As the first President of the Royal Academy of Arts, Joshua Reynolds played a pivotal role in shaping the course of British art in the 18th century. In these discourses, Reynolds reflects on the nature of art, the role of the artist, and the importance of aesthetic education. With insightful commentary on the works of the Old Masters and a wealth of practical advice for aspiring artists, this volume is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of art or (...) art theory. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

One of the finest private collections of Indian, Himalayan and Southeast Asian art in America is owned by James and Marilynn Alsdorf. This catalogue provides an opportunity for individuals other than scholars and specialists to view the works of art.

Since the 1960s, many artists have incorporated ecological concerns into their work, an endeavor that has required new strategies in art-making. To explore recent American manifestations of these interests, the David and Alfred Smart Museum commissioned new projects from artists Mark Dion, Peter Fend, and Dan Peterman, each focusing on interrelationships between particular organisms—human beings-and a specific group of sites—a museum building, a river landscape, and a university campus. The results, exhibited at the Smart Museum during the summer of (...) 2000, evoke the varied scales, from the microscopic to the global, at which human actions affect the environment. This catalog documents each of the artists' projects through an array of images and words: Smart Museum Associate Curator Stephanie Smith provides an introduction and brief overviews of the three projects, each of the artists contribute statements, and photographers Susan Anderson and Tom van Eynde document—in over 100 images—the processes and projects that comprise the exhibition. (shrink)

We explore themes in Nobel Prize–winning economist James M. Buchanan’s work and apply his Ethics and Economic Progress to problems facing individuals and firms. We focus on Buchanan’s analysis of the individual work ethic, his exhortations to “pay the preacher” of the “institutions of moral-ethical communication,” and his notion of law as “public capital.” We highlight several ways people with other-regarding preferences can contribute to social flourishing and some of the ways those who have “affected to trade for (...) the public good” might want to redirect their efforts. We show how Buchanan’s work has considerable implications for business ethics. Just as his economic analysis of politics changed how we understand government, we think his economic analysis of ethics can (and should) change how we understand business. (shrink)

The emergence of complex deep-learning models capable of producing novel images on a practically innumerable number of subjects and in an equally wide variety of artistic styles is beginning to highlight serious inadequacies in the ethical, aesthetic, epistemological and legal frameworks we have so far used to categorise art. To begin tackling these issues and identifying a role for AI in the production and protection of human artwork, it is necessary to take a multidisciplinary approach which considers current legal precedents, (...) the practice of software engineering, historical attitudes towards technological innovation and a sustained technical analysis of the models themselves. This paper queries the location and nature of substantive artistic work in the developmental stages of an AI-generated image, offering critiques of existing assumptions and posing questions for future research. The emergence of convincing AI creative output, artistic or literary, has significant long-term implications for the humanities, including the need for re-appraisal of foundational ideas about authorship and creativity in general. The effects of artificial intelligence, whether generalised or task-specific, cannot be ignored or displaced now that easy-access, scalable image and text production is a reality. (shrink)

Adults spend most of their conscious life speaking, comprehending, writing, and reading discourse. It is entirely appropriate for cognitive science to investigate discourse especially as transmitted texts or printed media, such as books, newspapers, magazines, and computers. However, there is another reason why text understanding has been one of the prototypical areas of study in cognitive science: Interdisciplinary work is absolutely essential. As cognitive scientists have unraveled the puzzles of text comprehension, they have embraced the insights and methodologies from (...) several disciplines. (shrink)

Reading Heidegger’s Being and Time, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” and the 1934-35 lecture courses Hölderlin’s Hymns“Germania” and “The Rhine,” the aim of this essay is twofold. First, the essay attempts to elucidate the manner in which the work of art functions as a superlative event of “ truth -happening”, which facilitates the movement of Dasein into the truth of Being as a legitimate member of a community, serving as, “the origin of a people’s authentic historical (...) existence.”1 Second, it explains why this notion of art as the historical manifestation of Being is crucial to understanding the shift, or “ turn,” in Heidegger’s philosophy of the 1930s and 1940s, i.e., it examines the philosophical problems Heidegger rectified when moving from Being and Time, and the conceptual-linguistic constraints of metaphysics and the subject-centered model of Dasein, to the later works on art and poetry. (shrink)

