'Object' and 'criterion of identity' are philosophical terms of art whose application lies at a considerable theoretical remove from the surface phenomena of everyday linguistic usage. This partly explains their highly controversial status, for their point of application lies precisely where the concerns of linguists and philosophers of language merge with those of metaphysicians. This chapter explains the possession of determinate identity‐conditions. It argues that the distinction between 'abstract' and 'concrete' objects is itself a highly controversial one, and although it (...) has indeed been argued that this distinction turns ultimately upon differences between the criteria of identity governing objects of these two broad categories. It examines the role which criteria of identity play in our talk about objects of the least controversial varieties. The chapter concerns the problem of identity over time and the paradoxes to which identity criteria often appear to give rise when time is brought into the picture. (shrink)

Scholarly translations of selections from the original classical Chinese texts and correcting or re-interpreting Sadler's 1944 translations as required for correctness and clarity.Scholarly annotations to Sadler's translation, including; discussion and explanation of textual content of classical texts, including elaborations on meanings, philosophical and biographical information; drawing linkages between the original textual content with strategic and military developments and events in the warfare and politics of East Asia in the recent historical period; discussion on points of the field of strategic studies.

The core concept of ‘the human’ that anchors so many humanities disciplines – history, literature, art history, philosophy, religion, anthropology, political theory, and others – issues from a very particular modern European definition of Man ‘over-represented’ as the human. The history of modernity and of modern disciplinary knowledge formations are, in this sense, a history of modern European forms monopolizing the definition of the human and placing other variations at a distance from the human. This article is an interdisciplinary research (...) that decenters Man-as-human as the subject/object of inquiry, and proposes a relational analytic that reframes established orthodoxies of area, geography, history and temporality. It also involves new readings of traditional archives, finding alternative repositories and practices of knowledge and collection to radically redistribute our ways of understanding the meaning of the human. (shrink)

That the palliatae of Plautus and Terence, besides purporting to depict Greek life, were in general adaptations of Greek plays has always been known. Statements in the prologues of the Latin plays and by other ancient authors left no room for doubt about this, while allowing the possibility of some exceptions. The question of the relationship of the Latin plays to their Greek models was first seriously addressed in the nineteenth century, mainly by German scholars, under the stimulus of Romantic (...) criticism which attached paramount importance to originality in art. Since then the question has been constantly debated, often with acrimony, and to this day very different answers to it continue to be given. Yet the question is obviously important, both for those who would measure the artistic achievement of the Latin dramatists and for those who would use the plays to document aspects of Greek or Roman life. It is not disputed that Plautus' plays contain many Roman allusions and Latin puns which cannot have been derived from any Greek model and must be attributed to the Roman adapter. What is disputed is whether this overt Romanization is merely a superficial veneer overlaid on fundamentally Greek structures or whether Plautus made more radical changes to the structure as well as the spirit of his models. (shrink)

First published in 1930, this book presents an imagined account of conversation between Plato and ‘A Modern Young Man’. In the first part, political and social institutions are considered and property, forms of government, socialism, the control of population, war and education, are discussed. The second part examines the idea of real Goods including the concepts of truth, art and love. In this work, the author sees Plato reaffirming his belief that real Goods come from some higher world, which it (...) is the destiny of the spirits to pursue. (shrink)

Philosophers and scientists have recently been showing renewed interest in dualistic conceptions of the human mind, owing to growing acknowledgment of the failings of materialism and reductionism in contemporary philosophical and scientific thought. This book presents a state-of-the-art overview of current developments in this exciting new area of interdisciplinary collaboration, and will be indispensable reading for all researchers and students in this field.

First published in 1930, this book presents an imagined account of conversation between Plato and ‘A Modern Young Man’. In the first part, political and social institutions are considered and property, forms of government, socialism, the control of population, war and education, are discussed. The second part examines the idea of real Goods including the concepts of truth, art and love. In this work, the author sees Plato reaffirming his belief that real Goods come from some higher world, which it (...) is the destiny of the spirits to pursue. (shrink)

First published in 1930, this book presents an imagined account of conversation between Plato and ‘A Modern Young Man’. In the first part, political and social institutions are considered and property, forms of government, socialism, the control of population, war and education, are discussed. The second part examines the idea of real Goods including the concepts of truth, art and love. In this work, the author sees Plato reaffirming his belief that real Goods come from some higher world, which it (...) is the destiny of the spirits to pursue. (shrink)

Zwischen der späten Weimarer Republik und der frühen Bundesrepublik wurde der Begriff ›Humanismus‹ in der Publizistik so oft verwendet wie nie zuvor. Intellektuelle aus unterschiedlichen Milieus verstehen den Zusammenbruch der Weimarer Demokratie und den Nationalsozialismus nicht allein als politisch-soziale Krise, sondern als Krise der Kultur. Die Berufung auf den Humanismus dient dabei oft als eine Art ›Bollwerk‹ gegen den ›Biologismus‹ und den als ›Nihilismus‹ kritisierten Werterelativismus der Moderne. Zugleich wird der klassisch-idealistische Humanismus selbst als krisenhaft und revisionsbedürftig angesehen, woraus sich (...) die Forderung nach einem neuen Humanismus ergibt. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes rekonstruieren aus interdisziplinärer – v.a. literatur- und philosophiegeschichtlicher – Perspektive verschiedene Humanismus-Konzepte, die in den 1930er und 1940er Jahren kursieren, sowie die zeitgenössische Humanismus-Kritik. Untersucht werden u.a. Varianten einer intellektuellen Berufung auf die Antike und ›Goethezeit‹, das Konzept des ›Dritten Humanismus‹, die Humanismus-Kritik Heideggers, Gehlens und Plessners, die Exildebatte um den ›sozialistischen Humanismus‹, Thomas Manns ›neuer Humanismus‹ sowie die juristische Diskussion um den Menschenwürde-Artikel im Grundgesetz der Bundesrepublik. (shrink)

