Digital Commons Network^™

If You See Something, Say Something: A Look At Experimental Writing On Art, Charlotte Lucy Latham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Signs all over New York City state, "If you see something, say something," but museum studies repeatedly find viewers do not attend to pictures, just as eye witness testimony is invariably skewed. Ways of seeing have been limited to known ways of discussing. Alternative approaches offer new insights. The first section, "Experiments in Art Writing," examines two texts: T.J. Clark's The Sight of Death, a journal of his daily visits looking at two Poussin paintings, for which he maintains the ambiguity of exploration and argues to keep visual images from their dissolution into political symbols; and, Charles Simic's Dime Store …

To Each His Own Reality: How The Analysis Of Artistic Exchanges In Cold War Europe Challenges Categories, Mathilde Arnoux

Artl@s Bulletin

How to reconstruct artistic relationships among four European countries, situated on both sides of the Iron Curtain, during the period that commenced post-Stalin and lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall? This is one of the questions that faces the research program To Each His Own Reality: The notion of the real in the art of France, West Germany, East Germany and Poland between 1960 and 1989, which was initiated in January 2011. The paper discusses syntheses of the questions that the research team is facing, descriptions of its methodology, an analysis of preliminary results and what they allow …

Shinto: An Experience Of Being At Home In The World With Nature And With Others, Marcus Evans

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This study discloses Shinto’s experiential and existential significance and aims to articulate Shinto’s sacred objective. It shows that Shinto, by way of experience, communicates being in the world with nature and with others as a sacred objective. This suggests that Shinto, in communicating its objective, appeals to the emotions more so than to the intellect; and that Shinto’s sacred objective does not transcend the natural world of both nature and everyday affairs. This study pursues this goal by showing the experiential and existential dimensions of the three primary features of Shinto: it shows how kami (or kami-ness) is thought of …

Reassessing Neo-Kantianism. Another Look At Hermann Cohen’S Kant Interpretation, Sebastian Luft

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Existence: An Unholy Trinity. An Account Of Indeterminate Existence, Salas Sanchez-Bennasar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What is it for something to exist? This dissertation provides an answer to this question by giving a philosophical theory of existence in which the concept of existence in understood as a complex tri-partite notion. The account of existence defended here is arrived at by taking into consideration past philosophical theories of existence, the everyday and scientific uses of the notion, and also philosophical considerations about the nature of reality.

There are three conditions that are central to existence: spatiotemporality, mind-independence, and being a member of the quantificational domain of a true and complete scientific description about the world. To …

Euler, Reader Of Newton: Mechanics And Algebraic Analysis, Sébastien Maronne, Marco Panza

MPP Published Research

We follow two of the many paths leading from Newton’s to Euler’s scientific productions, and give an account of Euler’s role in the reception of some of Newton’s ideas, as regards two major topics: mechanics and algebraic analysis. Euler contributed to a re-appropriation of Newtonian science, though transforming it in many relevant aspects. We study this re-appropriation with respect to the mentioned topics and show that it is grounded on the development of Newton’s conceptions within a new conceptual frame also influenced by Descartes’s views sand Leibniz’s formalism.

The Point Of Everyday Aesthetics, Kevin Melcionne

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The point of everyday aesthetic activity is well-being

The Place Of Eucharistic Adoration In The Apostolate Of The Laity In Light Of Magisterial Teaching, Jessica Leach

Theses

No abstract provided.

Visual Representations Of Prester John And His Kingdom, Michael E. Brooks

Quidditas

The mythical figure of the priest-king known to late medieval and early modern Europeans as Prester John fascinated literate Europeans for many centuries. Historians have weighed in on textual depictions of the legendary figure, but visual interpretations by European artists of the physical appearance of this eastern potentate have not been examined in any significant depth. These portrayals primarily took the form of map and book illustrations, and this essay examines the evolving visual representations that European artists developed of Prester John. In general, there was a gradual evolution over time in European artistic depictions of the legendary Prester John, …

Contemporary Aesthetics: Perspectives On Times, Space And Content, Ossi Naukkarinen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

What is contemporary aesthetics? The answer to this question is often simply stated rather than carefully elaborated, even if the current nature and scope of the discipline is far from self-evident. To examine how both the concept and the field of contemporary aesthetics can be understood, I suggest that it is useful to consider three themes: the time, space, and content of aesthetics, i.e., the questions of when, where, and what contemporary aesthetics is. Through this, it is possible to construe a conceptual space of contemporary aesthetics and to compare different instantiations of it with each other.

