Collingwood’s Opposition to Biography

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vasso Kindi

Abstract Biography is usually distinguished from history and, in comparison, looked down upon. R. G. Collingwood’s view of biography seems to fit this statement considering that he says it has only gossip-value and that “history it can never be”. His main concern is that biography exploits and arouses emotions which he excludes from the domain of history. In the paper I will try to show that one can salvage a more positive view of biography from within Collingwood’s work and claim that his explicit attacks against biography target specifically the sensationalist kind. First, I will show that Collingwood, in his later writings, allowed that, not only thought, but also relevant emotions can be the subject matter of history, which means that even if one takes biography to deal with emotions, it can still qualify as history. Second, I will argue, based mainly on Collingwood’s Principles of Art, that biography can be compared to portrait painting, in which case, it can be redeemed as a work of art and not just craft and, thus, have more than entertainment value. It can also be part of history, and more specifically part of the history of art which Collingwood endorses, if one takes the life of an individual, recounted by a biographer, to be an artistic creation, as Collingwood seems to suggest.

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (02) ◽  
pp. 329-344
Author(s):  
S. Solodovnyk ◽  

This article dwells upon the life path and the art of an artist and teacher, professor of Kharkiv Art and Industrial Institute (now Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Fine Arts) – Sergiy Solodovnyk (1915–1991) – my Dad. It is described in what way important events or important meetings with talented people can influence the development of personality, the formation of the artist’s and teacher’s views upon the methods of teaching and drawing and imagery in Arts, also the choice of the subject matter and genre. In artistic creation, both innate personality traits and those acquired in the process of studying the world, through which the artist passes in the process of creating a work of art and his formation as a person, as a lecturer or Teacher, are of great importance. The influence of his personality upon the students of several generations. His great importance in my life as a wise, delicate and caring dad. It is underlined in this article that good, honest deeds, love to people, homeland and to his direction in Art, sensitive attitude to the youth will always find reflection in human souls.


We often assume that works of visual art are meant to be seen. Yet that assumption may be a modern prejudice. The ancient world - from China to Greece, Rome to Mexico - provides many examples of statues, paintings, and other images that were not intended to be visible. Instead of being displayed, they were hidden, buried, or otherwise obscured. In this third volume in the Visual Conversations in Art & Archaeology series, leading scholars working at the intersection of archaeology and the history of art address the fundamental question of art's visibility. What conditions must be met, what has to be in place, for a work of art to be seen at all? The answer is both historical and methodological; it concerns ancient societies and modern disciplines, and encompasses material circumstances, perceptual capacities, technologies of visualization, protocols of classification, and a great deal more. The emerging field of archaeological art history is uniquely suited to address such questions. Intrinsically comparative, this approach cuts across traditional ethnic, religious, and chronological categories to confront the academic present with the historical past. The goal is to produce a new art history that is at once cosmopolitan in method and global in scope, and in doing so establish new ways of seeing - new conditions of visibility - for shared objects of study.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bogusław Dopart

The title of the present monograph refers to one of the most fundamental traits of the oeuvre and literary life of Adam Mickiewicz. While constantly occupied with invigorating and broadening the subject- -matter of his works, Mickiewicz is careful to follow a steady track of ideas, concepts, and truths. In constructing successive models of poetic worlds and varying them even within single works, he incessantly integrates them into a dynamic, open universe of the ‘man of transformations’ (in Wacław Borowy’s phrasing) in accordance with the ontic position and experience of a Romantic writer. Diversity and variance of poetic forms in Mickiewicz is counterbalanced by his leaning towards regularity and structural connectedness: cycles. As early as his first critical manifesto, he opposes a schematic labeling of his creative output; he presents the history of European poetry in terms of overlapping traditions and gradual differentiation of national literatures.


1984 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-39
Author(s):  
Roger D. Spegele

The history of recent efforts to establish a science of international politics may be usefully viewed as elaborate glosses on David Hume's powerful philosophical programme for resolving, reconciling or dissolving a variety of perspicuous dualities: the external and the internal, mind and body, reason and experience. Philosophers and historians of ideas still dispute the extent to which Hume succeeded but if one is to judge by the two leading ‘scientific’ research programmes1 for international politics—inductivism and naive falsificationism —these dualities are as unresolved as ever, with fatal consequences for the thesis of the unity of the sciences. For the failure to reconcile or otherwise dissolve such divisions shows that, on the Humean view, there is at least one difference between the physical (or natural) sciences. and the moral (or social) sciences: namely, that while the latter bear on the internal and external, the former are concerned primarily with the external. How much this difference matters and how the issue is avoided by the proponents of inductivism and naïve falsification is the subject matter of this paper.


