Edwin Denby’s Objectivist Modernism and the New York School

Whereas chapter 2 examines the emergence of a social modernist theory of ballet in the 1930s, chapter 3 illustrates a new ballet modernism arising in the 1940s through the contributions of Edwin Denby. Denby’s primary innovation to American ballet theory was to reassign dance meaning from social or political themes to the intrinsic properties of the movement itself. This chapter takes a biographical approach to Denby’s criticism to situate this theoretical shift in ballet within the interdisciplinary New York School, in which he was extensively involved, and in which similar challenges to the relation of art and politics were being made by painters, photographers, and composers. This chapter demonstrates that Denby was the architect of a new objectivist theory of dance, which relocates the emergence of objectivism to a much earlier point in dance history, and in a different genre, than previously acknowledged. More than any other critic, Denby was responsible for connecting this objectivist theory of dance to Balanchine’s American neoclassicism, formulating the set of aesthetic principles that still shapes our idea of American ballet to date.

Defining Investment Under the ICSID Convention and BITs: Of Ordinary Meaning, Telos, and Beyond

A number of commentators, including Michael Hwang and Jennifer Fong who were featured in a recent issue of this journal,1 have contributed to an ongoing debate about the definition of investment by expressing their support for an objectivist theory or the “outer limits” approach as advocated inSalini v. Morocco.However, this article argues that neither theSalinitest nor the rival subjectivist theory can offer an internally consistent and viable legal framework for determining the existence of an investment. After critically examining existing approaches to defining investments in arbitral practice, international investment treaties, European Union (EU) law, and international trade law, the article considers the role of ordinary and effective interpretation and a telos behind investment treaty instruments in coining a meaningful definition.

The fine-tuning argument: the Bayesian version

This paper considers the Bayesian form of the fine-tuning argument as advanced by Richard Swinburne. An expository section aims to identify the precise character of the argument, and three lines of objection are then advanced. The first of these holds that there is an inconsistency in Swinburne's procedure, the second that his argument has an unacceptable dependence on an objectivist theory of value, the third that his method is powerless to single out traditional theism from a vast number of competitors. In the final section of the paper the fine-tuning argument is considered, not now as self-standing, but as one of a number of theistic arguments taken together and applied in the manner of the final chapter of Swinburne's The Existence of God. It is argued that points already made also block the way for this line of thought.

Philosophy in France

It need occasion no surprise that Recherche de la Liberté by Daniel Christoff (P.U.F.) 1957, 220 pp., is devoted to philosophy of value. Freedom, one wants to say in this sort of context, is the attribute or even the essence of, for example, Sartre's pour soi; but since such a description would be, in existentialist language, a contradiction in terms, freedom had better be identified with the means whereby the dynamic self escapes from its essence, as Sartre would say. Because of this dynamic role of freedom in Continental philosophy it is natural that M. Christoff should be happier talking of liberation than of liberty. The word liberation refers to the process of value-making, and perhaps it is chosen in order that such question-begging terms as “creation of values” may be avoided. Question-begging because, although M. Christoff is by no means an exponent of the “objectivist” theory of values, he does not play down the importance of the concept in the interest of what is strictly never done but always in process of being done. He denies that rational thinking is “an immobile system of concepts”, and sees an alternation (presumably “dialectical”) of conceptualization and valuation as the activity of mind. It is not only in his view of liberty as liberation that M. Christoff reminds one of Lavelle and Gabriel Marcel, but also in his particular brand of altruism. He seems to see Sartre's point of view about “others” without sharing it.