Painting as an art: Wollheim and the subjective dimension -- Abstract art and transperceptual space: Wolheim, and beyond -- Truth in art: Heidegger against contextualism -- Space, place, and sculpture: Heidegger's pathways -- Vision in being: Merleau-Ponty and the depths of painting -- Subjectivity, the gaze, and the picture: developing Lacan -- Dimensions in time: Dufrenne's phenomenology of pictorial art -- Conclusion: a preface to post-analytic phenomenology.

If today a decidedly analytical interpretation of Wittgenstein’s thought seems to be dominant in many ways, there are, in my opinion, countless reasons that lead instead to reintroduce the possibility, and even the opportunity, of a different reading: a proper philosophical-aesthetic reading – where “philosophical” is equivalent to “transcendental” in the Kantian sense – which certainly seems to me more productive in theoretical terms.

Recent advances in out understanding of the cognitive neuroscience of perception have encouraged cognitive scientists and scientifically minded philosophers to turn their attention towards art and the problems of philosophical aesthetics. This cognitive turn does not represent an entirely novel paradigm in the study of art. Alexander Baumgarten originally introduced the term ‘aesthetics’ to refer to a science of perception. Artist’s formal methods are a means to cull the structural features necessary for constructing clear perceptual representations from the dense flux (...) of sensory information in conscious experience. therefore, he interpreted artist’s formal methods as tools for studying the structure of perception. Art was a field whose interests coincidentally overlapped with aesthetics. In what follows I examine three approaches to cognitive science and aesthetics that rest on a tacit assumption of Baumgarten’s program. I argue that whereas this new research can explain how viewers perceptually recover the content of artworks, it does not explain what makes those works aesthetically interesting. Therefore, the challenge for cognitive science and aesthetics is to tie the perceptual practices of artists and viewers to their more narrowly construed aesthetic, or artistic, practices. What is needed to establish this link is an interpretation of Baumgarten’s original definition of aesthetics that treats attention to the way the formal structure of an artwork works to convey its content as a source of aesthetic interest. Unfortunately this interpretation is not transparently established by explanations of the perceptual practices of artists and viewers. I conclude that it remains an open question whether this research can contribute to philosophical aesthetics. (shrink)

Devenir borgne! Difficile de ne pas vivre ce handicap comme un drame. Sans la vision binoculaire et stéréoscopique, le réel semble n'avoir plus d'épaisseur. L'auteur rapporte ce qu'il a éprouvé au cours de sa prise en charge ophtalmologique et interroge en même temps les peintres malvoyants et les philosophes : qu'est-ce que voir? Le handicap visuel permettrait-il de dépasser l'ordinaire de la vision? Pour répondre à ces questions, Monet, Degas, Victor Brauner sont interpellés dans leurs oeuvres ou encore (...) Bruegel et Rembrandt, en même temps que sont convoqués Platon, Descartes, Alain, Merleau-Ponty ou encore James Joyce et William Blake, sans oublier les Évangiles. Les bien-voyants ne se rendent pas compte qu'ils sont condamnés à vivre la tyrannie du réel. Et si les yeux empêchaient de voir en vrai? Le genre humain n'a peut-être pas vocation à voir mais à entrevoir. Dans ces conditions, ne devrait-on pas considérer la malvoyance comme un atout? Ne serait-il pas temps de voir autrement qu'avec les yeux? Peut-être, alors, sentira-t-on la présence de l'Être émerger de la pénombre"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Discusses the metaphysical themes of Bergman's films, analyzes his major works, and attempts to explain his philosophy.

