Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
William P. Seeley

This chapter introduces a model aimed at dissolving general philosophical skepticism about research in cognitive science and aesthetics. The discussion is focused around what can be called the puzzle of locating art. The puzzle of locating art emerges from two skeptical arguments: the common perceptual mechanisms argument and the normative dimension of appreciation argument. The central argument of the chapter is that skepticism about the value of cognitive science to explanations of art is an artifact of a confusion among cognitive scientists about the role of aesthetics in the arts and a confusion among philosophers about the role information from neuroscience plays in psychological explanations.

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 146-169
Author(s):  
Roberta Dreon

This article explores the significance of Hegel’s aesthetic lectures for Dewey’s approach to the arts. Although over the last two decades some brilliant studies have been published on the “permanent deposit” of Hegel in Dewey’s mature thought, the aesthetic dimension of Dewey’s engagement with Hegel’s heritage has not yet been investigated. This inquiry will be developed on a theoretical level as well as on the basis of a recent discovery: in Dewey’s Correspondence traces have been found of a lecture on Hegel’s Aesthetics delivered in 1891 within a summer school run by a scholar close to the so-called St. Louis Hegelians. Dewey’s deep and long-standing acquaintance with Hegel’s Aesthetics supports the claim that in his mature book, Art as Experience, he originally appropriated some Hegelian insights. First, Dewey shared Hegel’s strong anti-dualistic and anti-autonomistic conception of the arts, resisting post-Kantian sirens that favored instead an interpretation of art as a separate realm from ordinary reality. Second, they basically converged on an idea of the arts as inherently social activities as well as crucial contributions to the shaping of cultures and civilizations, based on the proximity of the arts to the sensitive nature of man. Third, this article argues that an original re-consideration of Hegel’s thesis of the so-called “end of art” played a crucial role in the formulation of Dewey’s criticism of the arts and of the role of aesthetic experience in contemporary society. The author suggests that we read Dewey’s criticism of the removal of fine art “from the scope of the common or community life” (lw 10, 12) in light of Hegel’s insight that the experience of the arts as something with which believers or citizens can immediately identify belongs to an irretrievable past.


2020 ◽  
pp. 18-37
Author(s):  
Margaret H. Freeman

Icons mean different things to different people. This chapter describes how the term icon is understood in semiotics, linguistics, religion, and popular discourse in order to establish a working definition for understanding how a poem can become an icon. Iconicity is the means whereby poetic features contribute to achieving a poem’s status as an icon. The chapter then takes up two problematic issues in the question of “meaning.” Making objects (nouns) out of actions (verbs) obscures the processes of minding that underlie aesthetic activity. Likewise, separating form from content obscures the integrated relation between “ceptions” (conceptions, perceptions, and proprioceptions) and structures. By replacing these assumptions from a cognitive science approach, the chapter prepares the groundwork for understanding the role of iconicity in the arts. After giving some examples of iconicity in literary critical approaches to poetry, it ends with a brief summary of the main features that constitute poetic iconicity.


2009 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-142
Author(s):  
Michael Novak ◽  

As in the nineteenth century so in the twentieth, a number of laymen and women have appeared in the firmament of intellect and the arts to place the entire body of Christians in their debt. Of these, no one has been more influential in different spheres than Jacques Maritain. In political and social thought, no Christian has ever written a more profound defense of the democratic idea and its component parts, such as the dignity of the person; the sharp distinction between society and the state; the role of practical wisdom; the common good; the transcendent anchoring of human rights; transcendent judgment upon societies; and the interplay of goodness and evil in human individuals and institutions. To read him is to be forced to look, through such distinctions, from many angles of vision at once. And all for the sake of unity: To distinguish in order to unite," is a most suitable motto for his life's work. Maritain focused on the real content of democracy understood as all those common experiences, ways of looking at things, forms of consciousness, habits, and convictions that entire peoples acquire slowly, underlining the importance of Christian renewal for the transcendent grounding of human dignity and human rights as "the soul of democracy."


2017 ◽  
pp. 98-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Tirole

In the fourth chapter of the book “The economy of the common good”, the nature of economics as a science and research practices in their theoretical and empirical aspects are discussed. The author considers the processes of modeling, empirical verification of models and evaluation of research quality. In addition, the features of economic cognition and the role of mathematics in economic research are analyzed, including the example of relevant research in game theory and information theory.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Sullivan ◽  
Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild

This introduction surveys the rise of the history of emotions as a field and the role of the arts in such developments. Reflecting on the foundational role of the arts in the early emotion-oriented histories of Johan Huizinga and Jacob Burkhardt, as well as the concerns about methodological impressionism that have sometimes arisen in response to such studies, the introduction considers how intensive engagements with the arts can open up new insights into past emotions while still being historically and theoretically rigorous. Drawing on a wide range of emotionally charged art works from different times and places—including the novels of Carson McCullers and Harriet Beecher-Stowe, the private poetry of neo-Confucian Chinese civil servants, the photojournalism of twentieth-century war correspondents, and music from Igor Stravinsky to the Beatles—the introduction proposes five ways in which art in all its forms contributes to emotional life and consequently to emotional histories: first, by incubating deep emotional experiences that contribute to formations of identity; second, by acting as a place for the expression of private or deviant emotions; third, by functioning as a barometer of wider cultural and attitudinal change; fourth, by serving as an engine of momentous historical change; and fifth, by working as a tool for emotional connection across communities, both within specific time periods but also across them. The introduction finishes by outlining how the special issue's five articles and review section address each of these categories, while also illustrating new methodological possibilities for the field.


2015 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-240
Author(s):  
Eran Laish

This article focuses on the main contemplative principles of the ‘Heart Essence’ (sNying thig), a Tibetan Buddhist tradition that is characterized by a vision of non-duality and primordial wholeness. Due to this vision, which asserts an original reality that is not divided into perceiving subject and perceived object, the ‘Heart Essence’ advocates a contemplative practice that undermines the usual intuitions of temporality and enclosed selfhood. Hence, unlike the common principles of intentional praxis, such as deliberate concentration and gradual purification, the ‘Heart Essence’ affirms four contemplative principles of non-objectiveness, openness, spontaneity and singleness. As these principles transcend intentionality, temporality, and multiplicity, they are seen to directly disclose the nature of primordial awareness, in which the meanings of knowing and being are radically transformed. Therefore, the article will also consider the role of these non-dual contemplative principles in deeply changing our understanding of being and knowing alike.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 144-148
Author(s):  
Liuba Zlatkova ◽  

The report describes the steps for creating a musical tale by children in the art studios of „Art Workshop“, Shumen. These studios are led by students volunteers related to the arts from pedagogical department of Shumen University, and are realized in time for optional activities in the school where the child studies. The stages of creating a complete product with the help of different arts are traced – from the birth of the idea; the creation of a fairy tale plot by the children; the characterization of the fairy-tale characters; dressing them in movement, song and speech; creating sets and costumes and creating a finished product to present on stage. The role of parents as a link and a necessary helper for children and leaders is also considered, as well as the positive psychological effects that this cooperation creates.


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