If the contemporaneity of difference seems the most striking characteristic of contemporary life today, its conceptual structure continues to elude definition. The same lack of clarity attends a frequently evoked parameter for the most desired resolution of such volatile differences: a cohesive, consensual world picturing, sometimes named “planetarity.” My overall project is a close examination of these two concepts, aimed at finding productive connections between them. Previous attempts to think them, from the confessions of St Augustine to the New (...) York Times columns of Thomas Friedman, reveal a plethora of illuminating insights, but the overall record reveals that both concepts remain inadequately imagined for current circumstances. Temporality and world-being seems to constellate around these concepts: contemporaneity, history, decoloniality, connectivity, artworlds, and planetarity. How might the contemporaneity of difference and the embattled yet emergent planetary commons be imagined in terms appropriate to present need – that is, as contemporaneous, differential and convergent? While this question is obviously of the broadest relevance, my specific goal within the history and theory of art and architecture is to articulate the conceptual structure underlying my recent accounts of the relationships between contemporary art and architecture and contemporary life. (shrink)

Søren Kierkegaard’s claim that having faith requires being contemporary with Christ is one of the most important, yet difficult to interpret claims across his entire authorship. How can one be contemporary with a figure who existed more than two millennia ago? A prominent answer to this question is that contemporaneity with Christ is achieved through a kind of imaginative co-presence made possible by reading Scripture. However, I argue, this ignores what Kierkegaard thinks about Christ as a living agent, and (...) not a merely historical agent. By drawing on Kierkegaard’s discussion of Christ’s true presence in the sacrament of Communion, I argue that contemporaneity with Christ should be understood in the same way as any other intersubjective relation. That is, I argue, that just as relating to any living person as contemporary requires a kind of two-way attention-sharing, relating to Christ as contemporary, on Kierkegaard’s account, requires a kind of two-way attention-sharing with Christ. (shrink)

Written memoranda of conversations, or memcons, provide a near‐contemporaneous record of what was said in conversation, and offer important insights into the activities of high‐profile individuals. We assess the impact of writing a memcon on memory for conversation. Pairs of participants engaged in conversation and were asked to recall the contents of that conversation 1 week later. One participant in each pair memorialized the content of the interaction in a memcon shortly after the conversation. Participants who generated memcons recalled more (...) details of the conversations than participants who did not, but the content of recall was equally and largely accurate for both participants. Remarkably, only 4.7% of the details of the conversation were recalled by both of the partners after a week delay. Contemporaneous note‐taking appears to enhance memory for conversation by increasing the amount of information remembered but not the accuracy of that information. These findings have implications for evaluating the testimony of participants on conversations with major political or legal ramifications. (shrink)

In an attempt to go beyond persistent East-West colonialist/imperialist relations of dominance as part of globalization, emerging discourses relating to the concept of contemporaneity have sought to extend critical legitimacy to both an internationally dominant deconstructivist postcolonialism and to localized anti-imperialist assertions of national-cultural identity. Emerging discourses relating to the concept of contemporaneity can thus be understood to have entered into a problematic theoretical double-bind involving mutually resistant essentialist and anti-essentialist perspectives on the critical significance of cultural identity. (...) In this essay I shall argue, with specific reference to the theorization of contemporary Chinese art, that one possible way beyond this problematic theoretical double-bind is to develop a polylogue, exploring in close analytical detail potential areas of remotivational interaction as well as resistance between international deconstructivist postcolonialist and localized essentialist anti-imperialist theoretical perspectives; a strategy akin to Jacques Derrida’s radical collage-text Glas (1974), which has the potential to open up differing discursive positions to one another while internally dividing and questioning their individual authority. (shrink)

As the twenty-first century begins, Benjamin’s aura as the quality of an authentic-art-object might be outdated, but the notion of kitsch remains essential in a post-Warholian world. The following discussion is an attempt to assess Western contemporaneity. By using a few examples, so to dissect problems into their smallest components, I suggest that the current popularity of kitsch inclinations and behaviours in Western societies are not a means to resist cultural and aesthetic elitism, but an implication of widespread bad (...) taste. (shrink)

