Aesthetics Commons^™

Editorial, Yuriko Saito

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

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Notices, Editorial Office

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

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Recent Publications, Editorial Office

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

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Illustrating Philosophy: Comments On Thomas Wartenberg's Thoughtful Images, Elisabeth Schellekens

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This short paper focuses on Thomas Wartenberg’s Thoughtful Images (OUP 2022) and offers a critical discussion of some of the book’s main claims. Of particular interest is the notion described by Wartenberg as “concept-based illustration” and the prospects of this kind of illustration to successfully represent a philosophical concept or theory. Among the questions raised, we find “What is required for an artwork to represent a philosophical claim?”, “Which norms should govern successful illustrations?”, and “How detailed can the content of a concept-based illustration be?”.

Wisdom Regarding Beauty. Self-Effacement And One's Right Relationship To Beauty, Alexndra Hayes

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

What does it mean to cultivate aesthetic virtue in a way that contributes to our character? Pursue beauty, not its effect. Many contemporary theories emphasize the great effects of aesthetic life—expertise, individual style, aesthetic community, and so on. Directly pursuing these effects effaces our endeavors. We should instead love beauty itself because it is worthy of love. This love cannot be measured as easily as these effects, though it is characteristically marked by a self-forgetting receptivity and childlike curiosity.

The Theology Of The Liturgical Seasons In The Syro-Malabar Church, Ann Mary Madavanakadu Cmc

Journal of Global Catholicism

This paper focuses on the theology of the liturgical seasons in the Syro-Malabar Church. The liturgical year with its liturgical cycles and seasons, is more than just a mere structural framework for the prayer life of the Church. It is a true locus of rich theology. The liturgical year is defined as the yearly plan of spiritual life by the Church, for her children, arranged in different seasons or periods to celebrate the mysteries of Christ in life together with feasts, fasts, and abstinence in order to make Christian life a successful pilgrimage to heaven for attaining salvation. This article …

Further Reflections On Visual Illustrations Of Philosophy: A Response To Freeland, Schellekens, And Strayer, Thomas E. Wartenberg

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The incisive commentaries about Thoughtful Images by Cynthia Freeland, Elisabeth Schellekens, and Jeff Strayer provide the occasion for a rethinking of some of the fundamental claims about visual illustrations of philosophy that I made in the book. The essay begins with a discussion of the “logic” of the term ‘illustration’ and then discusses the relationship between illustrations and technology. A variety of different themes are then addressed, such as the possibility of musical illustrations of philosophy; differences in the processing of written texts and visual images; additions to fidelity and felicity as norms applying to successful illustrations of philosophy; and …

Reading Texts And Pictures, Cynthia Freeland

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Wartenberg’s book, Thoughtful Images, is an ambitious defense of the value of philosophical illustrations. Through examples from a vast historical sweep, he differentiates several ways that images help us understand or even enact philosophy. My critical response focuses on how viewers understand and make sense of visual images, by comparison with how we interpret texts of philosophical authors. I argue that the relevant processes of interpretation are more similar than what Wartenberg assumes, especially when issues arise about the role of narratives in both texts and pictures.

A Typology Of Illustration, Jeffrey Strayer

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This article introduces the notions of technique-based, problem-based, and history-based illustrations as kinds of illustration relevant to art and philosophy that are intended to complement those recognized by Wartenberg. In doing so, it considers the possible illustration of different ideas within a single work, and the possibility that the complex interrelation of certain ideas may require a number of works for the success of their illustration. These different possibilities raise the issue of how illustration is related to artistic intention and understanding and to the history of art, with its settled and novel kinds of artistic production. Art as philosophy …

Experiential Time In Some Modern Poetry, Aaron Lercher

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Experiential or lived time (A-series time) can be many things. Gertrude Stein claims, in her 1935 Narration lectures, that experiential time is a plenum: all experiential time is full of vivid experience, if one is alert to perceive it. Stein, however, then poses a problem of narration that seems to obstruct poetic access to this vivid plenum. Bernadette Mayer and Lisa Jarnot take up Stein’s challenge with time-defined and time-filling poetic writing processes. Much like children, these processes can come to have their own experiential times.

Taste, Knowledge, And Discernment: On Sarah Worth’S Taste, Carolyn Korsmeyer

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In the course of her exposition of the sense of taste, Sarah Worth argues that taste can provide a purely sensuous, aesthetic kind of knowledge that is rooted in bodily sensation, in contrast to the information-gathering provided by the distance senses of vision and hearing. As such, taste experience is also independent of propositional knowledge. I argue that, on the contrary, taste is not only multimodal but its full operation is also dependent on certain ongoing cognitive conditions. Although Worth declares that there is no such thing as an aesthetic obligation, her defense of the importance of taste actually suggests …

Taste: A Philosophy Of Food, Sarah Worth

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This book has been such a labor of love for me; I cannot thank my commentators enough for taking this work seriously and giving such thoughtful feedback. Carolyn Korsmeyer, Deborah Knight, and Alexandra Plakias were willing not only to do an author-meets-critic session but to develop their thoughts further into these papers. I could not receive higher praise as a philosopher than serious consideration. The primary claim of my book is about the ways in which gustatory taste should be taken more seriously, especially as a form of knowledge. I approach this suggestion not from the historical sense of taste …

