Philosophy Commons^™

A New Problem For Aesthetics, Kevin Melchionne

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The essay introduces the problem of aesthetic unreliability, the variety of ways in which it is difficult to grasp our aesthetic experience and the consequent confusion and unreliability of what we take as our taste.

Philosophical Hermeneutics And The Ethical Function Of Architecture, Paul Kidder

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Karsten Harries’ book, The Ethical Function of Architecture, raises the question of how architecture can be interpretive of and for our time. Part of Harries’ pursuit of this question is done in dialogue with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, whose evocatively expressed ontology of building and dwelling recovered, in philosophical and poetic terms, the power of buildings to symbolize and interpret the most fundamental truths of being and human existence. The present essay identifies contributions to this hermeneutic and ontological approach to architecture drawn from the philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, emphasizing Gadamer’s notions of play (Spiel), symbol, and the …

Affirming Difference: Everyday Aesthetic Experience After Phenomenology, Wood Roberdeau

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This article explores the complex relationships among two different types of critique, the socio-temporal zone known as "everyday life" and the moment of the encounter by those who are encountering art works. It proceeds with a close study of the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Mikel Dufrenne, and tests their key concepts against generalized contemporary art practices that question a model of the traditional aesthetic experience by suggesting the possibility that within the expanse of postmodernity such a paradigm has shifted, (although it is not completely irretrievable). The paper argues that this shift has been achieved by remobilizing readymade objects …

Video Games As Mass Art, Grant Tavinor

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Videogames are one of the most significant developments in the mass arts of recent times. In commercial terms, they are now among the most prominent of the mass arts worldwide. This commercial and cultural success does not exhaust the interest in videogames as a mass art phenomenon because games such as Grand Theft Auto IV and Fallout 3 are structurally radically different from previous forms of mass art. In particular, the ontology of videogames, the nature and identity of their works, and how they are instanced and evaluated is a departure from the familiar mass arts of film and popular …

Disgust And Ugliness: A Kantian Perspective, Mojca Kuplen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Contemporary discussions of the problem of ugliness in Kant’s aesthetic theory have, to my knowledge, left unexplored the relation of disgust to ugliness. At most, they have explained away disgust as merely an extreme form of ugliness or displeasure, as Guyer did in his interpretation of ugliness in Kant’s aesthetic theory,[1] and by that strayed from the phenomenological and conceptual uniqueness of disgust in comparison to ugliness, while Kant, as I argue, did not. As a matter of fact, careful investigation of the concept of disgust in Kant’s writing will reveal the distinctive and multifaceted character that he ascribed …

Virtual Dance And Motion-Capture, Marc Boucher

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

A general view of various ways in which virtual dance can be understood is presented in the first part of this article. It then appraises the uses of the term “virtual” in previous studies of digital dance. A more in-depth view of virtual dance as it relates to motion-capture is offered, and key issues are discussed regarding computer animation, digital imaging, motion signature, virtual reality and interactivity. The paper proposes that some forms of virtual dance be defined in relation to both digital technologies and contemporary theories of virtuality.

City Walks And Tactile Experiences, Mădălina Diaconu

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper is an attempt to develop categories of the pedestrian’s tactile and kinaesthetic experience of the city. The beginning emphasizes the haptic qualities of surfaces and textures, which can be “palpated” visually or experienced by walking. Also the lived city is three-dimensional; its corporeal depth is discussed here in relation to the invisible sewers, protuberant profiles, and the formal diversity of roofscapes. A central role is ascribed in the present analysis to the formal similarities between the representation of the city by walking through it and the representation of the tactile form of objects. Additional aspects of the “tactile” …

Editorial Note

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Introduction, Ananta Sukla

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Everyday, Elsewhere: Allegory In Philippine Art, Patrick D. Flores

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The essay traces certain contexts of the allegorical impulse in Philippine image making and art, specifically as it marks the self-consciousness of the maker of image and art to render time, place, and event legible. It conceives of it as an aesthetic of migration, prefiguring an elsewhere that is aspired to as well as a phantasm of affinity that describes a present condition. The allegorical, therefore, bears the desire to belong to the world, referencing both the critique of coloniality as well as the possibility of transcending it at the very moment of revealing its ethical failure.

The Grid And The Nomadic Line In The Art Of Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Flaudette V. May Datuin

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Inspired by Thomas Lamarre’s deployment of Deleuze and Guattari’s “nomadic line” in his analysis of Heian calligraphy, this essay hopes to demonstrate how the Thai artist, Phaptawan Suwannakudt, drawing on a deeply internalized feeling for form in Buddhist painting, moves us to go beyond sight and surface appearances by creating through gestures, sensations and inscriptions zones of disruption, disorientation, departures, and arrivals.

The Role Of Westerners In The Conservation Of Legong Dance, Stephen Davies

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The image of legong-sumtuosly costumed girl dancers crowned with frangiapanis-is the face of Balinese culture. Yet it is only one of twenty dance/drama genres and prominent in only some centers. Legong, a secular court dance, has often been (and still is) in danger of extinction. Balinese are now less interested in legong than ever before and musicians prefer to play other kinds of music.

