Philosophy Commons^™

Berkeley’S Idealist Theory Of Knowledge And Whether Or Not Empiricism Can Lead To Idealism, Stacey Macpherson

All Volumes (2001-2008)

George Berkeley is perhaps one of the most unique and intriguing figures in the history of modern philosophy. Dissatisfied with and angered by the materialist philosophies of his contemporaries, especially the ideas of John Locke,
Berkeley called for a return to "common sense." But "common sense," for Berkeley, involved not just a skeptical view of materialism, but the assertion that the material world does not exist at all! Berkeley utilizes persuasive logical arguments and empiricist principles in order to refute the existence of matter. However, when he attempts to account for what does exist, he makes a startling claim which …

Endless Enlightenment: Eye-Operated Technology And The Political Economy Of Vision, Michael Gardiner

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Despite a residual popular temptation to see the posts of cultural analysis as signs of temporal closure, the logic of global visual media is strengthening, not weakening, metaphors of visibility which remain intact from the Enlightenment. Here I describe a stand-off between post-Enlightenment critiques (as in some sectors of Cultural Studies) and a narrow power base which is defined by producing light and managing the very conditions of visibility. For the world's most powerful state, still strongly bound to its original Enlightenment foundations, intervention into other states' sovereignty is increasingly justified by evidence from spy planes (rather than …

Panpsychism As Personal Experience: Resolving A Paradox, Jonathan Cotton

Theses : Honours

The thesis of panpsychism is that throughout the natural universe there is mentality, although I prefer the term "mind". We human beings experience this mentality in everyday consciousness and by analogy we are able to assert that mentality is not confined to the human experience alone. The extent to which this mentality penetrates, or is imbued by, our natural world has been a subject for discussion in western schools of philosophy since the ancient Greeks and in the even more ancient eastern schools of theosophy, such as Buddhism and the Hinduism of the Upanishads. I use the term "theosophy" here …

Women In Daoism By Catherine Despeux And Livia Kohn (Review), Robin R. Wang

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Defending Society From The Abnormal: The Archaeology Of Bio-Power, Brad E. Stone

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

On The Very Problem Of The Problem Of God In Zubiri And Unamuno, Brad E. Stone

Philosophy Faculty Works

Perhaps one innovation brought about by Spanish philosophy is the notion that “God” names a problem instead of an entity. This is what Xavier Zubiri means when he uses the phrase “the problem of God.” Although he does not employ the Zubirian phrase, Miguel de Unamuno also addresses God as a problem. This paper compares Zubiri’s and Unamuno’s accounts of how God appears to human beings polemically. For both thinkers, God is a problem only for human beings; there is something about the structure of human existence that makes God come to mind. For Zubiri, God comes to mind because …

Design By Nature, Timothy Shanahan

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

The Immense Rumor, Peter Goodrich

Articles

The article explores the intersection of friendship and law, particularly through the lens of Jacques Derrida's theory, which posits that the concept of friendship is inherently paradoxical and shaped by legal and theological frameworks. Derrida argues that the "immense rumor" of friendship reflects a historical inability to articulate amity publicly, leading to a repression of friendship in the public sphere. This repression is rooted in the humanist tradition, which draws from Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian influences, emphasizing the primacy of political or communal bonds over individual friendships. The analysis reveals that legal discourses have imposed prohibitions on the role of friendship, …

Rites Of Passing: Foucault, Power, And Same-Sex Commitment Ceremonies, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

According to Catherine Bell, "The popular contention that ritual and religion decline in proportion to modernization has been something of a sociological truism since the mid-19th century". Conventional wisdom maintains that ritual practices just don't hold central importance in the lives of those raised in the industrialized world as compared with the importance such things had for our distant ancestors or for our contemporaries in non-industrial societies. Some have contended that this is because ritual tends to be strongly correlated with pre-scientific cosmological beliefs that our society has for the most part outgrown. But for whatever reason, " [c]omparatively speaking," …

