Philosophy Commons^™

In But Not Of, Of But Not In: On Taste, Hipness, And White Embodiment, Robin James

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The status of the body figures paradoxically in the interrelated discourses of whiteness, aesthetic taste, and hipness. While Richard Dyer’s analysis of whiteness argues that white identity is “in but not of the body,” Carolyn Korsmeyer’s and Julia Kristeva’s feminist analyses of aesthetic “taste” demonstrate that this faculty is traditionally conceived as something “of” but not “in” the body. While taste directly distances whiteness from embodiment, hipness negatively affirms this same distance: the hipster proves his elite status within white culture by positioning himself as, in the words of James Chance’s song title, “Almost Black.” The notion of hip contributes …

Mixed-Race Looks, Ronald Sundstrom

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The multiracial population is growing larger and so is popular awareness about multiracial or mixed-race identity. Simmering beneath the growing public recognition of multiracial identity are questions about the legitimacy of mixed race, multiracial, or biracial as social categories, and further questions about the ethics and politics of those identities. Behind some of these questions are worries about how multiracial identity interacts with racialized aesthetic standards. This essay addresses these issues by investigating whether those affirmations are racist and betray monoracial groups. This essay concludes that such affirmations are not necessarily racist or traitorous. Instead, they are consistent with modern …

Red, Gold, Black, And Green: Black Nationalist Aesthetics, Crispin Sartwell

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper tries to show that black nationalist movements have been pervasively influential on the music and visual culture of the world. In particular, it focuses on the Marcus Garvey movement and some of its religious expressions or extensions - Rastafarianism and the Nation of Gods and Earths - and on reggae and hip hop music. This is also an illustration of a wider conceptual point: that political ideologies are not only constellations of texts and doctrines but multi-media aesthetic environments. Race itself is articulated in aesthetic categories, not only in terms of body appearance and color, but in cultural …

Toward A Development Of A Cosmopolitan Aesthetic, Nalini Bhushan

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this essay I explore the interaction between race and aesthetics in colonial India (1857-1947). In the context of nation building and the Indian independence movement, the Indian art world struggles to articulate conditions for the very possibility of an artist who would be authentically Indian while remaining authentically artistic, a seemingly impossible accomplishment. And yet a chosen few are somehow are able to do just this: cosmopolitan Indian artists, transcending the parochial boundaries of nation, race, ethnicity, and religion as set by tradition, while remaining rooted in something that is nonetheless fundamentally Indian. I focus on three artists from …

The Hijab And The Sari: The Strange And The Sexy Between Colonialism And Global Capitalism, Falguni A. Sheth

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

By exploring the “Western” reception of the sari in comparison to the hijab, I hope to illuminate the racial aesthetic that is at work in vilifying the latter while glorifying the former. The history of colonialism and the forced domestication of the sari help to facilitate its reception as an acceptably “sexy” garment. By contrast, the hijab has not been subjected to colonial modification. It has remained unmodified, and is still experienced as culturally, racially, and aesthetically strange by observers. In order to explore the role that political and cultural authority plays in shaping “acceptable” and “unacceptable” racial aesthetics as …

The Last King Of Scotland Or The Last N----R On Earth? The Ethics Of Race On Film, Paul C. Taylor

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper undertakes four tasks. It examines a tradition of cinematic and narrative representation that we might call “the narrative of moral gentrification.” It insists on the importance of excavating the racialist and often racist images, motifs, and myths that constitute this tradition. It recommends a form of philosophical aesthetics, located at the intersection of aesthetics, ethical perfectionism, and critical race theory, as a resource for doing this work. And it insists on the importance of subjecting problematic or qualitatively inferior expressive objects to critical scrutiny for the sake of developing proper iconographies and archives of white supremacist expressive culture.

