Comparison is fundamental to the practice and subject-matter of philosophy, but has received scant attention by philosophers. This is even so in “comparative philosophy,” which literally distinguishes itself from other philosophy by being “comparative.” In this article, the need for a philosophy of comparison is suggested. What we compare with what, and in what respect it is done, poses a series of intriguing and intricate questions. In Part One, I offer a problematization of the tertium comparationis (the third of comparison) (...) by examining conceptualizations of similarity, family resemblance, and analogy, which it is sometimes argued can do without a tertium comparationis. In Part Two, I argue that a third of comparison is already required to determine what is to be compared, and insofar as that determination precedes the comparison that tertium may be called “pre-comparative.” This leads me to argue against incomparability and to show how anything can indeed be compared to anything. In Part Three, I relate my arguments to what is today commonly labelled “comparative philosophy.” Finally, I raise some questions of ontology and politics in order to demonstrate the relevance of a philosophy of comparison. (shrink)

Following Foucault, ‘critique’ could be regarded as being the art not to be governed in this way or as a project of desubjectivation. In this paper it is shown how such a project could be described as an e‐ducative practice. It explores this idea through an example which Foucault himself gave of such a critical practice: the writing of ‘experience books’. Thus it appears that such an e‐ducative practice is a ‘dangerous’, public and uncomfortable practice that is not in need (...) of pastoral care but requires generosity, presence and attention. As such it demands a pedagogy of experience which is to be invented in order to ‘make’ oneself into a question, to transgress the limits of a governmental regime. (shrink)

This paper addresses an issue that has been studied from both scientific and art theoretical perspectives, namely the dichotomous nature of representational artworks. Representational artworks are dichotomous in that they present us with two distinct aspects at once. In one aspect we are aware of what is represented while in the other we are aware of the material from which the representation is composed. The dichotomy arises due the incompatibility, indeed contradiction, between these aspects of awareness, both of which must (...) be present if we are to fully appreciate the artwork. Examples from art history are given to show how artists have exploited this dichotomy in a way that conditions our response to their work. I hypothesize that the degree of manifest dichotomy in a work determines the strength of its aesthetic effect, and propose this could be experimentally tested. I conclude that scientific studies of aesthetic experience should take the dichotomous nature of artworks into account. (shrink)

This article interrogates Andrew Feenberg’s thesis that modern technology is in need of ‘re-aestheticization’. The notion that modern technology requires aesthetic critique connects his political analysis of micro-contexts of social shaping to his wider concern with civilization change. The former involves a modified constructionism, in which the motives, values and beliefs of proximal agents are understood in terms of their wider sociological significance. This remedies a widely acknowledged blind-spot of conventional constructionism, enabling Feenberg to identify democratic potential in progressive agency (...) at the scene of technology design. Feenberg argues that the aesthetics of naturalistic modernism may serve as a bridge between such interventions and cultural transformation. Referring to developments in design culture, especially as this relates to the human-machine interface on digital artefacts, the article suggests that this part of Feenberg’s argument has been falsified. This kind of aesthetic modernism is hegemonic in contemporary design and it has not brought about significant progressive advance. In conclusion, the article suggests a different approach to aesthetic critique that is based on difference rather than wholeness, and on the principle that there is no inherent correspondence of aesthetic standards and ethics in technology design. (shrink)

This is Not a Seminar is a multidisciplinary forum established in 2012 at Edith Cowan University in Australia to support practice-led and practice-based Higher Degree by Research students. The Faculty of Education and Arts at ECU includes cohorts of postgraduate research students in, for example, performance, design, writing and visual arts. We established the TINAS programme to assist postgraduate research students in connecting their creative practices to methodological, theoretical and conceptual approaches whilst fostering an atmosphere of rapport across creative disciplines. (...) The pilot programme conducted for six months in 2012 comprised dialogues with experienced creative researchers; critical reading sessions on practice-led theory; and workshops in journaling, ethics and copyright. This article is a reflection on the strengths and limitations of TINAS and future projections. More than an additional teaching and learning service, the programme has become a vital forum for creative dialogue. (shrink)

(2011). Beyond Myths, Fetishes, and Checklists: Discovering Diversity's Place in Education, Evaluation, and Accountability. Educational Studies: Vol. 47, No. 1, pp. 3-25.

