Philosophy Commons^™

Out In Thin Air, Daiqing Zhang

Masters Theses

My work often takes form in experience-charged installations underscored by phenomenology. The whys and hows behind the work mostly remain unspoken, since I would rather my work speak for itself. This writing project offered me the opportunity to comb through and tell the stories and thoughts that informed the work.

I have built a collection of documentation about the experience of having a sensitivity to moments of wonder in everyday life. These archives recorded sensuous imprints in life composed of mundane phenomena. In the collection there are images/footage of a glimpse of light leaking through cloud crevices; a brush of …

New Commandments, Jacob Sussman

Masters Theses

I reach into the earth, pull out mud-encrusted objects, and recombine them to define new meanings. With every object transposed, the past breaks down; new potentials form. “New Commandments” recombines historical symbolism through an intuitive building, destroying, and merging to reimagine or re-establish meaning.

The work critiques rites of passage, masculinity, and stereotypes by deconstructing how histories, ideologies, and preconceptions form.

As a queer person raised in-between Judaism and Christianity, social preconceptions and religious expectations festered my formation. Our choice is taken away at this moment of conception. To take back autonomy, I reimagine historical, and religious symbolism and transmute …

Landscape De/Re-Construction Through Art, Manuel Gonzalez

Masters Theses

Contemporary landscape architecture practice and education primarily focus on ecological and technical interventions. The climate crisis we find ourselves in demands scientifically informed decisions and well-engineered execution of projects, but, more importantly, creativity and innovation.

The fine arts, which were once integral and foundational to design, are today largely unappreciated and appropriated. The spiritual power of Art, Aesthetics, and Beauty, explored at length through art history and theory, are often viewed as indulgent or secondary to execution. The gap between Art & Design has widened. As a result, designers face challenges in fostering in individuals the kind of care and …

Margins (I Nvr Needed Acceptance From All U Outsiders), Jahi Lendor

Masters Theses

A comedian said, “American pie isn’t made out of apples, it’s made out of whatever you can get your fucking hands on.”1 With that, my work seeks to provide an honest representation of the infinite value of the everydayness and behavior of blackness ranging from trauma to beauty. Various mediums explore culture, class, collective memory, identity, and erasure. While resisting institutional and systemic boundaries between disciplines my practice actively seeks fluidity between media. The work often translates to (social) poetic-bricolage visualizations that combine gestures of assemblage, sculpture, installation, and painting. The work focuses on reflecting on how I see life …

Postindustrial Playbook++, Maxwell Fertik

Masters Theses

There is no such thing as an undisrupted ecosystem. Every inch of the planet is impacted by industrial development and its chemical legacy has mutated the soil and water. As a response, this thesis is designed to promote abundant over extractive resources and visualize a post-industrial reality. It consists of a series of objects, writing and design research on the relationship of industry and ecosystem.

In many ways it is a playbook++, laying out possible strategies or “plays’’ for making do with what exists around us amid collapse.

Japanese knotweed (Reynoutria japonica)(ي'ڑ*), a plant that grows in the most degraded …

Home. Objects. Transitions., Fei Gao

Masters Theses

As migratory life challenges traditional understandings of "home," can domestic objects, materials, or substitutes transformed into portable art forms soothe migratory anxiety, navigate connections to home, and become alternatives to the ideal home?

This thesis is an investigation of the value of domestic objects as transitional markers of "home" and their ability to foster positive emotional connection among those whose lives are in flux migrating people. Based on British psychiatrist Donald W. Winnicott's research on "Transitional Objects" or "Transitional Phenomena" such objects not only represent "comfort objects" for infants but also foreshadow the many roles assigned by individuals throughout their …

Moving At The Speed Of Trust, Sun Ho Lee

Masters Theses

Moving at the Speed of Trust is a workbook of strategies — practices, definitions, and techniques — to nurture community-building in support of inbetweeners who live between power structures and cultures and are often left out. Inbetweeners are those individuals whose lives are in transition through recent immigration or forced translocation from Asia to America.