The Empire Sings Back: Aesthetics, Politics, And Postcolonial Whimsy, Namita Goswami

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This essay recovers the devalued aesthetic dimension of the Bollywood film/song from its political over-determination as national allegory. The qualities attributed to the film/song, such as effeminacy, irrationality, fantasy, and non-synchronicity, which I term its postcolonial whimsy, and its surplus value as the Bollywood film’s most transnational component, allow for the free play of the imagination. This admits the possibility of another performative public culture and imagined community not premised on exploitation, calculability, and passive spectatorship and consumption. The film/song enables affect without literal linguistic comprehension, especially among those unfamiliar with the indigenous languages and musical traditions. What is derided …

The Impression Of Peter Lamarque And Others' Visits, Curtis Carter

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Phänomenologische Und Mundane Reduktion, Sebastian Luft

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Cultural Identity Of Art Works, Curtis Carter, Disikate Ke, Min Yu, Chengji Liu

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

A History Of Contemporary Aesthetics 1996-2006, Curtis Carter

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Friedrich Schelling, Michael Vater

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Taming Augustine’S Monstrosity: Aquinas’S Notion Of Use In The Struggle For Moral Growth, Theresa W. Tobin

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

In Book VI of his Confessions, Saint Augustine offers a detailed description of one of the most famous cases of weakness of will in the history of philosophy. Augustine characterizes his experience as a monstrous situation in which he both wills and does not will moral growth, but he is at odds to explain this phenomenon. In this paper, I argue that Aquinas’s action theory offers important resources for explaining Augustine’s monstrosity. On Aquinas’s schema, human acts are composed of various operations of intellect and will, and thus are subject to disintegration. In order to capture the gap in …

Paratragedy In Plato's Gorgias, Franco Trivigno

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Gender And Violence In Focus: A Background For Gender Justice In Reparations, Margaret Urban Walker

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

The Rhetoric Of Parody In Plato’S Menexenus, Franco Trivigno

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Sticks And Stones: The Philosophy Of Insults, By Jerome Neu, Margaret Urban Walker

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Preface Of "The History Of Analytic Aesthetics", Curtis Carter

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Editorial

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Unlimited Additions To Limited Editions, Christy Mag

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this paper I target the relationship between two prints that are roughly qualitatively identical and share a causal history. Is one an artwork if and only if the other is an artwork? To answer this, I propose two competing principles. The first claims that certain intentional relations must be shared by the prints (e.g., editioned prints vs. non-editioned prints). The second appeals only to minimal print ontology, claiming that the two prints need only be what I call 'relevantly similar' to one other. In the end, I endorse the second principle. There are no trumping features over and above …

Intentions And Interpretations: Philosophical Fiction As Conversation, Jukka Mikkonen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Appeals to the actual author's intention in order to legitimate an interpretation of a work of literary narrative fiction have generally been considered extraneous in Anglo-American philosophy of literature since Wimsatt and Beardsley's well-known manifesto from the 1940s. For over sixty years now so-called anti-intentionalists have argued that the author's intentions – plans, aims, and purposes considering her work – are highly irrelevant to interpretation. In this paper, I shall argue that the relevance of the actual author's intentions varies in different approaches to fiction, and suggest that fictions are legitimately interpreted intentionally as conversations in a certain kind of …

The Sensory Intention -- Art, Motif, And Motivation: A Comparative Approach, Yves Millet

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Philosophers like Gilles Deleuze claimed a new outlook for aesthetics asking for a rethinking of the traditional separation between the theory of sensibility and the theory of art. From a comparative standpoint, this article examines the concept of 'sensory intention' which in our view might be able to bridge the gap between acting and doing and therefore to link the theory of sensibility and the theory of art.

Traditional Chinese art, and more specifically the script style caoshu[草書],has been chosen as the medium through which to illustrate the theoretical discussion. Analysis of traditional Chinese thought on art allows us to …

(2009) Caring For The “Self As One Among Others”, Laurance J. Splitter

Collected Papers of Laurance J. Splitter

n this paper, I explore some underpinnings of the community of inquiry (CoI), viewed as the primary mode of classroom organization in Philosophy for Children but also as a pedagogic, personal and inter-personal framework for teaching and learning in any subject area. I will argue that the CoI provides a model of both personal and intellectual development which exemplifies how classroom teaching and learning may be seen both as forms of care and of self-care.

