Online research in philosophy

Following a hint from Edmund Husserl, this paper explores the proximity of the phenomenological and aesthetic gazes. It does so with one particular poem in mind: “September Song” by Geoffrey Hill. The paper examines the ways in which the poem responds to a given situation, the death of a child in the Shoah, and responds to the ethical status of its own aesthetic gaze. Phenomenological perspectives by Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida, and Marion, are brought to bear on the questions considered, and comparisons are made between Hill’s poem and similar poems by Dylan Thomas, Paul Celan, and W. S. Merwin.

In this essay I call attention to the fact that there is a work of art in Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art,” and yet almost no one talks about it: the C. F. Meyer poem “Roman Fountain.” This critical silence is all the more ironic, since (1) it is a self-sufficient artwork, and not just described or mentioned in the text; and (2) the poem’s fountain, as man-made spring, seems to speak to—if not speak of—Heidegger’s thesis concerning the Ur-sprung of the artwork itself. I argue that the poem illuminates a central problem or question concerning the status of art as mimesis, and I suggest that the reason why this poem tends to be overlooked amid the “obsessive” critical attention that it otherwise attracts can be found within the essay itself.

The Ellsberg Paradox documented the aversion to ambiguity in the probability of winning a prize. Using an original sample of 266 business owners and managers facing risks from climate change, this paper documents the presence of departures from rationality in both directions. Both ambiguity-seeking behavior and ambiguity-averse behavior are evident. People exhibit ‘fear’ effects of ambiguity for small probabilities of suffering a loss and ‘hope’ effects for large probabilities. Estimates of the crossover point from ambiguity aversion (fear) to ambiguity seeking (hope) place this value between 0.3 and 0.7 for the risk per decade lotteries considered, with empirical estimates indicating a crossover mean risk of about 0.5. Attitudes toward the degree of ambiguity also reverse at the crossover point.

This book reads Milton’s Paradise Lost as a poem that seeks to educate its readers by narrating the education of its main characters. Many of Milton’s characters enter the action in late adolescence, newly independent and eager to test themselves, to discover who they are and their place in the world. The poem charts their progress into moral adulthood. Taking as its premise that attention to the moral development of the poem’s main characters will open the poem to most undergraduate readers, this book explores both the pedagogical activity within Paradise Lost and the pedagogical activity that the poem encourages.

Now I may not be an educated man . . . But it seems to me to go against common sense to ask what the poet is ‘trying to say’. The poem isn’t a code for something easily understood. The poem is what he is trying to say.

We generalize Specker's theorem on typical ambiguity, that NF and TST + Ambiguity have the same stratified consequences, to the subschemes Amb(Γ) of ambiguity restricted to classes of sentences Γ with certain natural closure conditions.

The philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel emphasises the importance of understanding consciousness and, even more so, self-consciousness. His lectures on aesthetics contain aesthetic theories for all forms of art (viz. architecture, painting, music or poetry), but critics use them only in significantly altered versions. The present paper attempts to give an in-depth analysis of a poem following one interpretation of Hegel's philosophy of self-consciousness. The poem analysed is not a German Romantic poem, but an Indian poem from the mid-20th century. The explanatory force of Hegel's aesthetics is thus assessed with the needs of a global culture studies in mind.

This essay turns from a discussion of measure as it pertains to poetry to a discussion of Hölderlin’s poem “In Lovely Blueness” in the context of Heidegger’s essay on that poem, “Poetically Man Dwells.” For Hölderlin, paradoxically, although man measures himself against the godhead, there is a sense in which, for man, there is no measure on earth. I argue that Heidegger’s attempt to bridge the gap between absence and presence has the effect of “retheologizing” the poem and distorting its meaning. The argument proceeds partly by measuring several English translation of the poem against one another.

The problem addressed is that of finding a sound characterization of ambiguity. Two kinds of characterizations are distinguished: tests and definitions. Various definitions of ambiguity are critically examined and contrasted with definitions of generality and indeterminacy, concepts with which ambiguity is sometimes confused. One definition of ambiguity is defended as being more theoretically adequate than others which have been suggested by both philosophers and linguists. It is also shown how this definition of ambiguity obviates a problem thought to be posed by ambiguity for truth theoretical semantics. In addition, the best known test for ambiguity, namely the test by contradiction, is set out, its limitations discussed, and its connection with ambiguity's definition explained. The test is contrasted with a test for vagueness first proposed by Peirce and a test for generality propounded by Margalit.

It is no longer generally believed that Empedocles was the divided character portrayed by nineteenth-century scholars, a man whose scientific and religious views were incompatible but untouched by each other. Yet it is still widely held that, however unitary his thought, nevertheless he still wrote more than one poem, and that his poems can be clearly divided between those which do, and those which do not, concern ‘religious matters’.1 Once this assumption can be shown to be shaky or actually false, the grounds for dividing the quotations of Empedocles into two poems by subject matter disappear; and without that division our interpretation of Empedocles stands in need of radical revision. This paper startswith the modest task of showing that Empedocles may have written only one philosophical poem and not two, and goes on to suggest some of the ways in which we have to rethink the whole story if he did. If all our material belongs to one poem we are bound to link the cycle of the daimones with that of the elements, and this has far-reaching consequences for our interpretation.