These strategies revolve around threads of trust: kin, giggles, vulnerability, and shared experience. With these threads, we can question power. We can preserve stories, expand the ways we connect, shift perspectives on what is “standard,” and cultivate a community rooted in understanding. To understand each …

Moretheless, Abdelghani Alnahawi

Masters Theses

material investigations becoming questions with interjections

The Meaning Of A Choice, Julie-Louise Zeitoun

Masters Theses

If you are disabled or disadvantaged, you will be dismissed and stifled. Few people will actively care for your struggles. As a person with autism, I was deeply fearful of the persecution I had faced throughout my life; it was a fear that followed me with terrifying determination. I desperately wanted to blend into society. So I designed myself to be devoid of any weakness, and productivity was the way I chose to conceal any difficulties I faced. It was a way to measure my success — a way to measure my normalcy.

Standard medical textiles are generic, cumbersome devices. …

2022 Mlk Keynote Address: Eddie Glaude Jr. Presentation, Center For Social Equity & Inclusion, Eddie Glaude Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Series

One of the nation’s most prominent scholars, Eddie Glaude, Jr. is an author, political commentator, public intellectual and passionate educator who examines the complex dynamics of the American experience. His writings, including his most recent—the New York Times bestseller Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for our Own—take a wide look at Black communities, the difficulties of race in the United States and the challenges we face as a democracy.

In his writing and speaking, Glaude is an American critic in the tradition of James Baldwin and Ralph Waldo Emerson, confronting history and bringing our nation’s …

2022 Mlk Keynote Address: Eddie Glaude Jr. Pre-Event Presentation, Center For Social Equity & Inclusion, Eddie Glaude Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Series

One of the nation’s most prominent scholars, Eddie Glaude, Jr. is an author, political commentator, public intellectual and passionate educator who examines the complex dynamics of the American experience. His writings, including his most recent—the New York Times bestseller Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for our Own—take a wide look at Black communities, the difficulties of race in the United States and the challenges we face as a democracy.

In his writing and speaking, Glaude is an American critic in the tradition of James Baldwin and Ralph Waldo Emerson, confronting history and bringing our nation’s …

Reflections On “Catching The Ghost: House Dance And Improvisational Mastery”, Renee Conroy

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Contemporary Aesthetics recommends first reading Christian Kronsted’s article, “Catching the Ghost: House Dance and Improvisational Mastery,” appearing before this article.

This essay is a constructive response to Christian Kronsted’s “Catching the Ghost: House Dance and Improvisational Mastery,” in which he develops three topics introduced in his novel treatment of this club dance form. First, I consider the nature of the relationship between house dancing and house music. Second, I address the significance of “the vibe” in house culture. Third, I apply these reflections to Kronsted’s three puzzles of improvisational agency to demonstrate that an apt, aesthetic analysis of …

Architecture Emerging From Landscape: A Reading Of Spinoza In Landscape Architecture, Gokhan Balik

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In what follows, Benedict de Spinoza’s ontology of immanence and monism is deployed as a means to launch a rethinking in between landscape and architecture. Public urban landscape, I suggest, is not a static and neutral construction, but a complex system of dynamic relationships within a continuous process of becoming and a generative field of non-oppressive, non-hegemonic power. This study focuses on two temporary structures by different European practices in the Royal Park of Kensington Gardens, in London. This study uses these works to ground a philosophy of radical immanence within our understanding of a contemporary world of landscape architectural …

Catching The Ghost: House Dance And Improvisational Mastery, Christian Kronsted

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This article received the 2020 Outstanding Student Paper Award from the American Society for Aesthetics. Contemporary Aesthetics recommends reading Renee Conroy’s article, “Reflections on ‘Catching the Ghost: House Dance and Improvisational Mastery,’” following this article.