Teaching Economics, Jonathan B. Wight

Economics Faculty Publications

Ethical considerations intersect with economics education on a number of planes. Nonetheless, in terms of curricula, only a handful of economics departments offer courses specifically focused on ethics. This chapter addresses the ways in which instructors can incorporate ethical components into teaching principles and field courses in order to broaden economic understanding and to enhance critical thinking. It examines three pedagogical issues: the artificial dichotomy between positive and normative analysis; the limiting scope of efficiency in outcomes analyses; and the incorporation of alternative ethical frameworks into public policy debates.

Epistemical And Ethical Troubles In Achieving Reconciliation, And Then Beyond, Rory J. Conces

Philosophy Faculty Publications

My optimism towards reconciliation in places like Bosnia and Kosovo has become increasingly guarded because of certain epistemical and ethical issues. Reconciliation presumes the making of moral judgments about a wrongdoing, judgments that are empirically informed. If the perceptual judgments that are used to do the informing are made suspect because of a lapse in the commonplace self-restraints (or controls) on reasoning or glitches in the regulative ideals or epistemic goods like understanding and intelligibility, then the moral judgments on which they are grounded become suspect as well. This happens to both fanatic and non-fanatic. In this article I explore …

The Practice Of Ethics, Jeremy Bendik-Keymer

Faculty Scholarship

The point of this talk is not to school you in the practice of ethics, but to raise questions about the practice of ethics. There is a standard picture of the practice of ethics that goes like this:

Ethical theory is done in a classroom. It is divided into normative theory, meta-ethics, and descriptive ethics. Students learn to see how the ethics in their society and community works; they learn how to discover true ethical beliefs and sometimes discover them during class. Through meta-ethics, they understand what it is to have an ethical belief. Then –and here comes the practice …

Experience And Consciousness: Enhancing The Notion Of Musical Understanding, Adriana Renero

Publications and Research

Abstract:

Disagreeing with Jerrold Levinson’s claim that being conscious of broad span musical form is not essential to understanding music, I will argue that our awareness of musical architecture is significant to achieve comprehension. I will show that the experiential model is not incompatible with the analytic model. My main goal is to show that these two models can be reconciled through the identification of a broader notion of understanding. After accomplishing this reconciliation by means of my new conception, I will close the paper by discussing some reasons to accept an enhancing notion of musical understanding that includes levels …

Anger Et Cetera: Understanding The Emotions In Ethics, Damien Dupont

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues in part that because the ethical theory of sentimentalism is based on the mistaken belief that emotions are non-cognitive, sentimentalism cannot account for the fact of the influence of cognition in morality and moral action. Therefore sentimentalism is of little use in ethics.

This work is done by going back to examine Western thinking on the emotions from its dawn in Homer's writing through to contemporary philosophy and neurophysiology on the emotions. Following the development of the way emotions were thought of and how they related to ethics allows the identification of an intellectual forked path brought …

Swarms, Schools, Flocks, And Colonies: Exploring The Ontology Of Collective Individuals, Brian G. Henning

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Trusting In The 'Efficacy Of Beauty': A Kalocentric Approach To Moral Philosophy, Brian G. Henning

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

Although debates over carbon taxes and trading schemes, over carbon offsets and compact fluorescents are important, our efforts to address the environmental challenges that we face will fall short unless and until we also set about the difficult work of reconceiving who we are and how we are related to our processive cosmos. What is needed, I argue, are new ways of thinking and acting grounded in new ways of understanding ourselves and our relationship to the world, ways of understanding that recognize our fundamental interdependence and interconnection with everyone and everything in the cosmos, ways of understanding that recognize …