This volume reflects the development and theoretical foundation of a new paradigm for critical thinking based on inquiry. The field of critical thinking, as manifested in the Informal Logic movement, developed primarily as a response to the inadequacies of formalism to represent actual argumentative practice and to provide useful argumentative skills to students. Because of this, the primary focus of the field has been on informal arguments rather than formal reasoning. Yet the formalist history of the field is still evident (...) in its emphasis, with respect to both theory and pedagogy, on the structure and evaluation of individual, de-contextualized arguments. It is our view that such a view of critical thinking is excessively narrow and limited, failing to provide an understanding of argumentation as largely a matter of comparative evaluation of a variety of contending positions and arguments with the goal of reaching a reasoned judgment on an issue. As a consequence, traditional critical thinking instruction is problematic in failing to provide the reasoning skills that students need in order to accomplish this goal. Instead, the goal of critical thinking instruction has been seen largely as a defensive one: of learning to not fall prey to invalid, inadequate, or fallacious arguments. (shrink)

Various contemporary legal theorists have turned to ‘imagination’ as a keyword in their accounts of law. This turn is fruitfully considered as a potential response to the modern condition diagnosed by Max Weber as ‘disenchantment’. While disenchantment is often seen as a symptom of a post-metaphysical age, it is best understood as the consummation of metaphysics and not its overcoming. Law’s participation in disenchantment is illustrated by way of Holmes’ parable of the dragon in ‘The Path of the Law’, which (...) illustrates the rationalization and demystification of law. Four ideal–typical turns to ‘imagination’ are identified: the theoretical, the progressive, the transformative and the nostalgic. Most of these turns to imagination remain complicit with disenchantment. ‘Imagination’ often appears only to be harnessed in the service of more conventional keywords of legal thought: theoreticians turn to imagination as synthesis to serve as a form of super-reason; progressives turn to imagination as empathy to make law a more effective instrument; transformatives turn to imagination as invention to serve as a form of super-will. By turning to imagination as attunement, nostalgics come closest to accepting a world that is not masterable, i.e. they come closest to accepting an enchantment that is a gift and not the product of our imaginations. Indeed, modern imaginations are themselves symptoms of disenchantment. If Weber’s diagnostic calls for a human response, it cannot be one of overcoming disenchantment by imaginative re-enchantment: it belongs integrally to enchantment to exceed any and all human capacities. (shrink)

In many of his writings, Castoriadis argues that ‘the discovery of the imagination’ occurs in the works of Aristotle, Kant, Fichte, Freud, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Although he has systematically encountered and interrogated the works of Aristotle, Kant, Freud, and Merleau-Ponty, the work of Fichte remains an enigmatic absence within the orbit of Castoriadis' work. This study is an attempt to address this enigma through a close reading of Fichte’s The Science of Knowledge.

This paper revisits Plato’s and Aristotle’s views on mimesis with a special emphasis on mythos as an integral part of it. I argue that the Republic ’s notorious “mirror argument” is in fact ad hominem : first, Plato likely has in mind Agathon’s mirror in Aristophanes’ Thesmoforiazusae, where tragedy is construed as mimesis ; second, the tongue-in-cheek claim that mirrors can reproduce invisible Hades, when read in combination with the following eschatological myth, suggests that Plato was not committed to a (...) mirror-like view of art; third, the very omission of mythos shows that the argument is a self-consciously one-sided one, designed to caricature the artists’ own pretensions of mirror-like realism. These points reinforce Stephen Halliwell’s claim that Western aesthetics has been haunted by a «ghostly misapprehension» of Plato’s mirror. Further evidence comes from Aristotle’s “literary” discussion: rather than to the “mirror argument”, the beginning of the Poetics points to the Phaedo as the best source of information about Plato’s views on poetry. (shrink)

