In this essay I consider the end-of-art thesis in its metaphysical and empirical versions. I show that both use the correspondence theory of truth as the basis for their conception of the history of art. As a counterpart to these theories I have chosen Patočka’s conception of the history of art. His theory is based also on the relationship between art and truth, but he conceives truth in the phenomenological sense of manifestation. In the rest of the essay (...) I seek to show the consequences Patočka’s conception has for the history of art. In the rst part, I set out to show Patocka’s critique of Hegel’s aesthetics as a system based on the correspondence theory of truth. In particular, I endeavour to explain his critique of some intrinsic problems of Hegel’s aesthetics, the general failure of Hegel’s system to achieve its goal, and, lastly, Hegel’s giving up on the meaning of the art in the present. I also seek to show that Danto’s version runs into the same problems and conclusions as Hegel’s. In the second part I discuss Patočka’s analysis of modern art and the aesthetic attitude, where he nds a hidden a nity between art and aletheia, which Hegel overlooked. e last part of the essay focuses on the consequences that the conception of the truth of art as aletheia have for the history of art. I conclude that art in such a conception represents an independent eld of the manifestation of being in history beside philosophy. Moreover, modern and contemporary art do not mean the end of art; rather, they have their place in art history based on aletheia, since they are more focused on the manifestation itself than on what is manifested. Unlike Hegel and Danto, therefore, Patočka retains the historical meaning of modern and contemporary art. His conception of the history of art, summed up under the idea of aletheia, has greater explanatory potential than Hegel’s and Danto’s conceptions, and it retains the historical meaning of modern and contemporary art. (shrink)

This article investigates a tension that arises in Hegel’s aesthetic theory between theoretical and practical forms of reason. This tension, I argue, stems from Hegel’s appropriation of an Aristotelian framework for a historically unfolding social teleology which puts practical reason to work for the aims of theoretical reason. Recognizing that this aspect of Hegel’s dialectic is essential in overcoming problems left in Kant’s transcendental idealism, the appearance of incongruence does not lessen. Grouped together with absolute spirit, Hegel positions art (...) as a transitory mode of mind, a vehicle, which aims to raise spirit to the higher cognition of philosophy. When the unfolding absolute concept becomes too complex for articulation in the material, art must end, as spirit’s message can be expressed only through the non-material form of philosophy. This study focuses on the ambivalence found in Hegel’s writings regarding his account of historical completion. Though Hegel sees in the Absolute a metaphysical solution to the unity of subject and object, the practical aspects of the unity appear to falter when philosophy becomes the dominant mode of expression at the close of a historical cycle. In Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel links his notion of the Absolute, albeit with modification, to Aristotle’s nous. As described in De Anima, this entails a progression in which active and possible intellect rise to the level of the eternal, while passive intellect, the imaginative element, passes on with the body. Because the architecture of Aristotle’s nous, which is not in line with his defense of poetry, is integrated into the blueprint of Hegel’s absolute, an unresolved tension emerges in the spirit of art. A divergence of aims is forced to the surface through Hegel’s application of a template for achievement of theoretical knowledge, with an end in the universal, to a form of practical knowing which has an end in the particular. (shrink)

In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981)1 Arthur Danto construes individual style as something “given” that belongs to the artist “essentially” and “inseparably.” By contrast, his theory of the end of art, set forth in After the End of Art (1997) and elsewhere,2 suggests the liberation of artists from any stylistic commitments. How do these two theories go together? Can there be individual styles after the end of art? Examining the compatibility between Danto’s end of art thesis and his (...) essentialist conception of individual style, this paper tries to approach an answer to these questions. (shrink)

Towards the very end of his wide-ranging lectures on the philosophy of art, Hegel unexpectedly expresses a preference for comedy over tragedy. More surprisingly, given his systematic claims for his aesthetic theory, he suggests that this preference is arbitrary. This essay suggests that this arbitrariness is itself systematic, given Hegel’s broader claims about unity and necessity in art generally and his analysis of ancient as opposed to modern drama in particular. With the emergence of modern subjectivity, tragic plots lose (...) their necessity and so their redemptive conclusions; comic plots disintegrate into mockery and entertainment. In many cases, the dramas in question consequently fail to be art. This does not, however, mean that art ends: insofar as it inspires humans to a better understanding of their unity with the divine, it will continue to meet its mandate. But the lack of necessity in modern drama means we are free to prefer happy endings. Hegel’s seemingly arbitrary preference is, in the end, systematically justified. (shrink)

I investigate the role of feminist theorizing in relation to traditionally-based aesthetics. Feminist artworks have arisen within the context of a patriarchal Artworld dominated for thousands of years by male artists, critics, theorists, and philosophers. I look at the history of that context as it impacts philosophical theorizing by pinpointing the narrow range of the paradigms used in defining “art.” I test the plausibility of Danto’s After the End of Art vision of a post-historical, pluralistic future in which “anything goes,” (...) a future that unfortunately rests upon the same outdated foundation as the concept “art.” This essay was originally published in The Proceedings of the Twentieth Century World Congress of Philosophy (1999) and reprinted in Noel Carroll, ed., Theories of Art Today (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). (shrink)