Šiame straipsnyje siekiama atsakyti į klausimą, kas galėtų susieti filosofiją ir vizualiuosius bei žodinius menus. Ar įmanoma ir jei taip, tai kaip įmanoma reflektuoti visus menus kaip vieno kūrybinio įvykio momentus? Siekiant atsakyti į šį klausimą, pirma, aptariamas logikos ir kūrybiškumo susikertant menui ir filosofijai susidūrimas, antra – žodžio ir vaizdo nebendramatiškumas, surastas / išrastas belgų siurrealisto René Magritte’o ir reflektuotas Michelio Foucault. Čia sugrįžtama prie klasikinio F. Niezsche’s disputo su Sokratu apie logikos ir kūrybiškumo priešpriešą ir siekiama atsakyti į (...) klausimą, kurią pusę – Sokrato ar F. Nietzsche’s – paremia šioje diskusijoje Gilles’is Deleuze’as ir Félixas Guattari. Atrodytų, kad jie suderina logiką ir kūrybiškumą, pastebėdami, kad menas nėra nei mokslinio mąstymo, nei filosofijos koreliatas ar papildas, kad trys minties formos – menas, mokslas ir filosofija – turi po nepriklausomą specifinę kryptį, Kita vertus, interpretuodamas I. Kantą, G. Deleuze’as pastebi disharmoniją tarp vaizduotės, supratimo ir proto, ir, sekdamas Antonino Artaud’o įžvalgomis, jis išskiria naują minties tipą kaip tarpinę teritoriją tarp žodžio ir vaizdo. (shrink)

In the Interpretation of Dreams Freud asks how and if the dream, which is made of images, can express its connective structure, and in particular the negation. This can be made only by interpretation. This question represents the thread to examine the problem of the critical import of figurative arts, by comparing Adorno’s and Heidegger’s theories. According to Adorno, the artwork is mimesis: the capability to express negativity coincides with its autonegation, with its disappearing. For Heidegger, on the contrary, the (...) artwork is first of all a work, and interpretation is the reconstruction of its genesis, or better, the understanding of it as temporal. In the last part of the text the problem of the relationship between negation and image is tackled discussing Magritte’s painting «Ceci n’est pas une pipe»: the structure of this painting makes it a rebus, the deciphering of which carries a conceptual and interpretative work. Only this interpretation can account for the negation that it, as image, could otherwise not express. (shrink)

This paper tests the aesthetic theory presented in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation against the Foucauldian Turn in art in the 1980s and Damien Hirst's early artworks, in order to ask if the concepts taken from the more general aesthetics to be found in A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy? are better suited to an understanding of contemporary art, before returning to the question of whether there is something truly significant at work in this folie à deux between (...) painter and philosopher. (shrink)

This article examines the ACPA/NASPA Competencies as functional protocol of the neoliberal state. Described as ‘not a checklist’, Competencies structure rubrics, conferences, jobs, and performance as static, indicative of a power/knowledge rooted in protocol. We utilize post qualitative thinking, specifically poetics, to create a series of experimentations (in)tension with Competencies. This micropolitical practice disrupts protocol, opening imaginative space for subversion, movement, and becoming ∼ professional.

In analogy with Rousseau's concept of ?civil religion? as a system of ?positive dogmas?, ?without which?, as he observed, ?a man cannot be a good citizen?, this paper advances the concept of ?civil epistemology? as the positive dogmas without which the agents of government actions cannot be held accountable by democratic citizens. The civil epistemology of democracy shapes the citizen's views on the nature of political reality, on how the facts of political reality can be known and by whom. Modern (...) liberal democratic politics assumes that the exercise of political power can be manifest in a visible domain of publicly accessible facts. It rests on the Enlightenment faith in the powers of light and visibility to demystify political power, render political actors more exposed and therefore more honestly accountable and enlist the sense of sight as a vehicle of universal political participation. It is, in this context, that technology has come to play such an important symbolic role in the construction of the particular democratic genre of public action as a political spectacle. Democratic civil epistemology, and technology ? in the widest sense of the word ? as the prototype of action which can be observed in the field of visual perception, uphold the democratic conception of politics as a view. Together they define political actors as visible performers, journalists as observers (who translate actual seeing into virtual seeing) and the citizens as witnesses. (shrink)