Anti-Essentialism, Tom Leddy

Faculty Publications

From the late nineteenth century to the 1950s one of the main foci of aesthetic inquiry was the attempt to develop definitions of art and such related concepts as visual art, music, tragedy, beauty, and metaphor. Clive Bell (1958) famously stated that either all works of visual art have some common quality or when we speak of “work of art” we speak nonsense. DeWitt H. Parker (1939) argued more generally that the assumption underlying every philosophy of art is the existence of some common nature present in all the arts. This search for a common quality or nature …

Jerusalem Obscured: The Crescent On The Temple: The Dome Of The Rock As Image Of The Ancient Jewish Sanctuary, Curtis Hutt

International Dialogue

To begin with, what is it? In order to answer this question one must, of course, qualify it by asking—to whom? Pamela Berger in The Crescent on the Temple: The Dome of the Rock as Image of the Ancient Jewish Sanctuary has done a great service by supplying us with a history of the iconographic representation of Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock (the Qubbat al-Sakhrah). While no publication could ever exhaustively summarize the countless visual and literary portrayals of this world heritage site, Berger not only makes a valiant attempt at such but necessarily changes the way that almost all …

Review Of "The Critical Imagination" By J. Grant, Richard Thomas Eldridge

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Humility, Civility, And Vitality: Papal Leadership At The Turn Of The Seventh Century, Peter Iver Kaufman

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

In 416, Bishop Innocent I of Rome sent a colleague in Gubbio what was to become one of the most important set of liturgical instructions in early Christendom. Innocent composed his remarks on, inter alia, penitential discipline and prescribed gestures during the administration of the Sacraments to deter other bishops and their priests from improvising. He claimed that bishops of Rome, as successors of St. Peter, had the responsibility to authenticate ritual observances and achieve uniformity in Italy and elsewhere. Churches could not be left to alter or surrender valued practices because presiding priests or bishops thought them superfluous or …

Correlating The Nevius Method With Church Planting Movements: Early Korean Revivals As A Case Study, Wesley L. Handy

Liberty Theological Review

John Nevius served as a missionary to China in the late nineteenth-century. From his field experience, Nevius argued for radical changes in missionary methodology. His greatest influence may have been on the mission to Korea beginning in the 1890s. David Garrison, currently serving in South Asia, served for several years in influential administrative roles within the International (formerly Foreign) Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. He studied and advocated Church Planting Movements [CPM], necessitating a change in contemporary missionary methodology. Both men have made major contributions to the practice of missions. This article endeavors to show the similarities between …

Justice In Context: Assessing Contextualism As An Approach To Justice, Michael Buckley

Publications and Research

Moral and political philosophers are increasingly using empirical data to inform their normative theories. This has sparked renewed interest into questions concerning the relationship between facts and principles. A recent attempt to frame these questions within a broader approach to normative theory comes from David Miller, who has on several occasions defended ‘contextualism’ as the best approach to justice. Miller argues that the context of distribution itself brings one or another political principle into play. This paper examines this claim. It considers several plausible strategies for carrying out Miller’s general project and argues that each strategy fails. Nevertheless, the author …

Freshest Advices On What To Do With The Historical Method In Philosophy When Using It To Study A Little Bit Of Philosophy That Has Been Lost To History, Bennett Gilbert

University Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

The paper explores the question of the relationship between the practice of original philosophical inquiry and the study of the history of philosophy. It is written from my point of view as someone starting a research project in the history of philosophy that calls this issue into question, in order to review my starting positions. I argue: first, that any philosopher is sufficiently embedded in culture that her practice is necessarily historical; second, that original work is in fact in part a reconstruction by reinterpretation of the past and that therefore it bears some relation to historiographic techniques for the …

Covenant Nation: The Politics Of Grace In Early American Literature, Justin M. Scott-Coe

CGU Theses & Dissertations

The argument of this dissertation is that a critical reading of the concept of "covenant" in early American writings is instrumental to understanding the paradoxes in the American political concepts of freedom and equality. Following Slavoj Zizek's theoretical approach to theology, I trace the covenant concept in early American literature from the theological expressions and disputes in Puritan Massachusetts through Jonathan Edwards's Freedom of Will and the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, showing how the covenant theology of colonial New England dispersed into more "secular" forms of what may be called an American political theology. The first chapter provides an …

Approaches To The Atonement In The Mystery Plays, Adam C. Wolfe

Quidditas

The English Corpus Christi plays were a vibrant expression of late medieval Christianity, but they did not survive the Reformation. Many Protestant reformers opposed religious drama altogether, but there were some attempts by reformers to edit the plays and recast them in a Protestant mold, attempts which were ultimately unsuccessful. This paper examines one such attempt and finds that the problem went far beyond obvious references to, and representations of, specifically Catholic beliefs. Focusing on representations of the Atonement in the York and Towneley plays, I found at least four distinct theological approaches to this central concept of Christian theology, …

On 'Shock:' The Artistic Imagination Of Benjamin And Brecht, Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