What distinguishes low, middle, and high art? In this article, I give an ameliorative analysis of these concepts. On what I call the Capacity View, the distinction between low, middle, and high art depends on the relation between an artwork’s perceiver (specifically her aesthetic responsive capacities) and the perceived artwork. Though the Capacity View may not align perfectly with folk usage, the view is worth our attention due to three attractive upshots. First, it explains how an artwork’s status level can (...) be elevated or lowered over time and why biases can lead to mistaken judgments about such statuses. Second, it sheds light on the idea of cultural inheritance and why certain forms of aesthetic deference may be justified. Finally, it explains how high, middle, and low art each make distinctive contributions to the good life. (shrink)

A framework for thinking about the social role of art is developed. Using economic ideas, art is depicted as a capital asset – something that provides insight tosociety over some period of time. The idea of thinking about art as an asset enables a concrete distinction between high and low art, as well as the possibility that art can “race to the bottom,” with low art displacing high art, with the concomitant deleterious consequences.

We propose a novel type of low distortion radial embedding which focuses on one specific entity and its closest neighbors. Our embedding preserves near-exact distances to the focus entity and aims to minimize distortion between the other entities. We present an interactive exploration tool SolarView which places the focus entity at the center of a "solar system" and embeds its neighbors guided by concentric circles. SolarView provides an implementation of our novel embedding and several state-of-the-art dimensionality reduction and embedding techniques, (...) which we adapted to our setting in various ways. We experimentally evaluated our embedding and compared it to these state-of-the-art techniques. The results show that our embedding competes with these techniques and achieves low distortion in practice. Our method performs particularly well when the visualization, and hence the embedding, adheres to the solar system design principle of our application. Nonetheless - as with all dimensionality reduction techniques - the distortion may be high. We leverage interaction techniques to give clear visual cues that allow users to accurately judge distortion. We illustrate the use of SolarView by exploring the high-dimensional metric space of bibliographic entity similarities. (shrink)

Introduction : low theory -- Animating revolt and revolting animation -- Dude, where's my phallus? forgetting, losing, looping -- The queer art of failure -- Shadow feminisms : queer negativity and radical passivity -- "The killer in me is the killer in you" : homosexuality and fascism -- Animating failure: ending, fleeing, surviving.

Neither art nor philosophy was kind to beauty during the twentieth century. Much modern art disdains beauty, and many philosophers deeply suspect that beauty merely paints over or distracts us from horrors. Intellectuals consigned the passions of beauty to the margins, replacing them with the anemic and rarefied alternative, "aesthetic pleasure." In Only a Promise of Happiness, Alexander Nehamas reclaims beauty from its critics. He seeks to restore its place in art, to reestablish the connections among art, beauty, and desire, (...) and to show that the values of art, independently of their moral worth, are equally crucial to the rest of life.Nehamas makes his case with characteristic grace, sensitivity, and philosophical depth, supporting his arguments with searching studies of art and literature, high and low, from Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Manet's Olympia to television. Throughout, the discussion of artworks is generously illustrated.Beauty, Nehamas concludes, may depend on appearance, but this does not make it superficial. The perception of beauty manifests a hope that life would be better if the object of beauty were part of it. This hope can shape and direct our lives for better or worse. We may discover misery in pursuit of beauty, or find that beauty offers no more than a tantalizing promise of happiness. But if beauty is always dangerous, it is also a pressing human concern that we must seek to understand, and not suppress. (shrink)

Machine learning (ML) is increasingly used to enhance production systems and meet the requirements of a rapidly evolving manufacturing environment. Compared to larger companies, however, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) lack in terms of resources, available data and skills, which impedes the potential adoption of analytics solutions. This paper proposes a preliminary yet general approach to identify low-cost analytics solutions for manufacturing SMEs, with particular emphasis on ML. The initial studies seem to suggest that, contrarily to what is usually thought (...) at first glance, SMEs seldom need digital solutions that use advanced ML algorithms which require extensive data preparation, laborious parameter tuning and a comprehensive understanding of the underlying problem. If an analytics solution does require learning capabilities, a ‘simple solution’, which we will characterise in this paper, should be sufficient. (shrink)

The common assumption is that works of popular are less serious, less artistically valuable. Popular art is driven by a profit motive; real art, high art, is produced for loftier goals, such as aesthetic appreciation. Further, popular art is formulaic and gravitates toward the lowest common denominator. High art is innovative. It enriches, elevates, and inspires; popular art just entertains. Worse, popular art inculcates cultural biases. It is a corporate tool of ideological indoctrination, making contingent social and economic arrangements seem (...) necessary. Or so the common view holds. In light of these common assumptions, we must ask just what marks the distinction between high art and popular art? Is there really any important difference at all? Is there reason to think that popular is by its very nature aesthetically inferior to high art? In this article, I consider some of the prominent answers to these questions. The discussion is organized around questions concerning two general topics: (1) the nature of popular art, and (2) the putative aesthetic deficiencies of popular art. (shrink)

