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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Experience As Art, Sor-Hoon Tan
Experience As Art, Sor-Hoon Tan
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Chinese philosophy views experience as intrinsically aesthetic. This world view could be elucidated through a consideration of John Dewey's aesthetics and features of Chinese art. Dewey's philosophy of art starts with an understanding of experience as 'live processes' of living creatures interacting with their environment. Such processes are autopoietic in being self-sustaining, ever-changing, capable of increasing complexity, capable of generating novelty, direction and progress on its own. Its autopoietic character is a precondition of the aesthetic in the process of experience. An aesthetic experience is rhythmic, focused, consummatory, and reaches beyond the transitory boundaries of concrete existence. The aesthetic is …
Tolerating The Intolerable, Chandran Kukathas
Tolerating The Intolerable, Chandran Kukathas
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Presenting a lecture[1] on the virtue of toleration anywhere, let alone in the chambers of the Australian Senate department, should strike most people as a peculiarly pointless kind of exercise. Would anyone not in favour of toleration bother to turn up? (And what is the point of preaching to the converted? Would anyone against it bother to listen? And could such a person be converted?) In truth, it might not be easy to find anyone who openly professed intolerance. Almost everyone is in favour of tolerance; though of course, each will hasten to add, this does not mean that ‘anything …
Paternalism: A Deweyan Perspective, Sor-Hoon Tan
Paternalism: A Deweyan Perspective, Sor-Hoon Tan
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
“No, dear, you must not eat the soap; it’s not good for you.” Well-intentioned interference frustrates our desires even in the happiest childhood. Less happy is the perpetual state of adolescent rebellion against apparently arbitrary and unreasonable curtailments of one’s freedom, too frequently justified by the familiar refrain “It’s for your own good” adding insult to injury. Such interference does not necessarily cease with the eagerly awaited entry into adulthood. Not only parents are guilty of it; the state also engages in such interference. Can paternalism where one person deliberately interferes with another for the latter’s own good be morally …