Much art is committed to political causes. However, does art contribute something unique to political discourse, or does it merely reflect the insights of political science and political philosophy? Here I argue for indispensability of art to political discourse by building on the debate about artistic cognitivism, the view that art is a source of knowledge. Different artforms, I suggest, make available specific epistemic resources, which allow audiences to overcome epistemic obstacles that obtain in a given ideological situation. My goal (...) is to offer a general model for identifying cognitive advantages for artworks belonging to distinct artforms and genres, in a way that can account for each artwork’s historical and cultural specificity. More speculatively, however, my account also comments on the ancient struggle between philosophy and the arts as competing modes of persuasion, and expands our notion of legitimate political discourse to include a greater plurality of discursive genres. (shrink)

This paper argues for a realist position in the metaphysics of aesthetic properties. Realist positions about aesthetic properties are few and far between, though sometimes developed by analogy to realism about colours. By contrast, my position is based on a disanalogy between aesthetic properties and colours. Unlike colours, aesthetic properties are perceived as relatively unsteady properties: as powers that objects have to cause a certain experience in the observer. Following on from this observation, I develop a realist account of aesthetic (...) properties as causally efficient powers, analogous to properties like fragility or poisonousness. To show how such a view can be made ontologically respectable, I draw on recent ‘dispositionalist’ accounts of powers in philosophical metaphysics. I then offer two arguments in favour of this view. First, the view matches the phenomenology of aesthetic judgement. Second, the view offers an explanation of how it is that critics can demand agreement with their aesthetic judgements. (shrink)

The last twenty‐five years have seen a radical shift in the work of politically committed artists. No longer content to merely represent social reality, a new generation of artists has sought to change it, blending art with activism, social regeneration projects, and even violent political action. I assess how this form of contemporary art should lead us to rethink theories of artistic value and argue that these works make a convincing case for an often‐dismissed position, namely, the pragmatic view of (...) artistic value. However, the pragmatic view, when properly applied, sets the bar high indeed—art that tries to change society should be considered good art only when it succeeds in making a tangible difference. (shrink)

_An exploration of the relationship between contemporary art, politics, and activism, Artists Remake the World introduces readers to the political ambitions of contemporary art in the early twenty-first century and puts forward a new, wide-ranging account of art’s political potential. Surveying such innovations as evidence-driven art, socially engaged art, and ecological art, the book explores how artists have attempted to offer bold solutions to the world’s problems. Vid Simoniti offers original perspectives on contemporary art and its capacity as a (...) force for political and social change. At its best, he argues, contemporary art allows us to imagine utopias and presents us with hard truths, which mainstream political discourse cannot yet articulate. Covering subjects such as climate change, social justice, and global inequality, Simoniti introduces the reader to a host of visionary contemporary artists from across the globe, including Ai Weiwei, Olafur Eliasson, Wangechi Mutu, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, and Hito Steyerl. Offering a philosophy of contemporary art as an experimental branch of politics, the book equips the reader with a new critical apparatus for thinking about political art today. (shrink)

How can conceptual art contribute to political discourse? By the late 1960s, New York conceptual artists like Adrian Piper were faced with this difficult question. Conceptual artistic experiments seemed removed from the anti-war, anti-racist and feminist struggles, while personally many artists became increasingly involved in activism. I revisit the knotty relationship between art and politics through a close analysis of Piper's work in this period. Against the received view, I argue that Piper's early work was remarkably devoid of political concerns, (...) however, I also show how Piper’s later, anti-racist work, crucially derived from the rhetorical strategies, which she had developed earlier. Bridging art historical and philosophical approaches, this investigation culminates in a new philosophical view of the relationship between art and (anti-racist) political discourse: art emerges as a creative form of political rhetoric. (shrink)

What role do images play in philosophical persuasion? With the advent of bio-art in the 1990s, a new vista opened up for this age-old puzzle: the possibility of creating images through bioengineering of living matter. Here, I test the critical intentions of bio-artists by setting up a comparison between, on the one hand, bio-art, and on the other, bioethics, a philosophical discipline, which developed at around the same time as this new artform. I argue there is an aspect of ethics--'the (...) difficulty of reality' in Cora Diamond's coinage--which analytic bioethics obscures, and which art can help us come to terms with. I develop my argument by comparing the work of artists Eduardo Kac, Stelarc and Maja Smrekar, with utilitarian bioethics by philosophers like Julian Savulescu. Philosophical concepts of the living presence, the viral image and the pensive image are revisited through this inquiry. (shrink)

In Art Incorporated, you seek to debunk the myth of the artworld as autonomous of the market forces of global capitalism. Instead, you argue, works of art have become yet another commodity. However, one could say that works of art have always been commodities as well as objects of aesthetic appreciation. What makes the problem pertinent now, in the age of artists like Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst?

