In this study, Alan Paskow first asks why fictional characters, such as Hamlet and Anna Karenina, matter to us and how they emotionally affect us. He then applies these questions to painting, demonstrating that certain paintings beckon us to view their contents as real. As emblematic of the fundamental concerns of our lives, paintings, he argues, are not simply in our heads but in our world. Paskow also situates the phenomenological approach to the experience of painting in relation to contemporary (...) schools of thought, particularly Marxist, feminist, and deconstructionist. (shrink)

Despite the enormous body of commentary by analytic philosophers on Wittgenstein's theory of psychological privacy, I know of no phenomenologist who has attempted to deal with and respond to this theory, which is a threat to the very foundations of any philosophy that accords an honorific status to the data of subjectivity. Just why there has not been any response from phenomenologists to Wittgenstein's claims I am uncertain. Perhaps it is due to a simple prejudice on their part that analytic (...) philosophy is 'trivial' or 'not relevant' to their concerns. Or perhaps they are discouraged right from the beginning by the idiosyncratic and frequently ambiguous manner in which Wittgenstein expresses himself. Whatever the reason or reasons, it is time, it seems to me, for us who stand outside the analytic camp to take up Wittgenstein's serious challenge. (shrink)