The thylacine was a shy and elusive nonhuman animal who survived in small numbers on the island of Tasmania, Australia, when European settlers arrived in 1803. After a deliberate campaign of eradication, the species disappeared 130 years later. Visual and verbal constructions in the nineteenth century labeled the thylacine a ferocious predator, but photographs of individuals in British and American zoos that were used to illustrate early twentieth-century zoological works presented a very different impression of the animal. The publication of (...) these photographs, however, had little effect on the relentless progress of extermination. This essay focuses on the relationship between photographs of thylacines and the process of extinction, between images and words, and between pictures of dead animals and live ones. The procedures, claims, and limitations of photography are crucial to the messages generated by these images and to the role they played in the representation of the species. This essay explains why the medium of photography and pleas for preservation could not save the thylacine. (shrink)

In this article, ecosexuality – as popularized by activist-artists Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle – is explored through archaeological and genealogical means. Through an archaeological le...

Over the last few decades, theoretical discussions about metaphors have appeared with increasing frequency in the literature and, during the last fifteen years or so, such discussions have become more and more common in the methodology of economics. But what exactly is a metaphor? According to a tradition which dates back to Aristotle, a metaphor is the attribution to one object, A, of the name of another object, B, while this name or these qualities do not properly or normally belong (...) to A. Thus, a metaphor is present when a term used to describe A is a term which is already commonly used to name B. Defined in such a way, one must admit that metaphors are frequently found in economics as well as in other sciences. Let us consider, for example, a term like ‘elasticity’ which is extensively used by economists. According to the ordinary dictionary definition, this word designates a property of bodies by which they recover their initial form after having been submitted to a pressure; in a less technical sense, it refers to the flexibility of some bodies or to their responsiveness to pressures. (shrink)

This paper analyses and examines Deleuze’s Foucault as a means of investigating intellectual resources for a new sociology – one that, in Foucault’s name, is neither foundationalist nor rep...

Alienation as an aspect of the human condition has a long and storied history. Much of the attention has been focused, however, on alienation among humans themselves. Yet it is increasingly clear that we are in the process of alienating ourselves from the world and all of the creatures and objects in it. This discussion examines the second choral ode from Sophocles’ Antigone and some analyses of the content and formal aspects of Berg’s opera, Wozzeck, in the context of Adorno’s (...) concept of “distinctness without domination,” as means of providing a brief analysis of the problem of alienation considered in this larger sense. Theseconsiderations enable the isolation of several important factors that have inhibited our insight into the seriousness of this form of alienation: First, alienation among humans has effectively distracted us from the increasing urgency of our alienation from the world and the things in it. Second, blinded by our spectacular illusion of “progress,” we continue to pay for it by wreaking destruction upon the planet, the very fount of our existence. Third, morality has only too often been seen as being located in rationalized (hierarchical) relationships among humans rather than as an equally shared, spiritual relationship among the human community,the rest of the biosphere, and the very rocks and water upon which we exist. This final point suggests changes in attitude and behavior that could help us avoid the most devastating effects of this more broadly conceived form of alienation. (shrink)

Several critics of Foucault, notably Alan Megill and Jürgen Habermas, accuse Foucault of being an ‘aestheticist’. As such, Foucault fails to realise that the very appeal to aesthetics is made possible by modernity's rationalization, which offers better resources for emancipation than dangerous aestheticizations. This paper argues that such criticisms mistakenly deploy only certain modernist notions of aesthetics against Foucault. There are some fair grounds for holding that Foucault does appeal to such conceptions of aesthetics in his theorization of transgression, not (...) least because of his interest in modernist, avant‐garde writers and artists such as Roussel and Magritte. Yet, overall, Foucault's interest in avant‐garde aesthetics is not modernist in the sense understood by his critics. Foucault tends to focus on modernist illustration of the absence of foundations for representation and language, adopting a paraesthetic angle of critique. The limiting conditions that make representation possible can be seen in this light as both contingent yet necessary. Foucault's model of critique is developed in his early analyses of avant‐garde art and then expanded to cover subjectivity and the aesthetics of existence in his later philosophical critical ethos of modernity. Foucault uses avant‐garde art as a critical mode of reflection, to analyse and rethink the limits of the present. (shrink)

