scholarly journals De gustibus est disputandum: An empirical investigation of the folk concept of aesthetic taste

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Constant Bonard ◽  
Florian Cova ◽  
Steve Humbert-Droz

Past research on folk aesthetics has suggested that most people are subjectivists when it comes to aesthetic judgment. However, most people also make a distinction between good and bad aesthetic taste. To understand the extent to which these two observations conflict with one another, we need a better understanding of people's everyday concept of aesthetic taste. In this paper, we present the results of a study in which participants drawn from a representative sample of the US population were asked whether they usually distinguish between good and bad taste, how they define them, and whether aesthetic taste can be improved. Those who answered positively to the first question were asked to provide their definition of good and bad taste, while those who answered positively to the third question were asked to detail by what means taste can be improved. Our results suggest that most people distinguish between good and bad taste, and think taste can be improved. People's definitions of good and bad taste were varied, and were torn between very subjectivist conceptions of taste and others that lent themselves to a more objectivist interpretation. Overall, our results suggest that the tension Hume observed in conceptions of aesthetic taste is still present today.

2002 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 139-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos A. Duarte-Herrera

The US-Mexico border has been defined as a periphery, as a transborder social system, and more currently, as a station in transnational circuits. The two first definitions presuppose the strongly criticized concepts of region and cultural area. The third definition shares, along with the other two definitions, the positivist epistemological supposition that the border is a specific entity that can be known and experienced as such by any observer, no matter their social site. This paper is to support the definition of the border as a hyperreality constituted by speeches, practices, and experiences of the different social actors. From this posture, the image of the border as a formal geopolitical division is interpreted as a sustained image and reproduced by government agencies. Likewise, this writing is to support the documentation and promotion of alternative images constructed and reproduced by social actors from different power sites.


2018 ◽  
pp. 4-7
Author(s):  
S. I. Zenko

The article raises the problem of classification of the concepts of computer science and informatics studied at secondary school. The efficiency of creation of techniques of training of pupils in these concepts depends on its solution. The author proposes to consider classifications of the concepts of school informatics from four positions: on the cross-subject basis, the content lines of the educational subject "Informatics", the logical and structural interrelations and interactions of the studied concepts, the etymology of foreign-language and translated words in the definition of the concepts of informatics. As a result of the first classification general and special concepts are allocated; the second classification — inter-content and intra-content concepts; the third classification — stable (steady), expanding, key and auxiliary concepts; the fourth classification — concepts-nouns, conceptsverbs, concepts-adjectives and concepts — combinations of parts of speech.


Author(s):  
Volker Scheid

This chapter explores the articulations that have emerged over the last half century between various types of holism, Chinese medicine and systems biology. Given the discipline’s historical attachments to a definition of ‘medicine’ that rather narrowly refers to biomedicine as developed in Europe and the US from the eighteenth century onwards, the medical humanities are not the most obvious starting point for such an inquiry. At the same time, they do offer one advantage over neighbouring disciplines like medical history, anthropology or science and technology studies for someone like myself, a clinician as well as a historian and anthropologist: their strong commitment to the objective of facilitating better medical practice. This promise furthermore links to the wider project of critique, which, in Max Horkheimer’s definition of the term, aims at change and emancipation in order ‘to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them’. If we take the critical medical humanities as explicitly affirming this shared objective and responsibility, extending the discipline’s traditional gaze is not a burden but becomes, in fact, an obligation.


2011 ◽  
pp. 143-147
Author(s):  
L. G. Naumova ◽  
V. B. Martynenko ◽  
S. M. Yamalov

Date of «birth» of phytosociology (phytocenology) is considered to be 1910, when at the third International Botanical Congress in Brussels adopted the definition of plant association in the wording Including Flaó and K. Schröter (Flahault, Schröter, 1910; Alexandrov, 1969). The centenary of this momentous event in the history of phytocenology devoted to the 46th edition of the Yearbook «Braun-Blanquetia», which began to emerge in 1984 in Camerino (Italy) and it has a task to publish large geobotanical works. During the years of the publication of the Yearbook on its pages were published twice work of the Russian scientists — «The steppes of Mongolia» (Z. V. Karamysheva, V. N. Khramtsov. Vol. 17. 1995), and «Classification of continental hemiboreal forests of Northern Asia» (N. B. Ermakov in collaboration with English colleagues and J. Dring, J. Rodwell. Vol. 28. 2000).


Author(s):  
Al-KhaierAmer Abdul Kareem
Keyword(s):  

Abstract The research started with an introduction containing the statement of the problem. The study was divided into four parts: a preamble and three sections. The preamble involved a definition of the metaphorical image and its importance. The first section covered the sources of the metaphorical image, the second dealt with the types of the metaphorical image, and the third discussed the functions of metaphorical representation as well as the main tools that contributed to the construction and formation of the metaphorical image. Finally, the study ended with a conclusion comprising the most significant findings of this research. keyword: metaphorical image, AL-Sharif Al-Radi.


Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 377-379
Author(s):  
Kriszta Kotsis

Late antique and early medieval graphic signs have traditionally been studied by narrowly focused specialists leading to the fragmentation and decontextualization of this important body of material. Therefore, the volume aims “to deepen interdisciplinary research on graphic signs” (7) of the third through tenth centuries, with contributions from archaeologists, historians, art historians, a philologist, and a paleographer. Ildar Garipzanov’s introduction defines the central terms (sign, symbol, graphicacy), calls for supplanting the text-image binary with “the concept of the visual-written continuum” (15), and argues that graphicacy was central to visual communication in this period. He emphasizes the agency of graphic signs and notes that their study can amplify our understanding of the definition of personal and group identity, the articulation of power, authority, and religious affiliation, and communication with the supernatural sphere.


Author(s):  
Anatoly S. Kuprin ◽  
Galina I. Danilina

The purpose of this study is the analysis of limit situation in the narrative of war. The material of the study is the novel of Daniil Granin “My Lieutenant” and related texts. In the first part of the paper, the authors explore existing approaches to the term “limit situation” and similar concepts into scientific and philosophical traditions; limits of its applicability in literary studies and its relation to the categories of “narrative instances” and “event”. Proposed a literary-theoretical definition of the limit situation, which can be used in the analysis of fiction texts. Existing approaches to the examination of the situation of war are analyzed: philosophical-existential, psychoanalytic, sociological, literary. In the second part of the paper, the authors propose their method for analyzing limit situations in texts about war, which basis on existing approaches and preserves the text-centric principle of studying the structure of the story. Two interrelated areas of research have been identified: the study of war as a continuous limit situation in the intertextual aspect (the discourse of war); the study of limit situations (death, suffering, guilt, accident) in the narrative of war as part of a specific text. In the third part of the scientific work,the analysis of war as a continuous limit situation results in the study of the concept of “limit” (border) in a fiction text. The role of “limit” (border) concept in the texts about the war is studied, the possible types of limits in the discourse of war are examined. Limit situations in the narrative of war are analyzed on the basis of the novel “My Lieutenant” by Daniil Granin. A review of journalistic and scientific works about the novel revealed both the continuity and the differences between the novel and the “lieutenant” prose of the 20th century. An analysis of the limit situations in the novel revealed their key position in the narrative. These situations are independent of the fiction time, of the fluctuation of the point of view’; the function of the abstract author is to build the narrative as a “directive” immersion of the hero and narrator in these situations.


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (5) ◽  
pp. 135-150

The springboard for this essay is the author’s encounter with the feeling of horror and her attempts to understand what place horror has in philosophy. The inquiry relies upon Leonid Lipavsky’s “Investigation of Horror” and on various textual plunges into the fanged and clawed (and possibly noumenal) abyss of Nick Land’s work. Various experiences of horror are examined in order to build something of a typology, while also distilling the elements characteristic of the experience of horror in general. The essay’s overall hypothesis is that horror arises from a disruption of the usual ways of determining the boundaries between external things and the self, and this leads to a distinction between three subtypes of horror. In the first subtype, horror begins with the indeterminacy at the boundaries of things, a confrontation with something that defeats attempts to define it and thereby calls into question the definition of the self. In the second subtype, horror springs from the inability to determine one’s own boundaries, a process opposed by the crushing determinacy of the world. In the third subtype, horror unfolds by means of a substitution of one determinacy by another which is unexpected and ungrounded. In all three subtypes of horror, the disturbance of determinacy deprives the subject, the thinking entity, of its customary foundation for thought, and even of an explanation of how that foundation was lost; at times this can lead to impairment of the perception of time and space. Understood this way, horror comes within a hair’s breadth of madness - and may well cross over into it.


Author(s):  
Brian E. Daley, SJ

The Council of Chalcedon’s definition of the terms in which Nicene orthodoxy should conceive of Christ’s person remained controversial. Leontius of Byzantium argued for the correctness of the Council’s formulation, especially against the arguments of Severus of Antioch, but suggested that more than academic issues were at stake: the debate concerned the lived, permanently dialectical unity between God and humanity. In the mid-seventh century, imperially sponsored efforts to lessen the perceived impact of Chalcedonian language by stressing that Christ’s two natures were activated by “a single, theandric energy,” also remained without effect: largely because of the monk Maximus “the Confessor”, who argued that two complete spheres of activity and two wills remained evident in Christ’s life. Maximus’s position was ratified at the Lateran Synod and at the Third Council of Constantinople. The eighth-century Palestinian monk John of Damascus incorporated these arguments into his own influential synthesis of orthodox theology.


Author(s):  
James E. Baker

This article discusses covert action within the context of the U.S. law. The first section describes the main elements of the U.S. legal regime, including the definition of covert action and the “traditional activity” exceptions, the elements of a covert action finding, and the thresholds and requirements for congressional notification. The second section describes some of the significant limitations on the conduct of covert action. The third section discusses the nature of executive branch legal practice in this area of the law. And the last section draws conclusions about the role of national security law within the context of covert action.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document