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) was a Mexican artist who is remembered for her self-portraits, pain and passion, and bold, vibrant colors. This work aims to use her life story and her artistic production in a longitudinal study to examine with quantitative tools the effects of physical and emotional pain (rage) on artistic expression. Kahlo suffered from polio as a child, was involved in a bus accident as a teenager where she suffered multiple fractures of her spine and had 30 operations throughout (...) her lifetime. She also had a tempestuous relationship with her painter husband, Diego Rivera. Her physical and personal troubles however became the texture of her vivid visual vocabulary—usually expressed through the depiction of Mexican and indigenous culture or the female experience and form. We applied color analysis to a series of Frida's self-portraits and revealed a very strong association of physical pain and emotional rage with low wavelength colors (red and yellow), indicating that the expression of her ailments was, consciously or not, achieved by increasing the perceived luminance of the canvas. Further quantitative analysis that used the fractal dimension identified “The broken column” as the portrait with higher compositional complexity, which matches previous critical acclaim of this portrait as the climax of her art. These results confirm the ability of color analysis to extract emotional and cognitive features from artistic work. We suggest that these tools could be used as markers to support artistic and creative interventions in mental health. (shrink)

Tribal art , also termed ethnographic art or, in an expression seldom used today, primitive art , is the art of small-scale nonliterate societies. Some of the traditional artifacts to which the term refers may not be art in any obvious European sense, and many of the cultures where they occur may not strictly-speaking be tribal in social structure. The rubric nevertheless persists because the arts produced by small-scale cultures share significant elements in common. The tribal arts which have gained (...) the greatest attention in the West come from the Americas (such as the Inuit, Southwest and Plains Indians, and isolated areas of Central and South America), Oceania (including Melanesia and Australia, Polynesia and New Zealand), and Subsaharan Africa. The characteristics which define a small-scale, traditional society are (1) isolation, politically and economically, from civilizations of Europe, North Africa, or Asia, (2) oral traditions in the absence of literacy, (3) small, independent population groupings, usually in villages of no more than a few hundred souls who live a life of face-to-face social interaction and informal social control, (4) a low level of labor/craft specialization, (5) subsistence by hunting, fishing, and gathering and/or small-scale agriculture, (6) little technology beyond hand tools, and that often of stone rather than metal, and (7) slow rates of cultural change prior to European contact. Of this list, small size, lack of written language, and isolation from large civilizations are the essential features of societies whose art is discussed here. (shrink)

La distinción entre arte culto y arte popular, como un caso particular de la distinción entre alta cultura y cultura popular, forma parte de los principios de la teoría estética. En este artículo tratamos de ver cuál es el fundamento de la misma, así como de analizar el trasfondo estético de las críticas al arte popular, para, desde ahí, emprender una defensa del mismo en el ámbito de la teoría del arte, con la intención de situarla en paridad con el (...) arte culto, es decir, como un producto que puede no sólo satisfacer los criterios de la tradición estética, sino que, además, puede enriquecer el concepto tradicional de lo estético y aspirar al mismo valor que el arte consagrado. (shrink)

Mental disorders such as depression and anxiety are increasingly common. Yet there are too few specialists to offer help to everyone, and negative attitudes to psychological problems and their treatment discourage people from seeking it. As a result, many people never receive help for these problems. The Oxford Guide to Low Intensity CBT Interventions marks a turning point in the delivery of psychological treatments for people with depression and anxiety. Until recently, the only form of psychological intervention available for patients (...) with depression and anxiety was traditional one-to-one 60 minute session therapy - usually with private practitioners for those patients who could afford it. Now Low Intensity CBT Interventions are starting to revolutionize mental health care by providing cost effective psychological therapies which can reach the vast numbers of people with depression and anxiety who did not previously have access to effective psychological treatment. The Oxford Guide to Low Intensity CBT Interventions is the first book to provide a comprehensive guide to Low Intensity CBT interventions. It brings together researchers and clinicians from around the world who have led the way in developing evidence-based low intensity CBT treatments. It charts the plethora of new ways that evidence-based low intensity CBT can be delivered: for instance, guided self-help, groups, advice clinics, brief GP interventions, internet-based or book-based treatment and prevention programs, with supported provided by phone, email, internet, sms or face-to-face. These new treatments require new forms of service delivery, new ways of communicating, new forms of training and supervision, and the development of new workforces. They involve changing systems and routine practice, and adapting interventions to particular community contexts. The Oxford Guide to Low Intensity CBT Interventions is a state-of-the-art handbook, providing low intensity practitioners, supervisors, managers commissioners of services and politicians with a practical, easy-to-read guide - indispensible reading for those who wish to understand and anticipate future directions in health service provision and to broaden access to cost-effective evidence-based psychological therapies. (shrink)

There are good, even if inconclusive, reasons to think that cognitive penetration of perception occurs: that cognitive states like belief causally affect, in a relatively direct way, the contents of perceptual experience. The supposed importance of – indeed as it is suggested here, what is definitive of – this possible phenomenon is that it would result in important epistemic and scientific consequences. One interesting and intuitive consequence entirely unremarked in the extant literature concerns the perception of art. Intuition has it (...) that knowledge about art changes how one aesthetically evaluates artworks. A profound explanation of this intuitive fact is that perceptual experiences vary with artistic expertise. Cognitive penetration provides an explanatory mechanism for this latter effect. What one knows or otherwise thinks about art may affect, in one of two ways sketched below, how one perceives art. Differences in aesthetic evaluation may follow, either because high-level aesthetic properties can be perceptually represented or because they causally depend on low-level perceptible properties. All of this lends credence to the hypothesis that the expert better judges art because she better perceives art. And she better perceives art because she better knows art. (shrink)