The Pleasure Of Knowing: Comments On Sarah Worth's Taste, Alexandra Plakias

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In Taste: A Philosophy of Food, Sarah Worth explores the aesthetics of food through the philosophy of slow food. She discusses the relationship between the pleasure we take in our food and our knowledge of what we’re eating; on Worth’s view, taste is both a source of pleasure and a source of knowledge — provided we cultivate the skill of tasting in the right way. Here, I discuss Worth’s account of gustatory knowledge and suggest some complicating factors: in particular, not everyone has access to the sorts of foods required to cultivate the skill of taste and our food …

Eat, Taste, Know – Reflections On Sarah Worth’S Taste: A Philosophy Of Food, Deborah Knight

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Sarah Worth argues that philosophy should take gustatory taste seriously. While taste has played a central role in philosophical aesthetics, “aesthetic taste” is a trope referring to our judgments about the value or merit of an object, typically a work of art. What, then, about the literal sense of taste — the perception of flavor when we have something like food or drink in our mouths? Because our wide range of gustatory experiences and the kinds of judgments we make about them are so intimately connected to the kinds of things we eat, I look at fast food versus slow …

Japanese-English Translation: Nishida Kitarō––“Self-Determination Of The Eternal Now” 「永遠の今の自己限定」、西田幾多郎著（昭和六年七月） (July 1931) §1 Of 4; Complete Draft (Supersedes Draft Of 2 Jan 19); Translated By Christopher Southward; Revision And Expansion Underway, Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Japanese-English Translation: Nishida Kitarō––“Self-Determination of the Eternal Now” (July 1931) 「永遠の今の自己限定」、西田幾多郎著（昭和六年七月）

§1 of 4; Complete Draft (Supersedes Draft of 2 Jan 2019)

Translated from the Japanese by Christopher Southward; Revision and Expansion Underway, October 2023

From Patriarchal Stereotypes To Matriarchal Pleasures Of Hybridity: Representation Of A Muslim Family In Berlin, Rahime Özgün Kehya Dr

Journal of Religion & Film

Sinan Çetin’s blockbuster Berlin in Berlin (1993) is a Turkish-German co-production. In contrast to certain representational tendencies with German orientalism or Turkish occidentalism, it deconstructs the intersectional structures of migration, religion, and gender. The portrayal of religion in films about Turkish-German labour migration is a kind of cultural narcissism often projected into national cinema by denigrating the faith of the other and glorifying one’s own religion. However, perspectives at such intersections are critical and require sensitivity in filmmaking, as films can create prejudice or help build peaceful relationships around these sensitive issues. The paper employs discourse analysis in linking Derrida’s …

Viewing Terrence Malick’S A Hidden Life As Political Theology: Toward Theocinematics, Joel Mayward

Journal of Religion & Film

In this article, I bring Terrence Malick’s 2019 film, A Hidden Life, into conversation with two of philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s concepts: (1) the “social imaginary” as the interplay of ideals, images, ideologies and utopias, and (2) Ricoeur’s description of the genre of “parable” as a narrative-metaphor which provokes a “re-orientation by disorientation” within an audience’s imagination. Drawing from Ricoeur’s thought, I apply a theological film criticism I call “theocinematics” to A Hidden Life in order to call attention to the ways in which the cinematic form itself engenders sociopolitical and theological thought. Through emphasizing film aesthetics in my analysis, …

V.1 Fall 2023, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Fall 2023 issue contains articles on bubbles, a performance at AS220 "Belated Avowal" by RISD MFA student Cat Ashley, sleeping and dreaming, interviews of RISD students, a critical review of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, movement experiments, a Jake Shore show at Providence student gallery Ladybug Providence, and George Orwell's book "Why I Write," along with creative writing on a variety of topics.

The Role Of Moroccan Street Art In Decolonial Discourse And Binary Deconstruction, Taylor Rokala

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

As a country historically subjected to French colonialism and currently the site of a burgeoning street art scene, Morocco is a locus for street art that contributes to the decolonial project and deconstruction of remaining colonial structures left by the French. Drawing from Edward Said’s concept of orientalism, the idea of gaze, and bell hooks’s counter concept of oppositional gaze, this paper seeks to understand how Moroccan street artists use their art to challenge the binary opposition between tradition and modernity constructed during the French Protectorate. I will discuss the theme of temporality, because of street art’s ephemeral nature and …

Author Vs. Audience: Bridging The Gap Between Interpretation And Intent, Adrian R. Ross

PANDION: The Osprey Journal of Research and Ideas

Since Roland Barthes first published his essay “Le mort de l’auteur” (“The death of the author”) in the 1960s, literary critics have reconsidered the role of the author in the interpretation of media. Barthes and others have argued that the author’s intentions matter little after a work of art is handed off for public consumption, and that art is up for interpretation with the audience playing a greater role in its meaning. Others, however, argue that the author is the ultimate authority on the meaning of their work, and that authorial intent is the most important aspect to consider when …