Este estudio analiza la obra del artista brasileño, Hélio Oititica, quien podría tomarse como un ejemplo paradigmático del sincretismo en el arte moderno latinoamericano. Intentamos señalar cómo el artista conjuga dos lenguajes artísticos provenientes de tradiciones opuestas, la occidental y la no-occidental. Por una parte, vemos en Oiticica la influencia de los artistas de las vanguardias europeas, tales como Mondrian y Malevich, quienes intentaron desvelar mediante el despojamiento absoluto de las formas lo sagrado en el arte. Por otra parte, Oiticica (...) vuelve su mirada hacia las tradiciones propias, hacia el folklore y la sociedad marginada brasileña, acercándose a las prácticas estéticas no-occidentales, cercanas al ritual. (shrink)

While post-modernist assaults on modernity correctly expose the pretensions of modernity – including its constructs of meaning in history, its abnegation of mystery, and its lapses into scientism, historicism, and relativism – the philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan discerned progress as well as decline in recent intellectual history. In part this is because under contemporary conditions we can avoid the pretensions of modernity, since – in the wake of modern science and modern historical scholarship – we witness the differentiation of (...) interiority, which, properly understood as the discovery of the self, may be seen as leading to a new integration of the spiritual, the intellectual, the moral, and the historical. (shrink)

The paper endeavors to provide a perspective on aesthetics that proceeds from the original Greek meaning of “aesthetics” as “what is perceived by the senses.” It then introduces a potential dialogue between Confucian and Gadamerian hermeneutic philosophical insights on the importance of “making more sense,” i.e., developing a particular human ethico-aesthetic “sense” for the continuous generation of harmonious communities by partly fusing the two schools of thought. Since the focus of the paper is on early Confucian philosophy, the paper also (...) discusses the relational ontology of classical Chinese philosophy, Confucian considerations of learning, cultivation, emotions and humanization, but also touches upon broader East Asian philosophical notions of “everyday aesthetics,” i.e. how aesthetics is integrated into everyday life, for instance in ritual, dance, calligraphy and other fields that are too often set aside as belonging to a separate category of “art”. (shrink)