Art, as discussed in the third book of Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, plays a double role in his philosophical system. On one hand, beholding an object of aesthetic worth provides the spectator with a temporary cessation of the otherwise incessant suffering that Schopenhauer takes life to be; on the other, art creates an epistemological bridge between ourselves and the world as it really is: unlike science which only studies relations between things, contemplation of art leads to (...) knowledge of that which is “alone really essential to the world, the true content of its phenomena.” (WWR1: 184) It is this second aspect of Schopenhauer's aesthetics that is both appealing and curious: while Schopenhauer's aesthetics and epistemology are both rooted in his picture of the world as Will, which is (taken at face value) deeply counter-intuitive, it yet seems to me that by assigning epistemic value to art, he manages to capture the quality of profundity with which certain works of art strike us – a profundity that is accounted for neither by reference to mere enjoyment nor by reference to paraphrasable, propositional knowledge. (shrink)

Works of literature represent stories, characters, and events: these are the contents of a work. Often, the contents of literary works are fictional; however, it is just as characteristic of works of literature that these contents are narrated in a distinct style of writing, in an author’s distinct literary “voice.” In this paper, I consider whether works of literature might represent something over and above their fictional contents in virtue of their style alone and what consequences this might have for (...) our thinking about aesthetic education. Both of these concerns—with what works of art represent and what kind of knowledge they make available to us—have been central to recent analytic philosophy of art. While I.. (shrink)

The story of Andy Warhol is in many ways a story of an outsider breaking into the mainstream. Born into a working class immigrant family, queer, poor, and deeply self-conscious about his appearance, Warhol turned his fortunes around to become not only a wildly successful artist in the 1960s but one of the era’s arbiters of taste. His best-known dictum was that ‘in the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes’, although this was patently untrue of his own art. (...) Celebrities came and went, but his star shone for a long time and is now firmly fixed in the firmament of art history. (shrink)

Das deutsche Gesundheitswesen steht durch die schnell steigende Anzahl an CO- VID-19-Erkrankten vor erheblichen Herausforderungen. In dieser Krisensituation sind alle Beteiligten mit ethischen Fragen konfrontiert, beispielsweise nach gerech- ten Verteilungskriterien bei begrenzten Ressourcen und dem gesundheitlichen Schutz des Personals angesichts einer bisher nicht therapierbaren Erkrankung. Daher werden schon jetzt klinische und ambulante Ethikberatungsangebote verstärkt mit Anfragen nach Unterstützung konfrontiert. Wie können Ethikberater*innen Entscheidungen in der Krankenversorgung im Rahmen der COVID-19-Pandemie unterstützen? Welche Grenzen von Ethikberatung sind zu beachten? Bislang liegen hierzu (...) noch wenige praktische Erfahrungen vor. Angesichts der dynamischen Entwicklung erscheint es der Akademie für Ethik in der Medizin (AEM) wichtig, einen Diskurs über die angemessene Rolle der Ethikberatung bei der Bewältigung der vielfachen Heraus- forderungen durch die COVID-19-Pandemie zu führen und professionelle Hinweise zu geben. Mit dem vorliegenden Diskussionspapier möchte die AEM einen Beitrag zur Beantwortung wesentlicher Fragen leisten, die sich für die Ethikberatung in den verschiedenen Bereichen des Gesundheitswesens stellen. Sie regt an, diesen Dis- kurs weiter zu führen und hat ein Online-Forum (s. unten) eingerichtet, in dem Ethikberater*innen ihre Erfahrungen teilen und die professionelle Selbstreflexion der Ethikberatung in Pandemiezeiten mit Anregungen fördern können. (shrink)

Suzanne Lacy introduced the term ‘New Genre Public Art’ (NGPA) to refer to art practices that depart from those traditional of public art (such as installing works in parks and plazas) and focus instead on the direct engagement of artists with audiences to deal with pressing socio-political issues. In this paper, I argue that some works of NGPA should be valued for the intellectual value grounded in their artistic features, not dissimilarly to works of conceptual art. In developing my argument, (...) I take distance from Vid Simoniti’s recent account of ‘Socially Engaged Art’, offer a thorough analysis of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument (2002) and Kathrin Bohm’s and Stefan Saffer’s Mobile Porch (1999), and submit that both such works qualify as good works of NGPA. (shrink)