Improvements in the health capital of citizens are central to the development of countries. By exploiting steep decreases in antiretroviral drug prices and the subsequent increases in antiretroviral therapy (ART) coverage, we test whether the resulting improvements in the health of the population are associated with the prevalence of entrepreneurial activity and whether entrepreneurial activity strengthens the relationship between ART coverage and a country’s development. Drawing on a sample of 87 low- and middle-income countries (2006–2019), we find that a 1% (...) increase in ART coverage is associated with a 1.5% increase in the number of newly registered limited liability firms; however, there is no significant relationship with (male or female) self-employment. Higher ART coverage is particularly associated with development—as proxied by gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and the Human Development Index—in countries with low levels of new business formation and high proportions of self-employment. (shrink)

As the planet’s largest ecosystem, oceans stabilise climate, produce oxygen, store CO2 and host unfathomable biodiversity at a deep time-scale. In recent decades, scientific assessments have indicated that the oceans are seriously degraded to the detriment of most near-future societies. Human-induced impacts range from climate change, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, eutrophication and marine pollution to local degradation of marine and coastal environments. Such environmental violence takes form of both ‘spectacular’ events, like oil spills and ‘slow violence’, occurring gradually and (...) out of sight. The purpose of this paper is to show four cases of coastal and marine forms of slow violence and to provide counter-accounts of how to reinvent our consumer imaginary at such locations, as well as to develop what is here referred to as ‘low-trophic theory,’ a situated ethical stance that attends to entanglements of consumption, food, violence, environmental adaptability and more-than-human care from the co-existential perspective of multispecies ethics. We combine field-philosophical case studies with insights from marine science, environmental art and cultural practices in the Baltic and North Sea region and feminist posthumanities. The paper shows that the oceanic imaginary is not a unified place, but rather, a set of forces, which requires renewed ethical approaches, conceptual inventiveness and practical creativity. Based on the case studies and examples presented, the authors conclude that the consideration of more-than-human ethical perspectives, provided by environmental arts and humanities is crucial for both research on nature and space, and for the flourishing of local multispecies communities. This paper thus inaugurates thinking and practice along the proposed here ethical stance of low-trophic theory, developed it along the methodological lines of feminist environmental posthumanities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Pragmatist Aesthetics and New Visions of the Contemporary Art Museum:The Tate Modern and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary ArtAngela Marsh (bio)John Dewey mandated the repositioning of our experience of art within the realm of the everyday, and recognized the importance of art objects principally with regard to how they operate within an experience as "carriers of meaning."1 In this quote from Art as Experience, Dewey illustrates the segue between (...) art and the perceiver, and his belief that within the profound art experience, lived dichotomies are healed:In art as an experience, actuality and possibility or ideality, the new and the old, objective material and personal response, the individual and the universal, surface and depth, sense and meaning, are integrated in an experience in which they are all transfigured from the significance that belongs to them when isolated in reflection.2Although the ephemeral nature of Dewey's definition of art-as-experience — hinged upon immediacy and the subjective heuristics of the perceiver — may seem difficult to capture and apply, the practicality of the concept, Richard Shusterman argues, lies in its "transformative potential," as a way to reconceive the place of art and its function in our world:Defining art as experience, I argue, also has value in widening the realmof art by challenging the rigid definition between art and action that is supported by definitions that define art as mimesis, poiesis, or the narrow practice as defined by the institutional art world. In other words, I argue that Dewey's definition of art as experience has a very fruitful transformational potential.3By defining art as experience, Dewey also sought to dissolve the binary structures of aesthetic rifts: art and life, high art and low art, body and mind, subject and object, self and world, emphasizing the holistic action in our engagement with art.4 But according to Dewey, the divisor of art from life and thus to blame for the aesthetic barrenness of our lived reality is the museum institution, as Shusterman describes: [End Page 91]The compartmentalization and spiritualization of art as an elevated "separate realm" set "upon a far-off pedestal," divorced from the materials and aims of other human effort, has removed art from the lives of most of us, and thus impoverished the aesthetic quality of our lives.(PA, 19)However, we must keep in mind that Art as Experience was published in 1934. Today, new approaches towards encounter and engagement within public museums are taking form and gaining momentum, with unprecedented directorial visions and mandates designed to nurture and make accessible art-based experiences among diverse audiences — where art and life can meet via multiple approaches. Theoretical synchronicities between pragmatist approaches to aesthetics and fruitful museum experiences can be suggested upon consideration of various innovative programs and approaches initiated at the Tate Modern in London and the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. The overwhelming success of both venues could signify a reengagement of the general public with contemporary art, fed by "democratic," participatory approaches to exhibiting and programming art that make the museum more accessible to the various mixed publics it serves. In light of these new museological developments, Dewey's polemic oppositions between his conceptualizations of the museum experience and "art-as-experience" should be reexamined and possibly redefined.Dewey was entirely opposed to the concept of "art for art's sake." By exonerating art of any functional value — deeming it "fine" — art was elevated to a position separate from life, and thus rendered impotent to effect a lived aesthetic experience (which is how, Dewey would argue, the arts function most powerfully — as the purveyors of heightened experience). As Shusterman describes:The underlying motive for such attempts to purify art from any functionality was not to denigrate it as worthlessly useless, but to place its worth apart from and above the realm of instrumental value...and this freedom from use would be its defining and ennobling feature.(PA, 9)Dewey (and Shusterman) thus maintained that the very power construct that put the "fine" in art did so by removing the aspect of function from it. As previously stated, Dewey blamed museum institutions for removing art from its... (shrink)

