People’s notorious habits of disposal appear to have put them well on the way to making the earth inhospitable to life. But their relation to rejectamenta includes much more than shedding and ...tossing. Trash Talks offers a portrait of the intimate ties people maintain with the dumped and discarded. Scavenging with abandon from sundry sources, including Veblen, Darwin, Freud, Plato, Buddha, Milton, and Locke, the book explores the extent to which people rely on trash and waste to make sense of their lives and to shape connections with others. Examples are deliriously rich: Some people use others’ rubbish to gain otherwise hard-to-get information about them. Individuals trumpet wastefulness to proclaim superior social standing. They appear to think that there is a “right” relation to trash and that not having it betrays flaws in one’s character or very being. Some of us are intrigued by or in distress over the idea that evolution is a prodigiously wasteful process. In the ubiquitous heaps of garbage and trash, some see consequences of the clamorous dissatisfaction so worrisome to ancient sages, while others find confirmation of a flourishing consumer economy. People count on there being telling differences between those who know waste when they see it and those who don’t. While most may want to shove debris and detritus out of sight, many of their most impassioned projects involve keeping them resolutely in mind.
Expression and Extended Cognition COCHRANE, TOM
The Journal of aesthetics and art criticism,
09/2008, Letnik:
66, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Cochrane argues that, while it is certainly possible for a musical work to express emotions independent of those of the composer or performer, there is an extremely intimate connection between the ...emotional content of a piece of music and the emotional state of the producer of that music. He asserts that music can potentially play the same role as bodily changes in affecting one's emotional state.
Twelve Conceptions of Imagination STEVENSON, Leslie
The British journal of aesthetics,
07/2003, Letnik:
43, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
(1) The ability to think of something not presently perceived, but spatio‐temporally real. (2) The ability to think of whatever one acknowledges as possible in the spatio‐temporal world. (3) The ...liability to think of something that the subject believes to be real, but which is not. (4) The ability to think of things that one conceives of as fictional. (5) The ability to entertain mental images. (6) The ability to think of anything at all. (7) The non‐rational operations of the mind, that is, those explicable in terms of causes rather than reasons. (8) The ability to form perceptual beliefs about public objects in space and time. (9) The ability to sensuously appreciate works of art or objects of natural beauty without classifying them under concepts or thinking of them as useful. (10) The ability to create works of art that encourage such sensuous appreciation. (11) The ability to appreciate things that are expressive or revelatory of the meaning of human life. (12) The ability to create works of art that express something deep about the meaning of life.
Spackman seeks to characterize more carefully what might be meant by the claim that expressive qualities are ineffable. Central to his overall argument is the claim that expressive qualities are, as ...the traditional theorists maintained, fine-grained. He offers reasons why descriptive ineffability should be regarded as a source of value in the arts.
Music as Narrative and Music as Drama Levinson, Jerrold
Mind & language,
September 2004, Letnik:
19, Številka:
4
Journal Article, Conference Proceeding
Recenzirano
: In this paper I address the issue of narrativity in music. The central question is the extent to which pure instrumental music in the classical tradition can or should be understood as narrative, ...that is, as narrating a story of some kind. I am interested in the varying potential and aptness for narrative construal of different sorts of instrumental music, and in what the content of such narratives might plausibly be thought to be. But ultimately I explore, at greater length, an alternative way of construing musical process, namely, as dramatic rather than narrative in nature, following the lead of two musicologists, Anthony Newcomb and Fred Maus. After a comparison of the respective merits of narrative and dramatic construals of music, the paper concludes with an illustrative reading, in dramatic mode, of part of the opening movement of Schubert's Piano Sonata in A minor, D. 845.
Although few philosophers agree about what it is for something to be defined as art, most, if not all, agree on one thing: art must be in some sense intention-dependent. Art and Art-Attempts is about ...taking intention-dependence seriously as a substantive necessary condition for being art. Artworks are the products of the attempts (goal-oriented intention-directed activities) in which we engage, and these attempts not only succeed or fail but have products that reflect that success or failure. It is not just that an artwork must be the product of intentional action but rather that an artwork must be the product of a successful art-attempt—an attempt with success conditions that if satisfied entail satisfaction of the conditions for being art (whatever those may be). To capture a substantive (non-trivial) sense in which art must be intention-dependent requires trading mere intention-dependence for a substantive attempt-dependence. What follows from art’s intention-dependence being so reframed is a unified, systematic, and productive framework for philosophical enquiry into the nature of art and its principal relata. Art and Art-Attempts aims neither to propose nor to defend any particular, precise answer to the question ‘What is art?’ Instead, Art and Art-Attempts shows the ways in which taking intention-dependence seriously as a substantive necessary condition for being art can be profoundly revelatory, and perhaps even radically revisionary, as to the scope and limits of what any particular, precise answer to such a question could viably be.
PHILOSOPHER HENRI BERGSON HAS written at length about the creative process of artists and poets: the poet starts from "a fuller view of reality" than that of most people and then "plumbs the depths ...of his own nature in so powerful an effort of inner observation that he lays hold of the potential in the real, and takes up what nature has left as a mere outline or sketch in his soul in order to make of it a finished work of art. ...we can approach literature itself philosophically and become truly Bergsonian readers, who enter a work of literature without shedding the past and, instead, utilize that past toward a creative reading experience.
"Tortured by a longing for fame, wasting his days in argument, believing in countless ridiculous ideas, in systems, in criticisms, in the importance of the codification or reform of art, he Pellerin ...had reached the age of fifty without producing anything but sketches" (SE, p. 48). Another distraction is his servicing politics with art: glorifying the Revolution with a painting entitled The Genius of the Revolution (SE, p. 96), or another painting that "showed the Republic, or Progress, or Civilization, in the form of Christ driving a locomotive through a virgin forest.
The Appeal of the Mystery GOLDMAN, ALAN H.
The Journal of aesthetics and art criticism,
08/2011, Letnik:
69, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
A crucial test for a theory of aesthetic value is its ability to explain the value of particular works, or better kinds of works, especially those that have been very widely appreciated over a ...significant course of time. In music, for example, the theory should be able to explain the wide use and appeal throughout the classical and romantic eras of the sonata-allegro form for large scale movements. In literature, the most widely read genre for more than a century has been the mystery or detective novel, and its appeal calls for explanation as well if we are to understand the nature of literary aesthetic value. My aim in this article is to explain the source of appeal of such fiction, which lies in the kind of aesthetic or literary value the better examples provide. The explanation will lend further support to the theory of aesthetic value that I have previously defended.
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