In the field of contemporary continental ontology, Speculative realist thinkers are now grappling with the genealogy of their ideas in the history of modern philosophy. The Speculative Realism movement prompted a debate, criticizing the predominant postmodernist orientation in philosophy, which located its origins in Kantian "correlationism" which supposedly ended the period of early modern naive realist metaphysics by showing that the mind and the outside world can only ever be understood as correlates. The debate over a new kind of realism (...) has attracted many supporters and critics. In order to refocus its specific interpretation of modern philosophy in general and of the Kantian gesture in particular, this volume brings together major authors working on contemporary ontology and historians of ideas. It underlines and illustrates the fact that contemporary continental philosophy is rediscovering its past in original ways by productively re-interpreting some of the key concepts of modern philosophy. The perspectives and accounts of the key concepts of the history of philosophy are different in the views of individual contributors, and sometimes radically so, yet the discussion between contemporary realists and their critics shows that the real battleground of new ideas lies not in developing the philosophical motifs of the end of the 20th century, but rather in rethinking the milestones of modern philosophy. (shrink)

Against recent criticisms of idealism coming from the camp of the so-called New Realists, this volume shows that there is (and always has been) more to idealism than mind-centered ontology. The chapters by a group of both leading and up-and-coming scholars show that idealism can be approached from a plethora of angles, both contemporary and historically inspired, and that this broader view is precisely what may save its reputation in the 21st century.

1. Svet -- 2. Preizkušanje meja izrekljivega.

Že od vsega začetka je dobro znano, da so se po padcu Troje Ahajci surovo znesli nad preživelimi Trojanci, samo proti dvema, Eneju in Antenorju, so se zaradi starega gostinskega prijateljstva in ker sta se zmeraj zavzemala za mir in vrnitev Helene, odpovedali slehernemu vojnemu pravu. Nato je po raznih nezgodah Antenor z množicoEnetov, ki so bili zaradi upora pregnani iz Paflagonije in so, ker so pred Trojo izgubili kralja Pilajmena, iskali voditelja in bivališče, prišel v najbolj notranji zaliv Jadranskega (...) morja. Eneti in Trojanci so pregnali Evganejce, ki so prebivali med morjem in Alpami, in zasedli njihovo ozemlje. Kraj, kjer so najprej stopili na kopno, se imenuje Troja in po njem so poimenovali Trojanski okraj. Vsemu ljudstvu je ime Veneti. (shrink)

The article challenges the first premise of?speculative realism?, according to which, with Kant, the contact with the outside world was lost. Instead, it will be shown that the possibility of realism received its major impulse from two grand figures of German Idealism, from Kant as a precursor of the Romantic period and from Hegel as its, albeit critical, philosophical culmination. Based on three possible relations of knowledge to its outside, three ontologies will be distinguished, the ontology of immediacy, stretching from (...) rationalists to the last empiricists, Kant?s ontology of totalization, and, finally, Hegel?s?ontology of release? or?de-totalization?. As opposed to Descartes?s thing being constantly doubted in its existence, as opposed to Malebranche?s occasion being invariably induced by God, as opposed to Leibniz?s monad being an immediate embodiment of an idea, as opposed to Berkeley?s object vanishing when not perceived, and as opposed to Hume?s world lacking necessity, Kant philosophically warranted a world that does not have to be perpetually verified and can, hence, exist devoid of ideas produced by God and outside the constancy of the human gaze. Kant secured the normal and necessary existence of the world behind our backs and procured us with the common-sense normality of the world, but it was only Hegel?s absolute subjectivism that granted us the first glimpses into the radical meaninglesness of the facticity. It was not until Hegel?s logic of indifference of the notion to its immediate content that an egress of the circle of Kant?s totalization was made possible. nema. (shrink)

As an alternative to speculative realism, this book claims that realism is not a stance that became impossible with Kant but instead represents a concomitant phenomenon of modern reason, however obscure. The realist stance can be claimed only at the precarious pinnacle of the dialectic of totalization and release, where the overarching activity of the subject switches into a mode of de-totalizing release of the world from the constraints of consciousness and language.