Marcel Duchamp is often viewed as an "artist-engineer-scientist," a kind of rationalist who relied heavily on the ideas of the French mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré. Yet a complete portrait of Duchamp and his multiple influences draws a different picture. In his _3 Standard Stoppages_ (1913-1914), a work that uses chance as an artistic medium, we see how far Duchamp subverted scientism in favor of a radical individualistic aesthetic and experimental vision. Unlike the Dadaists, Duchamp did more than dismiss or (...) negate the authority of science. He pushed scientific rationalism to the point where its claims broke down and alternative truths were allowed to emerge. With humor and irony, Duchamp undertook a method of artistic research, reflection, and visual thought that focused less on beauty than on the notion of the "possible." He became a passionate advocate of the power of invention and thinking things that had never been thought before. The _3 Standard Stoppages_ is the ultimate realization of the play between chance and dimension, visibility and invisibility, high and low art, and art and anti-art. Situating Duchamp firmly within the literature and philosophy of his time, Herbert Molderings recaptures the spirit of a frequently misread artist-and his thrilling aesthetic of chance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Pragmatist Aesthetics and New Visions of the Contemporary Art Museum:The Tate Modern and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary ArtAngela Marsh (bio)John Dewey mandated the repositioning of our experience of art within the realm of the everyday, and recognized the importance of art objects principally with regard to how they operate within an experience as "carriers of meaning."1 In this quote from Art as Experience, Dewey illustrates the segue between (...) art and the perceiver, and his belief that within the profound art experience, lived dichotomies are healed:In art as an experience, actuality and possibility or ideality, the new and the old, objective material and personal response, the individual and the universal, surface and depth, sense and meaning, are integrated in an experience in which they are all transfigured from the significance that belongs to them when isolated in reflection.2Although the ephemeral nature of Dewey's definition of art-as-experience — hinged upon immediacy and the subjective heuristics of the perceiver — may seem difficult to capture and apply, the practicality of the concept, Richard Shusterman argues, lies in its "transformative potential," as a way to reconceive the place of art and its function in our world:Defining art as experience, I argue, also has value in widening the realmof art by challenging the rigid definition between art and action that is supported by definitions that define art as mimesis, poiesis, or the narrow practice as defined by the institutional art world. In other words, I argue that Dewey's definition of art as experience has a very fruitful transformational potential.3By defining art as experience, Dewey also sought to dissolve the binary structures of aesthetic rifts: art and life, high art and low art, body and mind, subject and object, self and world, emphasizing the holistic action in our engagement with art.4 But according to Dewey, the divisor of art from life and thus to blame for the aesthetic barrenness of our lived reality is the museum institution, as Shusterman describes: [End Page 91]The compartmentalization and spiritualization of art as an elevated "separate realm" set "upon a far-off pedestal," divorced from the materials and aims of other human effort, has removed art from the lives of most of us, and thus impoverished the aesthetic quality of our lives.(PA, 19)However, we must keep in mind that Art as Experience was published in 1934. Today, new approaches towards encounter and engagement within public museums are taking form and gaining momentum, with unprecedented directorial visions and mandates designed to nurture and make accessible art-based experiences among diverse audiences — where art and life can meet via multiple approaches. Theoretical synchronicities between pragmatist approaches to aesthetics and fruitful museum experiences can be suggested upon consideration of various innovative programs and approaches initiated at the Tate Modern in London and the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. The overwhelming success of both venues could signify a reengagement of the general public with contemporary art, fed by "democratic," participatory approaches to exhibiting and programming art that make the museum more accessible to the various mixed publics it serves. In light of these new museological developments, Dewey's polemic oppositions between his conceptualizations of the museum experience and "art-as-experience" should be reexamined and possibly redefined.Dewey was entirely opposed to the concept of "art for art's sake." By exonerating art of any functional value — deeming it "fine" — art was elevated to a position separate from life, and thus rendered impotent to effect a lived aesthetic experience (which is how, Dewey would argue, the arts function most powerfully — as the purveyors of heightened experience). As Shusterman describes:The underlying motive for such attempts to purify art from any functionality was not to denigrate it as worthlessly useless, but to place its worth apart from and above the realm of instrumental value...and this freedom from use would be its defining and ennobling feature.(PA, 9)Dewey (and Shusterman) thus maintained that the very power construct that put the "fine" in art did so by removing the aspect of function from it. As previously stated, Dewey blamed museum institutions for removing art from its... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art Education and the Emergence of Radical Art Movements in Egypt: The Surrealists and the Contemporary Arts Group, 1938–1951Patrick Kane (bio)So it wasn’t the aim of the artist to just toss out a work of art. A tradition of the exhibition of the natural, and its meaning was not that it fled from life, but that it had penetrated and plunged into reality. Its meaning was not a prescription (...) or plain exercise in the taste of the sublime, or harmony of forms and charming scenes; and its meaning was not as a decoration of life; it was in its expression of what life inspires in us to give back.—Henry Moore, as quoted by Ramses Yunan, in “The Aim of the Contemporary Artist”1In these crucial days of difficulty, the artists in this country live in tall aristocratic towers.... For this peasant has an art of his own that sustains him, and it is not that art of the educated class.—Kamil Al-Tilmisani (c. 1941–1942)By 1938, as the agrarian crisis in Egypt deepened, the Depression, food shortages, low wages, expropriations of crops, and forced rents opened a polemic among Egyptian intellectuals over the role of the state and the looming threat of fascism. With the dismissal of the government of Mustafa Al-Nahas at the end of 1937, the political turbulence underscored the weakening of the Wafd Party. Opponents of the old Wafdists and supporters of the monarchy resorted to openly fascist tactics, including the establishment of youth organizations and the Blue Shirts, the fascist front of the young Wafdists who modeled themselves on Mussolini’s Black Shirts. The serial crises of agrarian struggles and parliamentary stalemates between [End Page 95] nationalists and monarchists led to increasingly militant stances by the paramilitary fascist organization Misr Al-Fattah (Young Egypt) as a counter to the Muslim Brothers. When Mahmud Khalil resigned from the Wafd and assumed the presidency of the Senate in 1938, his ascension opened a new phase of struggle in politics through culture and the arts.2 In this context, caricatures and satirical sculptures of Khalil appeared in 1939 that parodied him as the icon of a “dictatorship of art.”3 Leading intellectuals from all political stances addressed these issues directly. The cultural journals were peppered with articles on the problems of everyday life and the material crises with such representative titles as ‘Abbas al-Aqqad’s “Food for the Rich,” in which he raised the problem of food shortages and inequity as an issue for reform.4 Within the year, articles in Al-Risala and Al-Thaqafa drew comparisons with French and Italian nineteenth-century landscapes as a model for the recognition of the countryside as a subject. In journalism and the arts, suffering became a part of the recognition of the everyday, as articles appeared on Millet’s nineteenth-century paintings of French peasants.As the war in Europe encroached into the cover pages of Egypt’s cultural journals, Zaki Muhammad Hasan wrote an essay for Al-Thaqafa entitled “The Angelus,” with a reproduction of the 1859 painting by Jean Francois Millet (1814–1874).5 Hasan wrote about Millet’s interest in the “the daily labors of the peasant” as a depiction of the conditions of French peasants. Hasan’s mention of Millet’s own peasant origins, and his listing of paintings of social conditions, including Les Glaneuses (The Gleaners), reflected a broadening interest in the artistic subject of the peasant and the rise of the peasant as artist. Although in Millet’s painting there is a prayer scene of a man and a woman in the fields that is generally regarded as the evening prayer with the sun setting, an Egyptian reader could link the prayer with the issue of workers taking breaks in the fields at a time when the issue of compensation of peasant farm workers was paramount.6 Hasan introduced “The Angelus” to his readers as a Catholic prayer in southern Europe offered at dawn, noon, and sunset and compared the origins of the prayer’s stanzas from the Gospel of Luke 1:28–31 with passages from the chapter on Maryam in the Quran... (shrink)