What happens to the form of the biennial when biennials become part of a world system of art institutions, subject to the historical temporality of a global contemporaneity? In particular, what happens when the periodic rhythms of national narratives of biennial exhibitions are overcoded by a serial sequence of international biennials – competing for contemporaneity – seemingly without end? This essay approaches these questions via a consideration of the debate about the transitional symbolic significance of the 1989 Third (...) Havana Biennale. It contrasts three historical problematics of ‘the contemporary’ as models through which to think the cultural function of biennials: the critique of anthropology, or, the coeval; socialist post- coloniality, or the avant-garde construction of traditions; the historical contemporaneity of a global capitalist modernity. (shrink)

This article contributes to understanding of Contemporary Art and of the temporality of contemporaneity, along with the philosophy of time more generally. I propose a diachronic contemporaneity over time gaps – elective contemporaneity – through examination of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic, the Third Analogy and the concept of ‘following’ among artistic geniuses; diachronic recognition and disjunctive synchronicity discoverable in William Kentridge’s multimedia artworks; as well as non-chronological temporal implications of superimpositions in late Palaeolithic cave art suggesting ‘graphic respect’. (...) Elective contemporaneity shows up complexity in relations to past and present, putting in question definitions of ‘Contemporary Art’ restricted to either chronology or supposedly definitive paradigms. (shrink)

Modernity and Contemporaneity is the 3rd volume in the Hellenic-Serbian Philosophical Dialogue Series, a project that was initiated as an emphatic token of the will and commitment to establish permanent and fruitful collaboration between two strongly bonded Departments of Philosophy, this of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and that of the University of Novi Sad respectively. This collaboration was founded from the very beginning upon friendship, mutual respect and strong engagement, as well us upon our firm resolution (...) to establish a solid continuity in the editing project. The publication of this volume allows us to entertain feelings of contentment and confidence that this objective of the project has been accomplished. (shrink)

Ethics edifies to the extent it takes seriously the munus propheticum Jesu Christi. Though many assume ethical action indicates behaviour realising Jesus Christ, this is problematic because it implies he is otherwise mute and absent. Paul Lehmann offers a refreshing alternative when he argues that the principal concern of ethics is alignment with all that God in Christ is doing now to make and keep human life human. Lehmann thus recasts the question ‘What am I to do?’ by taking seriously (...) the presence and activity of the One who summons human beings to participate in his work. In a manner consistent with the christological foundations of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics , Lehmann’s proposals evoke an ethic shaped by and subject to the self-disclosure and radiance of the triune God. (shrink)

Taking its point of departure in an anachronic exhibition, Soulèvements (2016/18), this book is a theoretical exploration of how the notion of contemporaneity understood as the coming together of different times in the same historical present relates to the end of a certain history of art. Critical of hitherto dominant chronological, ahistorical, and/or culturally restricted notions of the contemporary, Lund's overall aim is to make an argument for the contemporary contemporary, as the point of departure for any anachronic relationship (...) with time today, and as the inescapable point of departure for any possible historical imagination. (shrink)

Near the end of Practice in Christianity, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Anti-Climacus denies that progress occurs within history. We are not getting better every day, in every way. According to Anti-Climacus, we are the same as we have always been. This essay sets Anti-Climacus’s denial of progress in its historical context, arguing that he develops a counter-philosophy of history which combats the prevailing Hegelianism of his age. The essay also draws connections between Anti-Climacus’s philosophy of history and the themes of imitation and (...) contemporaneity, showing how a denial of history’s progress enables contemporary humans to interact with the same world Christ faced. (shrink)

Charles Altieri, Postmodernisms Now: Essays on Contemporaneity in the ArtsJean-Marie Schaefer, The Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to HeideggerKarol Berger, A Theory of ArtTiffany Sutton, The Classification of Visual Art: A Philosophical Myth and Its HistoryJames Kirwan, BeautyRichard Wollheim, On the EmotionsBeryl Schlossman, Objects of Desire: The Madonnas of ModernismStan Godlovitch, Musical PerformanceJohn Dixon Hunt, Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden TheoryTrevor Ponech, What Is Non-Fiction Cinema? On the Very Idea of Motion Picture Communication.