BackgroundCORE (Clarity and Openness in Reporting: E3-based) Reference (released May 2016 by the European Medical Writers Association [EMWA] and the American Medical Writers Association [AMWA]) is a complete and authoritative open-access user’s guide to support the authoring of clinical study reports (CSRs) for current industry-standard-design interventional studies. CORE Reference is a content guidance resource and is not a CSR Template.TransCelerate Biopharma Inc., an alliance of biopharmaceutical companies, released a CSR Template in November 2018 and recognised CORE Reference as one of (...) two principal sources used in its development.MethodsThe regulatory medical writing and statistical professionals who developed CORE Reference conducted a critical review of the TransCelerate CSR Template. We summarise our major findings and recommendations in this communication. We also re-examined and edited the Version 1 CORE Reference Terminology Table that we first published in 2016, and we present this as Version 2 in this communication.ResultsOur major critical review findings indicate that opportunities remain to refine the CSR Template structure and instructional text, enhance content clarity, add web links to referenced guidance documents, improve transparency to support the broad readership of CSRs, and develop supporting resources.The CORE Reference ‘Terminology Table’ Version 2 includes estimand as a defined term and an adaptation of the original ‘worked study example’ to incorporate the recently evolved concept of ‘estimands’.ConclusionsAs TransCelerate’s CSR Template represents an important milestone in authoring CSRs, we offer CSR authors advice and recommendations on its use, similarities, and differences with CORE Reference and advise them to consider shared interpretations between the two.RegistrationCORE Reference is registered with the EQUATOR Network. The TransCelerate CSR Template is not registered with any external organisation to the knowledge of the authors of this paper. (shrink)

It is said that reality is stronger than any description we can make of it, and we must admit that atrocities, when we see them, go beyond any idea we may have had of them. On the other hand, when it is a question of values and beliefs, the contrary is true: reality is much less than its representation and the ideas it professes. This loss of energy is called indifference. Madame Bovary believed that in Naples happiness was as firmly (...) rooted as the orange trees and as strong as stone. The wisdom of nations knows that that is not the case: “We hope for Paradise but as late as possible,” affirms a Christian proverb. This indifference poses a problem or an entire series of problems (Georg Simmel's work could be considered from that point of view) unless it arises from all our errors, spontaneous or scientific, concerning man and society. I do not know where I read, or dreamed, the story of a young ethnologist who went to study a tribe that was said to believe that the world would come to an end if the priests let the sacred fire go out. He assumed that the priests were as anxious as though they controlled the detonator of an atomic bomb. Admitted into the temple of the fire, he saw the peaceful religious going about routine tasks. Reality is rarely emphatic. Rites and customs, for example, reflect the beliefs of a society. Paintings and sculptures show what the society believes or serve to make it believe what it sees. Sculpture in cathedrals were the bible of the illiterate. Is that really certain? We notice that most often people perform the rites without believing in their significance and, in any case, without interest in them, because the liturgy is not a means of communication giving information. They do not look at the images. (How many Parisians have looked at the Napoleonic bas-reliefs on the Vendôme column?) and if they tried to do so, they would not be able to decipher their iconography or even see them: placed too high, the images are often undecipherable. So it is necessary to sketch out a sociology of art in which the art work, far from conveying an iconography and an ideology, is a decor that we do not even look at, that we can hardly see and that is however very important. The study of all these insufficiencies would be a vast program. Here we will confine ourselves to art. (shrink)

Excerpt from Opera Omnia The Works of J ohn of Salisbury have never before been collected together, nor have they ever until now, either wholly or in part, been printed in this country. Yet the writer was without doubt superior to all his contempo raries, and his Works are by far the most valuable compositions which have come down to us, from the twelfth and thirteenth cen tuties. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic (...) books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

In this essay the visual arts of the machine age morph into literature and theory and then back again to images, gestures, and thought.

