Philosophy Commons^™

Monstrous Thoughts And The Moral Identity Thesis, Stephanie Patridge

Religion & Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

The responses are not simply imagined: we are prescribed by Justine actually to find erotically attractive the fictional events, to be amused by them, to enjoy them, to admire this kind of activity. So the novel does not just present imagined events, it also presents a point of view on them, a perspective constituted in part by actual feelings, emotions, and desires that the reader is prescribed to have toward the merely imagined events. Given that the notion of response covers such things as enjoyment and amusement, it is evident that some kinds of responses are actual, and not just …

New Waves In Musical Ontology, Andrew Kania

Philosophy Faculty Research

Since analytic aesthetics began, around 50 years ago, music has perhaps been the art most discussed by philosophers. The reasons for philosophers' attraction to music as a subject are obscure, but one element is surely that music, as a non-linguistic, non-pictorial, multiple-instance, performance art, raises at least as many questions about expression, ontology, interpretation and value as any other art—questions that often seem more puzzling than those raised by other arts.

The Aesthetics Of Junkyards And Roadside Clutter, Thomas Leddy

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

A little more than thirty years ago, Allen Carlson argued that although the concept of "Camp" would seem to allow for the aesthetic redemption of roadside clutter and junkyards, it does not.[1] He opposes those who claim that if one takes the right attitude to roadside clutter it can be seen as aesthetic. In this essay I argue that that there is nothing wrong with this, although I will not base my argument on the idea of Camp sensibility.

A Silent Rhetoric: The Mechanism Of Propaganda As Persuasion, Ken-Ichi Sasaki

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Under ongoing globalization the particularity of cultures has become a major topic in contemporary aesthetics. Someone insists on the right of national culture against globalism, others wish to bridge cultures.[1] Apparently opposing one another, they share the same gaze on the individual character of every culture. To confirm or transcend our cultural or national affiliation through art there exists the common dimension of aesthetic persuasion: that is the subject of this paper.

"The People Are Missing", Maryvonne Saison

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

It is through the ideal of a sensus communis that Aesthetics has offered to Philosophy an articulation to Politics. I will question the idea of an "aesthetic sociability" through the concept of "régime esthétique" (aesthetic regime) proposed by Jacques Rancière to define the 18th century fundamental change carried by Aesthetics in order to think art and sensibility together.

One question will be the central core of my essay, which is how to understand nowadays Deleuze’s assertion that art should be "contributing to the invention of a people."

Consensus and dissensus are two reefs between which art and philosophy navigate at …

Aesthetic Appreciation, Ethics, And 9/11, Emmanouil Aretoulakis

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

There have been numerous critical articles on what really happened on the otherwise beautiful morning of 11 September 2001. Beyond doubt, the bulk of the critical responses to the terrorist attacks focused on the ethical and humanitarian, or rather the unethical and inhumane implications of the atrocious act, leaving no room for any philosophical reflection on the potential assessment or reception of the event from the perspective of art and aesthetics. The few years that have gone by since 2001 have provided us with some a sense of emotional detachment from the horror of that day, a detachment that may …

Not Just Mere Things, Thomas E. Wartenberg

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper examines Arthur Danto's contention, put forward in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, that at a certain point in its history art becomes philosophy. The similarities and differences between Danto's view and the Hegelian one from which it is derived are examined. Using Danto's favorite example of a philosophical work of art, Andy Warhol's Brillo Box (1965), it is argued that a more plausible interpretation of the meaning of the work undermines Danto's claims about art's transformation into philosophy.

Toward A Poeticognosis: Re-Reading Plato's The Republic Via Wallace Stevens' "An Ordinary Evening In New Haven", Dan Disney

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This article is a language-based re-reading of Plato's exile of the poets via Wallace Stevens' poem-manifesto, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." I examine how philosophy and poetry use language differently in order to deconstruct an origin of the speech-acts -- wonder -- that I then identify as a phenomenological difference between philosophers and poets. I contend that the thinking-into-language of philosophers is based in theoria, comprehension, and a resulting closure of wonder. I contrast this with the processes of poets, who I show to be moving thought into language via gnosis, apprehension, and a phenomenology opening onto …