Focusing primarily on the writings of Kierkegaard and secondarily on those of Kant, St. Augustine and Schelling, this work offers a novel and challenging way of approaching the concepts of anxiety, repetition, freedom and contemporaneity. Pivotal to this project is a reinterpretation of Kierkegaard’s notion of ‘taking notice’ and its elevation to the status of a central principle which opens up new interpretive dimensions.

This article reads Jean-Luc Godard’s film essay Histoire du cinéma as a contemporary artistic endeavour to resist the synchronising, standardising time of global capital, the pervasive uniformity of the global super-present, brought about by today’s televisual and digital communications, which threatens to trivialise the different processes of memory and history, as well as art and culture in general. Taking its point of departure in Bernard Stiegler’s observation that the final stage of capitalism is the control and synchronisation of “available brain (...) time,” the article argues that Godard’s work opposes this control and synchronisation of our minds through an aesthetics of contemporaneity. The argument is based on the development of a theoretical framework that combines recent theories of contemporaneity with reflections on the politics of images. Focusing on the ways in which the Holocaust is remembered in Histoire du cinéma, the article deals with Godard’s image-political creation of temporal contemporaneity through a montage of clips of old films and newsreels, photographs, stills, images of paintings, new footage, advertisements, music, sound and voice recordings, textual citation, narration and commentary. (shrink)

Investingating mediations between the social total complex and its partial complexes, Lukács emphasised language and law as aents having the sole function to mediate. Ideology as part of human's societal existence is itself organic component of the ontology of social existence. The way we think in is part of what we truly are. Juristic world-view as the deontoloy of the legal profession is one of the factors of the law's social existence. Actual decision making in law is modelled by the (...) logic of problem solving with open chanes within an open referential frame, upon which the logic of justification is built as added to the former posteriorly. Lukács designated the settling of the conflict of interests involved through the law's system of fulfilment as manipulation. This substantiates the personal responsibility of the decision maker. (shrink)

This paper investigates the assertions that EVA is more highly associated with shareholder wealth and firm values than are traditional performance measures. Two commonly used value-based performance metrics namely, Total Shareholder Return (TSR) and Tobin's Q were also considered to highlight the value-relevance of EVA vis-a-vis these measures in predicting shareholder wealth. Using a panel sample of about 1000 American firms over the period 1990 2002, the study found compelling evidence consistent with the notion that EVA outperforms other traditional performance (...) measures in explaining shareholder wealth. Value-relevance tests reveal EVA to be more highly associated with shareholder wealth than TSR and Tobin's Q. The incremental value-relevance tests have also suggested that EVA possesses the largest explanatory power over TSR and Tobin's Q. These results conclusively support the claims made by EVA proponents and further support the potential usefulness of EVA metric for internal and external performance measurement. (shrink)

This book presents an overview of postmodernism and its social indicators, and of the postmodern condition in consciousness as an indicator of its modification and development. The book brings together philosophical, sociological and cultural approaches towards contemporary societal issues, such as multiculturalism, culture of dialogue, philosophy of dialogue, tolerance, and gender. In doing so, it suggests a framing approach to cross-disciplinary research. The book also discusses various forms of multiculturalism, including multiculturalism as multiple modernities and plural modernities, and non-Western (...) class='Hi'>contemporaneity. It explores the background of the dynamics of the development of public consciousness, in particular from the modern to postmodern, and subsequently examines the West/non-West dichotomy and how that dichotomy is currently being reconsidered in response to the intellectual-spiritual realities of modern life. (shrink)

The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 4, Page 553-566, July 2022.

