Organisational aesthetics is a burgeoning field with a growing community of scholars engaged in arts-based and aesthetic approaches to research. Recent developments in this field can be traced back to the works of early Enlightenment writers such as Vico, Baumgarten and Kant. This paper examines the contributions of these three philosophers. In particular it focuses on Vico’s treatment of history and myth; Baumgarten’s notion of sensation and its relationship to rationality; and Kant’s investigations into form and content. An exploration of (...) an artistic organisation in change demonstrates how the conduct of an aesthetically aware manager can be informed by qualities such as an alert imagination and intuition, comfort with the chaotic, backward thinking, and attention to inner sensations and perceptions, all working together to provide a coherent view of the organisation. (shrink)

Law is a specialized semiotic realm, but lawyers generally are ignorant of this fact. Lawyers may manage meaning, but they also are managed by meaning. Seemingly trapped by the weight of pre-existing signs, their attempts to manage these meanings generally are limited to technical interventions and instrumentalist strategies. Signs have power over lawyers because they are embedded in narratives, a semiotic economy that confronts the lawyer as “given” even though it is dynamic and constantly under construction. Most lawyers do not (...) make meaning through legal narratives; rather, they parrot bits of the controlling narratives in response to certain problems. Because clients often can achieve their objectives when their lawyers crudely manipulate the symbols of law, these endeavors pay very well. Well-paid lawyers tend not to ask too many questions. Consequently, semiotics is, at best, misunderstood by lawyers; more likely it is wholly unknown. A lawyer’s avowed instrumentalism is the very problem to be addressed in this regard. For the scope of discussion, I refer to Vico’s famous On the Study Methods of Our Time and draw my conclusion for the lawyer of our time. (shrink)

Work on the relation between figurative language and the law is a fairly recent trend, within legal discourse studies, linguistics, and semiotics. The work in conceptual metaphor theory, for example, is starting to unpack the underlying metaphorical and metonymic structure of legal language, producing some new and important insights into the nature of this language. Missing from this emerging line of inquiry are the views of the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, who was the first to understand the power of figurative (...) language in the creation of symbolic systems, like language and the law. His tripartite evolutionary model of language shows that there is not one language of the law, but three “languages.” By integrating Vico’s model with the work in conceptual metaphor theory it will be possible to penetrate the underlying conceptual structure of legal discourse and thus lead to a more insightful science of this discourse. (shrink)

RESUMO Este artigo pretende mostrar o fundamento geométrico-matemático que permitiu a Giambattista Vico estabelecer um vínculo entre a criação humana e a criação divina. A pesquisa centrou-se no uso formal que o autor fez das ciências matemáticas para compreender o mundo. Considerando o pitagorismo presente na filosofía viquiana até 1710, o esforço busca mostrar a sobrevivência deste nos trabalhos posteriores do autor. Para isso, destacamos o novo papel que a geometria cumpriu inteligentemente na storia ideale eterna da Providência na "Scienza (...) Nuova". ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to show the geometric-mathematical basis that allowed Giambattista Vico to establish a bond between human and divine creation, focusing on the formal use of mathematical sciences in his comprehension of the world. Considering the Pythagorean character of his philosophy, up to year 1710, this study reveals its survival in Vico's later works by stressing the role of geometry in the witty understanding of Providence's storia ideale eterna in the "Scienza Nuova". (shrink)

Cognitive science depends on abstractions made from the complex reality of human behaviour. Cognitive scientists typically wish the abstractions in their theories to be universals, but seldom attend to the ontology of universals. Two sorts of universal, resulting from Galilean abstraction and materialist abstraction respectively, are available in the philosophical literature: the abstract universal—the one-over-many universal—is the universal conventionally employed by cognitive scientists; in contrast, a concrete universal is a material entity that can appear within the set of entities it (...) describes, of which it represents the essential, paradigmatic case. The potential role of concrete universals in cognitive science is discussed. (shrink)