Since the 1930s, legong has been presented at tourist centers and by ensembles touring overseas. Western expatriates have founded legong groups and generally brokered the relation between Balines and foreigners. Foreign scholars have studied, recorded, and …

Icon And Image In Modern Thai Art: A Preliminary Exploration, John Clark

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Thai modern art is marked by the actual deployment of religious or august symbolic icons or the quasi-iconic use of images of variable indexicality in otherwise highly secular contexts. What were the sources for such modern uses and have the semiotic functions of icons shifted? To answer these questions, at least partially, religious functions for images are examined by tracking the use of court images and Buddhist figures.

Playing With Shadows, Apinan Poshyananda

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This essay reflects on the practice of the Indonesian artist Heri Dono, whose exhibition in Tokyo in 2000 is the anchor. It probes the cultural contexts in which the contemporary art of Dono plays out, identifying key trajectories that help clarify the concerns of this particular articulation: the locale of Yogyakarta, the mentality of the Javanese, and the device of the puppet presentation or the wayang, which derives from the ancient epics.[1] All this is located within the scheme of an exhibition of contemporary art and rendered in such a way that it conveys a certain aesthetic of hybridity and …

Nothing But A Pack Of Cards: Semi-Fictitious Persons And Flopping Jellyfish In Elizabeth Bowen, Renée C. Hoogland

English Faculty Research Publications

Taking the wildly conflicting critical evaluations of Elizabeth Bowen's final novel, Eva Trout, or Changing Scenes (1969) as its starting-point, this essay argues against 'interpreting' both the novel and its 'monstrous' heroine in conventional representational terms, to argue, instead, for an appreciation, or experience, of both novel and protagonist as instantiations of a process of becoming along Deleuzian lines. Rather than seeing Bowen's final novel as a (failed) attempt to do what the Anglo-Irish writer's previous work would have suggested this text to do as well, the novel and its eponymous heroine are approached as Bowen's rigorously ethical effort to, …

The Virtuoso Human: A Virtue Ethics Model Based On Care, Frederick Joseph Bennett

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this thesis is to develop the foundation and structure for a virtue ethics theory grounded in a specific notion of care. While there has been a recent revival of interest in virtue ethics theory, the theory has its roots in Aristotle's work as well in the medieval writings of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas worked out many of Aristotle's ideas in much more detail. However, while Aquinas offers a very rich and compelling ethical theory, it is problematic because it is very tightly wrapped in his theology. A key component in Aquinas's theory is charity. Charity is one of …

Philosophical Precursors To The Radical Enlightenment: Vignettes On The Struggle Between Philosophy And Theology From The Greeks To Leibniz With Special Emphasis On Spinoza, Anthony John Desantis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation lays out some of the chief philosophical precursors to Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment. It investigates the principal question of Will Durant's The Age of Voltaire: "How did it come about that a major part of the educated classes in Europe and America has lost faith in the theology that for fifteen centuries gave supernatural sanctions and supports to the precarious and uncongenial moral code upon which Western civilization has been based?" The aim of this project is both broad and specific: the first is to provide a general history of the philosophical precursors to the Radical Enlightenment up …

The Role Of Nature In John Muir's Conception Of The Good Life, Randy R. Larsen

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Aristotle says our best moral guidance comes from considering the lives of exemplary individuals. I explore John Muir, as an exemplar of environmental virtue, and consider the role of Nature in his conception of the good life. I argue his conception consists of a web of virtue including various goods, values, and virtues. I suggest three virtues are cardinal: attentiveness, gratitude and reverence. I explore how Muir cultivated these virtues in Nature.

I argue Muir sought freedom from a popular conception of the good life, grounded in the gilded age values of money and materialism, and was sensitive to the …

E Pluribus Plurum, Or, How To Fail To Back Into A State In Spite Of Really Trying, Chandran Kukathas

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

“The framework for utopia,” Robert Nozick tells us at the beginning of the fi nal section of Part iiiof Anarchy, State, and Utopia( ASU), “is equivalent to the minimal state” (p. 333). The rich andcomplex body of argumentation of Parts iand iihad produced theconclusion that the minimal, and no more than a minimal, statewas legitimate or morally justifi ed. What Part iiireveals is that theminimal state “is the one that best realizes the utopian aspirationsof untold dreamers and visionaries” (p. 333). Although this happyconvergence is surely no accident, neither, Nozick insists, is it contrived, for it is the conclusion reached …

In Favor Of Teleosemantics: A Millikanian Treatment Of The Intentional Content Of Mental Representation, Pierre Faye

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Theoretical attempts to naturalize mental contents, that is, to explain how wholly physical organisms manage to represent the external world to themselves, are mostly conducted in accordance with causal-informational and/or functionalist approaches based on nomic physical correlations. In 1984, Ruth Millikan and David Papineau simultaneously, though independently, injected new life into the naturalist program by introducing a divergent approach known today as "teleosemantics."

