Over the last century, performance art has troubled the worlds of art and of philosophical aesthetics, unleashing modes of creativity and criticality that spill outside the customary boundaries of either. One of these modes is that of political activism. Performance art is genetically related to activism due to the shared historical contexts their respective waves have emerged from and responded to. In my article, I make the claim that the relationship between performance art and activism also has much to do (...) with certain significant structural and methodological overlaps between the two. I explore these overlaps against the backdrop of extant philosophical scholarship on performativity, a selection of art historical examples, and a critique of the charge of “performative activism” that has become popular in the last decade. I see the tension between the figurative meaning of the phrase “performative activism” and its literal application to politically charged performance art as a space of philosophical opportunity. A better understanding of performance art and its political import can not only help clear up laypeople’s misconceptions of performativity, but it can also strengthen philosophy’s own position on the subject. (shrink)

A recent New York Times article1 has focused attention on Charles Miller's Commission on the Future of Higher Education and its interest in addressing the quality of student learning and its adequacy to the demands of practice. The commission has initiated a debate on the possibility of using “standardized testing” in universities and colleges in order “to prove that students are learning and to allow easier comparisons on quality.”2 Miller is quoted as saying, on the one hand, that “what is (...) clearly lacking is a nationwide system for comparative performance purposes, using standard formats,” and, on the other, that “there…. (shrink)

The starting point of the following article are statements by various prominent musical performers of the 20th century who have testified to the life-experience of musical identification, i.e. the experience of unity and oneness with music. The purpose of the article is to explore the phenomenological implications of this experience on the basis of Martin Heidegger’s early phenomenological work. The article compares Heidegger’s early view of phenomenal givenness with that of Edmund Husserl. While Husserl sees phenomenal givenness as constituted by (...) (transcendental) consciousness, Heidegger finds primary givenness in the resonance (Mitschwingen) between the I and its lifeworld. I argue that in Heidegger’s early phenomenology it is not the subject, but rather the relatio between I and world, which “constitutes” givenness. This viewpoint allows for the exploration of musical identification as a life-experience. Musical identification suspends the difference between subject and object. In musical identification, it is the relation between “I” and music, which is constitutive of both. Thus, music cannot be adequately grasped in phenomenological terms if it is regarded simply as an object, which is the premise of more traditional phenomenological approaches to music such as Roman Ingarden’s and Mikel Dufrenne’s. Ingarden and Dufrenne both position music at a distance from the subject, as something to be explored in its objective characteristics, without presupposing the constitutive relation between them. Contrary to them, Hans-Heinrich Eggebrecht, Günther Anders and Ilya Yonchev all recognize that the subject-object divide is insufficient for the exploration of musical experience. However, while Eggebrecht ultimately remains within the subject-object-dichotomy, Anders and Yonchev both develop the idea of musical Mitsein, or Being-with-music, which dispenses with the subject-object premise altogether and interprets musical life-experience as a mode of Being within which the sense of the I and musical sense coincide. (shrink)

In this article, I propose a way for philosophical aesthetics to make sense of the curator's work and specifically its claim to creativity and value making. My thesis is that selecting art should be thought of as a fine art in itself. This thesis, in various formulations, has been a source of controversy for art historians, critics, and theorists for more than a century. Even though philosophers have barely addressed the issue, philosophical aesthetics has been complicit in the prevalent modes (...) of resistance. The unspoken reason that various figures of the artworld find it problematic to identify curators as artists is that the divisions of labor they protect are inherently normative. The inadvertent application of this normativity in equal measure affects curators who style themselves as artists. I offer a critique of the historical and philosophical underpinnings of this normative picture, which sets the stage for a reconsideration of curatorship and its stake on a place among the rest of the fine arts. (shrink)

