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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Nietzsche On Language And Our Pursuit Of Truth, Le Quyen Pham
Nietzsche On Language And Our Pursuit Of Truth, Le Quyen Pham
The Expositor: A Journal of Undergraduate Research in the Humanities
No abstract provided.
Divine Practical Thought In Plotinus, Damian Caluori
Divine Practical Thought In Plotinus, Damian Caluori
Philosophy Faculty Research
Plotinus follows the Timaeus and the Platonist tradition before him in postulating the existence of a World Soul whose function it is to care for the sensible world as a whole. It is argued that, since the sensible world is providentially arranged, the World Soul’s care presupposes a sort of practical thinking that is as timeless as intellectual contemplation. To explain why this thinking is practical, the paper discusses Plotinus’ view on Aristotle’s distinction between praxis and poiêsis. To explain why it is timeless, it studies Plotinus’ view on Aristotle’s distinction between complete and incomplete actuality. The …
Rhetoric And Platonism In Fifth-Century Athens, Damian Caluori
Rhetoric And Platonism In Fifth-Century Athens, Damian Caluori
Philosophy Faculty Research
There are reasons to believe that relations between Platonism and rhetoric in Athens during the fifth century CE were rather close. Both were major pillars of pagan culture, or paideia, and thus essential elements in the defense of paganism against increasingly powerful and repressive Christian opponents. It is easy to imagine that, under these circumstances, paganism was closing ranks and that philosophers and orators united in their efforts to save traditional ways and values. Although there is no doubt some truth to this view, a closer look reveals that the relations between philosophy and rhetoric were rather more complicated. …
Retroactive Harms And Wrongs, Steven Luper
Retroactive Harms And Wrongs, Steven Luper
Philosophy Faculty Research
According to the immunity thesis, nothing that happens after we are dead harms or benefits us . It seems defensible on the following basis: 1. If harmed (benefitted) by something, we incur the harm (benefit) at some time. 2. So if harmed (benefitted) by a postmortem event, we incur the harm (benefit) while alive or at some other time. 3. But if we incur the harm (benefit) while alive, backwards causation occurs. 4. And if we incur the harm (benefit) at any other time, we incur it at a time when we do not exist. 5. Yet nothing incurs harm …
In Defence Of Higher-Order Musical Ontology: A Reply To Lee B. Brown, Andrew Kania
In Defence Of Higher-Order Musical Ontology: A Reply To Lee B. Brown, Andrew Kania
Philosophy Faculty Research
In a recent article in this journal, Lee B. Brown criticizes one central kind of project in higher-order musical ontology—the project of offering an ontological theory of a particular musical tradition. I defend this kind of project by replying to Brown’s critique, arguing that musical practices are not untheorizably messy, and that a suitably subtle descriptivist ontology of a given practice can be valuable both theoretically and practically.
A Sense Of Life In Language Love And Literature, Lawrence Kimmel
A Sense Of Life In Language Love And Literature, Lawrence Kimmel
Philosophy Faculty Research
The fundamental human activity of telling stories, extended into the cultural tradition of literature, leads to the creation of alternative worlds in which we find resonance with the whole range of human thought and emotion from different and often conflicting perspectives. Fiction has no obligation to the ordinary strictures that bind our public lives, so the mind is free, engaging in literature, to become for the moment whatever imagination can conceive. So we become, in fictive reality, madman and poet, sinner and saint, embrace and embody sorrow and joy, hope and despair and all the rag tag feelings that flesh …
Definition, Andrew Kania
Definition, Andrew Kania
Philosophy Faculty Research
Much of the time most of us can tell whether, and which of, the sounds we are currently hearing are music. This is so whether or not what we are listening to is a familiar piece, a piece we have not heard before, or even music from a culture or tradition with which we are unfamiliar. In cases where we are unsure, or initially mistaken in our judgment, we will often change our opinion based on further information. This near-universal agreement suggests that the concept of music is one shared by different people, and has boundaries which we are implicitly …
Introduction, Andrew Kania
Introduction, Andrew Kania
Philosophy Faculty Research
To say that Memento (2000) is thought-provoking would be, at best, an understatement. One of the main reasons for this neo-noir's popular success is that audiences were hooked by the very puzzles that make the film a challenging one. These puzzles occur at various levels. There is the initial question of what exactly the structure of the film is and, once this is solved, the much more difficult task of extracting the story—what actually happens in the film, and the chronological order of the fictional events—from the fragmented plot. At the same time, however, the film quite explicitly raises philosophical …
The Methodology Of Musical Ontology: Descriptivism And Its Implications, Andrew Kania
The Methodology Of Musical Ontology: Descriptivism And Its Implications, Andrew Kania
Philosophy Faculty Research
I investigate the widely held view that fundamental musical ontology should be descriptivist rather than revisionary, that is, that it should describe how we think about musical works, rather than how they are independently of our thought about them. I argue that if we take descriptivism seriously then, first, we should be sceptical of art-ontological arguments that appeal to independent metaphysical respectability; and, second, we should give ‘fictionalism’ about musical works—the theory that they do not exist—more serious consideration than it is usually accorded.
