The Still Life of Objects – Heidegger, Schapiro, and Derrida reconsidered

2015 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-102
Author(s):  
KErstin Thomas

Kerstin Thomas revaluates the famous dispute between Martin Heidegger, Meyer Schapiro, and Jacques Derrida, concerning a painting of shoes by Vincent Van Gogh. The starting point for this dispute was the description and analysis of things and artworks developed in his essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art”. In discussing Heidegger’s account, the art historian Meyer Schapiro’s main point of critique concerned Heidegger’s claim that the artwork reveals the truth of equipment in depicting shoes of a peasant woman and thereby showing her world. Schapiro sees a striking paradox in Heidegger’s claim for truth, based on a specific object in a specific artwork while at the same time following a rather metaphysical idea of the artwork. Kerstin Thomas proposes an interpretation, which exceeds the common confrontation of philosophy versus art history by focussing on the respective notion of facticity at stake in the theoretical accounts of both thinkers. Schapiro accuses Heidegger of a lack of concreteness, which he sees as the basis for every truth claim on objects. Thomas understands Schapiro’s objections as motivated by this demand for a facticity, which not only includes the work of art, but also investigator in his concrete historical perspective. Truth claims under such conditions of facticity are always relative to historical knowledge, and open to critical intervention and therefore necessarily contingent. Following Thomas, Schapiro’s critique shows that despite his intention of giving the work of art back its autonomy, Heidegger could be accused of achieving quite the opposite: through the abstraction of the concrete, the factual, and the given to the type, he actually sets the self and the realm of knowledge of the creator as absolute and not the object of his knowledge. Instead, she argues for a revaluation of Schapiro’s position with recognition of the arbitrariness of the artwork, by introducing the notion of factuality as formulated by Quentin Meillassoux. Understood as exchange between artist and object in its concrete material quality as well as with the beholder, the truth of painting could only be shown as radically contingent. Thomas argues that the critical intervention of Derrida who discusses both positions anew is exactly motivated by a recognition of the contingent character of object, artwork and interpretation. His deconstructive analysis can be understood as recognition of the dynamic character of things and hence this could be shown with Meillassoux to be exactly its character of facticity – or factuality.

Author(s):  
Lubos SMUTKA ◽  
Irena BENEŠOVÁ ◽  
Patrik ROVNÝ ◽  
Renata MATYSIK-PEJAS

Sugar is one of the most important elements in human nutrition. The Common Market Organisation for sugar has been a subject of considerable debate since its establishment in 1968. The European agricultural market has been criticized for its heavy regulations and subsidization. The sugar market is one of the most regulated ones; however, this will change radically in 2017 when the current system of production quotas will end. The current EU sugar market changed is structure during the last several decades. The significant number of companies left the market and EU internal sugar market became more concentrated. The aim of this paper is presentation characteristics of sugar market with respect to the supposed market failure – reduction in competition. The analysis also identifies the main drivers and determinants of the EU especially quota sugar market. In relation to paper’s aim the following results are important. The present conditions of the European sugar market have led to market failure when nearly 75 % (10 million tonnes) of the quota is controlled by five multinational companies only. These multinational alliances (especially German and French one) are also taking control over the production capacities of their subsidiaries. In most countries, this causes serious problems as the given quota is controlled by one or two producers only. This is a significant indicator of market imperfection. The quota system cannot overcome the problem of production quotas on the one hand and the demand on the other; furthermore, it also leads to economic inefficiency. The current EU sugar market is under the control of only Sudzucker, Nordzucker, Pfeifer and Langen, Tereos and ABF.


2020 ◽  
pp. 123-150
Author(s):  
Julia Saviello

Smell and taste – of the five senses these are the two most strongly stimulated by smoking tobacco. The article presents an in-depth analysis of the reflection of both these forms of sensory perception in textual and visual sources concerning the early consumption of the herb. In a first step, tobacco’s changing reception, first as medicine and then as stimulant, is traced through the years of its increasing distribution in Europe, starting in the middle of the 16th century. As this overview reveals, at that time the still little known substance gave rise to new forms of sense perception. Following recent studies on smell and gustation, which have stressed the need to take into account the interactions between these senses, the article probes the manifold stimulation of the senses by tobacco with reference to allegorical representations and genre scenes addressing the five senses. The smoking of tobacco was thematized in both of these art forms as a means of visualizing either smell or taste. Yet, these depictions show no indication of any deliberate engagement with the exchange of sense data between mouth and nose. The question posed at the end of this paper is whether this holds true also for early smoker’s still lifes. In the so-called toebakjes or rookertjes, a subgenre of stilllife painting that, like tobacco, was still a novelty at the beginning of the 17th century, various smoking paraphernalia – such as rolled or cut tobacco, pipes and tins – are arrayed with various kinds of foods and drinks. Finally, the article addresses a selection of such smoker’s still lifes, using the toebakje by Pieter Claesz., probably the first of its kind, as a starting point and the work by Georg Flegel as a comparative example. Through their selection of objects, both offer a complex image of how tobacco engages different senses.