I investigate the role of feminist theorizing in relation to traditionally-based aesthetics. Feminist artworks have arisen within the context of a patriarchal Artworld dominated for thousands of years by male artists, critics, theorists, and philosophers. I look at the history of that context as it impacts philosophical theorizing by pinpointing the narrow range of the paradigms used in defining “art.” I test the plausibility of Danto’s After the End of Art vision of a post-historical, pluralistic future in which “anything goes,” (...) a future that unfortunately rests upon the same outdated foundation as the concept “art.”. (shrink)

In this paper the author reviews the most debated theories of art in contemporary aesthetics and offers a new, intentional-attributive definition of art. He begins by expanding on Weitz’s theory, after which he presents arguments that refute Weitz's claim that it is logically impossible to define art. The author then examines the institutional, the historical, and the aesthetic definitions of art and shows that all of these have weaknesses and none stands up completely to criticism. Taking into consideration the (...) shortcomings of the examined definitions, he suggests his own definition of art: for all x, x is an artwork if the author of x mainly intended to reveal such properties of x, the perception of which would evoke experiences, containing ends in themselves. (shrink)

In ‘The End of Art: A Real Problem or Not Really a Problem?’ I raised some questions about Arthur Danto’s famous ‘end of art’ thesis. A largely polemical paper, it was intended as an invitation to further discussion, and Kalle Puolakka has now taken up this invitation in ‘Playing The Game After The End of Art’. I thank him for his many insightful remarks. Critical comments are typically more interesting and helpful than simple praise, and Puolakka’s comments are no exception. (...) I would therefore like to return the favour. I will place Puolakka’s remarks under critical examination and in the process hope to rephrase, refine, and defend some of my original claims. First, however, I will briefly restate my reading of Danto’s ideas on the end of art. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the logic of the aesthetic argument used in the eighteenth century as a conceptual tool for formulating the modern concept of “(fine) art(s).” The essay also examines the main developments in the history of the art of modernity which were initiated from the way the “nature” of art was conceived in early modern aesthetics. The author claims that the formulation of the “aesthetic nature” of art led to the process of the gradual disappearance of all of (...) the formal elements that had previously characterized the visual arts; the result was “emptiness” or “nothingness” as art. The author refers to this process in terms of “vanishing acts” that allow for the formulation of an aesthetics of absence in connection to twentieth-century art (complementing the Ästhetik der Absenz, formulated in German art theory). The author also briefly addresses the consequences that these processes have for the way contemporary art, and art world operate. (shrink)

In 1984, Arthur Danto wrote an article with the telling title ‘The End of Art.’ Just a few years earlier, Richard Rorty had declared the end of philosophy and Michel Foucault, the end of politics. A few years later, Francis Fukuyama was to declare the end of history. So, on the face of it, Danto’s thesis fits in nicely with the ‘endism’ that was popular in the 1980s. In important ways, however, I believe it also stands out.

The article re-visits the different scholarly approaches to Hegel's end-of-art scenario, and then proposes a new reading whereby ending and finitude are presented as essential features of beautiful art. The first and most determinant of art's endings is the death of the Christly art object, not representations of Christ, but the actual death of (the son of) God himself as the last classical artwork. The death of God represents the last word in Greco-Roman art, the accomplishment of the beautiful individuality (...) and its failure to present the Absolute in a singular, naturally infected, lively, human (made) form. The ending of art brings about a new form of the sacred: the representational language of revelatory religion. The ongoing production of modern artistic forms is a feature of actuality ("Wirklichkeit") and as such is condemned to an infinite approximation of what has been. Such actuality nonetheless "ends" in the ironic discourse of contemporary artistic expression, which Hegel qualifies as a "Vereitelung". The final realization of the beautiful art form, as a human-informed singularity embodying absolute content, may well be the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, whose performative iteration takes place in the form of "worship" practiced in the modern, state university. (shrink)