The vision of an art masterpiece is associated with brain arousal by neural processes occurring quite spontaneously in the viewer. This aesthetic experience may even elicit a response in the motor areas of the observers. In the neurorehabilitation of patients with stroke, art observation has been used for reducing psychological disorders, and creative art therapy for enhancing physical functions and cognitive abilities. Here, we developed a virtual reality task which allows patients, by moving their hand on a virtual canvas, (...) to have the illusion of painting some art masterpieces, such as The Creation of Adam of Michelangelo or The birth of Venus of Botticelli. Twenty healthy subjects and four patients with stroke performed this task and a control one in which they simply colored the virtual canvas. Results from User Satisfaction Evaluation Questionnaire and the NASA Task Load Index highlighted an appropriate level of usability. Moreover, despite the motor task was the same for art and control stimuli, the art condition was performed by healthy subjects with shorter trajectories and with a lower perception of physical demand. In experiment 2, only the patients treated with artistic stimuli showed a reduction in the erroneous movements performed orthogonally to the canvas. This finding reminds the so-called Mozart effect that improves the performance of subjects when they listen to classic music. Thus, we called this improvement in the performance when interacting with an artistic stimulus as Michelangelo effect. (shrink)

This documents the exhibition and the artistic positions, describes the process of the project, and offers analysis of the cooperation experiment from the perspectives of the participating company, the consultants involved, and scholars of organisational science. This volume also places the project in an art theoretical framework.

This book analyses Darwin's influence on art and the effect of his science on experiences of beauty. The first chapter discusses Darwin's great forerunner, Alexander von Humboldt, and his contribution to thinking about the relationship between science and beauty. The second examines the public reception of Darwin in Germany, focusing on the German Naturalists and the important scientific controversies which Darwin's idea provoked. It shows the political use of science (Häckel and Virchow) and foreshadows present-day debates between Darwinism and Creationism, (...) science and an idealized view of nature."--Back cover. (shrink)

The article defines the function of the visual brain as a search for constancies with the aim of obtaining knowledge about the world, and claims that it is applicable with equal vigour to the function of art. We define the general function of art as a search for the constant, lasting, essential, and enduring features of objects, surfaces, faces, situations, and so on, which allows us not only to acquire knowledge about the particular object, or face, or condition represented on (...) the canvas but to generalize, based on that, about many other objects and thus acquire knowledge about a wide category of objects or faces. In this process, the artist must also be selective and invest his work with attributes that are essential, discarding much that is superfluous. It follows that one of the functions of art is an extension of the major function of the visual brain. Indeed, philosophers and artists often spoke about art in terms that are extremely similar to the language that a modern neurobiologist of vision would use, except that he would substitute the word ‘brain’ for the word ‘artist.’. (shrink)

Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory offers one of the most powerful and comprehensive critiques of art and of the discipline of aesthetics ever written. The work offers a deeply critical engagement with the history and philosophy of aesthetics and with the traditions of European art through the middle of the 20th century. It is coupled with ambitious claims about what aesthetic theory ought to be. But the cultural horizon of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory was the world of high modernism, and much has (...) happened since then both in theory and in practice. Adorno's powerful vision of aesthetics calls for reconsideration in this light. Must his work be defended, updated, resisted, or simply left behind? This volume gathers new essays by leading philosophers, critics, and theorists writing in the wake of Adorno in order to address these questions. They hold in common a deep respect for the power of Adorno's aesthetic critique and a concern for the future of aesthetic theory in response to recent developments in aesthetics and its contexts. (shrink)

"Discusses the European interpretation of the Pacific in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It considers the work of artists attached to scientific voyages of discovery and exploration from the time of Cook to the time of Dumont d'Urville and elucidates the ways in which their work is related to the scientific interestes and prevailing ideas of their eras."--Book jacket.

There are excellent research papers in the field of visual studies that examine the relationship between war and images. This paper has other and additional aims. The first is to examine not so much how war is transferred from the ground to image production, but how war, as intrusion of the real, forces a general reflection on image techniques. The second is to examine whether there is an instance of art that is somehow different from the instance of the mere (...) image, which is always related to something that manifests itself in war, and which, especially on the occasion of a war, invites a broader reflection on existence, judgement and the world. The paths taken for these investigations are rooted in the idea that a (political) theory of art cannot be reduced to an internal classification of image theory, since it investigates aspects that go beyond the definition of the image itself. (shrink)

