This special issue of HYPATIA: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy entitled "Women, Art, and Aesthetics" highlights the expanded range of topics at center stage in feminist philosophical inquiry to date (2003): recontextualizing women artists (essays by Patricia Locke, Eleanor Heartney, and Michelle Meagher), bodies and beauty (Ann J. Cahill, Sheila Lintott, Janell Hobson, Richard Shusterman, Joanna Frueh), art, ethics, politics, law (A. W. Eaton, Amy Mullin, L. Ryan Musgrave, Teresa Winterhalter), and review essays by Estella Lauter and Flo Leibowitz. Annotated (...) bibliography by Joshua Shaw. (shrink)

Aesthetics is the part of contemporary academic philosophy that is concerned with art, beauty, criticism, and taste. As such, it must address metaphysical issues, epistemic problems, and questions of value. This makes it difficult to present a coherent account of the subject matter of aesthetics. In this article, I argue that this difficulty is the result of ambiguities and contradictions that arose in disputes about the relationship between the science of aesthetics, the critique of taste, and the philosophy of art (...) in German philosophy during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. By reconstructing the history of these debates, I hope to shed new light on the origins of aesthetics as a discipline and to explain why its subject matter and status within philosophy are still so difficult to define. (shrink)

This article draws on the conclusion of the Commission on the Humanities in The Humanities in American Life that the aim of a liberal arts education is to foster critical reasoning through the use of language or discourse. This paper maintains that the critical method is in itself insufficient to achieve its purpose. Its failure is in its exclusion of feeling and of silence from the thinking process. Hence, the ultimate object of my analysis is to correct and to complement (...) the critical method with the aesthetic method of teaching the humanities. Central to the aesthetic method is art as a means to cultivate contemplative and creative skills. The essay brings out and examines the value of art as voices of silence in Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Dionysius, Bonaventure, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty and Paul Gauguin, and pays particular attention to the diaries of Eugène Delacroix. In the course of doing so, I shall be trying to make clear that art teaches us how to listen and how to encounter ourselves totally and completely. It goes on to suggest several pedagogical principles or consequences that flow from this aesthetic pedagogy. (shrink)

The issue discussed in this paper, although controversial, is cognitively nontrivial. Namely, we shall be interested in the matter of possibility to use certain semiotic conceptions in research conducted in the area of a certain group of specific sciences, that is humanities. The aim of this work is to show the possibility of adopting in humanities ready-made conceptions of symbol created on the grounds of the analytical philosophy of language and logical semiotics. Also, we wish to outline the actual state (...) of assimilating and using the mentioned philosophical conceptions by scientists who represent the sciences under consideration. (shrink)

Aesthetic value, often viewed as subjective and even trivial compared to other environmental values, is commonly given low priority in policy debates. In this paper I argue that the seriousness and importance of aesthetic value cannot be denied when we recognise the ways that aesthetic experience is already embedded in a range of human practices. The first area of human practice considered involves the complex relationship between aesthetic experience and the development of an ethical attitude towards the environment. I then (...) discuss how aesthetics has played a role in scientific study and the use of evaluative aesthetic concepts in science, such as variety and diversity. The final section shows the connection between the beneficial effects of aesthetic engagement with nature and the restorative value of nature for human well-being. (shrink)

Rooted in a tradition of thought and spirituality akin to, yet other than, the onto-theology of the Latin West, the aesthetico-theological experience of the Byzantine icon can help articulate aesthetic and numinous elements of our relation to nature that environmental philosophy should no longer ignore. In contrast to the technical mastery of the natural in Western art inaugurated by the Renaissance, itself related to the emerged technological mastery of nature in the late Middle Ages, the iconic sensibility characteristic of the (...) Byzantine East exhibits an experience of materiality common to non-Western humanity, seeing nature as a visible window to the invinsible, a lintel of the holy. A series of correlations between features of iconic seeing and exemplary encounters with the natural environment by prominent naturalists elaborates this thesis, along with examples from the later writings of Dostoevsky, who looked to divine beauty to save the earth. (shrink)

The processes of changing the way of thinking, typical for modern people, and subsequently shaping a new “Homo clicking” individual are analyzed. The authors consider a specific mindset of “Homo clicking” illustrating it with some patterns and modes of action that characterize individuals in the human–machine interface. Under this frame, the influence of modern converging technologies upon human conduct is examined and functional redistribution between human beings and technical devices is outlined. In the literature, the latter phenomenon is referred to (...) as “life outsourcing.” This material is used to introduce several principles that form the basis for a new type of thought and actions of “Home clicking”: snapping, transforming trust into knowledge, and action reduction. Reducing the traditional classic understanding of a human act of thinking to a pattern of a thinking act as a need-satisfying act is described. In the last section, we introduce an extension of Searle’s Chinese room, which can be seen as a possible consequence of intensive exploitation of technologies. (shrink)