This article speaks to contemporary women and men, who both suffer from gender issues such as disconnection, separation, oppression … and who forever wait for a so-called “tomorrow.” Through comparing process thought and Chinese philosophy, my study analyzes how process feminism synthesizes our demands for interconnection and how it alerts our narrow desires in seeking “a way out.” I further challenge a fundamental weakness in this genre of Whitehead’s organic multiplicity by contributing “creative harmony” of yin and yang in the (...) Yijing cosmology. This contribution offers process feminism a humanistic “creative creativity,” which avoids the oversight in Whiteheadian philosophy of organism and therefore prospects that the mutual connectivity in Chinese cosmology is “a way through” the actual practicability of both men and women, who share a common goal. (shrink)

Florea Lucaci: Avatarul ideii de absolut. De la Kant la filosofia limbajului. Provopress, Cluj-Napoca, 2008.

This article speaks to contemporary women and men, who both suffer from gender issues such as disconnection, separation, oppression and who forever wait for a so‐called “tomorrow.” Through comparing process thought and Chinese philosophy, my study analyzes how process feminism synthesizes our demands for inter‐connection and how it alerts our narrow desires in seeking “a way out.” I further challenge a fundamental weakness in this genre of Whitehead's organic multiplicity by contributing “creative harmony” of yin 陰 and yang 陽 in (...) the Yijing《易經》cosmology. This contribution offers process feminism a humanistic “creative creativity,” which avoids the oversight in Whiteheadian philosophy of organism and therefore prospects that the mutual connectivity in Chinese cosmology is “a way through” the actual practicability of both men and women, who share a common goal. (shrink)

The novel represents a formal attempt to come to terms with innovation and originality and to accept the limitations of tradition; it reflects the larger cultural embracing of the present moment as a legitimate subject not only for passing conversation but for serious discourse. For at least a half century before the novel emerged, the world of print had experimented in assuming, absorbing, and exploiting that new cultural consciousness based on human curiosity—on the one hand “preparing” readers for novels and (...) on the other offering later writers of novels some sense of potential subject matter and potential form, a sense of how the present could be won over to serious literature. The process was a curious and unstructured one; in its early manifestations it hardly seemed destined to lead to a significant new literary form. Even in retrospect, the print novelties of the turn of the century hardly seem part of a teleology of form or thought, but the broad ferment that authenticated the new, together with the apparent permanence that print seemed to bestow on accounts of the temporary and passing, ultimately led to a mind and art that transcended occasions and individuals even though it engaged them first of all—energetically, enthusiastically, evangelically. The first fruits of the modern moment-centered consciousness were not very promising, but the emergence of that consciousness enabled, when other cultural contexts were right, an altogether new aesthetic and a wholly different relation between life and literature. J. Paul Hunter, professor of English at the University of Chicago, is the author of The Reluctant Pilgrim, Occasional Form, and of a forthcoming book on literacy, readership, and the contexts of early English fiction, Before Novels. (shrink)

Around the globe people are confronted daily with intransigent problems of space and place. Educators have historically called for place-based or place-conscious education to introduce pedagogies that will address such questions as how to develop sustainable communities and places. These calls for place-conscious education have included liberal humanist approaches that evolved from the work of Wendell Berry (Ball & Lai, 2006) and critical place-based approaches such as those advocated by David Gruenewald (e.g. Gruenewald, 2003a, 2003b). In this paper I will (...) propose a reconceptualized framework of place as a pedagogical practice that draws on contemporary feminist poststructural and postcolonial philosophies as a basis for an alternative place pedagogy for 'global contemporaneity' (Carter, 2006, p. 683). Within this reconceptualized concept of place I will outline three key principles for a reconceptualised place pedagogy: our relationship to place is constituted in stories and other representations; place learning is local and embodied; and deep place learning occurs in a contact zone of contestation. These principles give rise to new emergent arts-based methodologies for developing and practising place-responsive pedagogies. (shrink)

Drawing together discourses on contemporaneity and new materialisms, this book examines a material conception of temporality that makes it possible to develop a critique of the philosophical discourse on presence. Claiming that 'there is no now,' Ebeling develops an archaeology of contemporaneity according to which the traces of the contemporary can only be secured through visual or material operations, not historical ones.