Early educators are in a bind. Teacher education programs are calling on them more and more to help students practice critical thinking and develop intellectual character ; yet school funding depends on meeting Common Core standards, which do not explicitly assess critical thinking until the high-school level. Add to that an over-engineered content curriculum, and thinking becomes a luxury that is quickly lost amid more immediate concerns. As a result, we are raising a generation of “excellent sheep” who flourish amid (...) standardized tests but are increasingly unable to think for themselves. The problem, we suggest, is that today’s teachers are in such a rush to give students the answers that they are not allowing them time to ask the questions. As a result, students cannot find the “deep structure” of issues. Bodies of knowledge thus strike them as disconnected facts, quickly forgotten. The solution, as suggested by recent work in cognitive science, is to teach critical thinking through teaching content. In what follows, we propose a way of organically integrating content and thinking through games, story books and art. With this, we put children into the driver’s seat, encouraging them to ask their own questions, to propose their own answers and to join their peers in joint inquiry through dialogue. In a word, we propose teaching children philosophy as early as possible. Tom Wartenberg has made considerable progress with his picture-book philosophy curriculum designed for elementary schools. But what of younger children? Combining the resources of Rollins College’s Philosophy Department and Child Development and Student Research Center, we set out to find “how low can we go?” Over four terms’ of trial and error, we have adapted and distilled Wartenberg’s methods into a model that works for the Center’s 4-year-olds, and we have tested this model on a larger scale through a one-term collaboration with the Winter Park Day Nursery. (shrink)

Dickens’s relationship with the Arts has confounded or silenced some of the most eminent critics from his day to ours. His own reticence on the topic likewise makes the idea of a book on Dickens and the Arts a little odd or dissonant. Though as this volume makes clear, he was well versed in a range of high and low arts, he was seemingly determined to embrace, if not the wrong side of the cultural track, metaphorically speaking, a different track. (...) The Introduction is structured around four broad areas which are key to an understanding of both the ideological underpinnings of shifting definitions of the Arts, and to an understanding of the reasons for Dickens’s complex relationship to the idea of the Arts: money/materialism; hierarchies of privilege; yardsticks of criticism or artistic judgement; the public good. There is an uneasy relationship between ‘the Arts’ and all four areas, between Dickens and all four, and between Dickens and the Arts understood via these frames, which are commonly invoked in discussions of the Arts. The contention of this volume is that, far from being a philistine who had no interest in the Arts, Dickens’s apparent reticence in an industrial age where the value and function of the Arts was uniquely important in public debate, masks a complex and sophisticated vision (if not theory) of the Arts in the modern era, which is, and was, ahead of its time. Dickens’s philosophy of art in fact works to complicate in subtle ways the idea of an opposition between idealist and integrationist views of the aesthetic, though its most characteristic thrust is integrationist. (shrink)

Moving from the grand tradition of Delacroix to the images of modern life made by Constantin Guys, this movement from "high" to "low," from the unified world of correspondances to the fragmented images of contemporary city life, motivates Baudelaire's equivalent to the post-1968 turn away from formalist art criticism.

