Do abstract paintings still make sense and if so what do they mean? By reducing the paintings to simple square blots as by Cézanne, to lines as by van Gogh and color traces as by Monet their meaning is fundamentally questioned. But by interpreting these compositions as effective forces or rather affective stimuli a new and different meaning becomes apparent. Landscapes are no longer introduced but made real in the aesthetic experience. Therefore aesthetics or rather aisthetics (perception) can be (...) defined as a notion of experience and knowledge. Thus the notion of an image gets a new understanding: it can be described as an "energetic system". (shrink)

We present a theory of human artistic experience and the neural mechanisms that mediate it. Any theory of art has to ideally have three components. The logic of art: whether there are universal rules or principles; The evolutionary rationale: why did these rules evolve and why do they have the form that they do; What is the brain circuitry involved? Our paper begins with a quest for artistic universals and proposes a list of ‘Eight laws of artistic experience’ -- a (...) set of heuristics that artists either consciously or unconsciously deploy to optimally titillate the visual areas of the brain. One of these principles is a psychological phenomenon called the peak shift effect: If a rat is rewarded for discriminating a rectangle from a square, it will respond even more vigorously to a rectangle that is longer and skinnier that the prototype. We suggest that this principle explains not only caricatures, but many other aspects of art. Example: An evocative sketch of a female nude may be one which selectively accentuates those feminine form-attributes that allow one to discriminate it from a male figure; a Boucher, a Van Gogh, or a Monet may be a caricature in ‘colour space’ rather than form space. Even abstract art may employ ‘supernormal’ stimuli to excite form areas in the brain more strongly than natural stimuli. Second, we suggest that grouping is a very basic principle. The different extrastriate visual areas may have evolved specifically to extract correlations in different domains , and discovering and linking multiple features into unitary clusters -- objects -- is facilitated and reinforced by direct connections from these areas to limbic structures. In general, when object-like entities are partially discerned at any stage in the visual hierarchy, messages are sent back to earlier stages to alert them to certain locations or features in order to look for additional evidence for the object . Finally, given constraints on allocation of attentional resources, art is most appealing if it produces heightened activity in a single dimension rather than redundant activation of multiple modules. This idea may help explain the effectiveness of outline drawings and sketches, the savant syndrome in autists, and the sudden emergence of artistic talent in fronto-temporal dementia. In addition to these three basic principles we propose five others, constituting a total of ‘eight laws of aesthetic experience’. (shrink)

Ajan luonnetta koskevissa käsityksissä on tyypillistä erottaa kaksi eriävää kantaa: A-teoreettinen presentismi ja B-teoreettinen eternalismi. Edeltävän väitetään tyypillisesti sopivan yhteen inhimillisen ajallisen kokemuksen kanssa ja jälkimmäisen ontologisesti perustavanlaatuisen luonnontieteen kanssa. Ilmikuvamme ajasta sisältää ehdottoman nykyisyyden ja yksisuuntaisen ajan kulun menneestä tulevaan. Tieteellinen kuva ajasta ei sisällä erityistä nykyisyyttä eikä ajan kulun edellyttämää dynaamista aikamuotojen muutosta. Monet ovat pitäneet kokemustamme ajan kulusta illuusiona. Tässä artikkelissa keskitytään A-sarjan mukaisen ajankulun virheteoreettiseen tulkintaan. Tarkastellaan mahdollisuutta, jonka mukaan meillä ei ole kyseistä kokemusta vaan (...) kuvailemme kokemustamme virheellisesti ajan virtaukseen liittyvillä vertauskuvilla. Tätä tukee fysikalistinen argumentti: Jos ajan kulun kokemuksellamme ei ole fysikaalista perustaa, meillä ei voi olla sen mukaista kokemustakaan ajasta. (shrink)