The Halcyon Tone As Birdsong, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Contained in one of Nietzsche's favorite words is the name of a seabird that flits back and forth across the landscapes and seascapes of Mediterranean reality, classical myth, and Nietzsche's imagination. Lexical authorities credit Nietzsche with reintroducing the word "halcyon [halkyonisch]" into the German language. That word will recall the "halcyon days," part of the metamorphic complex in the story of Alcyone, who lost her husband Ceyx at sea but was transformed along with him into a pair of seabirds, the female having the extraordinary characteristic of building a floating nest, in which she hatched her eggs during the weeks …

Dogs, Domestication, And The Ego, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In Zarathustra's "On the Vision and the Riddle," three animals-a spider, a snake, and a dog-make significant appearances, as do three human or quasihuman figures-Zarathustra himself, the dwarf known as the Spirit of Gravity, and the shepherd who must bite off the head of the snake. Of these animals, it is the dog who receives the most extended attention. Here, in the passage that along with "The Convalescent" (with its eagle and serpent) is usually and rightly taken to be Nietzsche's most articulate and yet highly veiled approach to explaining the teaching of eternal recurrence, the riddling vision involves animals. …

Conversion Of One’S Systems Of Beliefs; Godparents, Ethical Responsibilities Of., Howard Bromberg

Book Chapters

Contributions by Howard J. Bromberg to Ethics, Revised Edition

Practicing Practicing, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

"There is something ludicrous in philosophical discourse," Michel Foucault writes, "when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others, to tell them where their truth is and how to find it... " (Foucault 1985, 9). In our age of moral relativism and multiculturalism, it is easy to hear in this sentence a simple condemnation of intellectuals who pose as authorities on questions of belief, and it is all too easy to agree; yes, of course, we ought not tell other people what to think. But given the issues, directions, and investments of Foucault's work, especially in The Use of …

Allen D. Breck Award Winner (2003)

Quidditas

Catherine E. Winiarski

The Breck Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a junior scholar at the annual conference.

Front Matter

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Fama And Fortuna: Giorgio Vasari’S Michelangelo, Peter Kanelos

Quidditas

The life of Michelangelo is set indisputably as the capstone to Giorgio Vasari’s monumental, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori (1568). Cathedral-like in its detail and expanse, Vasari’s collection of biographies is itself a carefully designed and constructed work of art. Its separate parts are crafted with concern for the whole; from its series of individual narratives, a single grand narrative emerges. Buonarroti’s position in this is conspicuous, and purposefully so. In the first edition of the Vite (1550)—his biography, the only one granted a living artist—concludes the work decisively. It is the final entry and the …

Nationalism And Multiculturalism, Chandran Kukathas

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

If any issue dominates contemporary political theory, it is how to deal with cultural diversity and the claims –moral, legal, and political – made in the name of ethnic, religious, linguistic, or national allegiance (Kymlicka,2001: 17). Today, governments are confronted by demands from cultural minorities for recognition, protection,preferential treatment, and political autonomy within the boundaries of the state. Equally, international societyand its political institutions, as well as states themselves, have had to deal with demands from various peoplesfor political recognition as independent nations, and for national self-determination. The turbulent politics ofthe contemporary world may account in part for this development: …

Render Copyright Unto Caesar: On Taking Incentives Seriously, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay suggests we bifurcate our thinking. Conventional copyright rules by money, so let it rule the money-bound. Let a different set of rules evolve for more complex uses, particularly when the users have a personal relationship with the utilized text. Much recent scholarship contains dramatic suggestions to secure a freedom to be creative, rewrite, and be imaginative. My work has long sought to defend such freedoms, but I believe we understand imagination and its conditions too little to employ it as a starting point. I suggest instead that we acquire a better conceptual map of the generative process and …

Machines In The Ocean: The Aesthetics Of Wind Farms, Yuriko Saito

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This is an exploration of the aesthetic opposition lodged against wind power facilities. Taking the recent controversy regarding the proposal of a wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod as an example, I analyze the opponents' claim that such a construction "ruins" or "spoils" the otherwise pristine landscape. After suggesting some strategies of making the structure more aesthetically positive purely on the sensuous level, I propose that this specific issue must be discussed in the context of larger issues: civic environmentalism and the aesthetics of sustainability.