Marcel Duchamp is often viewed as an "artist-engineer-scientist," a kind of rationalist who relied heavily on the ideas of the French mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré. Yet a complete portrait of Duchamp and his multiple influences draws a different picture. In his _3 Standard Stoppages_, a work that uses chance as an artistic medium, we see how far Duchamp subverted scientism in favor of a radical individualistic aesthetic and experimental vision. Unlike the Dadaists, Duchamp did more than dismiss or negate (...) the authority of science. He pushed scientific rationalism to the point where its claims broke down and alternative truths were allowed to emerge. With humor and irony, Duchamp undertook a method of artistic research, reflection, and visual thought that focused less on beauty than on the notion of the "possible." He became a passionate advocate of the power of invention and thinking things that had never been thought before. The _3 Standard Stoppages_ is the ultimate realization of the play between chance and dimension, visibility and invisibility, high and low art, and art and anti-art. Situating Duchamp firmly within the literature and philosophy of his time, Herbert Molderings recaptures the spirit of a frequently misread artist-and his thrilling aesthetic of chance. (shrink)

in spite of koyré's conclusions, there are sufficient reasons to claim that galileo, and with him the beginnings of classical mechanics in early modern times, was closely related to practical mechanics. it is, however, not completely clear how, and to what extent, practitioners and engineers could have had a part in shaping the modern sciences. by comparing the beginnings of modern dynamics with the beginnings of statics in antiquity, and in particular with archimedes — whose rediscovery in the sixteenth century (...) was of great consequence — i will focus on the question of which devices played a comparable role in dynamics to that of the lever and balance in statics. i will also examine where these devices came from. in this way, i will show that the entire world of mechanics of that time — “high” and “low,” practical and theoretical — was of significance for shaping classical mechanics and that a specific relationship between art and science was and is constitutive for modern sciences. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of AestheticsChristopher McClintickThe Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics, by Martha Woodmansee; 200 pp. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, $29.50.Martha Woodmansee’s book The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics deftly employs a historical, materialist focus to trace the growth of the middle-class in eighteenth-century Germany and to analyze its startling, (...) significant effects on literary aesthetics and the construction of canon, genre, and treatment of gender. The first five chapters are devoted, essentially, to an outline of the development of German aesthetics and the concluding chapter to the English reception of Kant. Woodmansee’s study offers much insight into the period and helps greatly to demonstrate “how a cultural formation that evolved as recently as ‘art’ could have entrenched itself so thoroughly that we imagine it always to have existed” (p. 8).Woodmansee’s central contention is that populist theories of aesthetics in Germany and England, which in many ways anticipated important elements of materialist or cultural studies emphases, were muted by canonized writers of the eighteenth century like Schiller, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. These writers propagated instead the Kantian notion of art as a realm separate from other human activities and the distinction between high and low art forms. The first three chapters are particularly strong and provide the historical and methodological underpinning for Woodmansee’s rereading of the history of German aesthetics. Chapter One begins with a discussion of the little-studied German writer Karl Philipp Moritz who, she says, “gave the first unequivocal and systematic expression to what I have called our modern conception of the arts” [End Page 176] (p. 11). Woodmansee points particularly to the fact that Moritz champions the notion of art as having an intrinsic value, an idea that five years later, in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, “came to fruition” (p. 12). In Chapter Two, “Genius and Copyright,” Woodmansee lucidly discusses texts such as Lessing’s essay “Leben und leben lassen,” clarifying the tensions regarding “the emergence in the eighteenth century of writers who sought to earn their livelihood from the sale of their writing to the new and rapidly expanding reading public” (p. 36). The survey includes Herder, Wieland, Fichte, and Goethe, and reveals how these writers’ concerns about the often exploitive relationship of authors and publishers, the growth of a middle-class readership, and the integration of literature into the general economy, greatly contributed to the establishment of the author as the main focus of any critical undertaking.It is Schiller, however, as the archinterpreter and proponent of Kantian aesthetics who is singled out for a particularly thorough rereading. In Chapter Three, Woodmansee writes that Schiller does not represent the kind of political liberality he is purported to in works like On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1793) but instead, “at a historical moment when so much discursive activity was being carried on in the name of the people, sought to write them out of his model of poetry” (p. 75). Schiller’s relationship to the middle-class market and its role in his transcendental aesthetic is graphically traced—from his attempts to penetrate the market and, failing this, his acceptance of, and dependence on patronage, and consequent dismissal of the reading public.In Chapter Six Woodmansee devotes her attention to English criticism, ending somewhat abruptly her discussion of German aesthetics with neoclassicism. Here she clarifies the great influence of Kant on Addison, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, who perpetuated the notion of art as an ideal realm, as well as the idea that criticism is a task which has “essentially to do with the recovery of a writer’s meaning” (p. 55). Woodmansee scrutinizes Wordsworth’s ostensibly nonmaterialist artistic motives partly by discussing the poet’s indefatigable efforts to get parliament to extend copyright laws in order to reward high art projects which, Wordsworth believed, the public could not properly appreciate until a later date. Woodmansee’s materialist focus seriously challenges the contention, as many would have it, that Wordsworth was a champion of the working people.Chapter Five, “Engendering Art,” does not adequately develop the... (shrink)

Low Power Society is a new approach to social complexes. It is not about slow scale but fast, it is not about absence of power but intense power. It is a possible answer to the negative aspects of our present globalization. The archetype (C.G. Jung) of this concept-paradigm is Eros or, from another point of view, HermAfrEros - a synthesis of Hermes, Aphrodite and Eros.