In this book some options concerning the greenhouse effect are assessed from a welfarist point of view: business as usual, stabilization of greenhouse gas emissions and reduction by 25% and by 60%. Up to today only economic analyses of such options are available, which monetize welfare losses. Because this is found to be wanting from a moral point of view, the present study welfarizes (among others) monetary losses on the basis of a hedonistic utilitarianism and other, justice incorporating, welfare ethics. (...) For these welfarist evaluations information about the social consequences of the four options are collected from the literature and eventually corrected; then the consequences for individual well-being are assessed based on psychological research about well-being dependent on the social situation of the individual; finally the aggregation formulas of the respective welfare ethics are applied to these data. Assessments by other types of ethics, e.g. Kantian ethic, are included. The strongest abatement option is found to be optimum with great unanimity. - In addition a cost-welfare analysis of greenhouse gas abatement is undertaken revealing efficient cost-welfare ratios for these measures and the most efficient ratio for the strongest option. - A final, more theoretical part discusses the moral obligations following from such evaluations. The notion of 'moral obligation' is explained in a way that, apart from moral goodness of the required act, reinforcement by formal or informal sanctions is another necessary condition for moral obligations. This leads to a conception of a historical morality according to which the demands of morality rise in the long run. Applying this conception to the greenhouse effect implies that presently we have the moral duty to raise the standards of greenhouse gas abatement as much as is politically feasible. (shrink)

This paper builds off the Our Data Ourselves research project, which examined ways of understanding and reclaiming the data that young people produce on smartphone devices. Here we explore the growing usage and centrality of mobiles in the lives of young people, questioning what data-making possibilities exist if users can either uncover and/or capture what data controllers such as Facebook monetize and share about themselves with third-parties. We outline the MobileMiner, an app we created to consider how gaining access to (...) one’s own data not only augments the agency of the individual but of the collective user. Finally, we discuss the data making that transpired during our hackathon. Such interventions in the enclosed processes of datafication are meant as a preliminary investigation into the possibilities that arise when young people are given back the data which they are normally structurally precluded from accessing. (shrink)

This paper argues for a distinctive concept of "infopolitics" as a theoretical tool for understanding how new regimes of data are exerting increasing political control of our lives. It seems almost undeniable today that there is a politics at stake in such ubiquitous features of our society as social media interaction, electioneering (and election hacking) through those interactions, cell phone addiction, personal information monetization, the lack of security in personal data markets, and massively-scaled state surveillance. Yet, even if the fact (...) of the politics of these domains is now in view, what is insufficiently understood is how such a politics functions. What characterizes the politics of all of this data that is driving so much of our lives? To put the question in the terms afforded us by the political philosophy of Michel Foucault: what is the modality of power expressed in our contemporary politics of information? In response to these questions, this paper argues that the modality of "infopower" operates on us through the formats of data. (shrink)

Nykyaikaisen logiikan keskeisenä tutkimuskohteena ovat erilaiset formalisoidut teoriat. Erityisesti vuosisadan vaihteen aikoihin matematiikan perusteiden tutkimuksessa ilmaantuneiden hämmentävien paradoksien (Russell 1902, 1903) jälkeen (ks. kuitenkin jo Frege 1879, Dedekind 1888, Peano 1889; vrt. Wang 1957) keskeiset matemaattiset teoriat on pyritty tällaisten vaikeuksien välttämiseksi uudelleen muotoilemaan täsmällisesti keinotekoisessa symbolikielessä, jonka lauseenmuodostussäännöt on täsmällisesti ja yksikäsitteisesti määrätty. Edelleen teoriat on pyritty aksiomatisoimaan, ts. on pyritty antamaan joukko peruslauseita, joista kaikki muut - tai ainakin mahdollisimman monet - teorian todet lauseet voidaan loogisesti johtaa (...) tarkoin määrättyjen päättelysääntöjen mukaisesti (erityisesti Hilbert 1904, 1918, 1927; ks. myös Russell 1908, Zermelo 1908; vrt. Kleene 1952, §§ 14−15). (shrink)

Artikkeli käsittelee Saul Kripken Ludwig Wittgensteinin myöhemmistä töistä koostamaa merkityskeptistä haastetta, erityisesti niin kutsuttua äärellisyyden ongelmaa. Pääargumentti on, että skeptisen haasteen pääasiallinen vastaaja, semanttinen dispositionalismi, ei uusimmistakaan yrityksistä huolimatta ole kyennyt ratkaisemaan äärettömyyden ongelmaa. Ratkaistakseen ongelman dispositionalistin tulisi selittää, kuinka on mahdollista, että äärellinen puhuja voisi omata disposition käyttää jotain termiä äärettömässä määrässä tapauksia määrätyllä tavalla. Monet dispositionalistit esittävät, että ratkaisu löytyy niin kutsutuista ceteris paribus -ehdoista, joita vastaan Martin Kusch on argumentoinut. Jatkan Kuschin kritiikkiä ja osoitan ceteris paribus (...) -strategian keskeiset ongelmat, minkä lisäksi vastaan myös kahteen näistä ehdoista riippumattomaan dispositionalistiseen strategiaan. (shrink)

