PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF GESTALT THEORY (1948)

This concluding chapter briefly turns to Joyce’s final work, Finnegans Wake (1939). Joyce’s cacophonous ‘book of the dark’, with its many references to cinema, forms the centre of a discussion of the emergence of sound film. The importance of touch in both silent and sound film is restated through reference to the film criticism of Bryher, Dorothy Richardson, and Gertrude Stein, and Chaplin’s City Lights (1931), a late silent film focusing on Chaplin’s relationship with a blind flower-seller. The complex interrelationship between sound and image in both film and Finnegans Wake is contemplated through gestalt theory and multi-perspectival ‘figure–ground images’. The chapter concludes by returning to Ulysses, to consider the never-produced Reisman–Zukofsky screenplay and the ways in which the film would, and would not, have affirmed a phenomenological reading of Joyce’s text.

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Tactile Vision and Enworlded Being

10.1093/oso/9780198768913.003.0005 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Cleo Hanaway-Oakley

Keyword(s):

The Self ◽

The Other ◽

Fin De Siecle ◽

Gestalt Theory ◽

Fin De Siècle ◽

Phenomenal Field ◽

The Relationship

Stephen’s musings on the pre-cinematic ‘stereoscope’ are discussed in relation to Bloom’s contemplation of parallax and his mention of the ‘Mutoscope’. The three-dimensionality, tangibility, and tactility of stereoscopic perception is analysed alongside Bloom’s and Gerty’s encounter in ‘Nausicaa’ and the Merleau-Pontian concepts of ‘flesh’ and ‘intercorporeity’. The bodily effects of projected cinema—achieved through virtual film worlds, virtual film bodies, and the intercorporeity of film and spectator—are discussed through reference to panorama, phantom ride, and crash films. The dizzying effects of some of these films are compared to the vertiginous nature of the ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode of Ulysses; these cinematic and literary vestibular disturbances are elucidated through gestalt theory and the phenomenological concepts of ‘intention’, ‘attention’, and the ‘phenomenal field’. Finally, the relationship between the self and the other is considered, through a discussion of cinematic mirroring in Ulysses and in Mitchell and Kenyon’s fin de siècle Living Dublin films.

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Conceptual Analysis Rebooted

10.1093/oso/9780198807520.003.0008 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Edouard Machery

Keyword(s):

Experimental Method ◽

Conceptual Analysis ◽

Philosophical Tradition ◽

Traditional Use ◽

Philosophical Significance ◽

Conceptual Engineering ◽

Method Of Cases

Chapter 7 proposes a new, naturalistic characterization of conceptual analysis, defends its philosophical significance, and shows that usual concerns with conceptual analysis do not apply to this revamped version. So understood, conceptual analysis encompasses both a descriptive project and a normative project, similar to explication or to conceptual engineering. Chapter 7 also defends the philosophical significance of this novel form of conceptual analysis and its continuity with the role of conceptual analysis in the philosophical tradition. Furthermore, naturalized conceptual analysis often requires empirical tools to be pursued successfully, and an experimental method of cases 2.0 should often replace the traditional use of cases in philosophy.

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Legal Positivism about the Artifact Law

10.1093/oso/9780198821977.003.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Brian Leiter

Keyword(s):

Natural Kind ◽

Legal Positivism ◽

Philosophical Significance

This chapter defends legal positivism against the backdrop of the assumption that law is an artifact, not a natural kind, and that it is an artifact whose nature does not depend on the intentions of a creator. It explores in more detail the philosophical significance of that fact, given the growing interest in that topic as reflected in this volume and offers a synoptic explanation of what makes that view of the nature of law so plausible. The chapter goes on to argue that even within the constraint imposed by the metaphysics of what law is, positivism satisfies the most important theoretical desiderata, including locating law within a naturalistic worldview.

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Spinoza’s Afterlife in Judaism and the Task of Modern Jewish Philosophy

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195335828.013.25 ◽

2015 ◽

Author(s):

Michael L. Morgan

Keyword(s):

Emmanuel Levinas ◽

Leo Strauss ◽

Philosophical Significance ◽

Jewish Philosophy ◽

Jewish Intellectuals

This article examines Baruch Spinoza’s legacy within Judaism and his impact on modern Jewish philosophy. It first considers some of the Jewish intellectuals and leaders who have found inspiration or provocation in Spinoza, and then turns to Spinozism in Judaism and the philosophical significance of Spinoza’s reception among the Jews. It then explores the ways in which Spinoza has become a symbol of philosophical tendencies in Jewish self-understanding and concludes by discussing how Spinoza’s symbolic presence signals a dialectic in modern Jewish philosophy concerning various interpretations of Jewish existence and their interaction. More specifically, it looks at three Jewish philosophers who have at one time or another taken an interest in Spinoza, with emphasis on their various responses to him: Leo Strauss, Emil Fackenheim, and Emmanuel Levinas.

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