Simone Weil (1909-1943) was a defining figure of the twentieth century; a philosopher, Christian, resistance fighter, anarchist, feminist, labor activist and teacher. She was described by T. S. Eliot as "a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints," and by Albert Camus as "the only great spirit of our time." Originally published posthumously in two volumes, these newly reissued notebooks, are among the very few unedited personal writings of Weil's that still survive today. (...) Containing her thoughts on art, love, science, God and the meaning of life, they give context and meaning to Weil's famous works, revealing a unique philosophy in development and offering a rare private glimpse of her singular personality. (shrink)

Simone Weil is one of the most profound thinkers of the twentieth century. Her writings encompass an extraordinary breadth of subjects, including philosophy, religion, sociology, and politics. A political activist and resistance fighter, her accomplishments are even more astonishing in light of her death in 1943 at the age of thirty-four. Whilst Weil was concerned with deep philosophical questions - the nature of human thought and human faculties, the limits of language, and thought's contact with reality through mediation, science and (...) beauty - the full significance of her work has frequently been obscured by her categorization as a purely religious writer or Christian mystic. Simone Weil: Basic Writings is an expertly edited anthology of her most important writings, presenting Weil's philosophy as it relates to politics, the nature of work, human nature in its duality, necessity, beauty and goodness. D. K. Levy and Marina Barabas have translated all the extracts anew, including translations of important notes and references missing from existing English language editions of Weil's work. Following an extensive introduction by D. K. Levy which places Weil's life and thought in context, each section opens with a short introduction situating the chosen passages within Weil's oeuvre. Simone Weil: Basic Writings is an outstanding starting point for anyone seeking an introduction to Weil's philosophy, and also essential reading for students and scholars of Weil's thought in related disciplines. (shrink)

Gravity and Grace was the first ever publication by the remarkable thinker and activist, Simone Weil. In it Gustave Thibon, the priest to whom she had entrusted her notebooks before her untimely death, compiled in one remarkable volume a compendium of her writings that have become a source of spiritual guidance and wisdom for countless individuals.

"What is required if men and women are to feel at home in society and are to recover their vitality? Into wrestling with that question, Simone Weil put the very substance of her mind and temperament. The apparently solid edifices of our prepossessions fall down before her onslaught like ninepins, and she is as fertile and forthright in her positive suggestions . . . she can be relied upon to toss aside the superficial and to come to grips with the (...) essential and the profound." -- Time Literary Supplement. (shrink)

In Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks , Simone Weil discusses precursors to Christian religious ideas which can be found in ancient Greek mythology, literature and philosophy. She looks at evidence of "Christian" feelings in Greek literature, notably in Electra, Orestes, and Antigone , and in the Iliad , going on to examine God in Plato, and divine love in creation, as seen by the ancient Greeks.

The immediate and guiding aim of this book is to introduce the contemporary reader to the work and thought of Simone Weil.

Based on ten years of research, The Touch of the Past considers how historically traumatic events uniquely summon forgetting and remembrance. Within a specific focus on events of systemic mass violence, Roger Simon examines how testimonies of historic events influence learning as communities struggle with "difficult histories." The Touch of the Past is a serious and compelling contribution to research in education, historical consciousness, and memory/trauma studies.

In 1971, Ivan Illich wrote that school had become the world religion of a modernized proletariat. Without undoing the power of human interaction undergirding it, understanding how we learn is thus vital to undoing the institutional power of the West – of ‘deschooling’ society. Responding to the conflict between secular and religious schemes of education, the article investigates the ways in which the ‘atheist’ Gilles Deleuze and the ‘mystic’ Simone Weil both employed related stratagems from Stoic philosophy to critique ‘schooling’ (...) construed as the acquisition of, rather than participation in, knowledge. Through a critical reading of the differences between Deleuze's and Weil’s ideas of education, the argument suggests that these differences run aground on the fundamental opposition to a common adversary: that normative pedagogy which trivializes the need to re-school, as well as de-school, society. (shrink)

Critical discussion on definition of the work "Mithya" in the Advaitabrahamasiddhi of Madhusudanasarasvati.