In this article the possibilities of expanding the boundaries of the knowledge and tradition of art philosophy in Turkey through the works of names outside the discipline of philosophy are investigated. For this purpose the production of architectural historian Doğan Kuban is discussed. Kuban’s works are evaluated from a philosophical perspective and it is tried to justify that they should be included in the philosophy of art literature. It has been accepted by the researchers that aesthetics/philosophy of art in Turkey (...) started with the effect of westernization after the Tanzimat. The main problems of the few studies that follow the development of aesthetics are that they examine aesthetics, which developed mainly through literary figures and philosophers who had less space than them, until the establishment of the Republic, only through the works of professional philosophers since the Republic, and they exclude the idea of tradition by not establishing a connection between the local thinkers they have examined and ending their development line with İsmail Tunalı. Common problems in research create the impression that the acceptance of aesthetics or philosophy of art as an activity that only the philosopher can do is accepted as a prejudice. However, philosophy of art is not a field specific to philosophers and limiting the development and accumulation of philosophy of art in Turkey to the work of philosophers narrows the scope of discussion. When a philosophical approach to the subject is sought other than philosophers, the opportunity to meet important names in different disciplines and to read them with a new eye increases. When approached from this perspective, Doğan Kuban’s (1926-2021) works deserve to be questioned in terms of art philosophy. It is noteworthy that Kuban’s production which started in the 1950s and lasted for about 70 years presents a wide field of data and interpretation and that he often attempts theory by reminding the absence of criticism and philosophy in our culture. There are also thinkers who refer to Kuban’s interest in philosophy, aesthetics and philosophy of art. However, Kuban’s relevance to philosophy and aesthetics/art philosophy has not been studied extensively. In the article firstly answers will be sought to the questions of what philosophy and philosophy of art are, and then Kuban’s philosophy of art will be revealed according to the criteria to be determined here. Kuban’s philosophy of art will be examined in three stages. His own theoretical approach will be analyzed by reviewing his objections to the tradition of philosophy of art. In the next step, his views on the philosophy of architecture and the philosophy of Turkish art, which he pursued throughout his production as a quest, will be examined. Finally the problems in Kuban’s philosophy of art will be pointed out and its possibilities will be emphasized. Philosophy is the ability to redefine the concepts starting from the most basic/original problems in any field where one doubts the answers, to determine the principles of the field, to answer the sub-questions with principles in line with consistency and validity, and to construct his own explanation model for the structure of the field by associating these answers. In order to make philosophy of art and philosophy of architecture it is necessary to answer the basic questions of the relevant field, to reach conceptual and principled goals, and to present a model of explanation of the structure of the field within a certain method. In the context of the criteria of art philosophy determined here, Kuban’s thoughts can be questioned in terms of philosophy of art. The philosophy of art, the philosophy of architecture and the philosophy of Turkish art, which became evident by the bringing together of different pieces in Kuban’s works, is a continuous and mutually determined effort. The thinker who criticizes the thinking styles and provisions of Western aesthetics, has created his own concept map with redefinitions and conceptualizations. Kuban redefined the concepts in the field of study, based on these he constructed his understanding of art, the philosophy of architecture and tried to create a model of explanation of Turkish art in which he revealed its history, evolution and basic features. Criticizing the views of C. E. Arseven, J. Strzygowski, E. Diez and O. Aslanapa, Kuban tried to define Turkish art in his own way and tried to explain the basic principles of Turkish art through monumental and civil architecture. Even though this model of explanation has deficiencies it offers new research opportunities to history of art and philosophy researchers with the questions it asks, the concepts it highlights and its unresolved aspects. With his philosophical awareness, criticisms of the philosophy of art, the philosophy of architecture and the attempt to construct the theory of Turkish art, Kuban should be included in the subject area of the philosophy of art studies in Turkey. Evaluation of Kuban’s thoughts by including them in the accumulation of art philosophy in our history of thought will both broaden and diversify the horizon of the field of art philosophy and will enable the philosophy of art to be considered in the context of new relationships between individuals and disciplines by following the traces of thinkers from such different fields. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:Hegel's end-of-art thesis is arguably the most notorious assertion in aesthetics. I outline traditional interpretive strategies before offering an original alternative to these. I develop a conception of art that facilitates a reading of Hegel on which he is able to embrace three seemingly contradictory theses about art, namely, (i) the end-of-art thesis, (ii) the continued significance of art for its own sake (autonomy thesis), and (iii) the necessity of art for robust knowledge (epistemicnecessity thesis). I argue that Hegel is (...) able to embrace all three theses at once through a conception of the work of art as an internally purposive whole (what I call the "IP View" of art). On the IP View, because of the kind of wholes that artworks are, they (i.a) are valuable for their own sake as ends-in-themselves, (i.b) yield valuable experiences because they are valuable for their own sake, and thereby (i.c) are necessary for robust knowledge. Finally, I suggest that not only does Hegel appear to hold the IP View of art, but also that on such a view, there is a very sensible reason for affirming (one reading of) Hegel's end-of-art thesis as an important means to establishing art's actual significance for robust knowledge against soaring, but unsubstantiable, claims about art's potency with respect to robust knowledge. (shrink)

Bioethics, neuroscience, medicine are contributing to a debate on the definition and criteria of death. This topic is very controversial, and it demonstrates clashing views on the meaning of human life and death. Official medical and legal positions agree upon a biological definition of death as irreversible cessation of integrated functioning of the organism as a whole, and whole-brain criterion to ascertain death. These positions have to face many criticisms: some scholars speak of logical and practical inconsistency, some others of (...) invalid scientific theory about the supreme integrator. In this paper some criticisms are exposed and discussed in order to reconstruct the state of the art in bioethical debate. -/- . (shrink)