Poetic Leadership, A Territory Of Aesthetic Consciousness And Change, R. Amrit Kasten-Daryanani

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Poetic leadership is a new theoretical construct that views leadership as an activity that unites a lyrical intellect with keenly felt emotion for the purpose of producing changes in the consciousness of self and others. This change begins within the interiority of self, moving surely to broader realms of one's surroundings and society, provoking movement that impacts the developing potential of the individual and the cultural milieu in which they exist. Emotion is the primary trace into consciousness used in this dissertation, which serves to unite experiences of the heart with experiences of the mind. The unification of these disparate …

María Antonia González Valerio, El Arte Develado. Consideraciones Estéticas Sobre La Hermenéutica De Gadamer [Reseña Del Libro], Adriana Renero

Publications and Research

El tema central que nos ofrece María Antonia González Valerio es el estrecho vínculo que existe entre la estética y la hermenéutica de Hans-Georg Gadamer. Mediante una comparación de la estética gadameriana con otras teorías y reflexiones estéticas que la anteceden, tales como la Crítica del juicio de Kant, la Estética de Hegel, El origen de la obra de arte y Hölderlin y la esencia de la poesía de Heidegger, la autora se propone mostrar que Gadamer ofrece nuevas reflexiones sobre el arte y sobre la experiencia del arte.

Against Them, Too: A Reply To Alward, Andrew Kania

Philosophy Faculty Research

In his defense of a version of what I have called “the ubiquity thesis”—the idea that every narrative fiction contains an overarching fictional narrator—Peter Alward gives a helpful reconstruction of some of my arguments against that thesis and clearly lays out a part of the theoretical terrain on which this debate takes place. However, by the end of the piece he is offering solace to both me and those I was arguing against, which is about as close as philosophers come to fightin’ words.

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.

Aesthetics Into The Twenty-First Century, Curtis Carter

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

The new concerns facing aestheticians in the twenty-first century require serious attention if the discipline is to maintain continued viability as an intellectual discipline. Just as art changes as cultures develop, so must aesthetics. In support of this view is a personal account of evolving engagement with aesthetics and the factors that led to embracing change and a plurality of practices as essential to the health of aesthetic today. A brief examination of the state of aesthetics as it has evolved in the American Society for Aesthetics since its inception in the 1940s will follow. These two lines of development, …

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 …

Nietzsche's Debt To Kant's Theory Of The Beautiful In 'Birth Of Tragedy', R. Kevin Hill

Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Nietzsche describes Birth of Tragedy as a contribution to “the science of aesthetics”. In this paper, I will argue that a crucial influence on his emerging views was Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Nietzsche’s early aesthetic views are often attributed to some combination of Schopenhauer’s analyses of the plastic arts (inspiring Nietzsche’s conception of the Apollinian) and his analysis of music (inspiring Nietzsche’s conception of the Dionysian) along with Nietzsche’s own original insights into how these combine to form the tragic. As we shall see, the resources of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics were unavailable to Nietzsche due to epistemological commitments he had …

Making Tracks: The Ontology Of Rock Music, Andrew Kania

Philosophy Faculty Research

Philosophers of music have traditionally been concerned with the problems Western classical music raises, but recently there has been growing interest both in non-Western music and in Western musical traditions other than classical. Motivated by questions of the relative merits of classical and rock music, philosophers have addressed the ontology of rock music, asking if the reason it is held in lower esteem by some is that its artworks have been misunderstood to be of the same kind as classical musical works. In classical music, the production of the sound event to which the audience listens is the result of …

Oscar Wilde’S Artificiality And The Logic Of Genuine Pluralism, Jeremy Barris

Humanities Faculty Research

No abstract provided.

