Philosophy Commons^™

The Role Of Westerners In The Conservation Of Legong Dance, Stephen Davies

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The image of legong-sumtuosly costumed girl dancers crowned with frangiapanis-is the face of Balinese culture. Yet it is only one of twenty dance/drama genres and prominent in only some centers. Legong, a secular court dance, has often been (and still is) in danger of extinction. Balinese are now less interested in legong than ever before and musicians prefer to play other kinds of music.

Since the 1930s, legong has been presented at tourist centers and by ensembles touring overseas. Western expatriates have founded legong groups and generally brokered the relation between Balines and foreigners. Foreign scholars have studied, recorded, and …

Playing With Shadows, Apinan Poshyananda

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This essay reflects on the practice of the Indonesian artist Heri Dono, whose exhibition in Tokyo in 2000 is the anchor. It probes the cultural contexts in which the contemporary art of Dono plays out, identifying key trajectories that help clarify the concerns of this particular articulation: the locale of Yogyakarta, the mentality of the Javanese, and the device of the puppet presentation or the wayang, which derives from the ancient epics.[1] All this is located within the scheme of an exhibition of contemporary art and rendered in such a way that it conveys a certain aesthetic of hybridity and …

Editorial

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

A New Problem For Aesthetics, Kevin Melchionne

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The essay introduces the problem of aesthetic unreliability, the variety of ways in which it is difficult to grasp our aesthetic experience and the consequent confusion and unreliability of what we take as our taste.

Virtual Dance And Motion-Capture, Marc Boucher

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

A general view of various ways in which virtual dance can be understood is presented in the first part of this article. It then appraises the uses of the term “virtual” in previous studies of digital dance. A more in-depth view of virtual dance as it relates to motion-capture is offered, and key issues are discussed regarding computer animation, digital imaging, motion signature, virtual reality and interactivity. The paper proposes that some forms of virtual dance be defined in relation to both digital technologies and contemporary theories of virtuality.

City Walks And Tactile Experiences, Mădălina Diaconu

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper is an attempt to develop categories of the pedestrian’s tactile and kinaesthetic experience of the city. The beginning emphasizes the haptic qualities of surfaces and textures, which can be “palpated” visually or experienced by walking. Also the lived city is three-dimensional; its corporeal depth is discussed here in relation to the invisible sewers, protuberant profiles, and the formal diversity of roofscapes. A central role is ascribed in the present analysis to the formal similarities between the representation of the city by walking through it and the representation of the tactile form of objects. Additional aspects of the “tactile” …

Notices

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Stories In Pictures (And Non-Pictorial Objects): A Narratological And Cognitive Psychological Approach, Michael Ranta

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Narratological studies have frequently focused upon linguistic structures, considered to be paradigmatic cases of narrativity, while pictorial signs, such as icons and symbols or indices, have received comparably much less attention. In this paper, however, some basic and regularly occurring narrative aspects of pictures and non-pictorial objects will be presented and discussed.

Politics Of Beauty, Ken-Ichi Sasaki

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

I look back at the history of modern aesthetics to grasp its current situation and to propose its possibilities for the future. The early modern period, during which aesthetics came into being, was a great historical turning point for civilization. Our contemporary period shares this character, and it is worthwhile for us to consult its history in order to reflect on our civilization. Aesthetics began with Baumgarten’s proposal, which consisted in a triple subject: sensibility, beauty, and art. His idea was accepted because it responded to the fundamental problems of the period. Sensibility was the only form of cognition of …

Taking Art Personally: Austin, Performatives And Art, David Goldblatt

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper is an attempt to apply speech act theory to aesthetics. In particular, it purports to be a contribution to reception theory by drawing attention to certain similarities between the contextual structure of performatives and the structure of the reception of art. It hopes to locate the auditor or spectator of artworks in what J. L. Austin calls “the total context” to help explain how certain aspects of artworks can be taken personally, somehow being about and seemingly directed at “me.” It is one way the so-called paradox of fiction can be by-passed by showing how the emotive aspects …

Towards A Critical Philosophy Of Science: Continental Beginnings And Bugbears, Whigs, And Waterbears, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Continental philosophy of science has developed alongside mainstream analytic philosophy of science. But where continental approaches are inclusive, analytic philosophies of science are not – excluding not merely Nietzsche’s philosophy of science but Gödel’s philosophy of physics. As a radicalization of Kant, Nietzsche’s critical philosophy of science puts science in question and Nietzsche’s critique of the methodological foundations of classical philology bears on science, particularly evolution as well as style (in art and science). In addition to the critical (in Mach, Nietzsche, Heidegger but also Husserl just to the extent that continental philosophy of science tends to depart from a …

