Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Unruly Complexity: Ecology, Interpretation, Engagement, Peter Taylor

Curriculum and Instruction Faculty Publication Series

Ambitiously identifying fresh issues in the study of complex systems, Peter J. Taylor, in a model of interdisciplinary exploration, makes these concerns accessible to scholars in the fields of ecology, environmental science, and science studies. Unruly Complexity explores concepts used to deal with complexity in three realms: ecology and socio-environmental change; the collective constitution of knowledge; and the interpretations of science as they influence subsequent research.

For each realm Taylor shows that unruly complexity-situations that lack definite boundaries, where what goes on "outside" continually restructures what is "inside," and where diverse processes come together to produce change-should not be suppressed …

Translation As Transmission And Transformation, Jay L. Garfield

Philosophy: Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Como Devem Os Valores Influenciar A Ciência?, Hugh Lacey

Philosophy Faculty Works

Scientists make judgments of value all the time. They usually evaluatetheir theories according to “cognitive values” (empirical adequacy, power tomake predictions, explanatory power etc). But a theory can also be evaluatedaccording to non-cognitive values (social, political, economical, etc). Traditionally,cognitive and non-cognitive kinds of values are maintained separated from oneanother in order to protect science’s “autonomy”, impartiality”, and “neutrality”.However, social and moral values, as well as other kinds of non-cognitive values,play their role in science, not only by addressing the ethical issues of scientificresearch, but also by establishing the strategies according to which the problemsto be investigated are chosen, and practical …

(2005) Talking Globally, David K. Kennedy

Collected Papers of David Kennedy

Talking Globally is an annotated transcript of a discussion conducted by myself in a fifth grade classroom in a public school in an affluent suburban town in the northeast U.S. The stimulus for the discussion was a brief text, taken from Kofi Anan’s We The Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century, which offers a brief, vivid statistical picture of the planetary distribution of resources. In response, the students generated 14 questions, which ranged across a broad variety of topics, including the national debt, US weapons development and production, the war in Iraq, and the …

Review Of Lacan To The Letter: Reading Ecrits Closely, By Bruce Fink, 2004, Hervé Regnauld

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Spivak After Marx After Derrida, Philip Leonard

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Spivak is often viewed as an unequivocally deconstructive theorist, and she frequently reinforces this impression by proclaiming her allegiance to Derrida's ideas. Recent comments by her suggest, however, that there are limits to her deconstructive convictions. This essay considers some of Spivak's debts to Derrida's work, though it is primarily concerned with those occasions when she states her misgivings about his ability to understand postcoloniality, global power, and resistance movements. Reading Marx more accurately would, she insists, have allowed Derrida both to grasp capitalism's complex logic and to consider the effects of subaltern interventions upon capitalism's global authority. Such an …

Burn The Panopticon: Irigaray's Ethics, Difference, Poetics, Simone Roberts

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph of Prologue]

The following essay has a purpose more than a thesis. This essay explains the central tenets of Irigaray's ethics of sexual difference through an understanding her work as that of a symbolist philosopher. Symbolist poetry and French Feminist philosophy like Irigaray's have several qualities in common. One is that the literal level of language is not where the action is. A reader must think associatively on many levels at once in order to gather and interpret the several indirect messages sent by a particular image or metaphor. Another is an acquired comfort with paradox. Paradoxes lie …

The Discourse Beneath: Emotional Epistemology In Legal Deliberation And Negotiation, Erin Ryan

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Dispute Resolution And Legal Education: A Bibliography, Trevor C.W. Farrow

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

This selected bibliography is designed to act as a resource to assist in the ongoing, collaborative development of dispute resolution initiatives and programs in legal education and research in North America and abroad. Further, the particular focus of this bibliography, in addition to the teaching and research of dispute resolution generally, is the emphasis that law reform initiatives are putting on dispute resolution processes as potentially useful tools for increasing access to systems of civil justice around the common law world.