For almost two years now the COVID-19 pandemic impacted in most different forms habits, models of organization, socio-political dynamics and economic assets. Arrangements and orders taking decades to reach stabilization have demonstrated an unsuspected precarity, demanding a profound reorganization of dynamics we had been long accustomed to. As the distant, sanitized character of interaction, transmission, fruition and creation processes has turned from a contingent measure into the unamenable norm of these days’ routine, every aspect of social interaction is changing accordingly. (...) “Contact”, “contagion”, “proximity” and “distance” are not features of a transient period anymore: they are keywords of today’s experience. Indeed, while these concepts were already at stake in masscommunication and social media, it was not before nowadays that their precipitate on art forms could be taken into account more pristinely, for especially performative arts never had to amend their “familiar ground” in order to pursue their goals. Hence, how did artforms adjust themselves to wholly new forms of participation? What are we supposed to expect next? The main aim of this paper is to sketch out, relying on some classical loci of the history of Western aesthetics such as Plato, Aloïs Riegl, Walter Benjamin, this new, re-configured notion of aesthetic and artistic experience in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

Among the meritorious attempts to unravel the enigma of artistic creation are the views of Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer. In the following, we want to emphasise an aspect that is less discussed in the specialised literature, namely the relation between memory and creation. We are talking about the authentic creation that Kant and Schopenhauer consider to be the one that carries in itself the Aesthetic Ideas. With minor differences, the concept, as well as the associated linguistic expression, come together (...) in the work of both German philosophers. An authentic work of art is the work of genius and it has the role of transmitting Ideas. Thus, we will be able to observe “the secret” of a work of art – the Aesthetic Idea. (shrink)

Frequently, moreover, the essence sought for has been supposed to be nothing objective; those who have asked the question have supposed, rather, that the property in which the essence of works of art consists must somehow involve human negotiation with something. A work of art is a creation by, and a cherished object in, the life of humanity; and to suppose that the essence of such works is some property common and peculiar to them but exclusive of human interests, (...) would be as foolish as to suppose that a description of disease, in exclusively biochemical terms, with no mention of its misery and pain, could reveal the essence of such disorders. The question, "What is a work of art?" like the question, "What is a disease?" may be interpreted as asking for the essence of works of art, on the assumption that human activities are the realizations of dispositions toward them; that to each, there corresponds a prior mental readiness which when activated leads naturally into it. Thus interpreted, the question inquires after the essence of works of art; and it presupposes that in that essence will be found some posture of the mind, i.e., that if anything is a work of art, someone has a mental disposition of some kind toward it. (shrink)

Andrew Harrison; VI—Works of Art and Other Cultural Objects, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 68, Issue 1, 1 June 1968, Pages 105–128, https://do.

This article relates the ideas of Stanisław Brzozowski (1878-1911) with those of Bernard Stiegler (1952-2020), both of whom problematize the "work" of art understood as a labor practice. Through the conceptual analysis of epigenetics and epiphylogenetics for aesthetic theory, I claim that both thinkers develop practical concepts relevant to contemporary art philosophy. First, I present an overview of Brzozowski's aesthetics, for whom literature and the arts are linked with ethics, and aesthetic form is tied with moral judgment. Then, I (...) continue with an outline of Stiegler's, for whom the role of artists is to sculpt a new culture and historical epoch called the Neganthropocene. Finally, the notion of "work" as a type of memory practice is analyzed. The comparison shows that Stiegler develops epigenetics phenomenologically via memory ("tertiary retentions") and phylogenetics to epiphylogenetics. Both philosophers argue against determinism. This study suggests that their key ideas advance and complement each other. (shrink)