This thesis explores how we might think the relation between psychoanalysis and the cultural field through Donald Winnicott’s concept of the environment, seeking to bring the concept into dialogue with more “classical” strands of psychoanalytic theorizing. A substantial introduction sets out the rationale behind the thesis by reading Freud and Winnicott in relation to the “classic” and the “romantic”, or the “negative” and “positive”, in psychoanalytic thought. It goes on to outline the value of bringing these tendencies together in order (...) to think the relationship between psychoanalysis, culture and change. The chapters which follow move from psychoanalysis as a “cultural cure” – a method and discourse drawing on and feeding into a broad conception of cultural life – towards a notion of “culture as cure” informed by Winnicott’s theory of the environment. Chapter one examines Freud’s refusal of the “culture”/ “civilization” distinction and considers what it means for the idea of a cultural cure. Chapter two considers whether Winnicott’s thinking about “culture” ultimately prioritises the aesthetic over the political. Chapter three uses Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to explore an analogy between totalitarianism, technology and maternal care. Chapter four turns to the series In Treatment to think about the intersections of therapy and technology in terms of reflection and recognition. Chapter five employs Ian McEwan’s Saturday as a means to reflect on the capacity of culture to cure. Ultimately, I suggest that social “cure” may require more than “good-enough” cultural forms and objects, but Winnicott’s “romantic” theorization of the aesthetic, coupled with a “classic” attention to structures of power and oppression may offer a means of thinking the relationship between psychoanalysis and culture in potentially transformative ways. (shrink)

For Plato mimesis is the appearance of the external image of things. In his view, the reality was not to be found in the world of objects but in the realm of ideas. Therefore, Plato sees the arts as an occupation that is inferior to science and philosophy, but that is also a potential source of corruption. His concept of imitation, although it evolved over time, led him to take an increasingly dogmatic and intolerant position regarding artistic creation. His notion (...) that poetry is morally dangerous establishes the foundations for a didactic critique, which tends to flourish in societies undergoing political crises. Plato wrote his works during an age of instability and decline; an age when the role of Athens as the leading power in the Mediterranean was beginning to be questioned. Through an analysis of Ion and Books II, III, and X of The Republic, this essay explores the epistemological and moral —rather than aesthetic— nature of Plato’s judgment on the value of Poetry and the Arts. (shrink)

Like it or not, a big picture of the history of science is something which we cannot avoid. Big pictures are, of course, thoroughly out of fashion at the moment; those committed to specialist research find them simplistic and insufficiently complex and nuanced, while postmodernists regard them as simply impossible. But however specialist we may be in our research, however scornful of the immaturity of grand narratives, it is not so easy to escape from dependence – acknowledged or not – (...) on a big picture. When we define our research as part of the history of science, we implicitly invoke a big picture of that history to give identity and meaning to our specialism. When we teach the history of science, even if we do not present a big picture explicitly, our students already have a big picture of that history which they bring to our classes and into which they fit whatever we say, no matter how many complications and refinements and contradictions we put before them – unless we offer them an alternative big picture. (shrink)

The ArgumentFocusing on the celebrations of Newton and his work, this article investigates the use of the concept of genius and its connection with debates on the methodology of science and the morality of great discoverers. During the period studied, two areas of tension developed. Firstly, eighteenth-century ideas about the relationship between genius and method were challenged by the notion of scientific genius as transcending specifiable rules of method. Secondly, assumptions about the nexus between intellectual and moral virtue were threatened (...) by the emerging conception of genius as marked by an extraordinary personality – on the one hand capable of breaking with established methods to achieve great discoveries, on the other, likely to transgress moral and social conventions. The assesments of Newton by nineteenth-century scientists such as Brewster, Whewell, and De Morgan were informed by these tensions. (shrink)