A Re-Examination Of The Structure And Content Of Confucius’S Version Of The Golden Rule, Bo Mou

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Colorization Revisited, Julie C. Van Camp

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This article is both philosophical and practical in its intent. It endeavours to bring into focus an idea with an Ancient Greek lineage, poiesis, and determine whether it may revitalize our thinking about the 'making' of art. The art-making considered in this paper will concentrate exclusively on Western art and its historical and contemporary manifestations. I suggest that poiesis - that which "pro-duces or leads (a thing) into being'" - may enable practitioners in the varying art forms, and aestheticians who reflect upon them, to come to a deeper sense of how artworks work: that they realize themselves inter-dependently …

The Heresy Of Paraphrase Revisited, Stefán Snaevarr

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

I try to rejuvenate Cleanth Brooks' old thesis about the 'heresy of paraphrase.' This I do by analyzing a couple of well-known poems and by performing thought experiments of the "possible world" kind. They show that paradigmatic examples of poems are not paraphrasable. A prosaic text can be improved with the aid of a paraphrase, but a typical poem cannot. The deeper explanation for the non-rephrasability of poetry is that our understanding of it is basically tacit. In this way I hope to give Brooks' original thesis a more solid foundation.

Editorial

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Notices

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Recent Publications

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Foucault, Enlightenment And The Aesthetics Of The Self, Anita Seppä

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Mona Hatoum's video installation Corps étranger is an example of an artwork that critically comments on particular aspects of contemporary visual culture, such as the colonization of the body's interior by medical image technologies. It has indeed been interpreted in those terms by several authors from within the new academic field of Visual Culture. Here it is argued that the critical cultural impact of the installation might be more fully described when one grants art a relative autonomy within the cultural field and, moreover, draws on concepts from more traditional academic disciplines and approaches, such as aesthetics and phenomenology. Art …

How To Speak Of Nature? The Exemplary Position Of Mount Koli In Environmental Research, Yrjö Sepänmaa

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Mount Koli in Eastern Finland is a useful example for environmental aesthetics and landscape research. In case studies, an example represents a general set and the conclusion becomes a precedent. Koli provides a wealth of material: descriptions of local nature, art featuring Koli, and documents concerning the environmental debates around it. One can outline both the development of Koli into a culturally significant location and the activities and policies of the process, as well as the values and appreciations that guided them. The material we have can be used to examine an environmental institution designed to have the structure of …

Narrative Understanding And Understanding Narrative, Sarah E. Worth

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this paper I deal with the question of how it is that we have emotional responses to things that we do not believe in the reality of, specifically things like characters and events in literature and film (the paradox of fiction). The direction in which I wish to take this query is not the traditional philosophical approach to this question, however. There has been much written on this particular approach, and because of this I think that it is becoming, in philosophical effect, stuck. What I wish to do in what follows is to approach this question from a …

Reclaiming The Body: Francis Bacon's Fugitive Bodies And Confucian Aesthetics On Bodily Expression, Eva K. W. Man

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Recently there has been a cry in Western academic and artistic circles for reclaiming the body and repositioning its locus and identity. Body theories and body art have become topics of attention as well as subjects of philosophical discussion. This article looks at the issue from a comparative perspective, focusing on representative cases in Chinese and Western portrait paintings. It first discusses Francis Bacon's works of human bodies and identifies their philosophical and psychological loci. It then outlines the Confucian discourses on the body, their related metaphysical grounds, and their relations to traditional Chinese portrait paintings. Representative Chinese portraits like …

Kinetic Synesthesia: Experiencing Dance In Multimedia Scenographies, Marc Boucher

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The contrasting kinetic values between dancer and projected moving image in multimedia scenographies provide the viewer with a particular type of synaesthetic experience. It results from the interaction of kinesthesis proper to each medium, the dancing body and the moving image. The extensive use of projected moving images in performing arts is part of a cultural trend that privileges a fundamental yet little understood aspect of aesthetic experience. Kinetic synaesthesia is a transdisciplinary concept formulated in light of psychological, physiological, and phenomenological accounts of both synaesthesia and kinesthesis.