Editorial

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

From Mobile Ontologies To Mobile Aesthetics, Jos De Mul

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

We are living in a globalizing world, characterized by constant and rapid innovation. As we are inclined to go with this flow and its accompanying discourse of mobility, there is a danger that we overlook the persistence of cultural traditions. However, this paper argues that important differences exist between pre-modern, modern and post-modern traditions with regard to the form mobility takes. After a short discussion of the role information and communication technologies play in post-modern traditions, it is argued that these technologies transform our world, and not only our electronic files, into a global database and, as a consequence, generate …

Mobility: The Fourth Dimension In The Fine Arts And Architecture, Gerd-Helge Vogel

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Mobility is a basic behavioural pattern of human beings that has been accelerating in the course of its social development. Especially since the beginnings of the industrial revolution, mobility has caused a fundamental change in human relationships that continues today. This becomes visible when we look at the aesthetic and spiritual impact on architecture and the fine arts. It is my intention to present significant examples in order to give an idea of the different stages of its development today.

The Aesthetics Of The Road, Road Art, And Road Traffic, Yrjš Sepänmaa

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Three things are required for a good road: economy, safety and beauty. A key concept of this trinity is fitting: how to fit the road into the landscape. Together, the road and the landscape form a work of road art. Art attached to the road environment - in this case the other meaning of road art - is at its simplest art works placed beside a road. Art in a more demanding form gives the landscape new dimensions of meaning. Road and art in unison are more than the sum of their parts. Furthermore, travelling is a way to get …

Movement And Participation: Journeys Within Everyday Environments, Johanna Hällsten

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Motion is an elementary part of our everyday life; it determines our perception and appropriation of environmental features. We are immersed in the world while on foot, grounding awareness of the three-dimensionality of the world and ourselves through movement. As a site-specific installation artist, movement is a crucial aspect of my practice in the sense that it makes the work occur. I argue that the installation comprises the experience of the participant through his or her interaction with the space and the intervention that has occurred through movement. The experience is one which unfolds and changes as the participant walks …

Notices

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Editorial

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Living Art, Defining Value: Artworks And Mere Real Things, Serge Grigoriev

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this essay I examine the conceptual difficulties generated by drawing a distinction between artworks and mere real things. I argue that the distinction is an unfortunate one, requiring for its operation an assumption of possibility of an objective value judgment with regard to aesthetic productions, which, in reality cannot be defensible on purely philosophical grounds. The distinction, in fact, may be useful in describing the interactions between the artworld, qua a cultural institution, and the socio-economic environment in which it is situated; yet, it proves misleading when introduced into discussions about the nature of artworks and the nature of …

Are Supertasters Good Candidates For Being Human Ideal Critics?, Francis Raven

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper asks whether supertasters possess the criteria for ideal critics that David Hume outlines in his essay "Of the Standard of Taste." This might seem like a straightforward question, but there is a paradox involving supertasters: They possess more tastebuds than normal tasters, making it reasonable to assume they fulfill the requirements for Humean ideal critics with respect to taste. However, because they have more tastebuds, supertasters find certain foods bitter that normal tasters do not and thus negatively evaluate them. This might indicate that supertasters actually make poor candidates for being Humean ideal critics with respect to taste. …

Are Video Games Art?, Aaron Smuts

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this paper I argue that by any major definition of art many modern video games should be considered art. Rather than defining art and defending video games based on a single contentious definition, I offer reasons for thinking that video games can be art according to historical, aesthetic, institutional, representational and expressive theories of art. Overall, I argue that while many video games probably should not be considered art, there are good reasons to think that some video games should be classified as art, and that the debates concerning the artistic status of chess and sports offer some insights …

The Aesthetic Dissonance Of Industrial Wind Machines, Jon Boone

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Yuriko Saito recently published an essay in this journal, "Machines in the Ocean: The Aesthetics of Wind Farms" (Contemporary Aesthetics, 2 (2004)). The bulk of her essay is a search for the right aesthetic justification for wind plants sited in the ocean as well as for those onshore. Because wind power does not emit toxins into the air and its source of energy is recurrent, it offers the promise of a clean, renewable alternative to fossil fuels. The central problem with harnessing any form of energy is that enormous energies are wasted in the process of producing and channeling a …

Does Sad Music Make One Sad? An Ethnographic Perspective, Peter Manuel

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The question of the presence and role of negative emotions in the experience of music - Does sad music make one sad? - has been recognized as a key to understanding much musical experience, especially in terms of the apprehension and expressive power of specifically formal features of music. One set of scholars, sometimes loosely labeled "emotivists," has argued that negative emotional responses do play a central role in the apprehension of much music, that is, that actual sadness is a natural, intentional and essential response to sad music. Advocates of this view base their arguments in large part on …

Response To Jon Boone's Critique, Yuriko Saito

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Carrying The Jade Tablet: A Consideration Of Confucian Artistry, Eric C. Mullis