Abstract:Queer Chicana author Gloria Anzaldúa often used visual art to develop and teach her theories, which address issues relating to social identity and institutions as well as creativity and spirituality. Her large collection of archived sketches at the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers at the University of Texas demonstrates her drive to visually express ideas. The archive also holds unpublished works and talks in which Anzaldúa discusses her concepts of creativity and the image-making process. Despite the prevalence of images in her (...) work, few scholars have analyzed her artwork or her writings on creativity. To address this gap, I explore the question: How do Anzaldúa's sketches inform her theoretical concepts of creativity and image-making? Analyzing her visual work significantly contributes to academic scholarship, especially for scholars looking to engage with Anzaldúan theorizing beyond that of her written works. (shrink)

Behind the superficial obscurity of what fragments we have of Heraclitus' thought, Professor Kahn claims that it is possible to detect a systematic view of human existence, a theory of language which sees ambiguity as a device for the expression of multiple meaning, and a vision of human life and death within the larger order of nature. The fragments are presented here in a readable order; translation and commentary aim to make accessible the power and originality of a systematic (...) thinker and the first great master of artistic prose. The commentary locates Heraclitus within the tradition of early Greek thought, but stresses the importance of his ideas for contemporary theories of language, literature and philosophy. (shrink)

Amblyopia, or lazy eye, is a neurological vision disorder that studies have shown to affect two to five percent of the population. Current methods of treatment produce the best visual outcome, if the condition is identified early in the patient's life. Several early screening procedures are aimed at finding the condition while the patient is a child, including an automated vision screening system. This paper aims to use artificial intelligence techniques to automatically identify children who are at risk (...) for developing the amblyopic condition and should therefore be referred to a specialist, i.e., pediatric ophthalmologist. Three techniques, namely, decision tree learning, random forest, and artificial neural network, are studied in this paper in terms of their effectiveness, using metrics of sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy. The features used by the techniques are extracted from images of patient eyes and are based on the color information. The efficacy of pixel color data is investigated with respect to the measurement of the rate of change of the color in the iris and pupil, i.e., color slope features. A 10-fold stratified cross validation procedure is used to compare the effectiveness of the three AI techniques in this medical application domain. (shrink)

Around the year 1900, European discourse on art was becoming increasingly ‘esotericized’. The 1890s saw esoteric art salons create a sensation in Paris, and art critics and theorists painted a picture of the true artist and the esotericist as overlapping figures. There was also at the time a conflict regarding mediumistic art, a phenomenon initially made popular through Spiritualist mediums. This debate, as we shall see, had interesting gendered dimensions. In what follows, I will discuss how the Swedish female esotericist (...) and artist Tyra Kleen attempted to situate herself in connection to the concept of the artist as a magus, and the tensions between the positive view of mediumism in Spiritualism and the more negative or cautious approach to it in Theosophy, as well as in relation to the attendant gender issues. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art and Science, Facts and KnowledgeBengt Brülde (bio)Keywordsart, definitions, epistemology, facts and values, mental disorder, metaphysical realism, nominalism, physical disorder, social constructivismThe main purpose of my original article was to find out how the evaluative content of the concept of mental disorder, i.e. its "value component," should be characterized. Both Tyreman and Ross are focusing on other things, however. Tyreman seems to agree with my analysis, and his primary (...) objective is to find out whether my general analytical approach can be extended to other areas, e.g. whether it can be used to analyze the concept of physical disorder or the concept of art. It is hard to tell whether Ross agrees with my view, since her entire commentary is focused on a few assumptions I made in the beginning of the paper, mainly in passing, to make my evaluative investigation more manageable. In short, the main content of my original paper is never really challenged, and I do not think I have to revise my view on the evaluative content of the concept of mental disorder. Both commentaries give rise to questions that are interesting in their own right, however, e.g. questions about art and science, and about facts and knowledge. This gives me the opportunity to develop my views on a number of topics that I never touched upon in the original article, e.g. the purpose of defining "mental disorder," the factual component of the concept, the connection between ontological and epistemological issues, and the value-neutrality of science. I am very grateful to the editors for allowing me to give such an extensive reply.My Reply to TyremanTyreman wants to know whether the same kind of analysis given in my original paper can be applied just as usefully to other areas of health care. That is, the question is whether the same type of analytical approach can be extended to other areas where evaluative considerations seem to play a crucial part. In his commentary, Tyreman has mainly four areas in mind, namely physical disorder, art, good art, and good (competent) clinical practice. Or more specifically, the question is whether the kind of evaluative analysis I used in my original paper can help us answer the following four questions: (a) How should we define the concept of physical disorder, i.e. according to what criteria should we draw the line between physical disorders and other physical conditions? (b) How should we define the concept of art, i.e. according to what criteria should we draw the line between art and other artifacts and performances? (c) What is good art, i.e. according to what criteria should we evaluate those artifacts (etc.) that we have decided to categorize as works of art? (d) What makes a clinical performance or practice good or competent, according to what criteria should we evaluate such practices?The first two questions are conceptual, i.e. the question is how certain concepts should be [End Page 111] defined, and in what way or ways values enter the picture. The last two questions are straightforwardly evaluative, however, and it goes without saying that we have to rely on value judgments to answer these questions. This difference suggests that the conceptual analyses needed in the first two cases are somewhat different from the evaluative analyses needed in the last two cases. It is also far more likely that my analysis of mental disorder can be extended to the first two cases. After all, my approach is designed to capture the evaluative content of concepts that are not purely evaluative. (We will return to this below.)To see whether my analysis can be of any help in any of Tyreman's four cases, we need to recapitulate what it is all about. The analysis in question is specifically concerned with how the evaluative content of the concept of mental disorder should be characterized, i.e. how and to what extent we have to rely on value judgments to distinguish mental disorders from other conditions. The first part of the analysis consists in the formulation of four questions that any reasonably complete account needs to answer. These questions are: (0... (shrink)