Classicists have long been wary of comparisons, partly for ideological reasons related to the incomparability of ‘the Classical’, partly because of the often problematic basis and limited illumination afforded by such efforts as have been made: the -reception of the work of the Cambridge ritualists — such as J.G. Frazer and Jane Harrison — is a case in point in both respects. Interestingly, even the specifically comparative interests of the much more rigorous projects of the Paris School, at the Centre (...) Louis Gernet, have not had much resonance outside France, notwithstanding the enormous influence of their work concerning purely Greek subject matter. In part, perhaps, this was a result of the shift from Vernant's originally Marxist framework, in which societies were comparable in terms of an evolutionary sociological scheme, to a structuralist one, entailing an emphasis on the uniqueness of different cultural traditions. The emphasis on the uniqueness of the Classical world was only reinforced by post-structuralism and post-modernism, which in their strongest forms suggested that cultures, like languages, were fundamentally incommensurable, and thus not accessible to outsider knowledge, let alone comparable. Indeed, so virulent was the post-structuralist virus that disciplines to which we might have expected to be able to turn for guidance, like comparative religion, are only now recovering the courage ‘to compare religious phenomena, theologies or artefacts outside of footnotes or less heavily policed epilogues’. (shrink)

Can theories of mental imagery, conscious mental contents, developed within cognitive science throw light on the obscure (but culturally very significant) concept of imagination? Three extant views of mental imagery are considered: quasi‐pictorial, description, and perceptual activity theories. The first two face serious theoretical and empirical difficulties. The third is (for historically contingent reasons) little known, theoretically underdeveloped, and empirically untried, but has real explanatory potential. It rejects the “traditional” symbolic computational view of mental contents, but is compatible with recentsituated (...) cognition and active visionapproaches in robotics. This theory is developed and elucidated. Three related key aspects of imagination (non‐discursiveness, creativity, and seeing as) raise difficulties for the other theories. Perceptual activity theory presents imagery as non‐discursive and relates it closely to seeing as. It is thus well placed to be the basis for a general theory of imagination and its role in creative thought. (shrink)

There have been constant and multiple endeavours to argue for Darwin's both epistemic and practical debt to Romanticism. Almost all of these arguments emphasise Darwin's theoretical and aesthetic associations with Alexander von Humboldt, who, from a prevailing Darwin-centred perspective, is in turn usually oversimplified as an undisputed incarnation of Romanticism. The antagonistic view, however, develops nothing other than another stereotype of Humboldt as an anti-idealistic, pro-French, and even highly Anglophone empiricist naturalist, and accordingly rejects the claim of a romantic Darwin (...) in terms of his Humboldtian inheritance. In this paper, I will first portray a balanced figure of Humboldt in terms of both his critical incorporation of romantic philosophy and the idiosyncratic history of his science. Then, I will thematically compare Darwin with Humboldt and other romantics so as to elucidate Darwin's peculiar appropriation of romantic tenets. Three interrelated romantic themes are examined, along with a discrimination of different senses in which the term romanticism is used: a) the literature-science relation, b) the pursuit of the unity in and through multiplicity, and c) the epistemic role of imagination. On the basis of this triadic dissection, both Humboldt's and Darwin's adherence to and departure from romanticism are reevaluated. (shrink)

Recent writing on the expression of emotion has explored the idea that there is a symbolic dimension to many “expressive actions.” This paper aims to situate and better understand the “symbolic expression” account by exploring its position in a framework of views from the history of philosophy regarding emotion, action out of emotion, and their place in the good human life. The paper discusses a number of competing views that can be found in this tradition, ranging from irrationalism, through irenicism, (...) self‐externalization, and cognitivism to the symbolist tradition itself. In looking specifically at the roots of symbolism, the paper departs from the common view that Aristotelianism is the central tradition, for us, of thinking about philosophy of the emotions. It suggests that we can get a better grip on the source of these ideas by looking rather at how thinkers in the post‐Kantian and Romantic tradition wrestled with the question of the freedom and rationality of behaviour out of emotion. (shrink)

While the idea of art as self-expression can sound old-fashioned, it remains widespread—especially if the relevant ‘selves’ can be social collectives, not just individual artists. But self-expression can collapse into individualistic or anthropocentric self-involvement. And compelling successor ideals for artists are not obvious. In this light, I develop a counter-ideal of creative receptivity to basic features of the external world, or artistic objectivity. Objective artists are not trying to express themselves or reach collective self-knowledge. However, they are also not disinterested (...) or emotionless. They can be unmoved by personal feelings and human concerns, but they are still receptive—just attuned to the more elemental forces that creatively inspire them. I elaborate this ideal in dialogue with John Ruskin’s influential critique of the pathetic fallacy. By contextualizing Ruskin’s view vis-à-vis Romantic and Modernist poetics, post-Kantian aesthetics, modern environmental art, and contemporary theories of expressiveness, I show how it indirectly motivates my account. (shrink)

The publication of Timothy Michael’s British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason represents a landmark in the study of British Romantic literature. In 1953, M. H. Abrams published his...