The borderline between philosophy and literature is highly contested. Still, if literary theorists and philosophers agree on the occasional work’s ability to transcend border norms altogether, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame is a piece of dramatic writing that amply deserves the distinction. My article attempts a symptomatic comparison between the existential condition of Endgame’s characters, on the one hand, and the philosophical predicament, on the other. The importance of failure – both as an obstacle and as a catalyst for regeneration – provides (...) a useful framework for this cross-disciplinary comparison. I draw inspiration from Stanley Cavell’s reading of Endgame, but I take Cavell’s analysis a step further. In ‘Ending the Waiting Game’ Cavell finds satisfaction in discovering what Beckett’s play can say about a specific school of philosophy – logical positivism. I treat this discovery as an invitation to consider the possibility of a broader conclusion. There is much in Endgame, in Cavell’s other writings, in the works of his and Beckett’s commentators and in Wittgenstein’s legacy that points to the existence and acceptance of philosophical infirmity. I see the recognition of this infirmity as a necessary step towards a better understanding of the play but also as a contribution to our general sense of the productive continuities between philosophy and literature. (shrink)

My response to Paul C. Taylor’s “Black Reconstruction in Aesthetics” follows his example in engaging different disciplinary and thematic contexts. I start with an account of a scene in the 2018 movie Black Panther and explore its relevance to recent discussions about the restitution of African art objects. I then attend to some productive similarities between Taylor’s intervention into contemporary aesthetics and a prominent argument in favour of restitution. I finish by suggesting that the reconstruction Taylor calls for can be (...) achieved only if philosophers resocialize along a renewed commitment to engage Black aesthetics and Black lives in all their richness and importance. (shrink)

In this article I attempt to reveal some continuities between the anti-psychoanalytic stance adopted by Gilles Deleuze in his later work and Henri Bergson's early philosophy. On account of these continuities I hope to provide a glimpse into what I believe is a century-old tangent of philosophical resistance to the methods and theories of Freudian psychoanalysis. In order to achieve this, I start with a brief meditation on the challenges and benefits of cross-generational inheritance and collaboration in philosophy. The purpose (...) of this is twofold – to explore some general conditions for such collaboration and to tease out some of the implications of these conditions for the substantive argument my specific reading of Bergson via Deleuze occasions. I then expound on Bergson's theory of duration and some of the uses to which Deleuze puts it in the latter part of his career. In this I outline several fecund similarities between Bergson's critique of associationism and Deleuze's attack on Freud. Finally, I attempt a partial evaluation of Freudian psychoanalysis from the joint, albeit naturally disjointed, perspective of my primary sources. (shrink)

The work of artist Ron Athey has long befuddled the art historical establishment and has mostly remained under the philosophical radar. In this review of Athey’s Acephalous Monster, performed on August 28, 2021, at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater in Los Angeles, I propose a philosophical frame- work for Athey’s radical reinvention of ethical categories like agency, mutuality and communion. I describe the performance and its critical context in order to tease out the aesthetic dimension of this reinvention and (...) the subversive power of reconstituting personhood along lines of collective artistic jubilation and creative survival. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 4, August 2020, Page 309-313.

To complement theoretically driven work on argument, we present a datadriven description of published, written argument. We analyze political or philosophical treatises, articles in scholarly journals, and U.S. Supreme Court decisions. The description has emerged out of an inductive and a posteriori process based in grounded theory. The result is a suite of thirty-eight features that begins with conditions antecedent to writing and continues through to the consequences for the reader. We relate observational data to theories and practices from the (...) fields of rhetoric and applied linguistics, including pragmatics, to explain how the features work together as social and communicative acts in which the writer produces a text in order to affect or change the beliefs or actions of the reader. For our purposes, the whole text is the argument and is not reduced to its propositional content; it is a unified communicative act. In our description of argument, the writer, reader, and text are central categories. We describe these categories and their features using examples from a variety of types of written argument. (shrink)