Contents Acknowledgements vii Illustrations ix Preface xi Further Bibliography of A.C. Crombie xiii 1 Designed in the Mind: Western visions of Science, Nature and Humankind 1 2 The Western Experience of Scientific Objectivity 13 3 Historical Perceptions of Medieval Science 31 4 Robert Grosseteste 39 5 Roger Bacon [with J.D. North] 51 6 Infinite Power and the Laws of Nature: A Medieval Speculation 67 7 Experimental Science and the Rational Artist in Early Modern Europe 89 8 Mathematics and Platonism in (...) the Sixteenth-Century Italian Universities and in Jesuit Educational Policy 115 9 Sources of Galileo Galilei’s Early Natural Philosophy 149 10 The Jesuits and Galileo’s Ideas of Science and of Nature [with A. Carugo] 165 11 Galileo and the Art of Rhetoric [with A. Carugo] 231 12 Galileo Galilei: A Philosophical Symbol 257 13 Alexandre Koyré and Great Britain: Galileo and Mersenne 263 14 Marin Mersenne and the Origins of Language 275 15 Le Corps à la Renaissance: Theories of Perceiver and Perceived in Hearing 291 16 Expectation, Modelling and Assent in the History of Optics: i, Alhazen and the Medieval Tradition; ii, Kepler and Descartes 301 17 Contingent Expectation and Uncertain Choice: Historical Contexts of Arguments from Probabilities 357 18 P.-L. Moreau de Maupertuis, F.R.S. : Précurseur du Transformisme 407 19 The Public and Private Faces of Charles Darwin 429 20 The Language of Science 439 21 Some Historical Questions about Disease 443 22 Historians and the Scientific Revolution 451 23 The Origins of Western Science 465 Appendix to Chapter 10: 479 Sources and Dates of Galileos Writings [with A. Carugo] Pietro Redondi, Galileo eretico [with A. Carugo] Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier Corrections to Science, Optics and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought 495 Index 497. (shrink)