Perhaps the question “What is philosophy?” can only be posed late in life, when old age has come, and with it the time to speak in concrete terms. It is a question one poses when one no longer has anything to ask for, but its consequences can be considerable. One was asking the question before, one never ceased asking it, but it was too artificial, too abstract; one expounded and dominated the question, more than being grabbed by it. There are (...) cases in which old age bestows not an eternal youth, but on the contrary a sovereign freedom, a pure necessity where one enjoys a moment of grace between life and death, and where all the parts of the machine combine to dispatch into the future a trait that traverses the ages: Turner, Monet, Matisse. The elderly Turner acquired or conquered the right to lead painting down a deserted path from which there was no return, and that was no longer distinguishable from a final question. In the same way, in philosophy, Kant’s Critique of Judgment is a work of old age, a wild work from which descendants will never cease to flow.We cannot lay claim to such a status. The time has simply come for us to ask what philosophy is. And we have never ceased to do this in the past, and we already had the response, which has not varied: philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts. But it was not only necessary for the response to take note of the question; it also had to determine a time, an occasion, the circumstances, the landscapes and personae, the conditions and unknowns of the question. One had to be able to pose the question “between friends” as a confidence or a trust, or else, faced with an enemy, as a challenge, and at the same time one had to reach that moment, between dog and wolf, when one mistrusts even the friend. Gilles Deleuze was professor of philosophy at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes-St.-Denis, until his retirement in 1987. Among his books translated into English are the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia , the two-volume Cinema , The Logic of Sense , and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza . Daniel W. Smith is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is at work on a study of the philosophy of Deleuze, and is translating Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation. Arnold I. Davidson, executive editor of Critical Inquiry, teaches philosophy at the University of Chicago and is currently Marta Sutton Weeks Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the practice of categorizing works of art and its relationship to art criticism. How a work of art is categorized influences how it is appreciated and criticized. Being frightening is a merit for horror, but a demerit for lullabies. The brushstrokes in Monet's "Impression, Sunrise" (1874) look crude when seen as a Neoclassical painting, but graceful when seen as an Impressionist painting. Many of the judgments we make about artworks are category-dependent in this way, but previous (...) research has rarely examined in depth the ontological structure of art categories, how they are generated and maintained, and how they function. This dissertation fills this gap. The proposal of this dissertation can be summarized as follows. Categories (especially genres) should be analyzed as clusters of rules that regulate the responses and behaviors of agents in the artworld. The visual mundaneness is a critical reason to consider Duchamp's "Comb" (1916) provocative, given the existence of the readymade as a set of rules that justifies such reasoning. The critical and appreciative practice of which categorization is a part is a social practice of making, declaring, proposing, reforming, and developing rules of appreciation. How we appreciate artworks, and how criticism guides our appreciation, is sensitive to how we categorize artworks. How we categorize artworks is sensitive to what categories have been set up in our community and which categories are active regarding each artwork. (shrink)

In their seminal work, Dialectics of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno interpreted capitalism as the irrational monetization of nature. In the present work, I analyze three 21st century concepts, Anthropocene, Capitalocene and Machinocene, in light of Horkheimer and Adorno’s arguments and recent arguments from the philosophy of biology. The analysis reveals a remarkable prescience of the term “instrumental reason”, which is present in each of the three concepts in a profound and cryptic way. In my interpretation, the term describes the propensity (...) of science based on the notion of physicalism to interpret nature as the machine analyzable and programmable by the human reason. As a result, the Anthropocene concept is built around the mechanicist model, which may be presented as the metaphor of the car without brakes. In a similar fashion, the Machinocene concept predicts the emergence of the mechanical mind, which will dominate nature in the near future. Finally, the Capitalocene concept turns a perfectly rational ambition to expand knowledge into an irrational obsession with over-knowledge, by employing the institutionalized science as the engine of capitalism without brakes. The common denominator of all three concepts is the irrational propensity to legitimize self-destruction. Potential avenues for countering the effects of “instrumental reason” are suggested. (shrink)

Keskityn tässä esitelmässä varhaismodernistisen filosofian unia koskeviin näkemyksiin, johon monet myöhemmät teoriat unien ja muistin suhteesta perustuvat. Lähtökohtani on Descartesin ja Hobbesin välinen väittely unien luonteesta, mutta käsittelen myös monia muita näkemyksiä aiheesta.

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.