Curating is a confounding concept—highly specialized in its technical meaning but wildly ecumenical in colloquial usage. This makes it a good candidate for philosophical attention. Considering how often the boundaries of curating have been redrawn since the 1960s, it is encouraging to see philosophers finally turning their lens on it in the last decade. This is also partly what makes Sue Spaid’s The philosophy of curatorial practice: between work and world a welcome contribution. The book might fall short of a (...) definitive philosophical account of curating, but it charts helpful vectors of interest for future scholarship. On a personal note, as someone who has had the opportunity to debate Spaid on the subject of curating, both at live events and in print, I consider her book a meaningful addition to the conversational momentum the topic has been enjoying. -/- In what follows, I start with some general remarks and then focus on two constitutive aspects of Spaid’s book—her account of what curating is and her description of what curated exhibitions do. These are also two of the central questions philosophy has traditionally asked of art. In this sense, Spaid’s study traverses familiar methodological and thematic terrain. What she adds to the existing scholarship on perennial issues of intentionality, authorship, spectatorship, interpretation, etc. is her keen curiosity about the increasingly rich contributions curated exhibitions make to the life of art. (shrink)

One Seit Platon (mit dem Spott von Diogenes) über Kant ist die Fundamentalfrage "Was ist der Mensch?" bis heute nicht nur von der Philosophie (als regina scientiarum), sondern von der Wissenschaft überhaupt nicht beantwortet. Phänomenologisch hat der Mensch a posteriori physische (somatische), psychische(perceptio, emotio, cognitio), mentale (logische), spirituelle (conscientia, volitio, actio) "Sphären". Ontologisch in Kontext von to ti en einai (Aristoteles) sollte der Mensch a priori ein "Programm" (Information) vor der Kosmogonie haben. Der (Neo‐) Positivismus (z.B. Hume bis Carnap, Russel*; (...) * Nobel Laureate) verwirft Fragen der Metaphysik als Scheinprobleme. Damit bleibt das Menschen‐Wesen in Kontext von Postulaten, wie res cogitans (Descartes), Monaden(Leibniz), "Gott, Freiheit, Unsterblichkeit", Seligkeit und (moralischer) Vollkommenheit (Kant), absoluter Geist (Hegel) in der theologischen Dimension. Antwort könnte eine zukünftige (holistisch‐multidimensionale) philosophische theoretische und Experimentaltheologie (kontrollierbare Beobachtung) durch weitere Forschung geben, in Kontext (bzw. Existenz) von A. Physikotheologie bzw. (a) höhere (als drei) geometrische/physikalische Dimensionen (Hilbert, Riemann /Friedmann, Minkowski, Schmutzer), (b) Paralleluniversen (z.B. L. Randall), (c) Quantentheorie/‐philosophie (Planck*, u.a.), (d) Gravitations‐/Relativitätstheorie (Newton/Einstein*), (e) Vakuumenergie (Sato), etc. B. ChemoBiotheologie bzw. "psychischen" (Fechner) und "spezifischen" (Joh. Müller) Energien,"biologischem Feld" (Gurwitsch), künstlicher Biogenese (Oparin, Fox, Urey*, u.a.; 32 Fragen von John Bernal). C. Psychotheologie bzw. parapsychische Phänomene (Carrel*, Richet*/France, Rhinne/USA, Vassilev, Bechterew/Russia, etc.). D. Religionstheologie: (über‐) Bewußtsein, übersinnliche, immaterielle, supraphysikalische Phänomene (Sri Aurobindo, Dalai Lama*, Konfuzius/Laotse, Gopi Krishna, Papst Benedikt, Paramahansa Yogananda, Sri Yogendra, etc.)und ihre physiologische Begründung (Anand/Chinna, Kasamatsu/Hirai, Ornstein, Pauli*, von Weizsäcker, etc.). Damit hängt die ontologische Frage nach dem MenschenWesen mit der Lösung des Problemkomplexes "Gott Geist/Seele Mensch Natur" zusammen. (shrink)

Résumé Je me propose de faire un bref aperçu des traductions bulgares de l’œuvre de Condorcet : son nom apparaît au début du XXe siècle grâce à la traduction de l’Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain par le juriste Tzvetan Vassilev Poupechkov. L’œuvre est à nouveau publiée dans les années 1940 pour répondre aux besoins idéologiques des milieux socialistes et communistes. L’article s’emploie à définir les motifs du traducteur bulgare Dimităr Ivanov Polyanov (1876-1953), poète « du (...) prolétariat » éduqué en France, et à éclairer l’intérêt des éditeurs et des chercheurs des deux dernières décennies pour l’œuvre de Condorcet. (shrink)