A well-known feature of great works of art is their power to “live on” long after the moment of their creation – to remain vital and alive long after the culture in which they were born has passed into history. This power to transcend time is common to works as various as the plays of Shakespeare, the Victory of Samothrace, and many works from early cultures such as Egypt and Buddhist India which we often encounter today in major art museums. (...) -/- What is the nature of this power and how does it operate? The Renaissance decided that works of art are timeless, “immortal” – immune from historical change – and this idea has exerted a profound influence on Western thought. But do we still believe it? Does it match our experience of art today which includes so many works from the past that spent long periods in oblivion and have clearly not been immune from historical change? -/- This book examines the seemingly miraculous power of art to transcend time – an issue widely neglected in contemporary aesthetics. Tracing the history of the question from the Renaissance onwards, and discussing thinkers as various as David Hume, Hegel, Marx, Walter Benjamin, Sartre, and Theodor Adorno, the book argues that art transcends time through a process of metamorphosis – a thesis first developed by the French art theorist, André Malraux. The implications of this idea pose major challenges for traditional thinking about the nature of art. (shrink)
Metaethics, understood as a distinct branch of ethics, is often traced to G. E. Moore's 1903 classic, Principia Ethica. Whereas normative ethics is concerned to answer first-order moral questions about what is good and bad, right and wrong, metaethics is concerned to answer second-order non-moral questions about the semantics, metaphysics, and epistemology of moral thought and discourse. Moore has continued to exert a powerful influence, and the sixteen essays here (most of them specially written for the volume) represent the most (...) up-to-date work in metaethics after, and in some cases directly inspired by, the work of Moore. Contributors include Robert Audi, Stephen Barker, Paul Bloomfield, Panayot Butchvarvov, Jonathan Dancy, Stephen Darwall, Jamie Dreier, Allan Gibbard, Brad Hooker, Terry Horgan, Connie Rosati, Russ Shafer-Landau, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Michael Smith, Philip Stratton-Lake, Sigrun Svavarsdottir, Mark Timmons, and Judith Jarvis Thompson. (shrink)
For over thirty years, Robert Audi has produced important work in ethics, epistemology, and the theory of action. This volume features thirteen new critical essays on Audi by a distinguished group of authors: Fred Adams, William Alston, Laurence BonJour, Roger Crisp, Elizabeth Fricker, Bernard Gert, Thomas Hurka, Hugh McCann, Al Mele, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Raimo Tuomela, Candace Vogler, and Timothy Williamson. Audi's introductory essay provides a thematic overview interconnecting his views in ethics, epistemology, and philosophy of action. The volume concludes (...) with his comprehensive response essay that yields an illuminating dialog with all his critics and often extends his previous work. (shrink)
There was a brief inaugural session of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness during the Psychonomic Society Conference in Los Angeles in November 1995, but the first full conference of the Association was held this June in the very pleasant surroundings of the Claremont Colleges. Being at this conference was very different from being at Tucson II the previous year. This was a less ballyhooed, more intimate event, maybe less exciting, and less intellectually eclectic, but also perhaps more (...) conducive to serious scientific exchange. Certainly the roster of speakers was replete with luminaries of the consciousness studies movement, and highly respected names from psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy: Christof Koch, Bernard Baars, Ned Block, Philip Merikle, Daniel Schacter, Larry Jacoby, Walter Freeman, Valerie Hardcastle, both Churchlands, Melvyn Goodale, Owen Flanagan . . . to unfairly pick out just a few. (shrink)
After all, Lee is Professor of Economics and holder of the Bernard B. and Eugenia A. Ramsey Chair of Private Enterprise Economics at the University of Georgia. In addition to holding a named chair in “Private Enterprise Economics,” he is also the former president of the Association of Private Enterprise Educators, a group devoted to not only the study of markets, private enterprise, property rights, and capitalism, but one which is largely, but not exclusively, made up of academic economists (...) with strong free market views and strong skepticism of government actions (it started many years ago as an association of free enterprise chair holders but has expanded to include anyone with a strong free enterprise perspective).2 As well, Lee has been associated with another group that claims a market orientation, the Center for Study of Public Choice, both at George Mason University and at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State.. (shrink)