the Mona Lisa, the Mondscheinsonate, the Chanson d’automne are works of art, the salt shaker on your table, the car in your garage, or the pijamas on your bed are not. the basic question of the metaphysics of works of art is this: what makes a thing a work of art? that is: what sort of property do works of art have in virtue of which they are works of art? or more simply: what sort of property being a (...) work of art is? In this paper we argue that things are works of art in virtue of what they are like, their intrinsic features, that is, in virtue of the fact that they have the perceptual (auditory, visual, etc.) properties they have. In other words: being a work of art supervenes on perceptual-intrinsic features. Currently, this metaphysical view is extremely unpopular within the philosophy of art. It is unpopular because there allegedly exists a knock-down objection to it, the well-known argument from indiscernible counterparts. our thesis implies, among other things, that every perceptual duplicate of a work of art is also a work of art. according to the argument from indiscernible counterparts, however, there could be (or even: there are) indiscernible counterparts such that one of them is a work of art while the other is not. hence things cannot be works of art solely in virtue of what they are like. Our paper divides into three parts. In the first part we state our views. In the second part we defend it against various versions of the argument from indiscernible counterparts. (In doing so our position will become more plausible, we hope). In the final part we provide some meta-reflections on the matter. (shrink)

This essay is a rewriting of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” a classic text in critical theory and media studies. Appropriating Benjamin’s sentence, paragraph, and essay structures, the essay presents a series of theoretical reflections on the status of art during the current age of transmedia production. The essay seeks to contribute to a theory of contemporary art that moves beyond capitalist, and increasingly fascist, ideologies. As in Benjamin’s essay, this (...) class='Hi'>work is an effort to think dialectically about the contradictions that structure our contemporary moment, and therefore to formulate a socialist aesthetics. (shrink)

This paper argues that Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility” provides a rich analytic framework for understanding how the many dimensions of aesthe...

The article investigates how and why we treat works of art as persons. From rhetoric to jurisprudence, various disciplines have dealt with the practice of attributing human features and abilities to insensate objects. The agency of works of art acting as fictitious persons is not only rec­ognized at the level of aesthetic experience, but also outside it, because there have been cases in which they were subject to legal liability. Per­sonhood is not reducible to individual human beings. However, since works (...) of art lack senses and consciousness, there is ultimately a limit to the personifying metaphor. (shrink)

In keeping with the general theme of the General Assembly of CIPSH in Beijing, 2004, in this article I emphasize the potential of the internet to impact the use of works of art in public and private museums for study and research, and for the publication of research. The possibility exists nowadays of creating a hyper-real ‘musée imaginaire’ or ‘museum without walls’ to use André Malraux's phrase of more than fifty years ago. It is hard to see how it could (...) be anything but a benefit to human knowledge to have images of all works in the public domain (that is, for which the creator's copyright has expired) available on the world wide web. Under US law this year (2006) that would mean all works created before 1911. There are encouraging developments in that direction, but there is also constant legal wrangling. And I have to admit there are sometimes two sides to the question, even if I think one argument is far stronger than the other. (shrink)

This volume has 41 chapters written to honor the 100th birthday of Mario Bunge. It celebrates the work of this influential Argentine/Canadian physicist and philosopher. Contributions show the value of Bunge’s science-informed philosophy and his systematic approach to philosophical problems. The chapters explore the exceptionally wide spectrum of Bunge’s contributions to: metaphysics, methodology and philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of physics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of social science, philosophy of biology, philosophy of technology, moral philosophy, social and (...) political philosophy, medical philosophy, and education. The contributors include scholars from 16 countries. Bunge combines ontological realism with epistemological fallibilism. He believes that science provides the best and most warranted knowledge of the natural and social world, and that such knowledge is the only sound basis for moral decision making and social and political reform. Bunge argues for the unity of knowledge. In his eyes, science and philosophy constitute a fruitful and necessary partnership. Readers will discover the wisdom of this approach and will gain insight into the utility of cross-disciplinary scholarship. This anthology will appeal to researchers, students, and teachers in philosophy of science, social science, and liberal education programmes. 1. Introduction Section I. An Academic Vocation Section II. Philosophy Section III. Physics and Philosophy of Physics Section IV. Cognitive Science and Philosophy of Mind Section V. Sociology and Social Theory Section VI. Ethics and Political Philosophy Section VII. Biology and Philosophy of Biology Section VIII. Mathematics Section IX. Education Section X. Varia Section XI. Bibliography. (shrink)

"The texts published here reproduce, with some variation, those of five lectures held at the Mendrisio Academy of Architecture between October 2012 and April 2013.".