In first approximation, teleosemantics purports to naturalize mental content by substituting for the former concept of nomic correlations found in causal and/or functionalist models, the biological concept of etiological functions resulting from natural selection. Since its introduction, …

Moral Mental States: Four Methods In Metaethics, Christopher Alen Sula

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Metaethics has traditionally focused on the meaning of moral statements, the referents of moral terms, and the justification of moral claims. This dissertation focuses on the thoughts in virtue of which our moral statements have their meaning and our moral claims have their content. These "moral mental states," as I call them, are best understood as having both intentional and volitional aspects and, corresponding to each aspect, as having satisfaction conditions involving both correctness and success in action. Put simply, our moral mental states are not only responsible for changing the world; they are responsible for changing the world in …

Obtaining Speech Assets For Judgement Analysis On Low-Pass Filtered Emotional Speech, John Snel, Charlie Cullen

Conference papers

Investigating the emotional content in speech from acoustic characteristics requires separating the semantic con- tent from the acoustic channel. For natural emotional speech, a widely used method to separate the two channels is the use of cue masking. Our objective is to investigate the use of cue masking in non-acted emotional speech by analyzing the extent to which filtering impacts the perception of emotional content of the modified speech material. However, obtaining a corpus of emotional speech can be quite difficult whereby verifying the emotional content is an issue thoroughly discussed. Currently, speech research is showing a tendency toward constructing …

Reflexivity And Social Phenomenology, Benjamin K. Hoffman

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis develops an account of human understanding on the basis of an analysis of German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, and in relation to the thought of the Kyoto School philosopher Watsuji Tetsuro. The aim is to describe shared human intelligibility as founded upon a historical tradition and maintained by concrete practices, and yet as expressed only by interpretive projections, and therefore always open to revision. An analysis of the significance of anxiety and authenticity in Being and Time, as aspects of the existential interpretive process of our lives, is accompanied by a philosophical description of …

Power, Knowledge, Animals, Lisa Johnson

Dissertations and Theses

Although Foucault did not address the question of the animal, he asserted the assessment of whether a new politics of truth can be constituted as "the essential political problem" (1980, p. 134). Though the "essential political problem" may be considered as it relates to the politics of truth about animals, a Foucaultian perspective does not allow a prediction in response, other than the recognition that change may occur. What is understood to be "true" about animals may change if the relationships between events that exist at a given time ("conditions") require the emergence of a different way of knowing. This …

The Declaration Of Independence And Immigration In The United States Of America, Kenneth M. White

Faculty Articles

The United States has always been a nation of immigrants, and immigration policy has always been controversial. The history of immigration in the United States is contrasted in this article with a normative standard of naturalization (immigration policy) based on the Declaration of Independence. The current immigration debate fits within a historical pattern that pits an unrestricted right of immigration (the left) against exclusive, provincial politics (the right). Both sides are simultaneously correct and incorrect. A moderate policy on immigration is possible if the debate in the United States gets an infusion of what Thomas Paine called "common sense."

Handmaiden And Queen: What Philosophers Find In The Question: "What Is A Leader?", Joanne B. Ciulla

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

The word “philosophy” was born when the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras of Samos (572-497 BC) was asked if he thought he was a wise man. He answered no, he was merely a lover of wisdom – a phileo sophia. The philosophers who came after him were not as humble. Since philosophy was the study of just about everything, they dubbed it the “queen of the sciences”. Philosophy reigned supreme until Christian times when the theologian Clement of Alexandria (150–215?AD) demoted philosophy from the “queen” of the sciences to the “handmaid of theology”. The Enlightenment philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) also …

Leadership Ethics, Joanne B. Ciulla, Donelson R. Forsyth

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

A CEO bankrupts the company he is supposed to be leading. A retiree donates thousands of hours to her community. A company's leadership decides not to relocate a factory overseas, for the sake of the residents of an economically challenged town. A president of a club on a college campus encourages members to cheat on their examinations so that the group's members can earn academic honors. An elected public official arranges a tryst with a lover and abandons his duties for days on end.

These behaviors raise questions about motivation, rationality, and intent, but with a difference; these actions cannot …

Kant On Animal Consciousness, Colin Mclear

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Consider two different ways of characterizing the cognitive requirements necessary for perceptual awareness of an objective physical world.¹ On the one hand, objective perceptual awareness may only require the sensory capacity for awareness of particular physical individuals and their features, perhaps along with the minimal kinds of cognitive processing needed to integrate received sensory information with behavior. On the other hand, objective perceptual awareness may require not only these low-level cognitive capacities but also conceptual capacities, or perhaps even specific concepts.² Call these two lines of thought regarding objective perpetual awareness non-conceptualism and conceptualism respectively.

Taking Art Personally: Austin, Performatives And Art, David Goldblatt

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper is an attempt to apply speech act theory to aesthetics. In particular, it purports to be a contribution to reception theory by drawing attention to certain similarities between the contextual structure of performatives and the structure of the reception of art. It hopes to locate the auditor or spectator of artworks in what J. L. Austin calls “the total context” to help explain how certain aspects of artworks can be taken personally, somehow being about and seemingly directed at “me.” It is one way the so-called paradox of fiction can be by-passed by showing how the emotive aspects …

Phenomenology As Eschatological Materialism, Neal Deroo

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

No abstract provided.