How do we prepare engineering students to make ethical and responsible decisions in their professional work? This paper presents an approach that enhances engineering students’ engagement with ethical reasoning by simulating decision-making in a complex scenario. The approach has two principal inspirations. The first is Anthony Weston’s scenario-based teaching. Weston’s concept of a scenario is a situation that changes in response to choices made by participants, according to an inner logic. Scenarios can dynamically explore open-ended complex problems without imposing predetermined (...) results, allowing students to apply their ethical reasoning in a more realistic fashion. The second inspiration is Thi Nguyen’s theory of games. According to Nguyen, games are the “art of agency,” meaning that they provide a structure under which some result is agreed to be valuable, along with prescribed ways of achieving that result, in a relatively low-stakes and temporary social arrangement. By playing many games, Nguyen argues, we can develop a “library of agency,” that is to say, a set of values and means to achieving them that can inform how we make high-stakes decisions in real life. Engaging with carefully designed game scenarios, then, can enable students to practice making ethical decisions within a structured framework, which unfolds in response to their choices, while their decisions are driven by some defined goal. This roleplaying game–based approach thus allows students to build their own ethical libraries of agency, in preparation for professional decision-making. The approach is illustrated using a specific example recently deployed in a seminar on engineered living materials (building materials that incorporate living tissues). The scenario uses techniques from tabletop roleplaying games (e.g. Dungeons & Dragons) for outcome resolution, adventure design, and character creation. Through the game, students practice making difficult decisions in a humanitarian context. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to show that images have an ontological support by which they obtain an independent existence from the mind. In accordance with the new theories of aesthetics, we will see that the object of art is taken as an object of thought. Image has an important role in the existence of the work of art; therefore the image becomes an object of thought. To show how the image is independent from the mind or to show (...) how it is not a mind-dependent object, the analysis has to start from the pre-ontological level of the work of art in order to understand the existence of images in correlation with the work of art. At the beginning there is only the object. The object is the work of art before its concretization. It is not nature; it is the natural support of art. From this point of view, the role of the image can be explored in all ontological stages of the work of art. Firstly, it can be argued that the intuition of the artist is the image of the idea underlying the work of art. The intentional image is a subjective image. Secondly, it seems that people can see or have in mind different images (representations) referring to a work of art. This is possible in time and space and implies cultural differences, historical events and so on. A question arises: what supports the intentional image? One answer put forward is that the mind is the support of the image, but it seems that the original intentional image has something that can make other intentional images possible, an infinite number of representations, in other words an infinite number of images. The aim of this paper is to show that we can talk about an original intentional image (the first idea), intentional images (the representations of the work of art in time and space), and the transcendental image which can be defined as the ontological condition for the existence of the intentional image. At the end I will argue that the transcendental image is the support or the entity which offers the ontological conditions necessary for all intentional images. -/- Tags: intentional image, transcendental image, ontology, object and subjectivity. (shrink)

What question are decision theorists trying to answer, and why is it worth trying to answer it? A lot of philosophers talk as if the aim of decision theory is to describe how we should make decisions, and the reason to do this is to help us make better decisions. I disagree on both fronts. The aim of the decision theory is to describe how a certain kind of idealised decider does in fact decide. And the reason to (...) do this is that this idealisation, like many other idealisations, helps generate explanations of real-world behaviour. We shouldn't do what these ideal deciders do, or try to be more like them, because a lot of what they do only makes sense because of the differences between us and them. Still, sometimes those differences are small enough that they can be ignored in explanations, and that's when decision theory is useful. (shrink)

To get a comprehensive understanding of the core concept of “the end of art”, this book analyses the intellectual trajectory of Arthur Danto, highlighting his successive achievements in philosophy of action, philosophy of history and philosophy of art. If, as Danto says, everything is extensively associated with everything else, it is impossible to avoid putting the philosophy of art in relation with his whole philosophical system. -/- .

The striking title The End of Art managed to draw attention to the philosophical work of Arthur Danto. However, the lack of a systematic development which could support this thesis made him face harsh criticism. However, strong foundations for his statements can be deduced from his writings. In this paper, I analyse how to understand the thesis of the ‘end of art’. It should be approached not as a monolitical notion but as a complex concept that combines three different senses: (...) 1) the ‘end of art’ in the Hegelian sense: the conversion of art into philosophy, 2) the ‘end of art’ in the historiographical sense: as the end to the narratives of the history of art, and 3) the ‘end of art’ as the beginning of a new period in history, where Danto’s philosophy of art would be fully valid. (shrink)

In his philosophy of art history, Arthur C. Danto claims that in the 1960 ́s the master narrative of art had come to an end, and that we had reached the end of art. This conception has been widely considered, but also misunderstood. Hans Maes has recently discussed Danto's conception of the end of art in his article, where he clears some misconceptions about the thesis, but at the same time challenges Danto's analysis of contemporary art.

Where Gillo Dorfles sees an ‘aesthetic quotient’ able to promote a right relationship between man and nature, and nature and artefact, the concept of objectualization accounts for the ambivalent consequences of man’s appropriation of nature, occurring in the shaping of reality. This concept appears in the arts but also in the production of ordinary man-made objects. The latter recalibrates our own understanding of art and nature. Starting from a definition of objectualization, the hypothesis of an equation between ar- tificiality and (...) aesthetics will be found. Taking into account Dorfles’s claim about redeeming the unnatural as nature in its being the product of man’s creativity, we will assess his works focusing on the case of the artefact and graphic-musical object. Dorfles’s theory will be applied without following the different levels of analysis entirely: phenomenological, since the relationship between men, objects and machine is intentional; functional, as art depends on the role, determining a significance inside social condition, but on a symbolic or formal level, insofar as determining a stable presence of the significance at the level of the aspect, the shape becoming a mirror of men. In the end our own aesthetic constitution will be found together with the recalibration of the relationship with nature and the world through an idea of form combining artificialness and naturalness. (shrink)