Author(s):  
Teresa Estañ ◽  
Natividad Llorca ◽  
Ricardo Martínez ◽  
Joaquín Sánchez-Soriano

AbstractIn this paper we study the class of claims problems where the amount to be divided is perfectly divisible and claims are made on indivisible units of several items. Each item has a price, and the available amount falls short to be able to cover all the claims at the given prices. We propose several properties that may be of interest in this particular framework. These properties represent the common principles of fairness, efficiency, and non-manipulability by merging or splitting. Efficiency is our focal principle, which is formalized by means of two axioms: non-wastefulness and Pareto efficiency. We show that some combinations of the properties we consider are compatible, others are not.


Gesture ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Gerwing ◽  
Janet Bavelas

Hand gestures in face-to-face dialogue are symbolic acts, integrated with speech. Little is known about the factors that determine the physical form of these gestures. When the gesture depicts a previous nonsymbolic action, it obviously resembles this action; however, such gestures are not only noticeably different from the original action but, when they occur in a series, are different from each other. This paper presents an experiment with two separate analyses (one quantitative, one qualitative) testing the hypothesis that the immediate communicative function is a determinant of the symbolic form of the gesture. First, we manipulated whether the speaker was describing the previous action to an addressee who had done the same actions and therefore shared common ground or to one who had done different actions and therefore did not share common ground. The common ground gestures were judged to be significantly less complex, precise, or informative than the latter, a finding similar to the effects of common ground on words. In the qualitative analysis, we used the given versus new principle to analyze a series of gestures about the same actions by the same speaker. The speaker emphasized the new information in each gesture by making it larger, clearer, etc. When this information became given, a gesture for the same action became smaller or less precise, which is similar to findings for given versus new information in words. Thus the immediate communicative function (e.g., to convey information that is common ground or that is new) played a major role in determining the physical form of the gestures.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (78) ◽  
pp. 63-74
Author(s):  
Janne Lindqvist

Our understanding of Aristotle’s Rhetoric is still incomplete and distorted. This is especially true concerning his analysis of the specific topics of pathos that make up a significant part of the second book of the text. Even though this part of the text is almost twice as long as the analysis of the common topics, the discussion has attracted surprisingly small scholarly interest, at least as viewed as an example of a list of topics, as the researchers that have aspired to an understanding of “the topics” as such have almost all ignored this part of the text. The purpose of this essay is to lay out the grounds for such a study. The result of the essay is firstly a distinction between two kinds of specific topics, here somewhat ponderously labeled schematic and concrete specific topics. With these as a starting point it is possible to make a further distinction between three general specific topics here named subject, stimulus and agent. These three schematic topics could, it is finally suggested, be as useful in the 21:st century as they were in an Athens of the 4th century BCE


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 116-145
Author(s):  
Paula Giliker

Abstract In this paper, I will examine the extent to which the common law of tort in England and Wales imposes a duty to prevent harm on public authorities and private individuals. As will be seen, the starting point for the common law is that such liability should, in both cases, be regarded as exceptional. This must, however, be weighed against duties to prevent harm that arise under the torts of negligence and breach of statutory duty. Public authorities may also face claims that their failure to prevent harm is in breach of ECHR arts 2 or 3. While the law is complex, this paper identifies three key arguments that explain the current legal position at common law, namely that: (i) tort law should treat private and public parties alike: (ii) human rights claims should be treated as distinct from private law claims and (iii) libertarian concerns signify that a duty to prevent harm should be exceptional and needs to be justified. While these arguments provide both an explanation of and a justification for the current law, this article questions to what extent the treatment of public authority liability may be regarded as unduly harsh on vulnerable claimants.


2018 ◽  
Vol 157 ◽  
pp. 07010
Author(s):  
Beáta Pecušová ◽  
Mariana Pajtášová ◽  
Zuzana Mičicová ◽  
Darina Ondrušová ◽  
Andrea Feriancová ◽  
...  