In keeping with the general theme of the General Assembly of CIPSH in Beijing, 2004, in this article I emphasize the potential of the internet to impact the use of works of art in public and private museums for study and research, and for the publication of research. The possibility exists nowadays of creating a hyper-real ‘musée imaginaire’ or ‘museum without walls’ to use André Malraux's phrase of more than fifty years ago. It is hard to see how it could (...) be anything but a benefit to human knowledge to have images of all works in the public domain (that is, for which the creator's copyright has expired) available on the world wide web. Under US law this year (2006) that would mean all works created before 1911. There are encouraging developments in that direction, but there is also constant legal wrangling. And I have to admit there are sometimes two sides to the question, even if I think one argument is far stronger than the other. (shrink)

Martial-arts practice is not quite anything else: it is like sport, but is not sport; it constantly refers to and as it were cohabits with violence, but is not violent; it is dance-like but not dance. It shares a common athleticism with sports and dance, yet stands apart from both, especially through its paradoxical commitment to the external value of being an instrument of violence. My discussion seeks to illuminate martial arts practice by systematic contrast to games of sport and (...) works of performance art, especially dance. (shrink)

Citing works by Marcel Duchamp and others, this article argues that the transformation of what Danto termed a mere real thing into an artwork, and of an artwork into a mere real thing, are not symmetrical operations. It argues that mere real things and artworks not only belong to different categories, but that these categories are themselves of different kinds—the former being closed, and the latter open. Viewing mere real things through the lens of art leads to confusion. Amending Goodman’s (...) question, ‘When is art?’, this article suggests that one can only arrive at working definitions of what constitutes both an artwork and a mere real thing on the basis of contingent function. The adequate analysis of any given thing or action necessitates viewing it in accordance with an appropriate paradigm, whether that of an artwork, a thought experiment, or even a prank. Adequate analysis requires disciplinary dexterity, deference when appropriate, and multi-disciplinary attention best achieved through collaboration. (shrink)

The history of philosophy is rich in diverse and sometimes directly contradictory views on the character of the relation between science and art. There have been times when art was proclaimed as lower than science, as an inadequate form of assimilation of reality by man, while at others it was seen as the sole means of adequate reflection of the world hidden "behind Maia's mysterious veil." And although today we are far from overestimating or underestimating either of the ways in (...) which man perceives reality, the fact is that the problem of the relationship between science and art remains quite acute, as is shown in particular by the broad discussion on this question that has arisen in the pages of Problems of Philosophy [Voprosy filosofii] during the last three years. The present article is an attempt to treat yet another facet of the relationships between science and art, taking as point of departure the capacity of art to model not only certain aspects of reality but human reality itself, including that of scientific theory. From this standpoint art, as a meta-activity as it were, relates to positive cognition such as philosophy not so much "horizontally" as "vertically.". (shrink)

John Dewey puts aesthetic experience at the center of his reflection on art and beauty, reconsidering it dynamically. Nowadays, this view opened the path to somaesthetics, a term coined by Richard Shusterman, and aesthetic anthropology. Here, it is argued that the contribution of pragmatist aesthetics could be further developed by exploring its analogies with techno-aesthetics, a paradigm proposed by French philosopher Gilbert Simondon in the early 1980s. Art occupies accordingly a special place within the different forms of aesthetic experience, being (...) considered as a way of experimenting the impact of new technologies in the human experience. It is a process by which technologies create ‘devices’ for experimenting perception and reflection: namely, ways of reconstructing the nature of the human mind in-between body and technology, and by means of their interaction. Cinema reconsidered after Dewey’s fellow George H. Mead, offers an exemplary case as both artistic and technological devices. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to determine the nature of the artwork and the scope of the world revealed therein. the artwork is that by which art becomes actual. it is that in which art is expressed. however, it is more than an object of aesthetic experience. it is the revelation of a people's world. here the world means the world of a particular people at a particular time, the cultural and "intellectual atmosphere" of a historical people. a people's (...) world is their being, therefore, artwork is an epochal manifestation of a people's openness to being. (shrink)