledge as unified, even traditions that appear to be as discrete as alchemy and antiquarianism. By examining how (...) these two traditions were related to one another, we also see how knowledge was conveyed from one generation to the next. (shrink)

El objetivo de este trabajo es defender el uso tanto de métodos cualitativos como de métodos cuantitativos en investigación en filosofía del lenguaje. Concretamente, defenderé que la mejor opción para llevar a cabo este tipo de investigación es usar métodos propios de la lingüística de corpus, pero aplicando también métodos cualitativos. Para ello, argumentaré a favor de la idea de bucles virtuosos, procesos de retroalimentación entre ambos métodos que pueden producir ciertos hallazgos que serían imposibles de descubrir si solo se (...) usara uno de los dos tipos de método. (shrink)

El objetivo del artículo es reflexionar acerca del funcionamiento de los sentimientos morales y su papel en la comprensión del ámbito moral. Se pretende mostrar que los sentimientos tenen una dimensión cognitiva que posibilita su selección y los procesos de aprendizaje correspondientes. los trabajos de Strwson, Tugendhat y Hebermas nos permitirán aclarar en qué sentido es posible hablar de sentimientos virtuosos.

Semiotics, in the guise of the limited Saussurean semiology, has been widely used in the humanities and in cultural studies for the past 20 to 30 years at least. With the advent, nearly 20 years ago, of the environmental humanities, including the new field of humanities animal studies, the weaknesses of this mode of analysis became increasingly clear. This essay forms part of a larger attempt to develop a Peirce-informed biosemiotic theory capable of affording conceptual tools for the broad-based study (...) of human and nonhuman natural and cultural developmental ecologies. It is particularly concerned to develop a biosemiotic, and hence non-reductive, account of aesthetic experience in which function consists in the growth of knowledge. Based on the role of chance, and thus creativity, in natural and cultural evolutionary systems, this essay uses poetry and poetic theory in order to argue that chance is a habit-upsetting happenstance whereby something which has the potential to become a sign , or to become a bearer of meaning, actually does become a sign to some living thing. (shrink)

The European Landscape Convention has brought up the question of democracy in relation to landscape transformation, but without a clear definition of democracy. This paper conceptualises democracy in relation to three main sets of values related to self-determination, co-determination and respect for argument. It examines various methods that have been used to try to make landscape decisions more democratic. In the last part of the paper the connoisseur method is introduced. This method emphasises stakeholder participation in deliberative processes with (...) a particular focus on place-based knowledge. It has been used in Sweden as a means of involving local stakeholders in the democratic process of defining goals and objectives of their landscapes. In the conclusion, this method is recommended despite its dependence on favourable conditions, particularly continuity and commitment, and a few suggestions about possible improvements are presented. (shrink)