The given paper deals with the study of the properties of clay minerals, namely montmorillonite and moreover, it is focused on effect of these clay minerals on the curing characteristics of the polymer blends and the physical-mechanical properties of prepared vulcanizates. Montmorillonite is a major clay mineral which has a wide application in many industrial branches. It belongs to the group of dioctahedral smectite minerals with structural type in the ratio of 2:1. Characteristics of prepared modified and organomodified clay minerals are based on sulphur vulcanisation accelerators which are used for the preparation of real polymer blend where they represent a partial replacement of the common carbon black filler and then, the effect on the curing characteristics of polymer blends as well as physical-mechanical properties of the prepared vulcanizates are investigated. The results exhibit that the clay-based filler (modified and organomodified clay minerals) can be used as a partial replacement while the quality of the prepared blends is preserved.


Utilitas ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. J. Kelly

The argument of this paper is part of a general defence of the claim that Bentham's moral theory embodies a utilitarian theory of distributive justice, which is developed in his Civil Law writings. Whereas it is a commonplace of recent revisionist scholarship to argue that J. S. Mill had a developed utilitarian theory of justice, few scholars regard Bentham as having a theory of justice, let alone one that rivals in sophistication that of Mill. Indeed, Gerald J. Postema in his bookBentham and the Common Law Tradition, argues that Bentham had no substantial concern with the concept of justice, and that what analysis of the concept there is in Bentham's thought is unlike the utilitarian theory of justice to be found in chapter five of J. S. Mill'sUtilitarianismAlthough Postema's interpretation is not the only one that will be addressed in this paper, it serves as an important starting point for any rival interpretation of Bentham's ethical theory for two reasons. Firstly, it is the most comprehensive and most penetrating discussion of Bentham's utilitarian theory, drawing as it does on a wide variety of published and unpublished materials written throughout Bentham's career. Secondly, it is interesting in this particular context because the contrast that Postema draws between Bentham's and Mill's theories of justice depends upon a particular reading of Mill's theory of justice and utility which is derived from recent scholarship and which is by no means uncontroversial. As part of the defence of the claim that Bentham had a sophisticated theory of distributive justice, it will be argued in this paper that the contrast drawn between Bentham and Mill does not stand up to careful scrutiny, for insofar as Mill's theory of justice can be consistently defended it is not significantly different from the utilitarian strategy that Bentham employed for incorporating considerations of distributive justice within his theory. This is not to claim that there are not significant differences between the theories of justice of Bentham and J. S. Mill, but it is to claim that whatever technical differences exist between their theories, both writers saw the need to incorporate the concept of justice within utilitarianism. Therefore, rather than showing that Mill is an interesting thinker to the extent that he abandons his early Benthamism, by demonstrating how close Mill's theory of utility and justice is to that of Bentham, it will be possible to argue that Bentham employed a sophisticated and subtle utilitarian theory that was responsive to the sort of problems which occupied Mill a generation later.


2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 91-96
Author(s):  
Nikolay Valeryevich Belenov

This article attempts to localize the fortresses of the Volga Bulgars (first of all, fortresses Marj and Tehshu) known from medieval authors reportedly Najib Hamadani and Ahmed at-Tusi. In the course of solving this problem the question of these authors data reliability is raised, as well as the common source of this information borrowing. There is a good reason to see this in the source known among the Arab-Persian historical and geographical medieval manuscripts as Rizal by Ahmed ibn Fadlan, the Secretary of Abbasid embassy to the Volga Bulgars Elteber Almush, who visited the Volga in 922. This fact explains the absence of Bulgarian cities known from other sources in the given lists as well as the question of uniqueness of Hamadani and at-Tusis information. On the basis of the sources synthesis, place-and folklore studies, the article proposes some options for localization of some of these forts and etymology options of Bulgarian oikonyms mentioned in the papers by the considered authors. The author proves the importance of place names data at the present stage of Bulgar study research, especially of Volga Bulgaria historical geography as well as further studies are planned.


2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 533-544
Author(s):  
Marija Velinov

This paper argues that there is continuity in Foucault?s thought, as opposed to the common division of his work into three phases, each marking a distinct field of research - discourse, power, subject. The idea is that there are no radical turns in his work that justify this division; rather, there is a shift of focus: all crucial concepts are present (more or less [in]explicitly) in all periods of his thought and in all of his undoubtedly differently-toned and oriented works. This is shown through examining the characteristics of archaeology and genealogy, their relation, as well as the relation of discursive practices and strategies of power to knowledge. The retrospective and (re)interpretation intend to shed light on the constant interplay between concepts that demonstrate continuity in Foucault?s thought. The viewpoint, based in the integrity of Foucault?s work, offers a better starting point for understanding certain aspects of his theories.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document