Public reason liberalism is the political theory which holds that coercive laws and policies are justified when and only when they are grounded in reasons of the public. The standard interpretation of public reason liberalism, consensus accounts, claim that the reasons persons share or that persons can derive from shared values determine which policies can be justified. In this paper, I argue that consensus approaches cannot justify fair educational policies and preserving cultural goods. Consensus approaches can resolve some controversies about (...) teaching values in the educational system, such as curriculum choice. But they cannot determine which culture goods, e.g., architecture, artwork, or language ought to be preserved in the education system. Consensus approaches cannot fairly resolve competing claims about these kinds of disputes. -/- I propose that convergence accounts of public reason, which allow individuals to draw on their own comprehensive doctrines in limited ways, can remedy these weaknesses in the mainline public reason tradition. The convergence approach can justify a pluralist state that can advance valuable community goods. John Henry Newman’s advocacy of liberal arts education finds resonance in other cultures, notably among Confucians, illustrating that there can be a shared moral vision and inquiry into the good life across deep substantive disagreements about educational values and policies, once we expand our notion of justification to be more inclusive. (shrink)

Aesthetics, fledgling of the philosophic brood, is the most suspect of that family. It is suspected of all the philosophical sins: vagueness, disorder, dogmatism, emotionalism, reductionism, compartmentalization. Sometimes its youth is thought to be a sufficient excuse for these divagations. Sometimes the very nature of its content, involving the waywardness of genius, the remoteness of feeling from intellect, the surd of inspiration in even the mildest appreciation, are believed to condemn aes thetics irrevocably to the underside of the civilized man's (...) domain. Some philosophers have gloried in this apparently mystical and a-rational quality and have seen in it the very nature of the beautiful; others have come to regard it, rather, as evidence of the unskillfulness of our minds and have turned away from aesthetic problems to the task of sharpening the aesthetician's language and logic. The laughter of the gods is not difficult to discern through the poetry of the more mystical aesthetician or through the prose of the analysts. Meanwhile the manifold complexities and problems of aesthetic experience invite our understanding. For aesthetic experience is a present fact of human life and may, perhaps, be understood by men. Such, at least, will be the present assumption. This is the reason why the title of this book mentions art together with analysis; for if art is intelligible, the work of art and the experience of it may be analyzed into its functional parts. (shrink)

