The practice of Ontography deployed by OOO, clarified and expanded in this essay, produces a highly productive framework for analyzing Salvador Dalí’s ontological project between 1928 and 1935. Through the careful analysis of paintings and original texts from this period, we establish the antecedents for Dalí’s theorization of Surrealist objects in Cubism and Italian Metaphysical art, which we collectively refer to as ‘Ontographic art,’ drawing parallels with the tenets of Graham Harman’s and Ian Bogost’s object-oriented philosophical programmes. We respond (...) to the question raised by Roger Rothman concerning Object-Oriented Idealism in Dalí’s work by showing pivotal changes to Dalí’s ontological outlook, from Idealism to Realism, across the aforementioned period, positing the Ontographic intentionality of Dalí’s ontological project in Surrealist art. (shrink)

Following up on its predecessor in this Journal, the article defends philosophy as a guide to making and analyzing art; identifies Cubist solutions to the Prometheus Challenge, including a novel analysis of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon; defines a new concept of aesthetic attitude; proves the compatibility of Prometheus Challenge artworks with logic; and explains why Plato would have welcomed such artworks in his ideal state.

Kant’s account of the sublime makes frequent appeals to infinity, appeals which have been extensively criticised by commentators such as Budd and Crowther. This paper examines the costs and benefits of reconstructing the account in finitist terms. On the one hand, drawing on a detailed comparison of the first and third Critiques, I argue that the underlying logic of Kant’s position is essentially finitist. I defend the approach against longstanding objections, as well as addressing recent infinitist work by Moore and (...) Smith. On the other hand, however, I argue that finitism faces distinctive problems of its own: whilst the resultant theory is a coherent and interesting one, it is unclear in what sense it remains an analysis of the sublime. I illustrate the worry by juxtaposing the finitist reading with analytical cubism. -/- . (shrink)

In this article we approach a case of intersemiotic translation as a paradigmatic example of Boden’s ‘transformational creativity’ category. To develop our argument, we consider Boden’s fundamental notion of ‘conceptual space’ as a regular pattern of semiotic action, or ‘habit’ (sensu Peirce). We exemplify with Gertrude Stein’s intersemiotic translation of Cézanne and Picasso’s proto-cubist and cubist paintings. The results of Stein’s IT transform the conceptual space of modern literature, constraining it towards new patterns of semiosis. Our association of Boden’s framework (...) to describe a cognitive creative phenomenon with a philosophically robust theory of meaning results in a cognitive semiotic account of IT. (shrink)