Ceaselessly Testing The Good Of Death, Danielle A. Layne

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

The hope Socrates invokes during his defence becomes a statement to be tested and corroborated, and thus a catalyst for discovery rather than a valueless rejection of all arguments, beliefs or in Socratic terms “hopes.” In his prison cell Socrates tests the propositions in the Apology that death may be a good and in the Phaedo these arguments affirm Socrates’ hope, making it the more valuable belief. Thus since no man willing chooses evil, a valueless not knowing, over the good, the value-laden hope regardless of not-knowing, Socrates commits himself to the “great perhaps” of the immortality of the soul. …

A Religious Revolution? How Socrates' Theology Undermined The Practice Of Sacrifice, Anna Lannstrom

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Mark McPherran and Gregory Vlastos argue that Socrates’ theology threatened Athenian sacrificial practices because it rejected the do ut des principle (aka the principle of reciprocity). I argue that their arguments are flawed because they assume that the Athenians understood sacrifice as something like a commercial transaction. Drawing upon scholarship in anthropology and religious studies, I argue that we need to revise that understanding of sacrifice and that, once we do, McPherran’s and Vlastos’ arguments no longer show that Socrates would have been a significant threat to the practice of sacrifice. Finally, I argue that McPherran’s Socrates does undermine sacrifice, …

Earlier Buddhist Theories Of Free Will: Compatibilism, Rick Repetti

Publications and Research

This is the first part of a three-article series that examines Budd-hist accounts of free will. The present article introduces the issues and reviews earlier attempts by Frances Story, Walpola Rāhula, Luis Gómez, and David Kalupahana. These “early-period” authors advocate compatibilism between Buddhist doctrine, determinism (the doctrine of universal lawful causation), and free will. The second article reviews later attempts by Mark Siderits, Gay Watson, Joseph Goldstein, and Charles Goodman. These “middle-period” authors embrace either partial or full incompatibilism. The third article reviews recent attempts by Nicholas F. Gier and Paul Kjellberg, Asaf Federman, Peter Harvey, and B. Alan Wallace. …

Costume Designing For Theatre Of The Absurd - Come And Go, Footfalls, And The Dumb Waiter., Leslie Rose Epling

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In October of 2010, ETSU staged three one-act plays in the Theatre of the Absurd genre--Come and Go and Footfalls by Samuel Beckett and The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter. This thesis gives a brief overview of Theatre of the Absurd and how Beckett and Pinter helped to shape and define the genre. It also gives an analysis of these three plays from the perspective of the costume designer.

Christian Realism And Augustinian (?) Liberalism, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Surely there is enough kindling lying about in the Bible and in subsequent moral theology to fire up love for neighbors and compassion for countless “friends” in foreign parts--and in crisis. And, surely, the momentum of love’s labor for the just redistribution of resources, fueled by activists’ appeals for solidarity, should be sustained by stressing that we are creatures made for affection, not for aggression. Yet experience, plus the history of the Christian traditions, taught Reinhold Niebuhr, who memorably reminded Christian realists, how often love was “defeated,” how a “strategy of brotherhood . . . degenerates from mutuality to a …

The Resilience Of Computationalism, Gualtiero Piccinini

Philosophy Faculty Works

Computationalism—the view that cognition is computation—has always been controversial. It faces two types of objection. According to insufficiency objections, computation is insufficient for some cognitive phenomenon X. According to objections from neural realization, cognitive processes are realized by neural processes, but neural processes have feature Y, and having Y is incompatible with being (or realizing) computations. In this article, I explain why computationalism has survived these objections. To adjudicate the dispute between computationalism and its foes, I will conclude that we need a better account of computation.

A Little Bat And A Big City: Nocturnal Behavior Of The Tricolored Bat (Perimyotis Subflavus) Near Indianapolis Airport, Jared Scot Helms

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I captured 16 Perimyotis subflavus on property owned by the Indianapolis International Airport, of those 16 animals I obtained roosting data on all 16 and foraging data on 11 individuals. The goal of this project was to see if a short broad winged bat’s foraging and roosting habits were affected by the fragmentation of habitat due to rapid urbanization. Using radio telemetry to find roosts and to create multi-azimuth triangulation I was able to create data points and place them onto a habitat map inside ArcGIS software. Sampling the size of woodlots available to the bats I was able to …

Effect Of Core Strength On The Measure Of Power In The Extremities, Justin Shinkle

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of core strength on the transfer and production of forces in the extremities. Twenty-five division 1 collegiate football players performed a series of medicine ball throws in the forward, reverse, right and left directions in a static and dynamic position. The results of the medicine ball throws were compared to several athletic performance measurements including: push press power, 1RM squat, 1RM bench press, countermovement vertical jump, broad jump, 40 yard dash, 20 yard dash, pro agility to the right and left, and the L drill. Several strong correlations were found …

Sagp Newsletter 2010/11.1 East Philol, Anthony Preus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

No abstract provided.