2019 ◽  
pp. 83-94
Author(s):  
Jarosław Ławski

The subject matter of the present article is the image of library and librarian in a forgotten short story by a Polish-Russian writer Józef Julian Sękowski (1800−1858). Sękowski is known in Polish literature as a multi-talented orientalist and polyglot, who changed his national identity in 1832 and began to write only in Russian. In the history of Russian literature he is famous for Library for Reading and Fantastic Voyages of Baron Brambeus, an ironic-grotesque work, which was precursory in Russian prose. Until 1832 Sękowski was, however, a Polish writer. His last significant work was An Audience with Lucypher published in a Polish magazine Bałamut Petersburski (Petersburgian Philanderer) in 1832 and immediately translated into Russian by Sękowski himself under the title Bolszoj wychod u Satany (1833). The library and librarian presented by the author in this piece are a caricature illustration proving his nihilistic worldview. Sękowski is a master of irony and grotesquery, yet the world he creates is deprived of freedom and justice and a book in this world is merely a threat to absolute power.


1970 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-68
Author(s):  
Waldemar Szczerbiński

The subject of the following discourse is, as the title itself points out, the anthropology of Heschel. Considering the fact that Heschel is in general unknown in Poland, I shall take the liberty to make known, in short, some pieces of information about him. Heschel was born in Warsaw, Poland on January 11th 1907. After graduating from the Gymnasium in Wilno he started his studies at Friedrich Wilhelm Universität, Berlin. At the Berlin University he studied at the Philosophy Department and, additionally, he took up studies in the sphere of Semitic Philosophy and History of Art. In 1937 Heschel was chosen by Martin Buber as his successor at Mittelstelle für Jüdische Erwachsenen-Bildung in Frankfurt on the Main. In October he was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Poland together with all the Jews of Polish nationality. After returning to Warsaw he taught philosophy and biblical sciences at the Institute of Jewish Studies. Six weeks before the German aggression against Poland he left for England and then for the United States where he stayed until his death. He was the Professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Except for his didactical activity, our philosopher did not neglect creative work. As time went on he was becoming a more and more well-known and appreciated intellectualist and social worker in America. His activity went far beyond the boundaries of the Jewish world.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-382
Author(s):  
Dunja Fehimović ◽  
Ruth Goldberg

Carlos Lechuga’s film Santa y Andrés (2016) has enjoyed worldwide acclaim as an intimate, dramatic portrayal of the unlikely friendship that develops in rural Cuba between Andrés, a gay dissident writer, and Santa, the militant citizen who has been sent to surveil him. Declared to be extreme and/or inaccurate in its historical depictions, the film was censored in Cuba and was the subject of intense controversy and public polemics surrounding its release in 2016. Debates about the film’s subject matter and its censorship extend ongoing disagreement over the role of art within the Cuban Revolution, and the changing nature of the Cuban film industry itself. This dossier brings together new scholarship on Santa y Andrés and is linked to an online archive of some of the original essays that have been written about the film by Cuban critics and filmmakers since 2016. The aim of this project is to create a starting point for researchers who wish to investigate Santa y Andrés, evaluating the film both for its contentious initial reception, and in terms of its enduring contribution to the history of Cuban cinema.


Author(s):  
Christopher J. Berry

Examines Hume’s account of economic development as a subset of the history of civilisation, which is presented by him as a history of customs and manners. Since Hume believes that the subject matter of ‘economics’ is amenable to scientific analysis, the focus is on his employment of causal analysis and how he elaborates an analysis of customs as causes to account for social change. This is executed chiefly via an examination Hume’s Essays, though the History of England (as a test case) and the Treatise of Human Nature for its expression of Hume’s seminal analysis of causation are also incorporated.


Author(s):  
Patricia Emison

The span of this book is roughly that of directors who had started out in silent pictures reaching the end of their careers, including their transitions to color. The introduction of sound recording and color both transformed filmmaking, not least its cost. Misgivings were voiced early on about the moral effect of the new art, even as censorship was deplored. Mannerism as an art-historical concept was being developed to supplement that of Renaissance naturalism even as filmmakers were trying to reconcile the realism to which photography might seem suited with the artificiality it also enabled. Although studying the history of film inevitably dredges up evidence of racism, sexism, and other prejudices, the history of film, like the history of art, is too complex and has long been too deeply engrained in our cultural lives for historians to choose to be ignorant of once admired works we may now in part or thoroughly deplore, as well as minor yet elucidating works that may likewise be problematic, at least in part. The supposition that respect is the default response to any work of art underestimates the changing role of laughter and other forms of active disregard, particularly during the last century.


Author(s):  
Józef Wróbel

This chapter discusses the theme of Jewish martyrdom in the works of Adolf Rudnicki. Without losing sight of the universal dimensions of the theme he was taking up, Rudnicki enriches the subject-matter with characteristics that are specifically Jewish. First, the situation of Jewish society during the occupation differed from that of other nations. Jews were pushed to the very bottom of the invader's hierarchy. Their life and death depended not only on Germans but also on the aid of Poles among whom they lived, which was not always forthcoming. A second specific feature is derived from Rudnicki's chosen artistic genre, which monumentalized the suffering of Jews by including them in the biblical circle and the almost 2,000-year history of the Diaspora, the wandering and persecution with which God tries his chosen people. This problem dominated the writing of Rudnicki for at least ten years. Undoubtedly, the literary situation in the first half of the 1950s was decisive in Rudnicki's abandonment of the theme, since the subject of the war was quickly recognized as outdated. The chapter then studies occupation literature.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document