From a Hegelian perspective, Duchamp’s place in the development of the contemporary involves a synthesis of the satiric and ironic modes of art’s previous moments of dissolution. That reading reworks the theme of art’s dissolution into an analytic tool, and saves the concept of “the end of art” from being a mere slogan, one that’s charged with nostalgia and despair, but of ambiguous value as a term of art-historical and aesthetic understanding. However, once we address art in terms a systematic (...) reading of Hegel’s Lectures, we’ll finally begin to understand the potential for applying Hegel’s concept of the dissolution to the contemporary artworld. A Hegelian understanding of irony and satire will allow us to grasp historically, as a replaying of the moment of art’s dissolution, the advent of Marcel Duchamp. For better or for worse, it is in large part Duchamp’s synthesis of the satirical and ironic dissolutions of art that define contemporary art. The revised Hegelian approach that emerges is not merely critical of the contemporary, however, but is also equipped to understand and appreciate it, prepared to retain its most valuable possibilities, and thereby able to remain hopeful about what lies beyond. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 219-220 [Access article in PDF] Jack Zupko. John Buridan: Portrait of a Fourteenth-Century Arts Master. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. Pp. xix + 446. Cloth, $70.00. Paper, $40.00. What does the name "John Buridan" call to mind? For many, including medievalists, not much at all—at best, perhaps, a set of apparently unrelated ideas: nominalism; an impetus theory (...) of projectile motion; and a peculiar account of the will (although "Buridan's ass," the indecisive donkey caught between two equally appetizing bales of hay, is not found in Buridan's writing). In correcting this ignorance—an injustice to arguably the most famous and influential philosopher of the early-to-mid-fourteenth century—the temptation might have been to articulate Buridan's "positions" on "the big questions," allowing readers to fit Buridan into received categories. Thankfully, the present work, the first book-length study of Buridan in any language, resists this temptation. The John Buridan that emerges from Jack Zupko's skillful "exercise in philosophical portraiture" doesn't serve to simply fill gaps in our awareness of the historical record, but to enlighten and challenge our understanding of the practice of philosophy and the study of its history.Zupko emphasizes throughout that Buridan was a teacher, a master of arts in Paris. Buridan's pedagogical concerns help make sense of his central work in logic. As the basis for his arts lectures, Buridan chose Peter of Spain's Summulae Logicales, but in commenting on Peter, Buridan moves beyond creative exegisis to comprehensive renovation. Buridan (c. 1300-c. 1361) naturally wanted to accommodate terminist or via moderna supposition theory; but more importantly, he wanted a logic text that would set out a general plan of philosophical inquiry, "a compendium of methods, a 'how-to' book for the philosopher" (135). Buridan thus designed his own Summulae de Dialectica as a new authoritative logic text, and Zupko persuasively argues that its "nominalism" should be understood as less a set of doctrines in theoretical logic, than a program of logical practice, an education in logic as the ars artium, the universal intellectual tool.Zupko's portrait of "Buridan's vision of the philosophical enterprise" is thus appropriately divided into two parts. The first summarizes Buridan's method as described in the individual treatises of his Summulae. The second displays the method in practice, rehearsing and evaluating some of Buridan's arguments on various subjects. Many scholars will gravitate first to the latter part, where Zupko offers important interpretations and clarifications of Buridan's views. In these chapters, Zupko helps us to appreciate, among other things: how the problem of universals served to help Buridan define the scope of philosophy (ch. 10); the philosophical modesty of Buridan's account of the intellectual soul's presence in the body (ch. 11); the relationship between Buridan's epistemology and the skepticism of his Parisian contemporary Nicholas of Autrecourt (ch. 12); the sense in which Buridan is an "empiricist," viz an epistemic naturalist and reliabilist (ch. 13); how Buridan regarded moral psychology as applied physics, treating virtue as a kind of impetus (ch. 14); how Buridan's account of freedom can be regarded as a "perfection" of Thomistic intellectualism (ch. 15).Throughout these discussions, Zupko always keeps in sight his larger purpose of illustrating Buridan's conception of philosophical inquiry. Zupko makes much of the fact that [End Page 219] Buridan never wrote as a theologian, remaining his entire career in the arts faculty, where he wanted logic to organize secular inquiry. As Zupko notes, in this way Buridan's scholastic project seems to prefigure the "modern." But Buridan seems modern in another way as well. As Zupko points out in his "Introduction," though a cleric, Buridan never joined a religious order, so that his ideas developed independently of the Franciscan and Dominican traditions. He was, then, a teacher without a tradition—at least without deliberate allegiance to tradition, although he was in many ways the product of traditional scholastic intellectual discipline.Perhaps this... (shrink)