This book reconsiders the relationship between aesthetics and theological ethics. The primary question it seeks to answer is whether artistic creativity is a morally relevant activity. Drawing on the work of Jonathan Edwards and Thomas Aquinas, Choi argues that the arts are the cultural medium through which we can better understand what is morally possible, and that aesthetic objects can serve as snapshots of a particular community's perspectives on the good life. Art, in other words, offers glimpses not only into (...) competing moral visions within society but also the extent to which these contested moral views are understood. The arts, in Choi's view, provide a way of assessing the limits and possibilities of moral reasoning, the contextuality of moral discernment, and the need for moral thinking that is dialogical and dialectical. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.1 (2005) 77-92 [Access article in PDF] Art and the Teaching of Love Didier Maleuvre Art is rightly thought to be the domain of expression and illusion. It is expression because every work of art, however stone-faced or impersonal in aspect, is the product of human intention. And it is illusion because, however concrete, vivid, or raw, it holds up only images. These two (...) points — that art is expression and fiction — are deeply entrenched in the modern understanding of art. They are the twin pillars of our aesthetics.In the following I wish to argue that this focus on the expressive and the representative eclipse the most important dynamic of art — what I propose to call the communicative and the iconoclastic. By the former, I mean that art is primarily, not a subjectivity giving shape to a private vision, but a form of sanctifying the human conversation, that is, the encounter between subjectivities; by the latter, I mean to suggest that art is an image that paradoxically strives to go beyond the realm of images. On this account we will see that an image is artistic to the extent that it breaks through representation.Briefly put, art has a destination beyond itself. One should not imagine, as postmodernism ruled ex officio, that the essence of art is formal or social self-reflectivity. Certainly, self-mirroring occurs in art, but no more or less than in any act of intelligence. Moreover, it is not enough to affix tokens of self-consciousness onto an object to turn it into art. The aim of art is not art. Its destination is elsewhere; its aim is reality encountered and lived with.And the vehicle by which art travels into reality is not just skill, insight, knowledge, or intelligence. It is love. To defend these two propositions will be the gist of the following essay.The aim of education is rightly thought to be knowledge of the world. Knowledge, however, is of two kinds: one is concerned with storage of facts, the other with modes of relating to the world. The first is a technical pursuit; the second, moral practice. The sort of education fostered by art clearly belongs with the second sort. Art is less concerned with delivering [End Page 77] information about the world than teaching us about how to stand in relation to it, how to find our place in it, and live with it: through art we do not seek to master the world so much as become its denizens. It is a teaching of love. Art, Mind, and Reality Now, the idea that art is religious embrace of reality runs against a powerful philosophic doctrine: the idea, known as subjectivism — that the human mind is kept from reality by its own knowledge of reality. We perceive reality only through mental representations. I see a tree, I hear laughter, I taste tea. When my mind alights on these objects, they have already been retouched and recomposed by my senses. By the time I am aware of them, I have reordered the perceptual datum into the concepts of "tree," "laugher," "tea." So we really deal with conceptual images of things, even when those things fall on our head like rain, or trip us like an untied shoelace.Subjectivism takes art to be proof of its doctrine. No two artists have transposed the same landscape or object in exactly the same hues and forms. Monet may have wanted to put in his paintings only what the retina mirrored; still, in the end he painted like no other before him and an indisputable infusion of the Monet personality stamps his paintings. Likewise there is a Titian "take" on reality that is not Rubens's, a Constable way of painting gray watery skies that is not Corot's, or again a Twombly way of rendering the four seasons that is nothing like Vivaldi's. This, then, should be where art's commitment to reality expires — on the evidence that no two artworks have ever been able to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.2 (2002) 239-259 [Access article in PDF] Original Sin and the Problem of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe Peter Harrison It is not the philosophy received from Adam that teaches these things; it is that received from the serpent; for since Original Sin, the mind of man is quite pagan. It is this philosophy that, together with the errors of the senses, made (...) men adore the sun, and that today is still the universal cause of the disorder of men's minds and the corruption of men's hearts. Nicolas Malebranche 1In his Éloge du Pere Malebranche, delivered to the Parisian Academy of Sciences on 22 April 1716, Bernard Fontenelle recounted the story of Nicolas Malebranche's somewhat controversial conversion to Cartesianism. When friends and colleagues had taken him to task over his new-found commitment to the doctrines of Descartes, Malebranche responded with this question: "Did Adam have the perfect science?" It was agreed that this was the common view. Malebranche responded that he, too, aspired to the perfect science, and that his quest for this knowledge could not be satisfied by following the historical or critical pursuits of his colleagues, but by adopting the procedures set out by Descartes. 2 For Malebranche, the Cartesian method offered a means of overcoming the limitations of the fallen intellectual faculties of Adam's seventeenth-century descendents, and thus of restoring the fabled encyclopedic knowledge of the first man. [End Page 239]Aspirations to recover the science of Adam provided a common motivation for a number of early-modern philosophical projects. Earlier in the seventeenth century Francis Bacon had famously observed in his Novum Organum (1620) that the human dominion over nature which Adam had lost at the Fall could be restored in some measure by the sciences: "For man by the fall fell at the same time from this state of innocency and from his dominion over creation." The moral losses of the human race were to be restored in some measure by "religion and faith"; Adam's lost knowledge, and the dominion which it made possible, by "arts and sciences." 3 Bacon's vision of a reconstructed knowledge of nature during the period which he regarded (somewhat prematurely) as "the last times" clearly played an important role in legitimizing the goals and methods of the new natural philosophy. Indeed the program of the Royal Society of London from its inception in 1660 explicitly relied upon a Baconian rhetoric of the restoration of that human knowledge and dominion over nature which Adam had once enjoyed.While historians such as Charles Webster have alluded to the ways in which the myth of an original perfect philosophy motivated projects for the advancement of learning in a rather general way, little attention has been paid to the manner in which early-modern views of the nature of the original fall from knowledge directly informed the methods of the new sciences, determined the scope of their enquiry, and provided ammunition for use against traditional learning. 4 Moreover, most commentators, following Webster's lead, have restricted their attention to Francis Bacon, and to the Baconian aspirations of subsequent reformers of knowledge in seventeenth-century England. In this paper I shall suggest that the biblical narrative of the Fall played a far more direct role in the development of early modern knowledge—both in England and on the Continent—than has often been assumed, and that competing strategies for the advancement of knowledge in the seventeenth century were closely related to different assessments of the Fall and of its impact upon the human mind. While confirmation of this claim would require a more comprehensive study than space here permits, this paper will set out a number of preliminary considerations which establish the plausibility of such a thesis, showing how the biblical narrative of the Fall directly informed the epistemological projects of the seventeenth century, and prompted various rationalist and empiricist solutions. [End Page 240] The Mind of Adam There was an almost universal consensus in the sixteenth... (shrink)