ABSTRACTIn ‘The Principles of Art’, R. G. Collingwood argues that art is the imaginative expression of emotion. So much the worse, then, for Collingwood. The theory seems hopelessly inadequate to the task of capturing art’s extension: of encompassing all the works we generally suppose should be rounded up under the concept. A great number of artworks, and several art forms, have nothing to do with emotion. But it would be surprising were Collingwood philistine enough to think that art is only (...) ever concerned with communicating quotidian affective states, like anger, fear or love. Surely he has some more sophisticated notion of emotion in mind, and quite probably of expression too. And it turns out that those sophisticated notions can be pushed towards a version of the expression theory that meets the extensional challenge. If we interpret Collingwood as saying that expression is a particular application of imagination, and that imagination is the faculty that refines ideas of emotions, and that ‘emotions’... (shrink)

Plato's views on tragedy depend in large part on his views about the ethical consequences of emotional arousal. In theRepublic, Plato treats the desires we feel in everyday life to weep and feel pity as appetites exactly like those for food or sex, whose satisfactions are ‘replenishments’. Physical desire is not reprehensible in itself, but is simplynon-rational, not identical with reason but capable of being brought into agreement with it. Some desires, like that for simple and wholesome food, are in (...) fact ‘necessary’ and approved by reason. Other appetites, like lust and gluttony, are ‘unnecessary’ andanti-rational in that they are actively opposed to reason. According to theRepublic, the satisfaction of these ‘unnecessary’ desires inevitably strengthens the elements in the soul that oppose reason. The desire to weep at the theatre is treated in this dialogue as just such an anti-rational desire. Even a temporary indulgence in tragic pity and fear has a permanent deleterious effect on the soul, although it does not lead directly to any action.This paper argues that a radically different psychological theory, with important aesthetic implications, appears in the discussion of wine-drinking in Books 1 and 2 of Plato'sLaws. Though this long passage has been much scorned and neglected, it is of considerable philosophical importance. While in theRepublicPlato condemns drunkenness and other anti-rational states, in theLawshe extols the benefits of a hypothetical ‘fear drug’ that could induce a temporary state of anti-rational terror and of wine to produce other anti-rational emotions and desires. (shrink)

Many educators today think that the school's lessons and activities do not stimulate or engage students' imaginations. In order to alleviate this problem, they tend to use images in conjunction with, or sometimes rather than, words; they employ so-called imaginative or creative activities rather than chalk and talk. However, these principles and methods are based on somewhat misguided or trivial understanding of the importance of imagination in students' lives. Dewey's understanding of the relevance of imagination gives us a useful perspective (...) to better understand where imaginative engagement becomes crucial in education. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss some of the linguistic features of hermeneutic-phenomenological writing and, in so doing, we point to the close connection between lived experience and the ethical-aesthetic traits of writing the experience. Our exploration starts by contemplating texts written by the so-called Utrecht School. We reflect on their orientation as it has been understood, developed, and advocated by Max van Manen. The literary style of the Utrecht orientation is sometimes misunderstood and questioned. This article aims to explicate why (...) and how hermeneutic phenomenology needs an expressive language to "write the lived experience" rather than to simply write "about" the lived experience. Lived experiences are always past experiences that we try to bring into the present, and so the difference between recollections and memories are discussed in connection to writing the experience. We argue that what is being told and not seen is, metaphorically speaking, an event in sound, which can have ethical and aesthetic virtues of truth and beauty. Lived experiences, whether written as anecdotes or as other kinds of experiential accounts, can shine forth through the use of expressive language. But is this kind of language poetry? Can such an account be regarded as poetic writing? If it is poetic writing, exactly how does it differ from academic writing? Our exploration of questions like these leads us to the tentative conclusion that, as hermeneutic phenomenological researchers, we dwell in the borderland between a "poetic attitude" and a utilitarian writing style. (shrink)