This paper argues that Hegel attempts to appropriate the irreversible aspects of Romantic aesthetics in four ways: (i) Hegel radicalizes Kantian aesthetics on the basis of a basically textual approach to sublime experience that opens up the question of community as a philosophical one; (ii) without demoting classical conceptions of art, Hegel privileges Romantic conceptions that demonstrate the ascendancy of sign over symbol in a spiraling chain; (iii) Hegel laments the fate of art in the triumph of Romantic subjectivism but (...) also suggests how communities can reconstitute themselves on the horizon of aesthetic dissolution; so that, finally, (iv) art can be reconceived as a emancipatory adventure that redefines metaphysics through its historical unfolding as an unending series of semiotic transformations. (shrink)

Satisfying the demand of questioning the contemporary condition implies, first of all, a criticism of present times. From this point of view, it becomes clear that art and revolution whilst practices of creative disruption are undoubtedly in crisis. Hence, it is imperative to re-read Guy Debord, who not only refused the aestheticization of politics, but also the politicization of aesthetics. For the hermeneutics of contemporary, his work is, of course, essential. Proving it is, in short, the purpose of this paper.

In his 'Of the Standard of Taste' David Hume seems to make the paradoxical claim that even though the sentiments an agent feels in response to an artwork are subjective and unique, and it cannot be said that such sentiments are either correct or incorrect, there is a standard upon which art can be judged, which is at least partly determined by these sentiments.

Sumantra Ghoshal’s condemnation of “bad management theories” that were “destroying good management practices” has not lost any of its salience, after a decade. Management theories anchored in agency theory (and neo-classical economics generally) continue to abet the financialization of society and undermine the functioning of business. An alternative approach (drawn from a more classic institutional, new ecological, and refocused ethical approaches) is reviewed.

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)

From the perspective of an African ethic, analytically interpreted as a philosophical principle of right action, what are the proper final ends of a publicly funded university and how should they be ranked? To answer this question, I first provide a brief but inclusive review of the literature on Africanising higher education from the past 50 years, and contend that the prominent final ends suggested in it can be reduced to five major categories. Then, I spell out an intuitively attractive (...) African moral theory and apply it to these five final ends, arguing that three of them are appropriate but that two of them are not. After that, I maintain that the African moral theory prescribes two additional final ends for a public university that are not salient in the literature. Next, I argue that employing the African moral theory as I do enables one to rebut several criticisms of Africanising higher education that have recently been made from a liberal perspective. I conclude by posing questions suitable for future research. (shrink)

In Beyond Art (2014), Dominic Lopes proposed a new theory of art, the buck passing theory. Rather than attempting to define art in terms of exhibited or genetic featured shared by all artworks, Lopes passes the buck to theories of individual arts. He proposes that we seek theories of music, painting, poetry, and other arts. Once we have these theories, we know everything there is to know about the theory of art. This essay presents two challenges to (...) the theory. First, this essay argues that Lopes is wrong in supposing that theories of arts were developed to deal with the ‘hard cases’ – developments such as Duchamp’s readymades and conceptual art. This is a problem since Lopes holds that the buck passing theory’s capacity to deal with the hard cases is one of its virtues. Second, this essay argues that the buck passing theory has no account of which activities are arts and no account of what makes some activity an art. (shrink)

In perceptual experience we are directed towards objects in a way which establishes a real relation between a mental act and its target. In reading works of fiction we enjoy experiences which manifest certain internal similarities to such relational acts, but which lack objects. The substitution theory of art attempts to provide a reason why we seek out such experiences and the artifacts which they generate. Briefly, we seek out works of art because we enjoy the physiology and the (...) phenomenology of, for example, the experience of love or mountain climbing, and works of art serve as props for the promotion of substitutes for the corresponding genuine feelings. Art arose, or came to be separated out from other, related phenomena, through the discovery that the experience of substitute emotions can be pleasurable. (shrink)

A content theory of art would identify an artwork with the meaningful or representational content of some concrete artistic vehicle, such as the intentional, expressive, stylistic, and subject matter-related content embodied in, or resulting from, acts of intentional artistic expression by artists. Perhaps surprisingly, the resultant view that an artwork is nothing but content seems to have been without theoretical defenders until very recently, leaving a significant theoretical gap in the literature. I present some basic arguments in defence of (...) such a view, including the following. Content views of linguistic communication are ubiquitous, so why should they not be applicable in artistic cases as well? Also, propositional accounts of language involve two kinds of content (the proposition expressed by a sentence, plus the worldly state of affairs it represents), both of which kinds can be used in explaining artworks. In addition, the differing modal properties of artworks and concrete artefacts can be used to show that artworks could not be, or include, such physical artefacts. (shrink)

This is a critical discussion of Nick Zangwill’s Aesthetic Creation Theory of Art, as presented in his book Aesthetic Creation. The discussion focuses on two questions: first, whether the notion of art implied by Zangwill’s theory is at once too wide and too narrow; second, whether Zangwill is right about the persistence conditions of works of art.

