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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
The Problem Of The "Virtual": Virtual Reality, Digital Dualism, And Religious Experience, Jordan Brady Loewen
The Problem Of The "Virtual": Virtual Reality, Digital Dualism, And Religious Experience, Jordan Brady Loewen
Dissertations - ALL
This dissertation uses resources from religious studies to critique the problem of digital dualism haunting notions of the "virtual" in the discourse of contemporary virtual reality technologies (VR). Digital dualism is the idea that digital or "virtual" worlds are fundamentally distinct from the "real" or physical world. Digital dualism is a problem because it mischaracterizes how we experience the spatial and temporal connections to our body in digital-virtual worlds and contributes to a false sense of subjective singularity rather than multiplicity that destabilizes how we relate to ourselves and others. Using the study of religion, philosophy, and aesthetics, we can …
Transcendentalism, Art, And Social Change: An Overview For A New Generation, Nidra Kilmer
Transcendentalism, Art, And Social Change: An Overview For A New Generation, Nidra Kilmer
Theses - ALL
The purpose of this study is to investigate the philosophy, art, methods, and outcomes of the Transcendentalist movement in 19th century America, with the aim of identifying strategies for creative practice that may inspire artists and educators in the 21st century. In the introductory section, the need for such an inquiry is established. Correlations are drawn between transcendental art from China, India, and America, in order to enrich the conversation by examining how ideas of transcendentalism, art, and social change are approached from different cultural perspectives. The historical context and philosophical roots of the American Transcendentalists is summarized, followed by …
Pushing The Pictorial Turn: Mitchell, Benjamin, And Religion Online, John William Borchert
Pushing The Pictorial Turn: Mitchell, Benjamin, And Religion Online, John William Borchert
Religion - Theses
This thesis asserts a visual ontology as a way of understanding religious practice online. W.J.T Mitchell argues twenty-first century humanities are shifting away from text and towards an interest in the meaning of images. However, he denies digital images a place within this pictorial turn, judging them banal. Mitchell's theorization of new media is a postmodern rereading of Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". I argue that Mitchell's utilization of Benjamin's aura in his constructions of the human relationship to new media misinterprets the role of these technologies in relating the image to the …
The Flower Of Human Perfection: Moses Mendelssohn's Defense Of Rationalist Aesthetics, Aaron M. Koller
The Flower Of Human Perfection: Moses Mendelssohn's Defense Of Rationalist Aesthetics, Aaron M. Koller
Philosophy - Dissertations
This work is an analysis of Moses Mendelssohn's contributions to aesthetic rationalism, a tradition that arose in 18-century Germany. Rationalists held that aesthetic experience is primarily explained by the perfection of the object being considered, where perfection is a fundamental, rational (law-governed) property. As this work shows, Mendelssohn was among the first to acknowledge and effectively address several significant objections to the rationalist theory: its seeming inability to account for pleasure generally, tragedy and tragic pleasure more specifically, and the sublime; and its apparent blindness to the claims of genius and Rousseau's ethical critique of the arts. Many commentators have …