Philosophy Commons^™

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, …

Sculpture And Its Meaning In The Context Of Berleant’S Aesthetic Engagement, Anna Wolińska

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

It is not my intention to provide a comprehensive analysis of Berleant’s notion of aesthetic engagement. My goal is modest. I hope to account for the key significance of the philosophical problematization of sculpture, in the context of engaged aesthetics. In writing about the philosophical problematization of sculpture, I am thinking most of all about the problem of space, a phenomenon that emerges in the relationship of the solid form to its surroundings. It is a relationship that is usually perceived as directly connected with the sculpture. I want to emphasize that Alicja Kuczyńska was well aware of the …

Visual Interlude I, Mara Miller

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

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 …

It's Funny 'Cause It's True: The Lighthearted Philosophers’ Society’S Introduction To Philosophy Through Humor, Jennifer Marra Henrigillis, Steven Gimbel

Open Educational Resources

It's Funny 'Cause It's True is an introductory text in philosophy exploring logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics through questions in the philosophy of humor. Subfields receive a substantive introduction with interactive essays written to be accessible to undergraduates.

Three Roles Of Narratives In The Treatment Of Chronic Pain, Nina Atanasova

Philosophy and Religious Studies Department Faculty Publications

In this paper, I discuss the roles narratives play in the diagnostics, treatment, and recovery of chronic pain patients. I show that the successes of this narrative approach to the treatment of chronic pain support the biopsychosocial model of disease. The central example of narrative interventions discussed in the paper is pain neuroscience education. This is an intervention which aims at helping chronic pain patients reconceptualize their pain experiences so as to align them with neuroscientific knowledge of pain. Multiple clinical trials have established the success of these interventions in pain reduction. This shows that neuroscience pain education is in …

Günther Anders’S Epitaph For Aikichi Kuboyama, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Günther Anders’s poem Du kleiner Fischerman is read here as a text contribution to the irruption that is violence and its enduring (omnipresent) aftermath. The essay includes a discussion of transmedial expression, including dramatization, or television and social media, text and subtext, as well as the inspiration of Anders’s poem as a work of art continuing in our times: the ongoing exclusion(s) of certain names and certain thinkers as of certain musical modes, including electronic musical works, as of voices and of collective memory, or oblivion. Reading Raymond Williams along with Anders and Adorno on television updated in today’s era …

Mythopoetic Naturalization: Toward A New Paradigm Of Reifcation, Bryan Smyth

Faculty and Student Publications

This paper sketches a new approach to the critical-theoretic problem of reifcation understood as a normatively problematic form of naturalizing or dehistoricizing entifcation. Entifcation in general is approached phenomenologically in terms of the mythic outer horizonality of the lifeworld, and reifcation is shown to stem from the dichotomy between nature and history which, along with a corresponding dichotomy between myth and reason, is characteristic of Enlightenment rationality. Dereifcation necessitates overcoming these dichotomies, and this implies a critical embrace of myth and mythopoesis in the sense of instituting more normatively appropriate lifeworld horizons. While classical Marxism and radical social theory have …

The Fourfold Route To Empirical Enlightenment Experimental Philosophy’S Adolescence And The Changing Body Of Work, Robert Barnard, Joseph Ulatowski, Jonathan M. Weinberg

Faculty and Student Publications

The time has come to consider whether experimental philosophy’s (“x-phi”) early arguments, debates, and conceptual frameworks, that may have worn well in its early days, fit with the diverse range of projects undertaken by experimental philosophers. Our aim is to propose a novel taxonomy for x-phi that identifies four paths from empirical findings to philosophical consequences, which we call the “fourfold route.” We show how this taxonomy can be fruitfully applied even at what one might have taken to be the furthest edges of possible applications of x-phi in metaphysics and formal philosophy. Ultimately, the fourfold route helps us understand …

Obey Your Superior As If She Were Your Mother!, St. Norbert College

Center Events

A lecture from SNC's Dean of Humanities Jennifer Hockenbery on how Augustine’s maternal image of God affected his rule, his view of women, and his hope in community.

Listening To The Transgender Child’S Voice: Navigating Parent-Child Conflicts Regarding Gender-Affirming Care, Halle Paredes

Philosophy Honors Papers

No abstract provided.