In light of new historical evidence regarding ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson’s correspondence with art historian Erwin Panofsky, this article provides an in-depth analysis of the presence of entheogenic mushroom images in Christian art within the context of the controversy between Wasson and philologist John Marco Allegro over the identification of a Garden of Eden fresco in the 12th century Chapel of Plaincourault in France. It reveals a compelling financial motive for Wasson’s refusal to acknowledge that this fresco represents Amanita muscaria, (...) as well as for Wasson’s reluctance to pursue his hypothesis regarding the entheogenic origins of religion into Christian art and artifacts. While Wasson’s view – that the presence of psychoactive mushrooms in the Near and Middle East ended around 1000 BCE – prevailed and stymied research on entheogens in Christianity for decades, a new generation of 21st century researchers has documented growing evidence of A. muscaria and psilocybin-containing mushrooms in Christian art, consistent with ethnobotanist Giorgio Samorini’s typology of mushroom trees. This article presents original photographs, taken during fieldwork at churches and cathedrals throughout Europe and the Middle East, that confirm the presence of entheogenic mushrooms in Christian art: in frescoes, illuminated manuscripts, mosaics, sculptures, and stained glass windows. Based on this iconic evidence, the article proposes a psychedelic gospels theory and addresses critiques of this theory by art historians, ardent advocates, medieval historians, and conservative Catholics. It calls for the establishment of an Interdisciplinary Committee on the Psychedelic Gospels to independently evaluate the growing body of evidence of entheogenic mushrooms in Christian art in order to resolve a controversial question regarding the possible role of entheogens in the history and origins of Christianity. (shrink)

It is widely acknowledged that categories play significant roles in the appreciation of artworks. This paper argues that the correct categories of artworks are institutionally established through social processes. Section 1 examines the candidates for determining correct categories and proposes that this question should shift the focus from category membership to appreciative behaviour associated with categories. Section 2 draws on Francesco Guala’s theory of institutions to show that categories of artworks are established as rules-in-equilibrium. Section 3 reviews the explanatory (...) benefits of this institutional theory of the correct category. [Winner of the 2022 Debates in Aesthetics Essay Prize]. (shrink)

O artigo interpreta a teoria acerca do fim da arte de Arthur Danto, apontando, ao final, críticas à proposta do filósofo, sem esquecer de mostrar em que medida a teoria se mostra frutífera para pensar a arte contemporânea.The paper interprets the theory about the end of art Arthur Danto, pointing at the end, criticism of the proposal of the philosopher, not forgetting to show to what extent the theory proves fruitful for thinking about contemporary art.

What determines whether an object is an artwork? In this paper I consider what I will call ‘social’ theories of art, according to which the arthood of objects depends in some way on the art-related social practices that we have. Though such a dependence claim is plausible in principle, social theories of art tend to unpack the determining link between artworks and social practices in terms of intentional relations between the objects in question and the people involved in the relevant (...) practices. This intentionalism has unappealing upshots. Drawing on two-dimensional approaches in social ontology, I show how social theories of art can be done differently, improving their prospects. (shrink)

Georg Henrik von Wright was not only the first interpreter of Wittgenstein, who argued that Spengler’s work had reinforced and helped Wittgenstein to articulate his view of life, but also the first to consider seriously that Wittgenstein’s attitude to his times makes him unique among the great philosophers, that the philosophical problems which Wittgenstein was struggling, indeed his view of the nature of philosophy, were somehow connected with features of our culture or civilization. -/- In this paper I draw inspiration (...) and courage from Von Wright’s insistence that trying to understand Wittgenstein in relation to his times is a philosophic task in its own right in order to probe into a relatively obscure region in Wittgenstein’s thought: his relation to the music of his times. It is a topic, on which Von Wright, and most other prominent Wittgenstein scholars, have said very little, but it is also one, which Wittgenstein himself attested was so important to him that he felt without it he was sure to be misunderstood. -/- I offer textual and historical evidence in support of my claim that, parallel to Wittgenstein’s exposure to Spengler’s Decline of the West in 1930, he was also introduced to the music theory of Heinrich Schenker, which helped him to articulate, partly by way of critique, a complex and unique position concerning the modern music of his times, which exhibits his rejection of what Von Wright later dubbed ‘the myth of progress’. As Von Wright observed in other regions of Wittgenstein’s work, he believed also with regards to the arts and to music in particular, neither in a brilliant future nor in the good old days. -/- I argue that Wittgenstein actually made a distinction between three kinds of modern music: (a) bad modern music, which is clearly a case of confusing means for ends, the hallmark of the myth of progress, as Von Wright observed; (b) vacuous modern music, which embodies some sort of diffidence, a difficulty to see through the omnipresence of what Von Wright called (following Habermas) a ‘colonialization’ of reified measures of progress; (c) good modern music, a paradoxical notion for Wittgenstein, which betokens the unlikely yet possible striving to penetrate through what appears as dissolution of the resemblances which unite this culture’s ways of life by rendering this condition as expressible and intransitively understandable. In the context of this third category, I offer an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s complex remarks on the music of Gustav Mahler, which palpably show that the problem of good modern music and the problem of philosophizing in the time of civilization were one and the same in Wittgenstein’s mind. -/- I conclude that, with regards to Von Wright’s own critical view of the modern myth of progress, we can learn from Wittgenstein that progress in the realm of art is closely aligned with the ideal of the perfection of man, yet transcending a social or political context. It is the ideal of cultural cohesion: affinity that the arts show to other human practices and cultural artifacts of its period. Wittgenstein’s tentative notion of good modern music (and its circumscription by his notion of the music of the future) may show its true colors when viewed in the context of Von Wright’s plea not to abandon work for progress as a critical task. (shrink)

