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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Time, History, And Providence In The Philosophy Of Nicholas Of Cusa, Jason Aleksander
Time, History, And Providence In The Philosophy Of Nicholas Of Cusa, Jason Aleksander
Faculty Publications
Although Nicholas of Cusa occasionally discussed how the universe must be understood as the unfolding of the absolutely infinite in time, he left open questions about any distinction between natural time and historical time, how either notion of time might depend upon the nature of divine providence, and how his understanding of divine providence relates to other traditional philosophical views. From texts in which Cusanus discussed these questions, this paper will attempt to make explicit how Cusanus understood divine providence. The paper will also discuss how Nicholas of Cusa’s view of the question of providence might shed light on Renaissance …
Anti-Essentialism, Tom Leddy
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 …
Marx Wartofsky, Tom Leddy
Marx Wartofsky, Tom Leddy
Faculty Publications
Marx W. Wartofsky was born in Brooklyn and received his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees at Columbia University. He was a professor at Boston University (where he taught for twenty-six years) and then at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He was long-time editor of the Philosophical Forum, which he founded in 1970. He also co-founded with Robert Cohen the Boston University Center for Philosophy and History of Science in 1960. He wrote three books: Conceptual Foundations of Scientific Thought (1968), Feuerbach (1977), and Models: Representation and the Scientific Understanding (1979), the last …
Pretty, Tom Leddy
Everyday Aesthetics And Photography, Tom Leddy
Everyday Aesthetics And Photography, Tom Leddy
Faculty Publications
Everyday aesthetics as a new subdiscipline within aesthetics benefits by constantly going back to and borrowing from earlier theorists, even those who were primarily concerned with the aesthetics of art. To that end, I will begin my discussion of everyday aesthetics and photography with a look at that classic formalist aesthetician from the beginning of the 20th century, Clive Bell (1958). Bell was notoriously very negative about photography. He basically saw photographs as mechanical imitations of reality. He also famously criticized illustrative or descriptive painting for doing what photography can do better. One of the problems he had with people …
The Problem Of Temporality In The Literary Framework Of Nicholas Of Cusa’S De Pace Fidei, Jason Aleksander
The Problem Of Temporality In The Literary Framework Of Nicholas Of Cusa’S De Pace Fidei, Jason Aleksander
Faculty Publications
This paper explores Nicholas of Cusa’s framing of the De pace fidei as a dialogue taking place incaelo rationis. On the one hand, this framing allows Nicholas of Cusa to argue that all religious rites presuppose the truth of a single, unified faith and so temporally manifest divine logos in a way accommodated to the historically unique conventions of different political communities. On the other hand, at the end of the De pace fidei, the interlocutors in the heavenly dialogue are enjoined to return to earth and lead their countrymen in a gradual conversion to the acceptance of rites which …