Coherent Infinitism As A Hybrid Model Of Epistemic Justification, Luca Batt

Bouwsma Paper Contest

In this paper I will be arguing for a new theory of justification as a hybrid of coherentism and infinitism which I shall call Coherent Infinitism (CI), with the goal of showing that we can have justified beliefs. This paper will be divided into sections. I will begin with a basic layout of both coherentism and infinitism as separate theories of justification. In the subsequent section major objections to both these theories will be analyzed, which make them implausible by themselves. The third section of this paper will focus on the nature of justification and the properties of the justification …

Logos-Sophia, Pittsburg State University Philosophical Society

LOGOS-SOPHIA: The Journal of the PSU Philosophical Society

Logos-Sophia, Volume 16, Spring 2021. The Journal of the Pittsburg State University Philosophical Society has largely been a student publication with occasional faculty contributions.

Community Unclaimed: Plurality And The Problem Of Sovereignty In Bataille, Nancy, And Blanchot, Gregory J. Grobmeier

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation takes up the exchange between three prominent French thinkers on the question of “community”: Georges Bataille, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Maurice Blanchot. Taken together, and starting with Bataille’s prewar writings and communitarian activism in the 1930s, the exchange between them now spans nearly a century. Georges Bataille’s importance as a political thinker and writer was brought out of relative obscurity with the publication of Jean-Luc Nancy’s “La Communauté désoeuvrée” in 1983. Less than a year after the appearance of Nancy’s inaugural essay, Maurice Blanchot, a close friend of the late Bataille, published La Communauté inavouable. Blanchot’s text was …

The Martyr’S Desire: Levinas, Girard, And Infinite Responsibility, Joshua Alan Lawrence

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Perhaps the whole of human history could be summed up with one word: economy. The law of the home and the home of all law. Without fail, this situation results in a structured devotion that must decide what to do with desire. And the economic decision often follows a violent trajectory, most commonly described as sacrifice. Today, states will make efforts to conceal this underlying logic, but the insidious configurations of ‘real politik’ usually surface with a frightening intensity.

My project considers these problematic vestiges through Emmanuel Levinas’s reconfiguration of subjectivity. To address these bio-historical realities, my work highlights the …

Vi. Barolo Landscape Studies: Barolo Mga 360º Vermeer Rilke, Charles S. Taylor

Wine Journey: Tasting Dwelling Learning at The Kitchen Table

Oh tall tree in the ear / O hoher Baum im Ohr! astonished me years ago, reading Rilke with students. WHAT did it mean? He knew. Jubilant praise sings in my ear. An ascending tree crossed paths with astounding wine unexpectedly. Breaking in new hiking shoes in vineyard dust in Serralunga d’Alba began a 40-year-long anticipated visit to Barolo and Barbaresco. Walking also through vineyards in La Morra, Barolo and Neive, tastings at Azienda Agricola Vigna Rionda S.S. di Massolino Fiili (Serralunga d’Alba) and Castello di Neive Azienda Agricola (Barbaresco), invited private tastings at La Morra’s Poderi Marcarini and at …

The Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, John Shannon Hendrix

Architecture, Art, and Historic Preservation Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Critical Notice Of Words And Contents, Robert Stainton, Arthur Sullivan

Philosophy Publications

Full review of Richard Vallee's 2018 book Words and Thoughts. The article focuses on the explication and critique of John Perry's "pluri-propositional" or "reflexive referential" view, which Vallee applies to a range of context sensitive expressions.

Linguistic Prescriptivism, Alex Barber, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Understanding Stability In Cognitive Neuroscience Through Hacking's Lens, Jacqueline A. Sullivan

Philosophy Publications

Ian Hacking instigated a revolution in 20th century philosophy of science by putting experiments (“interventions”) at the top of a philosophical agenda that historically had focused nearly exclusively on representations (“theories”). In this paper, I focus on a set of conceptual tools Hacking (1992) put forward to understand how laboratory sciences become stable and to explain what such stability meant for the prospects of unity of science and kind discovery in experimental science. I first use Hacking’s tools to understand sources of instability and disunity in rodent behavioral neuroscience. I then use them to understand recent grass-roots collaborative initiatives aimed …