This work tries to show that the metapoetic meditation developed by Ramos Rosa throughout his very extensive poetic work not only did not condemn his poetry to a cold cloister in the textual plane, but also contributed decisively to the opening to the real, to the effect of evidence and to the sense of communion that would become increasingly sensitive in his writing. To this end, we propose to clarify the thread that, under the aegis of the poetic lucidity consecrated (...) by the author, leads us from his metapoetic meditation to a poetic meditation of an ontophenomenological and sapiential nature, that is, from his metapoetry to a poetry whose wisdom provides a set of intuitions with a sapiential and philosophical accent. It is our intention to contribute, in this way, to the understanding of the (cognitive and ontological) demand and scope of Rosa’s poetic path, as well as, collaterally, to the debate around topics such as poetic (self-)reference, the ontological status of the poetic text or the philosophy-literature relationship. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Shaftesbury and Hutcheson Du Bos Addison Baumgarten A Glimpse Ahead: Kant.

There is a contemporary scepticism towards vision-based metaphors in management and organization studies that reflects a more general pattern across the social sciences. In short, there has been a shift away from ocularcentrism. This shift provides a useful basis for metatheoretical analysis of the philosophical discourse that informs organizational analysis. The article begins by briefly discussing the vision-generated, vision-centred interpretation of knowledge, truth, and reality that has characterized the western philosophical tradition. Taking late 18th-century rationalism as the high-point of ocularcentrism, (...) the article then presents a metatheoretical framework based on three trajectories that critiques of ocularcentrism have subsequently taken. The first exposes the limits of the metaphor by, paradoxically, taking it to its limits. The second trajectory seeks to displace the primordial position of the ocular metaphor and replace it with an alternative lexicon based on other human senses. Last, the third trajectory describes how the Enlightenment ocular characterization of the visual and mental worlds has effectively been inverted in the postmodern moment. (shrink)

In this article, I seek to study Whewell as writer of philosophical doctrines by focusing on his frequent usage of the metaphor of light, which symbolized (human) knowledge. It is my primary claim that Whewell choose to visually illustrate his doctrine of Fundamental Ideas, which are the bearers of ultimate reality and meaning in Whewell's epistemology, by means some key metaphors that made reference to light.

Plato's views on tragedy depend in large part on his views about the ethical consequences of emotional arousal. In the Republic, Plato treats the desires we feel in everyday life to weep and feel pity as appetites exactly like those for food or sex, whose satisfactions are ‘replenishments’. Physical desire is not reprehensible in itself, but is simply non-rational, not identical with reason but capable of being brought into agreement with it. Some desires, like that for simple and wholesome food, (...) are in fact ‘necessary’ and approved by reason. Other appetites, like lust and gluttony, are ‘unnecessary’ and anti-rational in that they are actively opposed to reason. According to the Republic, the satisfaction of these ‘unnecessary’ desires inevitably strengthens the elements in the soul that oppose reason. The desire to weep at the theatre is treated in this dialogue as just such an anti-rational desire. Even a temporary indulgence in tragic pity and fear has a permanent deleterious effect on the soul, although it does not lead directly to any action. This paper argues that a radically different psychological theory, with important aesthetic implications, appears in the discussion of wine-drinking in Books 1 and 2 of Plato's Laws. Though this long passage has been much scorned and neglected, it is of considerable philosophical importance. While in the Republic Plato condemns drunkenness and other anti-rational states, in the Laws he extols the benefits of a hypothetical ‘fear drug’ that could induce a temporary state of anti-rational terror and of wine to produce other anti-rational emotions and desires. (shrink)