En este ensayo argumento que, en la ontología social de John Searle, existe un círculo virtuoso entre la cooperación, las instituciones y los poderes deónticos. Son categorías de la realidad social que se retroalimentan y fortalecen mutuamente. La primera sección es introductoria a los conceptos y problemas aquí tratados, mientras que la segunda versa sobre el abecé de la ontología social. En la tercera sección abordo cómo las instituciones están ligadas a prácticas sociales; es decir, las primeras de alguna (...) manera sintetizan la existencia de las segundas. Sin instituciones no podría haber ciertas prácticas, y estas necesariamente llevan a la creación de instituciones. Finalmente, en la última sección argumento acerca de la existencia de un círculo virtuoso entre la cooperación (y la confianza), las instituciones y los poderes deónticos en la realidad social. Es decir, sostengo que existe un fenómeno de retroalimentación y de fortalecimiento mutuo, en tanto la existencia de una categoría fortalece la existencia de las demás categorías. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When Little Girls Become Junior Connoisseurs:A Cautionary Tale of Art Museum Education in the HyperrealMelinda M. Mayer (bio)Introducing the TaleA young girl about eleven years old appeared on the TV screen. She stood in an art museum expounding upon the painting hanging behind her. She talked about the artist and what the image portrayed. With an air of elitist prissiness that suited the museum environment, the girl delivered her (...) presentation to a group of schoolmates. As I and the other art museum educators assembled in the conference room where the video was shown learned, the girl had participated in a program at a prominent art museum in which students from her school came to the museum many times during the school year. This repeat-visit program culminated with these youngsters demonstrating what they learned about art by giving a talk on a single artwork to friends, family, or other classmates. The girl's recitation of art historically correct information was impressive. She sounded just like a junior art historian. Yet, something was missing. The little girl appeared to copy the style of art historical talk more than its content. I turned to the colleague sitting next to me and wondered, "Did that girl learn how to make meaning or how to talk like a curator?"Despite the several years that have passed since the conference, the image of that little girl lingers in my mind. A repeat-visit school program is what an art museum educator working with school tours desires.1 All an art museum educator can hope to impart on a one-shot tour is a simple exposure to art and the museum. Hopefully, that one encounter will result in a lifelong appreciation of art and art museums, but that is a tall order for one field trip. Repeat-visit programs, by contrast, allow knowledge and skills related to art to be presented in the school and museum and reinforced in subsequent sessions. Students can learn to meaningfully interpret the content [End Page 48] of works of art as well as make personal connections with them.The girl in the video, however, did not appear to be engaged in meaning-making. No hint that the painting had metaphorically come off of the museum wall and moved into her life experience appeared in the girl's presentation. Instead, she successfully imitated the manner of an art historian.In the essay "The Precession of Simulacra," the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard theorizes that reality or meaning no longer exist.2 Like the Moebus strip, which when split generates a duplicate of itself, what we experience as reality in this increasingly mediated age in which we live is no more than the repeated circulation of models or simulacra. Rather than models emerging out of real phenomena or originals, they beget themselves—models precede models. Any notion of reality implodes in the circulation of these simulations. Reality becomes what Baudrillard calls the hyperreal—simulation generating simulation. What does this imply for visual art? Interpretation of meaning in artworks would not reveal some represented truth of human experience; instead it would be the repetition of interpretive forms masking that there is no reality to represent. The talk by the little girl in the video indicated that art museum education, at least in that program, had become the perpetuation of a model of inquiry. Rather than making meaning, the girl reproduced the aesthetics of art history interpretation. Even under the ideal circumstances of a repeat-visit school program, the girl became the perfect model of a petite connoisseur.Although the video depicts one little girl in one art museum program, is there not a cautionary tale here for the field of art museum education?3 When visitors to art museums, including children on school field trips, participate in educational programs, are they engaging in meaning-making or an experience in the hyperreal? In theory art museum educators espouse facilitating meaning-making as their mission; however, in practice are they falling into a vortex of recycling the models of art historical interpretation they assimilated during their own education? Do they replicate the form of the model rather than the substance of interpretation... (shrink)

Victor Nuovo represents the philosophical thought of John Locke as the work of a Christian virtuoso: an empirical natural philosopher, who was also a practising Christian. Locke believed that the two vocations were not only compatible, but mutually sustaining, and he aspired to unite them in producing a system of Christian philosophy.

O objetivo desse trabalho é apresentar a proposta do filósofo Nelson Goodman para adeterminação da relação de confirmação válida entre hipóteses e enunciados de prova a partir dotratamento de David Hume para seu problema da indução. Goodman reconhece, no que ele chama de“velho” problema de Hume, uma possibilidade de se superar um grande desafio enfrentado pela filosofiada ciência: o de distinguir as inferências indutivas válidas das inválidas. Com a indicação do hábitocomo o responsável pela nossa confiança em certas inferências indutivas, (...) Hume abria passagem para aformulação, por parte de Goodman, de uma justificativa circular para a determinação da validadeindutiva. Como Goodman reconhece essa validade, e sob quais condições ela poderá ser determinada, éo que discutiremos ao longo desse artigo. (shrink)

Historians of natural history have shown that the study of plants, animals, and minerals was a form of connoisseurship in the eighteenth century. Historians of early modern experiments have linked scientific knowledge to the manual skills of artisans. I combine these two insights, arguing that connoisseurship in the sciences meant learning to touch, not just learning to look. The focus is on gems and mineralogy in eighteenth-century France. I show, firstly, that the study of gems was linked to the connoisseurship (...) (“connoissance”) of paintings. Next, books on gems were closely related to the new mineralogical treatises that emerged in the middle of the eighteenth century. These treatises formalized a distinction between “Oriental” and “Occidental” gems that was also a distinction between hard and soft gems. The best judges of hardness were gem cutters, a group that participated in mineralogy through the culture of collecting. Finally, the knowledge of cutters contributed to the quantification of hardness in the form of the hardness scale and the scratch sclerometer. (shrink)

