Online research in philosophy

Three years' experience in teaching a course in Literature and Medicine is reviewed. Examples of the Laboratory or in vitro functions of art are given, as they relate to and benefit both medical students and practitioners. The usefulness of literature (especially) in the medical setting is underscored, together with the need for medical personnel to be more aware of their heritage in this area. Examples of well-known physicians who have excelled in the arts (literature, music, painting/sculpture) are given and their major contributions discussed. There are some surprises.

Pleasure is one of the strongest candidates for an occurrence that might be good, in some respect, unconditionally. Malicious pleasure is one of the most often cited alleged counter-examples to pleasure’s being an unconditional good. Correctly evaluating malicious pleasure is more complex than people realize. I defend pleasure’s unconditionally good status from critics of malicious pleasure.

From its dissonant musics to its surrealist spectacles (the urinal is a violin!), Modernist art often seems to give more frustration than pleasure to its audience. In Untwisting the Serpent, Daniel Albright shows that this perception arises partly because we usually consider each art form in isolation, even though many of the most important artistic experiments of the Modernists were collaborations involving several media--Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is a ballet, Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts is an opera, and Pablo Picasso turned his cubist paintings into costumes for Parade. Focusing on collaborations with a musical component, Albright views these works as either figures of dissonance that try to retain the distinctness of their various media (e.g. Guillaume Apollinaire's Les Mamelles de Tiresias ) or figures of consonance that try to lose themselves in some total effect (e.g. Arnold Schoenberg's Erwartung ). In so doing he offers a fresh picture of Modernism, and provides a compelling model for the analysis of all artistic collaborations. Untwisting the Serpent is the recipient of the 2001 Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship of the Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University.

This collection brings together thirteen new essays by some of the most respected contemporary scholars of Schopenhauer's aesthetics from a wide spectrum of philosophical perspectives. The dynamics of the empirical will and Will as a thing-in-itself in the interplay of Schopenhauer's metaphysics and philosophy of fine art has important implications for the freedom, salvation, and tragic suffering of the artist, the representation of Platonic Ideas in art, and the role of artistic inspiration, emotion, and aesthetic pleasure in the beautiful and sublime. These essays examine the unique theory Schopenhauer developed to explain the life and work of the artist, and the influence his aesthetic philosophy has had on subsequent artistic traditions in such diverse areas as music, painting, poetry, literature, and architecture. The authors present Schopenhauer's thought as a vital and enduring contribution to aesthetic theory, and to the idealist vision which continues to guide Romantic and neo-Romantic art.

The visual arts include painting, sculpture, photography, video, and film. But many people would argue that music is the universal or only art of sound. In the modernist era, Western art music has incorporated unpitched sounds or ‘noise’, and I pursue the question of whether this process allows space for a non-musical soundart. Are there non-musical arts of sound—is there an art phonography, for instance, to parallel art photography? At the same time, I attempt a characterization of music, contrasting acoustic, aesthetic, and acousmatic accounts. My view is that there is some truth in all of these. I defend the claim that music is an art with a small ‘a’—a practice involving skill or craft whose ends are essentially aesthetic, that especially rewards aesthetic attention—whose material is sounds exhibiting tonal organization. But acoustic and acousmatic accounts help to distinguish between music and non-musical soundart, since music must have a preponderance of tones for its material.

Since the beginning of the eighteenth century the philosophy of art has been engaged on the project of trying to find out what the fine arts have in common and, thus, how they might be defined. Peter Kivy's purpose in this accessible and lucid book is to trace the history of that enterprise and argue that the definitional project has been unsuccessful. He offers a fruitful change of strategy: instead of engaging in an obsessive quest for sameness, let us explore the differences between the arts. He presents five case studies, three from literature, two from music. With its combination of historical and analytic approaches this is a book for a wide range of readers in philosophy, literary studies, music, and non-academic readers with interests in the arts.

THE QUESTION: I am asking a very specific question: what good is knowledge about wine when it comes to enjoying the experience of tasting a wine? Can knowledge, about wine in general or about the specific wine you’re drinking, help you enjoy that wine? Can such knowledge even make the wine taste better? Assuming you have a basic liking for wine, have a normal sensitivity to aromas and flavors, and know how to expose the qualities of a wine to the responsiveness of your senses, how, if at all, can knowledge about a particular wine affect your enjoyment of it? Can it enhance your pleasure or even, on occasion, detract from it? Or, rather, does it provide its own kind of pleasure, cognitive or even intellectual pleasure, distinct from the pleasure of tasting?

Introduction. What are the arts and how do we respond to and evaluate them? -- Pictures : drawing, painting, printmaking, and photography -- Sculpture -- Architecture -- Music -- Literature -- Theatre -- Cinema -- Dance.

Explanation and Value in the Arts offers penetrating studies by art historians, literary theorists, and philosophers, of issues central to explaining works of literature and painting. The first chapters look at the sources of interest in the fine arts and point to the intimate relation between aesthetic and other values. The next contributions develop the interaction between value and explanation in the study of the arts, including considerations of the nature of creativity and the principles for the explanations of works. A final section takes up questions of the role of ideology and the determining role of power.

Bogue provides a systematic overview and introduction to Deleuze's writings on music and painting, and an assessment of their position within his aesthetics as a whole. Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts breaks new ground in the scholarship on Deleuze's aesthetics, while providing a clear and accessible guide to his often overlooked writings in the fields of music and painting.