“Shock” is perhaps the central concept of modernist aesthetics and Walter Benjamin its best known theorist. It has been well documented that Benjamin’s long-lasting friendship with Bertolt Brecht and the latter’s dramatic theory had a profound influence on his thinking about this notion. Brecht's techniques of interruption and juxtaposition in the practice of epic theater were in close relationship with Benjamin’s use of montage as a mechanism to “liberate” meaning. Despite Theodor Adorno’s and Gershom Scholem’s attempt to situate Benjamin’s thought in a different aesthetic tradition, Brecht’s understanding of Verfremdung (estrangement) and Benjamin’s idea of “shock” are often deemed identical. …

Propaganda And The 21st Century Student, Miguel Martinez-Saenz , Provost, Academic Affairs, Tammy M. Proctor

Administrators/Executives/Staff Scholarship

This short piece provides a way of thinking about the Enlightenment’s legacy and the strength of modern propaganda in order to enable world history teachers to use these themes in their classes, both for teaching history and for helping students to reflect on their own lives. The authors provide background on the ideas of 1930s critical theorists and their impact on the interwar period, then suggest practical ways that world history instructors (in high schools and universities) can use these insights in developing lectures, lesson plans, and assignments for their classrooms.

Knowledge And Thought In Heidegger And Foucault: Towards An Epistemology Of Ruptures, Arun Anantheeswaran Iyer

Dissertations (1934 -)

This dissertation shows how Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault, by questioning the very understanding of the subject-object relationship on which all epistemology is grounded, challenge two of its most cherished beliefs: 1. Thought and knowledge are essentially activities on the part of the subject understood anthropologically or transcendentally. 2. The history of knowledge exhibits teleological progress towards a better and more comprehensive account of its objects. In contrast to traditional epistemology, both Heidegger and Foucault show how thought and knowledge are not just acts, which can be attributed to the subject but also events which elude any such subjective characterization. …

Aristotle On Truth, Facts, And Relations: Categories, De Interpretatione, Metaphysics Gamma, Blake Hestir

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Aristotle’s conception of truth looks like this:

TA-Schema: ‘S is P’ is true ↔ S is P.

TA-Schema(n): ‘S is not P’ is true ↔ S is not P.

By Tdf Aristotle need only mean that stating with respect to some property P that is in the case some subject S that P is in the case of S, is what amounts to truth. More precisely then for Aristotle the TA-Schema would amount to:

TA-Schema*: ‘S is P’ is true ↔ the universal P is instantiated in the case of S. TASchema( n)*: ‘S is not P’ is true ↔ …

Writing And Rewriting Early Modern History: Five Sixteenth-Century English Chroniclers, Barrett L. Beer, Andrea Manchester

Quidditas

In the field of early modern historical writing, sixteenth-century English chronicles have been regarded as an outdated medieval form, and they and their authors have suffered in comparison with later works influenced by Renaissance humanism. Yet in the Tudor period, chronicles, especially the smaller, abridged versions, enjoyed a substantial readership and were reprinted multiple times—very often with revisions. The nature of and motivation behind these revisions reveal much about the varying personal priorities and backgrounds of the chroniclers as well as the readership for which they were writing. This study focuses on five sixteenth-century chroniclers, Thomas Cooper, Robert Crowley, Richard …

Philosophical Precursors To The Radical Enlightenment: Vignettes On The Struggle Between Philosophy And Theology From The Greeks To Leibniz With Special Emphasis On Spinoza, Anthony John Desantis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation lays out some of the chief philosophical precursors to Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment. It investigates the principal question of Will Durant's The Age of Voltaire: "How did it come about that a major part of the educated classes in Europe and America has lost faith in the theology that for fifteen centuries gave supernatural sanctions and supports to the precarious and uncongenial moral code upon which Western civilization has been based?" The aim of this project is both broad and specific: the first is to provide a general history of the philosophical precursors to the Radical Enlightenment up …

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 …

Icon And Image In Modern Thai Art: A Preliminary Exploration, John Clark

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Thai modern art is marked by the actual deployment of religious or august symbolic icons or the quasi-iconic use of images of variable indexicality in otherwise highly secular contexts. What were the sources for such modern uses and have the semiotic functions of icons shifted? To answer these questions, at least partially, religious functions for images are examined by tracking the use of court images and Buddhist figures.

Our Country Right Or Wrong: A Pragmatic Response To Anti-Democratic Cultural Nationalism In China, Sor-Hoon Tan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Since Deng Xiaoping came into power, China has been described as pragmatic in its approach to politics and development, and in the nineties there has been a revival of interest in Chinese cultural tradition. What is the relation between these two phenomena? Do they coexist, separately in mutual indifference, or in tension? Has there been constructive engagement, or at the very least does the potential for such engagement exist? More specifically, what roles, if any, do they play in China's quest for democracy? Does Dewey's pragmatism have any relevance to China in the twenty-first century? The issue of cultural tradition …

Early Continental Philosophy Of Science, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

Whole Set Of Volume 1 No 2 (2010) Of Comparative Philosophy, Comparative Philosophy

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.