This essay investigates the development of seeing as an affective, political and potentially transformative practice across the course of John Kinsella’s poetic career. It analyses how seeing becomes a means for Kinsella to apprehend the relationship between self and environment and to consider how local-scale is tied to broader-scale change. At the same time, it traces Kinsella’s concern at the ways in which Western theories of vision shape and reinforce structures of power, particularly in terms of gendered and colonial (...) violence. Moving through and then past ekphrastic debates, I argue that Kinsella considers how poetry and art might, in their own ways, ethically engage with both the human and more-than-human and actively navigate and reflect upon states of connection. (shrink)

This book is a collection of essays in honor of Radoslav A. Tsanoff, Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Rice University for forty years. Besides a tribute to Tsanoff written by J. S. Fulton, there are ten essays written by distinguished philosophers, each considering a topic in his field of interest. Virgil Aldrich discusses the importance of language in an essay entitled "Self-Consciousness." An examination of the new in art and an attempt to explicate its value and rationale is (...) presented by Van Meter Ames; illustrative material is drawn from such sources as contemporary film, pop art and chance music. In "Social Science and Social Norms" Clifford Barrett discusses the relevance of facts and norms in systematic considerations of social scientists. C. P. Snow's concept of two cultures is examined by A. Cornelius Benjamin in "Philosophy and the Cultures." Other essays presented are "Philosophy and Common Sense" by George Boas, "Conscience and Conscientiousness" by A. Campbell Garnett, "Criteria for Ideas of God" by C. Hartshorne, and "Sovereignty and the Idea of Republic" by C. W. Hendel. Charles Morris examines the common themes of the pragmatic movement, discussing such fields as epistemology, axiology and cosmology, and such philosophers as Peirce, Dewey, Mead and Lewis. In the concluding essay G. R. Morrow discusses Plato's views about a God and the many gods of the Greek pantheon. This book is a loose collection of papers, lacking any single theme or determinate relation between the essays presented; each essay, however, is competently handled and is interesting in its own right.—E. M. (shrink)

Art interprets the visible world, physics charts its unseen workings--making the two realms seem completely opposed. But in Art & Physics, Leonard Shlain tracks their breakthroughs side by side throughout history to reveal an astonishing correlation of visions. From teh classical Greek sculptors to Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, and from Aristotle to Einstein, aritsts have foreshadowed the discoveries of scientists, such as when Money and Cezanne intuited the coming upheaval in physics that Einstein would initiate. In this lively and (...) colorful narrative, Leonard Shlain explores how artistic breakthroughs could have prefigured the visionary insights of physicists on so many occasions throughtout history. Provacative and original, Art & Physics is a seamless integration of the romance of art and the drama of science...and exhilarating history of ideas. (shrink)

Griselda Pollock provides concrete historical analyses of key moments in the formation of modern culture to reveal the sexual politics at the heart of modernist art, exploring the writings of Elizabeth Siddall, Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot.