This paper offers an interpretation of Plato's argument in Republic V that lovers of sights and sounds can have only opinion, and philosophers alone have legitimate claims to knowledge. The argument depends on the idea that knowledge is "set over what is" while mere opinion is "set over what is and is not." I argue for an enhanced veridical interpretation of 'to be' in this passage, on which 'what is' means, roughly, "what is so." Given a distinction between what is (...) so independently of how things seem and what is so partly in virtue of how things seem, I interpret the argument as an attempt to show that philosophers, who attend to what is so independently of how things seem, have knowledge, while the lovers of sights and sound have mere opinion because they attend not to how things are independently of how they seem, but only to how they are in virtue of how they seem. (shrink)

The question of the extent to which a natural philosopher like Robert Boyle was influenced by the reformers has a great deal of intrinsic interest. That Boyle was a Protestant and was well versed in the current theological issues of his day is beyond dispute. But the central question to be explored in this paper is the extent to which he was influenced either directly by the reformers themselves or indirectly by Calvinist theology. This in turn has implications for the (...) broader historiographical question of the relation between the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution. Thus a subsidiary aim of this paper is to use Boyle as a case study to test the broader historiographical claim that the Reformation played a significant, even indispensable, role in the rise of the Scientific Revolution. On this latter question my researches are only a small brick in a much larger edifice. What is true of Boyle may or may noet be usefully generalised across other Protestant natural philosophers of the early modern period. Yet Boyle, perhaps more than any other Protestant natural philosopher of this period, has been the focus of claims affirming such a connection and any case for or against them must deal with him. (shrink)

The ‘musca depicta’ trope is well known to art historians, with a history going back to Pliny. It flourished in the Renaissance, but in eighteenth-century England the meaning of the trope was altered greatly when employed in popular culture, both in live theatrical presentations (by George Alexander Stevens) and in published poetry (by James Robertson, comedian of York). Originally, the trope signalled the virtuosity of the painter, who was able to fool the eye by depicting flies so real that the (...) viewer attempted to shoo them off the picture. However, in the hands of Stevens and Robertson, that bit of theatre was turned on its head, as the supposed connoisseur engaged in a harsh criticism of a painting is startled when a fly that he thinks poorly depicted suddenly flies off the canvas, thereby rendering the connoisseur a satiric target. (shrink)

Este artigo pretende retomar a interpretação que pode ser chamada de tradicional das três condições do ato propriamente virtuoso expostas em EN II 4, i.e., o conhecimento, escolher deliberadamente o ato por ele mesmo e seguir-se de uma disposição firme e não hesitante. A atenção da análise será voltada à primeira e à terceira condição. Buscar-se-á mostrar que a condição do conhecimento pode ser compreendida como conhecimento das circunstâncias, do ato ele mesmo como virtuoso e das técnicas ou (...) ofícios que podem ser por ele requeridos. Buscar-se-á igualmente justificar a introdução do termo ‘disposição’ na tradução apresentada, já que o termo grego ‘hexis’ não consta na passagem analisada. Um apontamento será feito, por fim, no sentido de oferecer uma justificativa mais ampla para a interpretação aqui defendida na medida em que a localiza como um posicionamento contrário à concepção intelectualista socrática. (shrink)

Eric Booth has completed the curriculum for today’s classical music performers in The Music Teaching Artist’s Bible: Becoming a Virtuoso Educator (2009). This book could handily serve as the text for a class designed to help music performance majors learn about the items that are usually ignored within today’s skill-based music performance degrees offered in most American universities and conservatories. Booth makes the case that many classically trained performing musicians unknowingly do more harm than good for their audiences and (...) careers. He repeatedly states that a better understanding of the issues addressed in his book will equal more gigs and employment for musicians while providing better experiences for .. (shrink)

En este artículo argumentamos que la naturaleza pública o privada de la educación tiene una incidencia directa en las instituciones que conforman la realidad social. Para sustentar lo anterior, en primer lugar discutimos cómo, según Searle, habitamos un mundo de instituciones gobernadas por reglas y poderes deónticos, ontológicamente irreductibles. Luego, postulamos que la intencionalidad colectiva requiere de la confianza para mantenerse, y esta aumenta cuando gobiernan reglas y poderes deónticos en circunstancias normales. Finalmente, planteamos que la educación pública es una (...) institución que, a diferencia de la privada, privilegia el espacio de lo común. Sócrates es un ejemplo de esto, al proponer una filosofía que no solo busca la verdad, sino que además privilegia el reconocimiento de la ley por sobre la satisfacción inmediata de deseos e inclinaciones personales. De todo esto se explica el círculo virtuoso: la educación pública, al ser inclusiva y beneficiar a todos, potencia las instituciones sociales que tutelan ese interés y, dentro de ellas, el servicio público. (shrink)