I interviewed seven expert house dancers regarding their improvisational practice and discovered several intriguing testimonial consistencies. House dancers articulated a feeling of simultaneously being in control and not in control of their movements. Furthermore, in peak moments of improvisation, interviewees were often surprised by their own capabilities. How do we award artistic credit to someone who is seemingly not aware of his or …

Baking As A Means Of Non-Verbal Expression: An Aesthetic Inquiry On Conventual Pastry, Maddalena Borsato

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The aim of this essay is to philosophically explore the domain of conventual pastry by understanding baking as a form of aesthetic expression. I intend to investigate the aesthetic meaning of making sweets, both for the specificity of this taste and for the link between tacit knowledge and the meaning of gift through cloistering. From the very beginning of its production in the monasteries, pastry developed not only as an economic livelihood but also as a way to create a meaningful language beyond the so-called intellectual activities. The philosophical interest lies in the relationship of food practice with intimate …

Aesthetics From The Visual Artists’ Viewpoint, Dena Shottenkirk

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

How to characterize aesthetics has been revived with Bence Nanay’s Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception. Reviewing criticisms made by Dustin Stokes, this paper makes the argument that Nanay’s problem is broader than what Stokes points to, as it involves the problem of property attribution and the difference between perceiving a property in a nonaesthetic situation and an aesthetic one. The latter context involves not attributing a property to an object, but rather the process of perceiving low-level features. The problem of how to characterize aesthetics is thus solved by looking at three things: recent research into gist perception, Gareth …

Authenticity, Universality, And Expression In Song: The Case Of Flamenco, Peter Manuel

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This article explores questions of aesthetic expression and meaning in song, focusing in particular on the enigmatic dynamics involved in song’s combination of abstract and lyrical dimensions of import. These questions are especially overt and actively debated in flamenco, where an ideology of authenticity and suffering, akin to that in African-American genres such as blues or rap, implies that a singer must draw on certain profound biographical experiences rather than universal emotions. However, the accounts of various performers suggest alternate expressive processes in which singers of any background can use a certain sort of role-playing to generate actual emotions that …

Making Sense Of ‘Tropical’ Kitsch, Max Ryynänen, Anna-Sofia Sysser

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The ‘tropical’ has not just been “imported” to Northern spas and travel agency advertisements. Plastic palm trees and inflatable pineapples echo tourism experiences, have roots in “feel-good” Americana, and belong to colonial imagery. The tropical is often portrayed in simplified ways, even though there is a huge diversity of cultures, inhabitants and landscapes within the tropical zone. Could the concept of kitsch help us to understand the construct of the tropical? Could the ‘tropical’ help us to understand kitsch? If one takes away the nearly deceased modern conception of kitsch as pretentious pseudo-art and concentrates on sentimental and/or sugared knickknacks …

The “Body In Motion” As The Substance Of Dance Improvisation? Based On Motifs From Maurice Merleau-Ponty’S Phenomenology Of Perception, Lilianna Bieszczad

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In the beginning of my academic career, it was my personal experience of dance practice that provided a direct impulse for studying the phenomenon of dance as art from a philosophical perspective. It was that same experience that drew my attention to the concept of aesthetic engagement proposed by Arnold Berleant. His theory, in my view, captures the fundamental aspects of dance in a unique way.[1] That early study led me to develop and promote the aesthetics of sensitivity, which in turn created a basis for the appreciation of dance as a practice that is inseparable from life.[2] Many problems …

Disinterestedness, Disdain And The Reception Of Berleant’S Major Idea, Cheryl Foster

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Arnold Berleant’s philosophical theories have proven to be prescient in their identification of an aesthetic interface between human beings and the natural world – the interface he calls “engagement,” a form of participatory aesthetics. This essay presents the context out of which Berleant’s theory of engagement has evolved and then touches upon the application of engagement first to cases of aesthetic appreciation and then to a very recent case in coastal ecology and management. It is suggested that Berleant’s elaboration of a “participatory aesthetics” both mirrors and informs the scientific model of “participatory research,” which in turn has implications for …

Negative Aesthetics In Art, Environment, And Everyday Life: Arnold Berleant’S Theory And The Novels Of Kirino Natsuo, Mara Miller