You omega know something when you know it, and know that you know it, and know that you know that you know it, and so on. This paper first argues that omega knowledge matters, in the sense that it is required for rational assertion, action, inquiry, and belief. The paper argues that existing accounts of omega knowledge face major challenges. One account is skeptical, claiming that we have no omega knowledge of any ordinary claims about the world. Another account embraces (...) the KK thesis, and identifies knowledge with omega knowledge. This position faces counterexamples, and struggles to make sense of inexact knowledge. The paper then develops a new account of knowledge, by proposing the principle of Reflective Luminosity: if you know that you know something, then you omega know it. I argue that Reflective Luminosity allows for omega knowledge while avoiding the problems for KK. (shrink)

We explore the question of whether sustained rational disagreement is possible from a broadly Bayesian perspective. The setting is one where agents update on the same information, with special consideration being given to the case of uncertain information. The classical merging of opinions theorem of Blackwell and Dubins shows when updated beliefs come and stay closer for Bayesian conditioning. We extend this result to a type of Jeffrey conditioning where agents update on evidence that is uncertain but solid (hard Jeffrey (...) shifts). However, merging of beliefs does not generally hold for Jeffrey conditioning on evidence that is fluid (soft Jeffrey shifts, Field shifts). Several theorems on the asymptotic behavior of subjective probabilities are proven. Taken together they show that while a consensus nearly always emerges in important special cases, sustained rational disagreement can be expected in many other situations. (shrink)

Is the brain really a computer? In particular, is our intelligence a computational achievement: is it because our brains are computers that we get on in the world as well as we do? In this paper I will evaluate an ambitious new argument to the contrary, developed in Landgrebe and Smith (2021a, 2022). Landgrebe and Smith begin with the fact that many dynamical systems in the world are difficult or impossible to model accurately (inter alia, because it is intractable to (...) find exact solutions to the differential equations that describe them—meaning we have to approximate—but at the same time they are such that small differences in starting conditions lead to big differences in final conditions, thwarting accurate approximation). Yet we manage to survive and thrive in a world full of such systems. Landgrebe and Smith argue from these premises that it is not because our brains are computers that we get on as well as we do: instead it is because of the various ways that we dynamically couple with such systems, these couplings themselves impossible to model well enough to emulate in silico. Landgrebe and Smith thus defend a dynamical systems model in the lineage of Gibson (1979), Van Gelder (1995), and Thompson (2007), though their focus is on decisively refuting the computationalist alternatives rather than developing the positive account. Here I will defend the claim that human intelligence is genuinely computational (and that whole brain emulation and others forms of AGI may be possible) against this argument. (shrink)

Philosophe politique et intellectuel engage dans la vie des idées aux Etats-Unis comme dans le monde, Michael Walzer est l'un des penseurs de la société parmi les plus stimulants a l'époque contemporaine. Son oeuvre défriche des pistes nouvelles de réflexion dans les domaines du politique, de la justice sociale, de la morale ou de l'identité culturelle. En même temps, Walzer, dont la pensée s'est forgée lors des luttes pour l'égalité des droits civiques aux USA et contre la guerre du Vietnam (...) dans les années 1960, poursuit une activité féconde d'animation du débat public à travers sa revue Dissent. Dans cet essai, Simon Wuhl a souhaité éclairer une autre dimension de la pensée de Michael Walzer : la relation étroite avec la pensée juive, dont les potentialités d'universalisation sont une référence majeure dans la plupart de ses écrits. Qu'elle s'exprime ouvertement comme dans son article emblématique sur " Les deux universalismes ", ou en arrière-fond comme dans son livre plus théorique sur les Sphères de justice, l'empreinte du judaïsme est toujours présente dans son oeuvre pour éclairer les grandes questions de société. Faisant par ailleurs retour, dans certains de ses travaux, sur les textes de base du judaïsme, Walzer mobilise les ressources méthodologiques des sciences humaines pour les soumettre à une relecture critique. (shrink)

Existing indexing systems used to arrange philosophical works have been shown to misrepresent the discipline in ways that reflect and perpetuate exclusionary attitudes within it. In recent years, there has been a great deal of effort to challenge those attitudes and to revise them. But as the discipline moves toward greater equality and inclusivity, the way it has indexed its work has unfortunately not. To course correct, we identify in this article some of the specific changes that are needed within (...) current indexing systems and propose a new model that could embody them. We use the Diversity Reading List in Philosophy as a case study and PhilPapers as a basis for comparison. The model we propose not only represents the discipline in a more inclusive and fair way, but it is also efficient, easy to use or implement, and adaptable for a variety of contexts. (shrink)