We spent a wonderful morning in the van Gogh gallery in Amsterdam. Of course we knew all the paintings, we had seen them all in reproduction, and the building was more like a bank vault than a setting for art. But what art! At first sight how small and uniform the paintings were in reality: yet every blade of grass, every flower in a field, every olive tree, every vibration in the sky, every patch of colour, every brush stroke, testified (...) to life and to a life vibrating beneath the surface form. In a true sense, an artist inspired, an artist breaking convention, artistic and social, but nevertheless an artist transforming life with a vision of the enhancement of life, a vision inviting each one of us to look again at the natural forms around us, to feel the spirit or the gods dwelling in them, a vision of enchantment and of humanity in a disenchanted world. Art—painting—can, then, be a source of spiritual nourishment as Kant and Schiller and Ruskin in their different ways thought it should be. (shrink)

We spent a wonderful morning in the van Gogh gallery in Amsterdam. Of course we knew all the paintings, we had seen them all in reproduction, and the building was more like a bank vault than a setting for art. But what art! At first sight how small and uniform the paintings were in reality: yet every blade of grass, every flower in a field, every olive tree, every vibration in the sky, every patch of colour, every brush stroke, testified (...) to life and to a life vibrating beneath the surface form. In a true sense, an artist inspired, an artist breaking convention, artistic and social, but nevertheless an artist transforming life with a vision of the enhancement of life, a vision inviting each one of us to look again at the natural forms around us, to feel the spirit or the gods dwelling in them, a vision of enchantment and of humanity in a disenchanted world. Art—painting—can, then, be a source of spiritual nourishment as Kant and Schiller and Ruskin in their different ways thought it should be. (shrink)

Visual Agnosia is a comprehensive and up-to-date review of disorders of higher vision that relates these disorders to current conceptions of higher vision from cognitive science, illuminating both the neuropsychological disorders and the nature of normal visual object recognition.Brain damage can lead to selective problems with visual perception, including visual agnosia the inability to recognize objects even though elementary visual functions remain unimpaired. Such disorders are relatively rare, yet they provide a window onto how the normal brain might (...) accomplish the complex task of vision. Visual Agnosia reviews a century of case studies of higher-level visual deficits following brain damage, places them in the general context of current neuroscience, and draws relevant conclusions about the organization of normal visual processing. It is unique in drawing on research in cognitive psychology, computational vision, visual neurophysiology, and neuropsychology to interpret the agnosias and draw inferences from them about visual object recognition.Following a historical account of agnosia research, Visual Agnosia offers a taxonomy of a wide range of agnosia syndromes, describing and interpreting the syndromes in terms of the latest theoretical models of visual processing and ultimately bringing them to bear as evidence on a variety of questions in the study of higher vision.Martha J. Farah is Associate Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Visual Agnosia is included in the Issues in Biology of Language and Cognition series, edited by John Marshall. (shrink)

Behind the superficial obscurity of what fragments we have of Heraclitus' thought, Professor Kahn claims that it is possible to detect a systematic view of human existence, a theory of language which sees ambiguity as a device for the expression of multiple meaning, and a vision of human life and death within the larger order of nature. The fragments are presented here in a readable order; translation and commentary aim to make accessible the power and originality of a systematic (...) thinker and a great master of artistic prose. The commentary locates Heraclitus within the tradition of early Greek thought, but stresses the importance of his ideas for topical theories of language, literature and philosophy. (shrink)

This book analyzes contemporary visual art produced in the context of conflict and trauma from a range of countries, including Colombia, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Australia. It focuses on what makes visual language unique, arguing that the "affective" quality of art contributes to a new understanding of the experience of trauma and loss. By extending the concept of empathy, it also demonstrates how we might, through art, make connections with people in different parts of the world whose experiences differ (...) from our own. The book makes a distinct contribution to trauma studies, which has tended to concentrate on literary forms of expression. It also offers a sophisticated theoretical analysis of the operations of art, drawing on philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, but setting this within a postcolonial framework. _Empathic Vision_ will appeal to anyone interested in the role of culture in post-September 11 global politics. (shrink)

This essay is an attempt to reconcile the disturbing contradiction between the striving for order in nature and in man and the principle of entropy implicit in the second law of thermodynamics - between the tendency toward greater organization and the general trend of the material universe toward death and disorder.

This essay is an attempt to reconcile the disturbing contradiction between the striving for order in nature and in man and the principle of entropy implicit in the second law of thermodynamics - between the tendency toward greater organization and the general trend of the material universe toward death and disorder.

Downs, Stephen Review(s) of: Earthly visions: Theology and the challenges of art, by T.J. Gorringe, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 254, $55.00.

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)