Philosophers of science discuss whether theory selection depends on aesthetic judgments or criteria, and whether these putatively aesthetic features are genuinely extra-epistemic. As examples, judgments involving criteria such as simplicity and symmetry are often cited. However, other theory selection criteria, such as fecundity, coherence, internal consistency, and fertility, more closely match those criteria used in art contexts and by scholars working in aesthetics. Paying closer attention to the way these criteria are used in art contexts allows us to (...) understand some evaluative and developmental practices in scientific theory selection as genuinely aesthetic, enlarging the scope of the goals of science. (shrink)

A review of Tiziana Andina's The Philosophy of Art: The Question of Definition: From Hegel to Post-Dantian Theories (Bloomsbury 2013).

“Applying the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to 21st Century Art” was delivered to the 2009 Congress of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) in Dublin as a guide to critical thinking through a paradigm shift. This new paper uncovers a new critical theory in the form of a formula that has been successfully applied to a universal appraisal of arts across all boundaries, whether they be gender, discipline or culture. The configuration predicted by Pauli as arising from under the (...) collapsed quantum wave is sourced in an ancient icon: the hieros gamos. As her functional role as newspaper critic shifted to a more esoteric passage as performance artist/curator/blogger, the author spent 14 years theorizing; and another 14 years applying a new critical theory to contemporary art. Her (R)evolution series for the Huffington Post places the containment of the hieros gamos at the forefront of contemporary art practice. The goal is the embodiment of Jean Gebser’s 360-degree aperspectival awareness, whereas the shadow is contacted and absorbed into the very body of art. This paper will reveal the strategy for determining holistic art forms containing the 21st century icon that Pauli understood would arise from under the collapsed quantum wave. (shrink)

In The Life of a Style, Jonathan Gilmore claims that such narrative developments inhere in the history of art itself.By exploring such topics as the discovery ...

Proponents of the aesthetic theory of art advocate that the aesthetic domain encompasses all artworks. However, there is a belief that although much art falls under the aesthetic, there are some artworks that do not. Avant-garde artworks are offered as counterexamples to the aesthetic theory as they are artworks that reject the very idea of the aesthetic. This paper explains the idea of non-perceptual aesthetic properties and explores whether it can incorporate avant-garde artworks into the domain of the (...) aesthetic. (shrink)

The chapter studies the speculative realist critique of the notion of finitude and its implications for the theme of the "end of the world" as a teleological and eschatological idea. It is first explained how Quentin Meillassoux proposes to overcome both Kantian and Heideggerian "correlationist" approaches with his speculative thesis of absolute contingency. It is then shown that Meillassoux's speculative materialism also dismantles the close link forged by Kant between the teleological ends of human existence and a teleological notion of (...) the "end of the world." Speculative materialism no longer sees the end of thought, or the end of the thinking human being, as an insurmountable limit of conceivability, but rather as one contingent and possible event among others. This allows us to conceive an "end of all things" in a positive sense with regard to which the old eschatological hope for the end of the present world of injustice and for the emergence of a new world of perfect, "divine" justice becomes meaningful and legitimate in an entirely new sense. (shrink)

Editor’s NoteThanks to the initiative of Alan Norrie, we are pleased to present here a symposium on Nick Wilson’s book The Space that Separates: A Realist Theory of Art. Several authors have contri...

Art, for Hegel, is not only distinct but self-distinguishing of and from nature – it happens in and through the latter. It liberates us from being merely natural creatures, and it does so by a dynamic of a cut or break - even though this liberation is achieved only through natural sensuousness, and hence, keeps us tethered to nature in some particular way. Inspired by Todd McGowan’s emphasis on the central role of contradiction in Hegel’s philosophy, this paper considers the (...) possibility to applying the dialectic between art and nature as it is unfolded in Hegel’s Aesthetic to a more insidious constellation — namely, what Marxists came to refer to as second nature: the world of commodities, in which man-made things appear to those who produce them as a naturalised and repressive opposite, a pseudo nature, an alienated solidified history. (shrink)

In "Convention and Dickie's Institutional Theory" (British Journal of Aesthetics 1980), Catherine Lord maintains the following thesis: (L) If a work of art is defined as institutional and conventional, then the definition precludes the freedom and creativity associated with art. Lord also maintains that the antecedent of this conditional is false. In this note, I argue that (i) certain confusions and assumptions prevent Lord from showing the antecedent is false, and (ii) even if the antecedent is assumed to be (...) true, there are counterexamples to the entire conditional. With regard to (ii), I will suggest that conventionality is necessary for creativity. [This was my first published paper, written as a graduate student, taken from my University of Illinois at Chicago dissertation written with Professor George Dickie on the topic of conventions, utilitizing David Lewis' definition of "convention."]. (shrink)

Starting out from the ontology of human work set out by Marx in Das Kapital, the paper seeks to analyse the relations between the artist and his actions and aims, the work of art he produces, and the audience for this work. The paper concludes with a discussion of the problem of creativity in the arts, drawing on ideas of Roman Ingarden and other phenomenologists.