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this paper I discuss the aesthetic dimension of ritual action. In order to demonstrate how the rites render action aesthetically expressive, I draw on the notion of an "art of context" and further detail the Confucian understanding of artistic practice as an essential component for moral cultivation. In turn, I use John Dewey's account of aesthetic form in order to support and further demonstrate the ability of the rituals and arts to organize action and to thereby render it aesthetically significant. However, Dewey's account entails that we question either conceptual or institutional limitations of aesthetic form as such limitations …

Immersive Contemplation In Video Art Environments, Tiffany Sutton

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This essay examines a form of video art -- what is called a "video environment" -- that calls upon as much as it departs from familiar conventions that are bound up in museum display. I argue that the way that works in this genre are housed in museums enables them to give rise to a form of contemplation, one involving immersion, that is, if not unique to this genre, then certainly demonstrated by it. My examples of video environments make a case for the coherence of this rarely experienced immersive form of contemplation, the value of which, in turn, makes …

Production Theories And Artistic Value, David E.W. Fenner

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this paper, I want to argue that what I call "production theories" - theories that purport to account for the value of a work of art instrumentally and in terms of something experienced by audience members in attending to the work - are insufficient to account for artistic value. The production theories I will discuss include those of Monroe Beardsley, Nelson Goodman, Leo Tolstoy (for lack of a more current pure affective theory), and Alan Goldman (whose account may be seen as an amalgam of the first three). The first three of these theorists represent the most popular and …

Natural And Empty Desires: An Epicurean View Of Musical Experience, Daniel Putnam

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Epicureans distinguish natural desires, which have their origin in the body itself, from empty desires which are imposed by society. Natural desires allow a person to enjoy pleasures free from anxiety and worry. Empty desires such as those for status or luxury are endless and lead to a life of frustration, resentment and anxiety. In this paper I apply this distinction to musical experience and differentiate between the genuine enjoyment of music and musical experience tainted by empty desires.

The Evolution And Revolutions Of The Networked Art Aesthetic, Jeanne Marie Kusina

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Mail art, artist books, artist amps, assemblings, experimental and visual poetry, Email art, video, and performance art have all, at various times, been considered members of the loosely configured classification known as "Networked art". Yet the common thread associating these diverse media is not the manner of their production, but rather the dynamic way in which they are distributed throughout artist networks. Emphasizing communication and generosity, Networked artists attempt to subvert conventional systems of exchange while also maintaining an intimacy of expression. I will discuss these qualities and how they often evolve from subtle attempts to undermine an allegedly flawed …

Avant-Garde Or Pré-Jugé?, Sinead Murphy

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper receives its impetus from Gadamer's account of effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte) and his corresponding challenge to the 'problem of purity' that he locates in Kant's critique of aesthetic judgment and that derives from the attempt to establish universal founding principles for thought and action. This is a deep and wide-ranging issue, and so I focus on a very specific aspect of it: the division between intuition and understanding, between history as a given flux and enlightenment as a unifying synthesis, that motivates Kant's search for pure reflective grounds to reconcile them, and on the challenge posed to this division …

Art And Embodiment: Biological And Phenomenological Contributions To Understanding Beauty And The Aesthetic, Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Increasing awareness of the crucial and complex role of the body in making and experiencing art has led to a diverse range of biological and phenomenological philosophies of art. The shared emphasis on the role of the body re-connects these contemporary theories of art to aesthetics' pre-Kantian origin as a science of sense-perception (aesthesis) and feeling. Tracing some of the current positions in such diverse thinkers as Dissanayake, Langer, and Merleau-Ponty, this paper will examine their shared interest in art as a pre-reflective, non-discursive mode of knowing, symbolizing, and being-in-the-world. This paper argues that while some biologically based theories have …

The Eye And The Hand: Professional Sensitivity And The Idea Of An Aesthetics Of Work On The Land, Justin Winkler

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Academic aesthetics is guided by the visual and notions of distance. In this article I want to study how an aesthetics of work, of process and proximity, could function. I am asking why the peasant population has been always been supposed not to have an aesthetic appreciation of their land. I contend that they had some kind of appreciation, but that this was conceived expressed in terms fundamentally different from the academic and pictorial landscape aesthetics. With the term 'professional' sensitivity and examples from the Swiss Alps and Southern France, I discuss the question of how an archaeology of an …