Susanne Langer sees the ‘the public importance of art’ as one of ‘the ultimate questions in a philosophy of art’. Indeed, Langer is often referred to as an authority on the justification of art education and is cited as providing good reasons for incorporating the arts in the curriculum. It is therefore surprising to note, as Elliot Eisner does, that Langer’s theory has had little influence on actual art education. For while many theoreticians in the social sciences and education have (...) found Langer’s contribution to the understanding of the arts highly significant, Eisner laments that ‘alas, the lesson Susanne Langer was trying to teach … in her remarkable book, never took hold in … American public schools’. It seems that policy-makers outside of art education circles remain sceptical regarding the need for art education. The substantiation of art education requires firm ground against scepticism. It is therefore important to understand the ways in which Langer’s project fails to fulfil its promise. In examining Langer’s aesthetic theory, I will show that despite its philosophical acuity, Langer’s argument fails to persuade the art education sceptic who believes that art occupies a minor role in education and should therefore remain marginal in the school curriculum. (shrink)

In this essay, I survey the different uses of the concept of the symbol at play in the philosophy of religion. Considering that historically theories of the symbol have frequently had significant religious presuppositions and implications, I suggest that one might expect that the symbol would play a significant role in current research. This is not the case, however, since the very specific metaphysical, linguistic and theological premises that have traditionally informed much theorisation of the symbol tend to be unpopular (...) today. The main exception is Peircean symbolics which has recently been re-appropriated by a variety of philosophical fields, including philosophy of religion. To open up further contexts for contemporary deployments of the symbol, I look to contemporary public and legal debates concerning the right to wear religious symbols as an area of research unjustly neglected by philosophers of religion: much of the inchoate conceptual work being done in the legal cases themselves would naturally feed into academic philosophical discussion of the symbol. (shrink)

The systematic examination of the visual depiction of nonhuman animals by humans, and the representation of nonhuman animal imagery is an opportunity to observe varying degrees of anthropocentrism in the manner in which the nonhuman animal is represented. The investigation we present ventures beyond the traditional scope of post-modern human alterity and suggests that an Otherness status should be extended to encompass both the human animal and the nonhuman animal. An important motivation for seriously considering nonhuman animal experience is the (...) biological similarities shared by human animals and nonhuman animals. Many perspectives toward the nonhuman animal have ignored such similarities, and this in turn results in the infliction of much trauma and injustice on nonhuman animals. We argue that the visual representation of nonhuman animals has the potential, to a substantial degree, to affect the general human understanding of and interactions with all nonhuman animals, and with positive, neutral, and negative implications for all involved. In other words, it really matters how we represent animals. (shrink)