Piece For The End Of Time: In Defence Of Musical Ontology, Andrew Kania
Piece For The End Of Time: In Defence Of Musical Ontology, Andrew Kania
Philosophy Faculty Research
Aaron Ridley has recently attacked the study of musical ontology—an apparently fertile area in the philosophy of music. I argue here that Ridley’s arguments are unsound. There are genuinely puzzling ontological questions about music, many of which are closely related to questions of musical value. While it is true that musical ontology must be descriptive of pre-existing musical practices and that some debates, such as that over the creatability of musical works, have little consequence for questions of musical value, none of this implies that these debates themselves are without value.
Works, Recordings, Performances: Classical, Rock, Jazz, Andrew Kania
Works, Recordings, Performances: Classical, Rock, Jazz, Andrew Kania
Philosophy Faculty Research
In this essay, I undertake a comparative study of the ontologies of three quite distinct Western musical traditions – classical, rock, and jazz – approached from the unusual angle of their recordings. By the ‘ontology’ of a tradition I mean simply the kinds of things there are in that tradition and the relations that hold between them. A study of this scope is bound to leave many questions unanswered when restricted to this length. The ontology of classical music has been debated in the analytic tradition for close to half a century, and there has been a growing interest in …
Restorative Rigging And The Safe Indication Account, Steven Luper
Restorative Rigging And The Safe Indication Account, Steven Luper
Philosophy Faculty Research
Typical Gettieresque scenarios involve a subject, S, using a method, M, of believing something, p, where, normally, M is a reliable indicator of the truth of p, yet, in S’s circumstances, M is not reliable: M is deleteriously rigged. A different sort of scenario involves rigging that restores the reliability of a method M that is deleteriously rigged: M is restoratively rigged. Some theorists criticize (among others) the safe indication account of knowledge defended by Luper, Sosa, and Williamson on the grounds that it treats such cases as knowledge. But other theorists also criticize the safe indication account because it …
Paradox And Metaphor: An Integrity Of The Arts, Lawrence Kimmel
Paradox And Metaphor: An Integrity Of The Arts, Lawrence Kimmel
Philosophy Faculty Research
Art is movement, movement is life. Surprisingly, the spareness of paradox in art promotes a fullness of life. We must first speak as simply as possible about art as a fundamental human activity. Only then can we hope to say something of consequence about the so-called “fine arts” — which may be misleading as a description. In substance, the reference “fine art” simply means useless art: “fine” as being free from utility. Art is imaginatively productive, it makes something, whether painting, poem, or partita. But this making has no independent utility, and its character as a work of art …
The Dialectical Convergence Of Rhetoric And Ethics: The Imperative Of Public Conversation, Lawrence Kimmel
The Dialectical Convergence Of Rhetoric And Ethics: The Imperative Of Public Conversation, Lawrence Kimmel
Philosophy Faculty Research
Man is a rule-making, rule-governed creature—he is, as Aristotle put it, an animal defined by and within a community of speech. The two disciplines of ethics and rhetoric and the cultural activities they engage are instrumental to this defining activity of human life. If moral life is riddled with ambiguities, theoretical understanding of it is no less plagued with an ambivalent relationship which rhetoric and ethics have to each other, despite their mutual concern with the practical affairs of human beings. To argue a necessary convergence of rhetoric and ethics for an understanding of moral life, it is ironic and …