BackgroundThe time that children and young people spend in nature and outdoor spaces has decreased significantly over the past 30 years. This was exacerbated with a further 60% decline post-COVID-19. Research demonstrating that natural environments have a positive impact on health and wellbeing has led to prescription of nature-based health interventions and green prescribing, although evidence for its use is predominantly limited to adults. Growing evidence also shows the impact of arts on all aspects of health and wellbeing. However, what (...) has received scant attention in literature is the interconnection between the two: arts and nature.AimsThis review synthesizes the literature surrounding the interconnectedness between arts and nature, and their impact on the health and wellbeing of children and young people.MethodsEight major electronic databases were systematically searched, while hand-searching included 20 journals, six books, and contact with experts. The review was conducted using the Cochrane handbook for systematic reviews, PRISMA guidelines and TIDieR template. All stages were conducted independently by two researchers and the protocol was published on PROSPERO.ResultsAlthough 9,314 records were identified, only 11 records were included as most studies focused either on arts or nature, but not both. Studies were conducted in United Kingdom, United States, Ireland, Australia, and Hong Kong, in a range of spaces such as forests, woodlands, beaches, parks, fields, gardens, and school playgrounds. The review encompasses data from 602 participants in total.DiscussionArts-in-nature offered an inclusive medium to engage all children and young people, especially those who might otherwise remain disinterested about environmental issues and disengaged with educational programs. Further, arts-in-nature provided stimuli to increase nature connectivity, understand environmental issues and explore ways to prevent environmental disasters. This led to higher environmental awareness and pro-environmental behaviors, and potential decrease in eco-anxiety.ConclusionAlthough the quality of qualitative studies was high, the quality of quantitative studies was low or unclear, thus quantitative evidence is still at its infancy. Implications for research, policy, and practice are discussed, such as methods and activities to strengthen future interventions. Scaling-up existing interventions may lead to wider recognition and inclusion of arts-in-nature in future health guidelines, including green prescribing. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Kathleen Stock’s book Material Girls, by way of imitation. I have attempted to write a faux chapter in the book’s style, identifying four moments in overcoming the low-high culture divide in responses to the arts.

Infertility is an unpredictable but widespread condition. While high‐income countries grapple with when, or how to cover the costs of assisted reproductive technology (ART), such as in‐vitro fertilisation (IVF), these services are generally only available to wealthy persons at private facilities in low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs). Although the principle of non‐interference with normal individual reproductive rights is robust, whether it is also the responsibility of collective society to provide the means (when ART applies) to achieve pregnancy, is controversial. Recently, (...) a low‐cost model was developed at a South African public institution. The target population for this model was “helpless and marginalised, childless couples”, but a new threat has arisen, namely, infertile couples who could conceivably afford private care. In the allocation of this scarce resource, we argue for a prioritarian response that first addresses the worst‐off, in order to even out unequal access imposed by sharp differences in income. (shrink)

This paper is a study of a social-justice, arts-based literacy curriculum in a low income, working-class, predominately African-American school district in Newark, New Jersey. Participating students studied photography and poetry of established artists and took and developed their own photographs accompanied by written narratives. As a part of the curriculum students also wrote poetry and analytical essays. I present my findings within the context of a Vygotskian pedagogical approach that takes social consciousness and metaphor as its central concepts. The paper (...) lays out this conceptual apparatus and deploys it to analyze the curriculum and student work. The paper argues for curriculum that develops social consciousness as the most effective for preparing students to create and participate in democratic societies. The research and analysis show that an arts based curriculum, in addition to successfully teaching literacy, is one of the most effective ways of bringing students’ life experience into the classroom for analysis and discussion, making activity at school relevant for students lives, especially those whose daily activities regularly confronts issues of life and death. (shrink)

Analyzing and evaluating legal case reports are labor-intensive tasks for judges and lawyers, who usually base their decisions on report abstracts, legal principles, and commonsense reasoning. Thus, summarizing legal documents is time-consuming and requires excellent human expertise. Moreover, public legal corpora of specific languages are almost unavailable. This paper proposes a transfer learning approach with extractive and abstractive techniques to cope with the lack of labeled legal summarization datasets, namely a low-resource scenario. In particular, we conducted extensive multi- and cross-language (...) experiments. The proposed work outperforms the state-of-the-art results of extractive summarization on the Australian Legal Case Reports dataset and sets a new baseline for abstractive summarization. Finally, syntactic and semantic metrics assessments have been carried out to evaluate the accuracy and the factual consistency of the machine-generated legal summaries. (shrink)

Sense of presence and extraneous cognitive load are the two psychological effects widely employed to explain the cognitive outcomes caused by high-immersive media. This study identified the concepts of both technological affordance and the psychological effects of VR learning. It investigated the mechanism by which immersion leads to better or worse communication in the context of art education. We operationalized the concept of immersion into two levels: a high-immersive VR system and a low-immersive tablet system. Through a between-subject experiment, we (...) found that higher immersion not only led to a greater sense of presence but also lowered extraneous cognitive load. Enjoyment and attention increased as a sense of presence rose but were not necessarily predicted by extraneous cognitive load. This study found that sense of presence was a more robust explanatory variable than ECL and that cognitive load could be lower in a high-immersive environment with content specifically designed for VR. (shrink)