This article aims to reconstruct a Millian argument for protecting a broad artistic freedom, as well as to delineate the exceptional cases in which censorship of works of art might be justified. Mill'sOn Libertyoffers two lines of reasoning that might be used to defend the widest possible artistic freedom. The first is Mill's defense of freedom of speech in chapter 2, although this would apparently still allow for censoring art that serves to instigate harm. The second is his defense of (...) “experiments in living” in chapter 3, but this might allow for censoring the exhibition or publication of artworks that constitute “offences against decency.” While this Millian doctrine on artistic freedom provides guidelines for coping with difficult cases in arts management, its limitations highlight the peculiarities of the arts and literature in relation to freedom and censorship. (shrink)

ABSTRACTKant is concerned to give meaning, depth and veracity to the notion of the subject, which he does on transcendental grounds, and also to shift it beyond purely cognitivist formulations. He opens the subject up to other dimensions of the world that he or she establishes – not only the cognitive, but also the political – ethical and the aesthetic. He does this by constructing and denoting different faculties and their principles that ought to be employed in the distinct domains (...) – the understanding, reason in its pure and practical orientations, and the imagination. Whilst practical reason is Kant’s main focus, the imagination is Kant’s unfinished business and is not limited to the issue of aesthetics. It is both reason’s “other”, and “an indispensable dimension of the human soul”, equal in power and capacity to the other faculties. (shrink)

It is often claimed that certain remarks by Wittgenstein reveal him to have been an unsympathetic reader of Shakespeare and an unappreciative judge of the latter’s achievements. In the present paper, I attempt to show that this sort of observation is not only wrong but due to an inadequate perspective. An examination of the relevant remarks may bring to light a number of more or less interesting principles of evaluation, or aesthetic maxims and appraisals, but these do not say much (...) about Shakespeare’s works, nor are the meant to be instructive in this way. What Wittgenstein’s remarks are really about is his own intellectual physiognomy: it is by way of contrast, by comparing certain features of Shakespeare with what he supposes to be characteristic of himself, that he hopes to learn about the limits and potentialities of his own personality. (shrink)

Both Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty repudiate the mirror view of perception and embrace what Nietzsche refers to as solar love or creative perception. I argue that Merleau-Ponty thinks of this type of perception primarily in terms of convergence and Nietzsche in terms of divergence. I then show how, contrary to their own emphases, Merleau-Ponty's notion of flesh and Nietzsche's idea of chaos suggest that convergence and divergence are abstractions from an ontologically prior realm of hybrid perceptions. In this realm, each perception (...) is shot through with the others, simultaneously inside and outside one another. The creative tension among these perceptions continually produces new perspectives or voices, that is, a realm whose very being is metamorphosis. Moreover, this realm of hybrid perceptions suggests a political principle that might prove attractive for communities in an age of diversity and cultural hybridity. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill's crisis of 1826 has received a great deal of attention from scholars. This attention results from reflection on the importance of the crisis to Mill's mature thought. Did the crisis signal rejection or revision of Benthamism? Or did it have little or no effect on Mill's view of his intellectual inheritance? Ultimately, an interpretation of the cause and resolution of the crisis is integral to an understanding of the nature of Mill's moral and social philosophy. Scholars, in (...) their zeal to understand Mill's crisis, have suggested various reasons for both the onset of the crisis and the recovery. Yet Mill's own perception of his crisis has often been overlooked or rejected. (shrink)

RESUMEN El trabajo reconstruye la recepción del pensamiento de Fr. Schlegel en la obra temprana de Paul De Man. Nuestra hipótesis sostiene que si analizamos los ensayos gestados antes de los años 80 se puede visibilizar que De Man inscribe al romanticismo a partir de algunos de los críticos del romanticismo, pero, al mismo tiempo, modifica la imagen orgánica y totalizadora del romanticismo que una parte de la crítica literaria sostenía en relación con la poesía romántica. A tales efectos, examinamos (...) de qué modo se presenta esta recepción en dos textos previos a 1980: Retórica de la temporalidad y Alegorías de la lectura. ABSTRACT The work reconstructs the reception of the thought of Fr. Schlegel in the early work of Paul De Man. Our hypothesis holds that if we analyze the essays produced before the 1980s, it can be appreciated that De Man inscribes the romanticism from some of the critics of romanticism, but, at the same time, it modifies the organic and totalizing image of romanticism that a part of literary criticism held in relation to romantic poetry. To this end, we examine how this reception is presented in two texts previous to 1980: Rhetoric of Temporality and Allegories of Reading. (shrink)