Seeking An Aesthetics Of Metafiction, Erin J. Vachon

Senior Honors Projects

According the Oxford English Dictionary, metafiction is ‘fiction in which the author self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or departing from novelistic conventions…and narrative techniques.’ In short, metafiction announces itself as a textual artifact and examines the very nature of fiction. Metafiction has been defined as such, but I seek the effect of the text upon the act of reading and the reader: into what space is the reader initiated when the boundaries between author-text-reader become dismantled or confused? What does the act of reading become, beyond a mere analytic exercise? I am searching …

A Phenomenological Aesthetic Of Cinematic 'Worlds', Christopher Yates

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Contemporary film aesthetics is beset by difficulties arising from the medium itself and the bewildering itinerary of film theory. Inspired by Martin Heidegger's hermeneutical vision in "On the Origin of the Work of Art" (1935), my essay seeks to overcome this paralysis by grounding the aesthetic value of cinematic art in its ability to "disclose the world" through a convergence of artist and viewer intentionalities. Stanley Cavell has gone far by exploring a corresponding "natural relation" between philosophy and cinema, but his work assumes an ontological discourse without an appropriate phenomenological method. I contend that Mikel Dufrenne's phenomenology of aesthetic …

The Color Of The Sublime Is White, Jeffrey Downard

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this paper, I examine Melville's discussion in Moby Dick of the whiteness of the whale from the perspective of a Kantian account of the sublime. My aim, in the first instance, is to see if the comparison helps to shed light on Melville's puzzling discussion of the color white and why this color serves to heighten the feeling of being overwhelmed by terror when confronted with something extremely large or powerful. In turn, I intend to use Melville's discussion of whiteness to put pressure on some of the philosophical assumptions behind a Kantian analysis of the sublime. In particular, …

From Aesthetics To Politics: Rancière, Kant And Deleuze, Katharine Wolfe

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

What does politics have to do with aesthetics? Surely, both politics and aesthetics are concerned with imagining, envisioning, and even creating, yet aren't the kinds of things these fields of inquiry imagine, envision and create greatly disparate? Jacques Rancière argues that what is at stake in politics, just as it is in aesthetics, is the distribution of the sensible, and that politics happens not only through the disruption of a certain aesthetic organization of sense experience but through the eruption of a distinct aesthetics. Here I elaborate the Kantian foundation for Rancière's conception of the kind of aesthetics that politics …

Toward Eco-Friendly Aeshetics, Sheila Lintott

Faculty Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

"Inspired Industry.", Amanda M. Dock

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis supports the Master of Fine Arts exhibition entitled "Inspired Industry" at Johnson City Area Arts Council, Johnson City, Tennessee, from November 14 - December 22, 2005. It is the culmination of studies and research affected by the artist's own industry vis-à-vis personal inspirations, including: discussion of aesthetics and personal utilization of the techniques learned in relation to both functional and non-functional ceramic forms. This is a self-evaluation of personal preferences and how this body of ceramic work evolved.

Against The Ubiquity Of Fictional Narrators, Andrew Kania

Philosophy Faculty Research

In this paper I argue against the theory – popular among theorists of narrative artworks – that we must posit a fictional narrative agent in every narrative artwork in order to explain our imaginative engagement with such works. I accept that every narrative must have a narrator, but I argue that in some central literary cases the narrator is not a fictional agent, but rather the actual author of the work. My criticisms focus on the strongest argument for the ubiquity of fictional narrators, Jerrold Levinson’s ontological-gap argument. Finally, I outline an alternative “minimal theory” of narrators, and some consequences …

Foucault And Habermas, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The article is a comprehensive comparison of Foucault and Habermas which focuses on their distinctive styles of critical theory. The article maintains that Foucault's virtue ethical understanding of aesthetic self-realization as a form of resistance to normalizing practices provides counterpoint to Habermas's more juridical approach to institutional justice and the critique of ideology. The article contains an extensive discussion of their respective treatments of speech action, both strategic and communicative, and concludes by addressing Foucault's understanding of parrhesia as a non-discursive form of truth-telling.

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 …

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 …

Aesthetics And Mobility - A Short Introduction Into A Moving Field, Ossi Naukkarinen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Aesthetics cannot by any means be defined only as philosophy of art. Everything can be approached from an aesthetic standpoint. Aesthetically interesting ways to move about can be found in most everyday situations. Our everyday mobility consists of various ways of getting about, and sometimes our approach to them is aesthetically colored. That we move in different ways and link them with aesthetic considerations of some sort is deeply rooted in our thinking. Our bodily experiences of the world are typically movement experiences, and our conceptual thinking is also built on them: We simply cannot make sense of the world …

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 …

Editorial

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.