scholarly journals Imagining one experience to be another

Synthese ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bence Nanay

AbstractI can imagine a banana to be a phone receiver. I can also imagine the flapping of my arms to be flying. So it is possible to imagine one thing to be another—at least for some types of ‘things’. I will argue that although it is possible to imagine an object to be another object and it is also possible to imagine an activity to be a different activity, one cannot imagine one’s present sensory experience to be a different sensory experience with different qualitative character. This claim will have some important consequences beyond the philosophy of imagination, for example, for some accounts of depiction.

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Lifshitz ◽  
T. M. Luhrmann

Abstract Culture shapes our basic sensory experience of the world. This is particularly striking in the study of religion and psychosis, where we and others have shown that cultural context determines both the structure and content of hallucination-like events. The cultural shaping of hallucinations may provide a rich case-study for linking cultural learning with emerging prediction-based models of perception.


2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 558-577
Author(s):  
Mickey Vallee

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari refer to Glenn Gould as an illustration of the third principle of the rhizome, that of multiplicity: ‘When Glenn Gould speeds up the performance of a piece, he is not just displaying virtuosity, he is transforming the musical points into lines, he is making the whole piece proliferate’ (1987: 8). In an attempt to make sensible their ostensibly modest statement, I proliferate the relationships between Glenn Gould's philosophy of sound recording, Deleuze's theory of passive synthesis, and Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the stutter. I argue, ultimately, that Glenn Gould's radical recording practice stutters and deterritorialises the temporality of the recorded performance. More generally, the Deleuzian perspective broadens the scope of Gould's aesthetic practices that highlights the importance of aesthetic acts in the redistribution of sensory experience. But the study serves a broader purpose than celebrating a pianist/recordist that Deleuze admired. Rather, while his contemporaries began to use the studio as a compositional element in sound recording, Gould bypassed such a step towards the informational logics of recording studios. Thus, it is inappropriate to think of Gould as having immersed himself in ‘technology’ than the broader concept of a complex, one that redistributed the striated listening space of the concert hall.


Author(s):  
Fiona Sampson

Today, poetry and art music occupy similar cultural positions: each has a tendency to be regarded as problematic, ‘difficult’, and therefore ‘elitist’. Despite this, the audiences and numbers of participants for each are substantial: yet they tend not to overlap. This is odd, because the forms share early history in song and saga, and have some striking similarities, often summed up in the word ‘lyric’? These similarities include much that is most significant to the experience of each, and so of most interest to practitioners and audiences. They encompass, at the very least: the way each art-form is aural, and takes place in time; a shared reliance on temporal, rather than spatial, forms; an engagement with sensory experience and pleasure; availability for both shared public performance and private reading, sight-reading, and hearing in memory; and scope for non-denotative meaning. In other words, looking at these elements in music is a way to look at them in poetry, and vice versa. This is a study of these two formal craft traditions that is concerned with the similarities in their roles, structures, projects, and capacities.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anandi Silva Knuppel

Scholarship on Hindu traditions and practices proposes the practice of darshan as fundamental to Hindu traditions, particularly in temple worship, observing that devotees seek out images of deities primarily to see them and “receive” their darshan. These works typically gloss the definition of darshan with a sentence or two about seeing, exchanging glances, and/or receiving blessings. In this paper, I focus on the ways in which darshan is ideally imagined in conjunction with other bodily sensory practices through sources of authority, such as texts and senior devotees, to create a specific sensory experience and expectation in the transnational Gaudiya Vaishnava community. I then look to the lived realitiesof darshan in this tradition, specifically how devotees negotiate the structures created through sources of authority in their daily lives. Through this juxtaposition of idealized and lived darshan, I argue that we need a new approach towards theories of practice to take into account the complexities of darshanic moments in this and other religious practices.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 137-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Cantwell

The iconic dimension of holy books has drawn increasing scholarly attention in recent years (e.g. Iconic Books and Texts, James Watts, ed., London, Equinox, 2013). Asian Buddhism provides rich material for considering the ritualization of engagement with sacred texts. In Tibetan Buddhism, this aspect of book culture is perhaps especially pronounced (see, for instance, Schaeffer 2009, especially Chapter 6; Elliott, Diemberger and Clemente 2014). This paper explores the topic in relation to the engagement of the senses in Tibetan context, through seeing, touching, holding and tasting texts. It would seem that it is not the sensory experience in itself, but rather the physical experience of a transmission and incorporation of the sacred qualities from the books into the person which is emphasized in these practices. Parallels and contrasts with examples from elsewhere are mentioned, and there is some consideration of the breadth of the category of sacred books in the Tibetan context in which Dharma teachings may take many forms.


Author(s):  
А. Karam

In the article it is revealed the essence of interpretation of the phenomenon of «aesthetic competence» from the point of view of philosophy, psychology, pedagogy, sociology, and cultural studies. Emphasis is placed on the interconnection of synonymous terms «readiness» and «preparedness»: «readiness» is a concept broader than competence and preparedness, which may be single, fragmented, that is, not to provide the full capacity to perform the functions of an activity. The essence of the outlined phenomenon is analyzed through its separate concepts, taking into account their relation: «aesthetic competence» with the concepts «competence», aesthetics «. Artistic and aesthetic competence is defined as a system of internal means of regulation of artistic and aesthetic actions, which includes artistic and aesthetic knowledge, social guidelines, skills and experience, aesthetic orientation, based on knowledge and sensory experience, free possession of artistic and aesthetic means and perception of artistic and aesthetic situation. The essence and features of aesthetic competence are revealed. The modern approaches to defining the concept of «aesthetic competence» are highlighted. The components of aesthetic competence are revealed. Specific features and factors influencing the development of aesthetic competence are highlighted. In conclusion, it is noted that the concept under study, aesthetic competence, should be differentiated into such varieties as aesthetic and artistic competence, while each of them, for a particular artistic profession, will at the same time have a general and specific meaning.


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