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Articles 1 - 15 of 15
Full-Text Articles in Philosophy
Cockroaches, Or Worlds As Images, Nathalie Blanc
Cockroaches, Or Worlds As Images, Nathalie Blanc
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
The cockroach is an insect of tropical origin whose presence in urban space draws our attention to the fact that the city is not only an artificial and controlled universe but also a porous one because of the interstices through which the animals slip. This article analyzes the role of animals in cities, and more particularly of the cockroach, in the city dweller's imagination and in the construction of an aesthetic experience of urban life. Imagination, metaphor, and domestication are the clues to understanding a sharp, active thought of the lived environment. One will thus approach the place of aesthetics …
Words And Worlds: Irony Makes Literary Creations, Alastair Goff
Words And Worlds: Irony Makes Literary Creations, Alastair Goff
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
In this paper I take up anew the suggestion recurrent in the work of Kierkegaard and Lukács, among others, that literature is fundamentally ironic. Literary creations, I argue, are ironic because they convey the real world, even though the worldhood of this world is ineffable. In creating a world from words in a novel or poem, the author confronts his or her own skepticism about the possibilities of written expression. Literary creations are only completed when the reader is able to engage with the world of words that is constituted in the work, and to realize that what is said …
Film And The Public Memory: The Phenomena Of Nonfiction Film Fragments, James F. Moyer
Film And The Public Memory: The Phenomena Of Nonfiction Film Fragments, James F. Moyer
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Film theory and philosophy have in recent decades rightly critiqued earlier theorists' claims for the fundamentally realist nature of the cinema, and of photography generally. While cognizant of the problematic status of "realist" representation-of photography being somehow purely or naively representative-this essay nevertheless deliberately recuperates a realist discourse with which to value some forms of nonfiction film. The essay sees "nonfiction film fragments" as a form of witnessing, and tries to articulate our experience of such film in terms of memorializing the people and events it bears witness to. The essay goes even further in its claims on behalf of …
Geoaesthetics: New Orleans, Landscape, And Eros, Robert Frodeman
Geoaesthetics: New Orleans, Landscape, And Eros, Robert Frodeman
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
The success of contemporary society in producing knowledge serves to highlight the breakdown between knowledge production and its use. New Orleans and Katrina offer one example of this breakdown. All the knowledge necessary for acting beforehand was available; the problem was not one of knowledge but of will. Geoaesthetics, appropriating the erotic nature of our relationship to the land, is offered as an inter- and transdisciplinary means for making disciplinary knowledge more pertinent.
Poetics And Maieutics: Literature And Tacit Knowledge Of Emotions, Stefán Snaevarr
Poetics And Maieutics: Literature And Tacit Knowledge Of Emotions, Stefán Snaevarr
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
The theme of this paper is the idea that imaginative literature can disclose our tacit knowledge of emotions. It this does with the aid of such devices as metaphors and similes. The kind of insight we get thanks to the disclosive power of literature is akin to that which Kjell S. Johannessen has called 'knowledge by familiarity,' Frank Palmer 'knowing what' and Charles Taylor implicitly 'the result of articulation.' I defend the theory that at least some important emotions cannot be understood (or even exist) outside of behavioral contexts and that this understanding is mainly tacit. I try to show …
Aesthetics And The Environment: Repatriating Humanity, Nikolaos Gkogkas
Aesthetics And The Environment: Repatriating Humanity, Nikolaos Gkogkas
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
If aesthetics is to claim its place among the fundamental philosophical disciplines, it must adequately deal with the ecological challenge, that is, the need to explain the continuity-relation between human and non-human environments. To that effect, Arnold Berleant's aesthetics of engagement constitutes an attractive proposal. Its critics (Allen Carlson and others) seem to miss its point and attack it on the basis of a particular understanding of Kantian aesthetics (mainly the disinterestedness thesis). But not only can Berleant's aesthetics meet the ecological challenge; it is also possible that it encourages a re-evaluation of traditional aesthetic categories (like disinterestedness) without necessarily …
Acquired Taste, Kevin Melchionne
Acquired Taste, Kevin Melchionne
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Acquired taste is an integral part of the cultivation of taste. In this essay, I identify acquired taste as a form of intentional belief acquisition or adaptive preference formation, distinguishing it from ordinary or discovered taste. This account of acquired taste allows for the role of self-deception in the development of taste. I discuss the value of acquired taste in the overall development of taste as well as the ways that an over-reliance on acquired taste can distort overall taste.
Implied World Views In Pictures: Reflections From A Cognitive Psychological And Anthropological Point Of View, Michael Ranta
Implied World Views In Pictures: Reflections From A Cognitive Psychological And Anthropological Point Of View, Michael Ranta
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
In traditional art history, iconological attempts to analyze visual works of art by treating their formal and semantic features as symptoms of more general, implied world views or cultures have occurred rather frequently. Still, such attempts have been criticized for permitting subjective and non-verifiable interpretations. In this paper, however, I will argue that (i) pictorial works of art indeed imply wider world views or schemata, and (ii) that our comprehension of these schemata can be explained by taking into account recent research within cognitive psychology. More specifically, I will argue that intelligence partly consists of the storage and retrieval of …
Architecture Vs. Art: The Aesthetics Of Art Museum Design[1], Larry Shiner
Architecture Vs. Art: The Aesthetics Of Art Museum Design[1], Larry Shiner
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
Many art critics have complained that the most dramatic art museum designs of the last decade have upstaged or interfered with the art within. This essay examines eight contemporary cases before drawing some lessons for art museum design, and ends by setting the architecture vs. art problem in the context of the philosophy of architecture, focusing on the issues of function and symbolism.
Artist's Labor, Derek Whitehead
Artist's Labor, Derek Whitehead
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This essay explores the relations between perception, phenomenology and art practice. The object of my inquiry is the kind of perceptual repertoire available to the artist in relation to his art, which extends beyond the technical means available to art making in its varying forms. I invoke an artist's innate perception as the source and locus of art's creation. This creation of art also has an outward or phenomenological dimension. In this respect, I investigate the ways in which phenomenological perception, via Maurice Merleau-Ponty's hermeneutic insights into artistic activity, might offer to contemporary arts practice a means of reappraising its …
Paleolithic Flints: Is An Aesthetics Of Stone Tools Possible?1, Riva Berleant
Paleolithic Flints: Is An Aesthetics Of Stone Tools Possible?1, Riva Berleant
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This paper asks whether an aesthetics of Paleolithic tools is possible, and if so, what it might be. The application of our own aesthetic sensibilities to artifacts of prehistory is not difficult. We easily recognize and appreciate their visual and tactile qualities. The more complicated questions that the paper explores are whether we can uncover the aesthetic sensibilities of their makers and, if we cannot, whether aesthetic examination of prehistoric tools from our own perspectives is adequate or useful. The paper is based on study of Paleolithic flints from French archaeological sites dating from about 500,000 years ago to about …
Art, Perception And Indeterminacy, Robert Pepperell
Art, Perception And Indeterminacy, Robert Pepperell
Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)
This article considers the phenomenon of visual indeterminacy, which occurs when the sensory data gathered from the visual system cannot be integrated with semantic knowledge. A number of examples are given, including from the author's own art work, and some results presented from a scientific study based on them. The implications for the operation of the mind and, in particular, the nature of aesthetic experience are addressed, and the distinction between the perception of visual forms and their cognitive interpretation is discussed. Arguments about the nature of aesthetic experience are then considered from some historical sources and interpreted in light …