Interpretations of Mill's response to literature are often placed within a larger analysis of the development of his ethical thought. Such interpretations commonly seek to describe the importance to Mill's intellectual development of the episode in his personal experience, recollected in Chapter V of his Autobiography, which awakened him to the value of poetry and to the need for an active cultivation of personal feeling. The connection between the two is usually made by demonstrating how his mature ethical thought integrates (...) ideas that were first brought home to him during this reaction against the logical rigour of his background and upbringing, a reaction that contrasts Mill's acceptance of the importance of personal culture and emotion with the scant regard afforded to these elements within Benthamite utilitarian thought. Thus the resolution of Mill's personal crisis is seen as shedding light on key limitations within the moral philosophy that he inherited from Bentham and from his father. (shrink)

Rorty claims argument is inherently conservative and philosophical progress comes from "sparkling new ideas," not argument. This assumes an untenable opposition between the generation and the evaluation of ideas, with argument relegated to evaluation. New ideas that contribute to progress arise from critical reflection on problems posed by the tradition, and constrained by the criteria governing evaluation. Thinking directed toward the criticism and evaluation of ideas or products is not algorithmic; it has a generative, creative component. An overall assessment in (...) any complex circumstance requires constructing a new view from the questioning, weighing, rejecting, reconciling, and integrating of numerous divergent points of view. Thus, the process of argumentation can issue in new ideas. (shrink)

This article addresses two issues: the first is the philosopher's fear of a lawless freedom of nature. I quote Deleuze and Guattari, who explain our terror before chaos and the consequent call for help and protection. My hypothesis was that this threat of chaos has affected also the enlightened mind of Kant. Facing the possibility of chaos, the objective Kant did not exactly fear delusion and madness, which affect only fragile subjectivities, but was terrified with the chance that nature does (...) not behave regularly, i.e., that _ knowledge _ becomes impossible. The second issue is a harder and more difficult question, and it is related to the _modern_ artist’s (or genius) anguish. It is a technical or an artistical complaint. He/She finds no more given rules to create his/her artworks. Differently from the philosopher, the genius fears the silence and the absolute muteness of nature. I try to deal with these two issues by taking into account Kant’s concept of purposiveness of nature as a regulative principle. I realize that, although this sufficed to calm down the philosopher’s anxiety, it proved to be insufficient to guide the artist. The delusion and madness that threaten the genius are deeper and more extreme than those of the philosopher. In order to treat the artist’s pain, without having to abandon the connection between art and nature, that constitutes one of the most fruitful reading keys of Kant’s Aesthetics, I resort to other ideas I found reading Lacoue-Labarthe and Hannah Arendt. (shrink)