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Arnold Berleant’s valuable analysis of ‘negative aesthetics’ in his 2010 book Sensibility and Sense: The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World provides an analytic framework not only for general investigation of negative aesthetics but for understanding their extension into daily life and literature. It illuminates the work of Japanese novelist Natsuo Kirino (1951- , 夏生桐野), just as her novels illustrate Berleant’s negative aesthetics. In Kirino’s narratives, negatively aesthetic landscapes determine characters’ mindsets, even as they mirror the moral and aesthetic bleakness of society at large, revealing characters’ internal dynamics and the larger social world with the same destructive efficacy Berleant …

Editorial Introduction To Special Volume 9: Aesthetics Beyond Philosophy: Exploring Berleant’S Concept Of Engagement Editorial Introduction, Bogna J. Gladden-Obidzińska

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

A Philosophical Retrospective, Arnold Berleant

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Arnold Berleant’S Project Of Post-Kantian Aesthetics, Krystyna Wilkoszewska

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Changes in art and culture toward the end of the twentieth century have become a challenge for aesthetics. Arnold Berleant is one of the forerunners of the revising of modern aesthetics, and has been from the very start of his research. He has especially examined the relationship of aesthetics to philosophy.

His critique resonates with views expressed by Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, James, and Dewey, in addition to ecological and feminist departures from Kantian aesthetics. He has criticized the category of disinterestedness and the aesthetics of separation, isolation, contemplation, and distance. This critical analysis is linked to overcoming the notion of experience …

Arnold Berleant’S Environmental Aesthetics And Chinese Ecological Aesthetics, Cheng Xiangzhan

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Professor Arnold Berleant has visited China academically several times since the early 1990s, becoming more and more popular in Chinese academia. Almost all of his books have been translated into Chinese, which produced a significant impact on Chinese scholars, especially on the development of Chinese ecological aesthetics, or ecoaesthetics. They generated a hot topic on the similarities and differences between Western environmental aesthetics and Chinese ecological aesthetics, in view of which this paper first outlines Berleant’s academic activities in China, then focuses on the impact of his environmental aesthetics on the ecological aesthetics mainly advanced by the Chinese scholars Zeng …

Berleant's Opening, Crispin Sartwell

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Throughout modernity, aesthetics had been marked by a significant narrowing of its subject matter, the early peak of this trend being Kantian aesthetics of disinterestedness and modernist formalism based on distance. Arnold Berleant’s mission in aesthetics has been to re-open its domain towards all elements of every-day life, including consumer products, political systems, and the environment. By defining the aesthetic field as an environment of continuity between the self and the non-self, Berleant has managed to transform the Kantian subject-object relation into one of unity. However, the paper argues that such an environmental aesthetics requires a basically realist or materialist …

The Role Of Aesthetics In World-Making, Yuriko Saito

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Arnold Berleant’s oeuvre spanning five decades is devoted to restoring aesthetics’ connection to the rest of our lives. In this paper, I shall join him by highlighting the crucial role aesthetics plays in shaping our lives and the world by interacting with objects, environments, and people. I show how our seemingly innocuous and trivial aesthetic tastes and preferences regarding everyday objects and activities have a surprisingly significant power to determine our attitudes, judgments, and actions, often with serious political, environmental, and moral implications. In light of this power of the aesthetic to affect the quality of life and the state …

Berleant’S Phenomenology Of Sculptural Space: Brâncuşi, Alicja Kuczyńska

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The distinction between reason and senses, until recently maintained in philosophy, has now grown to cause serious doubts. The situation requires creating new forms of cognitive continuity revealed in various levels of emotional experience. Constantin Brâncuşi’s art is analyzed as an example of transgression of this distinction through building a vinculum between the earthly and the heavenly and between the external and the internal. The author refutes the common attribution of Brâncuşi’s art to the Parisian trends or to primary organic forms. In Brâncuşi’s understanding, art creates its own philosophy whose aim is to attain the essence of being. Thus, …

Visual Interlude I, Mara Miller

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Visual Interlude Ii, Mara Miller

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.