Three of Zygmunt Bauman’s recent books are assessed to present insights into the recent development of his thought and the challenges it poses to the social sciences, humanities and the wider public. By reading Bauman’s recent work through the influence he takes from Georg Simmel, the former’s disparate recent work is understood as an attempt at the cultivation of critical and ethical engagement through the externalization and objectification of his own subjective culture. The more radical elements of Bauman’s work are (...) emphasized in his attempts to stimulate a counter-culture through encouraging critical analysis of society. It is proposed that he achieves this through ‘polylogic’ discourse and engagement with the public. Sociology is presented as a tool of freedom through ‘defamiliarizing the familiar’ and Bauman’s most powerful tool in this is the demonstration of his particular critical view of the world. The broad-ranging engagement with diverse topics in his recent books enables him to place this critical perspective, rather than a particular topic or issue, at the centre of his work. The metaphorical and other literary devices used by Bauman to stimulate critique and in particular to spur on the radical potential of youth are highlighted as some of his most powerful contributions. (shrink)

Nowadays there is a renewed interest in philosophy as art-of-living. Several prominent authors have pointed out the return of the notion of the good life in philosophy, particularly understood as a form of normative ethics. Questions such as: how should I live have been taken up as a resistance against the dominances of a neo-liberal discourse in all areas of life. This paper is concerned with this renewed interest in philosophy as art-of-living and the form of education that supports this. (...) The main idea is that the commitment from which we live is a subject of change. This way, art-of-living comprises the possibility and the effort to lead on’s life in a reflective way, and not to let it simply go by. Historically this has been connected to the process of becoming educated. In this paper I will take a closer look at this renewed interest in philosophy as the art-of-living by contrasting two different readings of philosophy as the art-of-living. One that is inspired by Oscar Brenifier and one that is inspired by the late Foucault. (shrink)

Sociologists, philosophers and historians of science are gradually recognizing the importance of visual representation. This is part of a more general movement away from a theory-centric view of science and towards an interest in practical aspects of observation and experimentation. Rather than treating science as a matter of demonstrating the logical connection between theoretical and empirical statements, an increasing number of investigations are examining how scientists compose and use diagrams, graphs, photographs, micrographs, maps, charts, and related visual displays. This paper (...) focuses on diagrams in biology, and tries to demonstrate how diagrams are an integral part of the production of scientific knowledge. In order to disclose some of the distinctive practical and analytical uses of diagrams, the paper contrasts the way diagrams and photographs are used in biological texts. Both diagrams and photographs are shown to be “constructions” that separately and together mediate the investigation of scientific phenoman. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore the role of the lived body in meaningful understanding beyond linguistic conceptualization in phenomenologically oriented inquiries. In this exploration we consider the role of visuality and enactment as possibilities for accessing meaning beyond language-bound descriptions of the phenomenon of moving childhoods--that is, children's lived experiences of immigration. We suggest that immigration is an experience that interrupts the familiarity of the lifeworld, and thus brings immigrant children's awareness of their bodies to a conscious level. We ask: (...) What methods of inquiry can be used to access more directly the "embodied understanding" and, in particular, the lifeworlds of immigrant children as they leave the familiar "home world" and enter the "alien world" of a new school? In addressing this question, we focus on one aspect of phenomenological inquiry--gathering experiential accounts, or lived experience descriptions, in investigating childhood phenomena--which presents a particular challenge to researchers working with young children. We present an example of a method that bridges hermeneutic phenomenology and arts-based research methodology developed specifically to engage immigrant children bodily in accessing their lived experiences of their first day of school in the host country, and in the development of a polymedia text showing these experiences. We believe that the example demonstrates how fotonovela facilitates immigrant children’s recollection of and reflection on their experience of being at the door of a new classroom. Moreover, the production of visual texts, when shared with or read by others, has an evocative power similar to that of a phenomenological text. Thus, we argue, fotonovela is a particularly suitable method for engaging children in developing polymedia descriptive texts about their lived experiences. (shrink)