I argue that scientific and poetic modes of objectivity are perspectival duals: 'views' from and onto basic natural forces, respectively. I ground this analysis in a general account of objectivity, not in terms of either 'universal' or 'inter-subjective' validity, but as receptivity to basic features of reality. Contra traditionalists, bare truth, factual knowledge, and universally valid representation are not inherently valuable. But modern critics who focus primarily on the self-expressive aspect of science are also wrong to claim that our knowledge (...) is or should be ultimately mediated by ourselves. In objective science, we represent nature as a field of phenomena determined by and within explanatorily-basic physical structures that encode the causal impact of elemental physical forces. These causally-basic forces hence ground the possibility of objective scientific theory, even though (I argue) they are systematically excluded from its representational contents. I show how my notions of force and field emerge partly through my effort to naturalize concepts of 'God' and 'Laws' in 17th-century natural philosophy. In science, we use the structure of basic forces' impact to see corresponding objects. We do not see these forces themselves—and this relates to the 'transcendence' of 'God'. I supplement this historical analysis by critiquing standard accounts of objectivity, and by synthesizing elements from neo-Kantian epistemology and current 'structural' realism into a view that I call 'dynamic structuralism'. Finally, I argue that physics systematically relies on passive characterizations of phenomena like inertia and impressed force. Dynamic alternatives that are just as empirically adequate are possible, but they are non-scientific. Poetic objectivity involves a direct presentation of nature as an order of interacting forces. I elaborate first by developing a novel theory of the relation between beauty and sublimity, mediated by a basic category of 'sensory force' (e.g. a 'singing' tone in a beautiful melody). I then describe the interaction between sensory and affective dimensions of aesthetic experience, in relation to an original historical analysis of passion and 'disinterestedness' in Kant, Schiller and Nietzsche. I synthesize these lines of analysis into a critique of the role of 'expression' in art. I also resist 'spectator'-centric aesthetics, in this connection, by developing an account of artistic objectivity in dialogue with Ruskin's critique of the 'pathetic fallacy'. I contrast artistic objectivity with Romantic ideals of self-expression, while elaborating its positive relation to certain currents within Victorian and Modernist aesthetics, including Imagists' stress on 'exteriority'. My project creatively extends Nietzsche's view that philosophical and scientific theories are 'perspectival' expressions of theorists' drives. It is a virtue of Nietzsche's account that he takes the outlet of strong human drives in creative acts of theorizing to be just one among many higher modes of 'will to power' in nature—many of which are totally impersonal. But Nietzsche is still too focused on self-expression or willing one's own power. Objective science involves external forces' 'expression' in and through us, not just 'expressing' our own powers. And Nietzsche's vitalistic 'will to power' must be replaced by a basic ontology that better accommodates inorganic phenomena, like the 'lawful' order of celestial motions. Thus I aim to de-anthropomorphize and 'de-organicize' post-Kantian notions of willful striving and organic development, while preserving for force the primary ontological and evaluative status that theorists from Schiller and Goethe to Schelling and Schlegel to Emerson and Nietzsche attributed to will or to life. (shrink)

This thesis proposes a re-conceptualisation of engineering practice that moves towards responding to the nature of our 21st Century (21C) predicament – the dynamic, turbulent, labyrinthine flux which has developed through the inhabitation of modern humanity in our open living world. It describes a philosophy and practices to achieve this. Key concepts are the context within which practice takes place and an integrated approach at the system level. Together these principles promote processes and practices that can design life situations which (...) are more desirable and feasible, not only for humanity but to strengthen our natural environment. This is active adaptive planning; it changes practitioners’ relationship with the world by providing spaces where the agenda is not “driven” by the “push” of the past but elicits the “pull” of future intentions. Using these approaches people are engaged collectively in processes that re-connect with context taking into account the relevant uncertainties across what are often articulated as “different” systems (e.g. social, environmental, technical) and between past, present, future. Further, it works the loops – performing ontological politics that is linking and knotting what emerges from these processes with all the potential stakeholders, mobilising resources, peers, allies and the public. The thesis identifies links between Socio-Technical Systems, Actor-Network Theory and process philosophy. This extends Actor-Network Theory which has already removed those intellectual constructs that disarticulated reality, focusing attention on practise, movement, the making and remaking of reality, or net-work-ing with the complex heterogeneous nature of agency. It envisages practitioners having an epistemology and ontology that is formed through being “out-and-about” in the world, making “translations”. Through embedding these ideas in the way engineers learn and in the processes that they use, engineering becomes a “putting through”, manoeuvring, dissolving boundaries, always being in action, moving towards sustaining with others, while recognising purpose, congruence and transforming as emergent properties. Through purposive imag(in)ing of different ways of sustainable doing and being integration can occur, reframing across methodology, epistemology, ontology and philosophy. (shrink)