<P>While there are many books on the romantics, and many books on Heidegger, there has been no book exploring the connection between the two. Pol Vandevelde’s new study forges this important link. </P> <P>Vandevelde begins by analyzing two models that have addressed the interaction between literature and philosophy: early German romanticism (especially Schlegel and Novalis), and Heidegger’s work with poetry in the 1930s. Both models offer an alternative to the paradigm of mimesis, as exemplified by Aristotle’s and Plato’s discussion of (...) poetry, and both German romanticism and Heidegger owe a deep debt to Plato. The study goes on to defend the view that Heidegger was influenced by romanticism. The author’s project is thus both historical, showing the specificity of the romantic and Heideggerean works, and systematic, defending aspects of their alternative mode of thinking while also pointing to their weaknesses. </P>. (shrink)

Tracing the broad outline of European art history means presenting the different methods considered essential to the formation of this discipline. Historiographical research arrives quite naturally at a criticism of the methods themselves and at a search for a broader horizon.To the extent that the historian is involved with the thinking and the problems of his age, his methods reveal personal and conjunctural concepts and ideas which will guide the reflections of his successors ; these successors will modify and correct (...) the concepts received in order to adapt them to new experiences and questions. Or they will add others which are more apt to supply the answers sought. The means of analysing art history today are the fruit of four centuries of discussion during which certain normative criteria, traditional theories and underlying concepts were called into question while at the same time, though being sometimes exported to other areas of the world, they have demonstrated a tenacious degree of longevity. But perhaps a brief recapitulation might be helpful here. (shrink)

The following overview of the present situation and recent trends in the philosophy of science in the USA brings together bibliographical and institutional evidence to document the last stages of the supersession of logical positivism, the emergence of the historical school , its widespread influence upon other fields as well as within philosophy of science, and finally some of the reactions to it, many of which envision their endeavors as mediations between the historical school and the older logical approaches As (...) well as recording pertinent institutional trends, the report provides a series of capsule summaries of representative work from the extant literature primarily from 1966 to the present. (shrink)

It is a commonplace in certain areas of art theory and contemporary art practices to consider Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades as ordinary objects, which have an artistic value that depends more on a theoretical or institutional framework than on an aesthetic experience. The aim of this paper is, on the one hand, to show the historical emergence of these artifacts on the light of the impact of the industrial production in avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. Discussing Walter Benjamin’ s (...) and Jean Brun’s, it argues that Duchamp’s practice has an explanatory principle, both in the mechanical reproduction of the work of art and in the aestheticization of the machine. On the other hand, it brings forward some observations regarding Duchamp’s insight on the “total lack of good or bad taste” and the perceptual dimension of a sculptural object as the Large Glass, coming back to Arthur Danto’s interpretation of ready-mades and to the notion of “implementation” introduced by Nelson Goodman to define “the process of bringing about the aesthetic functioning that provides the basis for the notion of a work of art”. (shrink)

The origins of landscape are usually explained in two complementary ways: on the one hand, landscape is initially related to the artistic genre of the same name, i.e. to the painted landscape; on the other hand, and much more recently, it corresponds to landscape experienced by someone, to the mental representa-tion of a piece of nature. This article is based on a third hypothesis: according to him landscape is, at least partly, the result of a series of modern technologies. The (...) modern window, cartography, central perspective and various other human inventions have made it possible to forge a landscape image of the world. Fram-ing a glimpse of nature through the gaze is a cultural fact, mediated by scopic devices, and not a capacity that human beings possess a priori. (shrink)