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1. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Ronel Alberti da Rosa I Hear Dead People: Or How the Teoria degli Affetti Contributed to the Humanistic Representation of Dead and Living Characters in the Early Italian Opera
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The opera Orfeo, una favola in musica (1607) from Claudio Monteverdi, marked a rupture with the metaphysical aesthetics from Renaissance. Thanks to the theoretical achievements from Galilei and Caccini, the early Italian opera included innovative elements such as a “certain noble negligence” by singing – as an expression of truth in music – and the acceptance of dissonance as a strengthening element of both pathetic and human. In its beginning the musical drama used to depict spirits and dead people in order to distinguish two realms of the cosmos: that from the living ones and that from the passed away. As a result the new characterizations proved to be largely more convincing than the previous attempts of dramatizing afterlife, mostly sacred music with episodes of lives of saints or the Christian Passion. This paper aims to examine the theoretical and aesthetical premises that enabled a shift in the form to depict musically the death in the beginning 17th century. The core query is why it was necessary to change from a metaphysical aes­thetical paradigm to another one, which was denoted by the rhetorical and the pathetical as well. I hope to demonstrate that the defeat of melody by the rhetoric in the struggle for the key role in the singing theater inaugurated a musical new era marked by an aestheticization of death and of dying.
2. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Tiziana Andina An Ontology for the Works of Art
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“What is art?” All in all it sounds like a fairly trivial question: art is so ingrained in our world that intuitively we believe everyone is able to answer it. If we look at this question closely, however, we realize that things are not so simple. Among the first who tried to clarify the issue was Plato, one of the most ardent Western philosophers for definitions. In the 10th book of the Republic he drew a long lasting distinction: the objects that make up our universe are divided among the most perfect ones, the ideas, after which everything is shaped, the less perfect ones, the material things, which are modeled after the ideas, and at the bottom of the hierarchy there are the works of art, which are more flawed, imperfect, useless and even dangerous than material things in general. It has been written that the history of philosophy is ‘nothing but a series of footnotes to Plato’. As far as the philosophy of art is concerned that is certainly true until the 20th century, when - at least since Modernism - the elegant Platonic thesis began to show signs of aging and it was no longer able to provide a good answer to the question with which we began. The talk develops the idea that the works of art are a kind of higher order objects; in particular, they are semantics vehicles, namely objects that carry meanings, which are the product of human representations.
3. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Adil Asadov Manifestation of Realized and Unrealized Essence: Beauty and Ugliness
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The world becomes beautiful when it is built in accordance with its essence. A human becomes fascinating when he leads a life arisen from his human essence. Human beauty is the result of realization of the essence and the direct expression of a true life, of leading a real life. Life becomes truly real and meaningful only, when it is a process of realization of the essence. The only architect of human beauty is a real and, thus, happy life. A man becomes happy when he elevates his reality to the ideals created by the true human desires. Happiness is a self-confirmation expressed by the realization of the ideals. Life becomes happy when it is perceived with joy as it is true and real. As happiness is a sense of perceiving life with joy, feeling of life’s beauty, while beauty is materialization, an objective expression and an embodiment of a life that is happy and perceived with joy as well. A happy man, as if he doesn’t walk, but dances, doesn’t speak, but recites a poem, doesn’t live in this ordinary and banal world, but instead he lives in a celestial fairytale world. The aesthetics of behavior is much more the result of making life true and real than memorizing a behavioral etiquette.
4. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Luz María Barreiro Güemes The Aesthetics Uptaking: A Privileged Path to The Knowledge of Reality in the Ancient Mexicans: An Experience Called La Barranca
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The Nahuatl Philosophy: Flower and Song. The wise nahuas understood that the inner experience of man is the search for the answers to the meaning of life and the hereafter: the search for the truth that they identified as a flower and a song. In the afterlife there is a new flower and song: the absolute truth, the foundation of the identity of what exists: they called it Ometeótl. Looking for a new way of knowing, capable of bringing man to a safe and sound knowledge with a foundation in the same idea that I know from my inner and deep experience. Saying truthful and beautiful words, making poetry, flowers and songs. An experience called La Barranca.1 By reflecting the student finds in itself the principles of reality. The arts, especially word, songs and theater are means to penetrate the knowledge and reach flowers and songs to the truth. La Barranca is an educational center in the indigenous area of Mezquitán in the state of Jalisco, Mexico (with the participation of 320 children).
5. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Rachel Aumiller Hegel on the Crucifixion as Comedy
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The process of bringing an exhausted order to the grave to make space for the life of new societal practice and belief is represented in ancient Greek drama by the death of the gods who ‘’die’’ once in tragedy and once again in comedy. Hegel reads the second and final death of the gods in ancient comedy as enacting a kind of societal action through which a community reclaims its creative agency by destroying the social and political orders that structured a tragic stage of history. Although Hegel highlights this creative action as going beyond aesthetic representation, he sees ancient comedy as achieving a superficial sense of freedom from tragedy, because the community sees itself as separate from its creation, which is destructible. For this reason Hegel moves beyond ancient comedy and locates comic resolution not in the representation of the death of the old gods on the ancient stage, but in the narrative of the death of Christ. This paper explores how Hegel’s reading of the incarnation and crucifixion of Christ mirrors the ancient tragedy and comedy. I argue that comedy, for Hegel, is realized through the story of the crucifixion, in which the comic community identifies with that which must be destroyed for the reconciliation of its society.
6. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Georgios Chantzis An Unexpected Sequel to Neopragmatism: From Richard Rorty’s Aesthetic Textualism to Richard Shusterman’s Somaesthetics
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What is the quarrel in full swing within American pragmatism? How do contemporary neopragmatists read the philosophical tradition which they uphold and under what conditions is it that they envisage its future? Richard Rorty’s renewal of pragmatism toward the end of the 20th century was based on the aesthetization of philosophy. Today his legacy seems to be evolving in an unexpected direction. Richard Shusterman, a potential disciple, proposes the delineation of a new subfield of investigation, somaesthetics. Both philosophers acknowledge and reinforce the philosophic aims of John Dewey. Aims of anti-fundamentalism and perspectivism of formative interaction and faith in meliorism that both espouse personal self-fashioning by means of the person’s aesthetization within a liberal democracy, either through discrete narratives and forceful texts, as Rorty writes or through the somatic understanding of the self and of the other, as Shusterman practices, all the way to the gymnasium. Language and the body do not comprise a new dualism. Rather, they recommend supplementary fields of action, whose forcefulness does not lie in rationalism or in naturalism, but in the allure which something, both a means and an end, manages to exert. One issue of contention is the degree to which the aesthetization of language and the body crosses over from the private to the public sphere of life.
7. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Zsolt Bátori Is Conceptual Art an Art Form?
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In this paper, I consider the account of conceptual art that regards such works as being unique and singular pieces of artworks that belong to a specific art form. I argue that the art form theory of conceptual art is mistaken for it fails to provide a sufficient explanation of the role of the specific contents (ideas) of what this theory considers to be unique and singular works of the art form (conceptual art). After the explication and criticism of the art form theory of conceptual art I will suggest a different account. The single artwork theory of conceptual art I propose denies that conceptual art is an art form; instead, it considers conceptual art to be one single work of art with numerous token executions (performances) of the work as a type. The advantage of my proposal over the art form theory will be that both contents of specific execution tokens and the relation of these tokens to the unique and singular work as a type will be adequately explained without the disadvantages of the art form theory of conceptual art.
8. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Thiago Nicolau de Araujo Museum to Open Skies: Tombstone Art and Aesthetics of Death
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We realized different ways societies express the feeling about death, but always keeping the idea of preserving the memory of the dead by the image in an attempt to keep alive their identities. Thus, the tomb constructions inside the public and private cemeteries show this concern; to preserve the memory through works of renowned artists, tombs of important personalities, texts and other traces that tell the story of the people buried there, making the space a museum in the open sky. So this paper aims to show how the tombstone art express aesthetics feelings through works of art and symbols expressed on tombstones.
9. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Ludmila Demchenko J. Baudrillard’s “Simulative” Reality Concept as “The Transformed Forms” Expression in the Modern World
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Philosophy transformations in the modern world are fully represented in J. Baudrillard’s “simulative” reality concept based on the cardinal social changes in which new technical and information processes, the global capital are fancifully interwoven, giving rise to the so-called “simulative” vir­tual reality and showing the development dead ends of post-industrial technology, contradictions and development threats of the “virtual” financial capital as the dominant form of contemporary social reality. The reality vision through the prism of simulation phenomenon becomes the determining fact in J. Baudrillard’s philosophy, which in his interpretation means a self-sufficient reality acquisition by signs, images, symbols, which fill the validity, start to absorb, assimilate the existing objective reality. Moreover, there are various forms of visibility not only economic, but also political, social, cultural ideological etc. In J. Baudrillard’s interpretation of “simulative” reality there is content of such a phenomenon identified and labeled by K. Marx as the ‘commodity fetishism’ on the basis of which “the converted forms” of the public reality are formed, in which the money as signs, cost forms replace and absorb real public processes, and derive the real sources of “simulative” reality, while its postmodern version only establishes and describes the contemporary forms of its manifestation. In search of the adequate explanation in J. Baudrillard, he actually identifies the virtual and the objective and the real, verbally allocating the simulacra with the substantive status in the world, and in this sense “simulative” reality in the concept of the given thinker takes the central place and confidently guides the ball, replacing by itself the objective reality by means of the entire sequence of brighter and picturesque, but substantially emasculated effects of the real, the truth and objectivity.
10. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Carlos Javier Ferrero Martínez Dynamics of the Sublime: A Way into the Wild
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The Kantian notion of sublime is taken to be a dynamic kind of feeling that human beings can experiment on/with. For example, when an alpinist is on a mountain, alone, at a snowy edge, close to the peak he wants to conquer or when he watches a sunrise; in these moments the alpinist realizes how wonderful the nature is, how incredible the world is, and he realizes that only a thin line separates that feeling and death. There is just a void over that edge, a scary fall for hundreds of meters. This paper suggests that the sublime is a consequence of the approach, through these kinds of activities, to the environment; a feeling that provides us with knowledge of the limitless and, most importantly, a knowledge of our human condition. In the mountaineering, as in other kinds of physical, exploratory activities, the sublime is possible due to the physical skill and the power of decision and adaptation to the hazards of being in an extreme situation. This paper also shows how, through these kinds of activities, the sublime is maintained in confrontation with the western “society of simulation” and the ideas of virtual experience and “safe experience”.
11. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Tina Adamou Fika Philosophic Allegories in Renaissance Art
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Undoubtedly the Renaissance era was a period during which art was closely related to philosophy, probably more than in any other time. This is partly due to the interest awoken to people of that time in classical antiquity, declaring, therefore, their clash with their immediate past. Thus, it is this interest in the Classical world that reignites the study of ancient philosophy as well. Neoplatonism, which dominated Florence with the founding of the Platonic Academy, affected fundamentally and directly the formation of art in that city; whereas the influence over the art of Venice was more implicit. Even if the Venetian artists seem on the surface to bypass the systematic study of the unrivalled Greek ideals, a closer look reveals that in reality they competed with classic heritage by integrating it in various ways and in many levels in their artwork.
12. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Konstantina Drakopoulou, Konstantinos Avramidis Graffiti: An Art of Identity and its Critical Discourse (1980-1985)
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Graffiti is an art of identity: individual, collective, ethnic and racial. From the disenfranchised poor sprang up the “ghetto youth” in New York in the 1960s. Many members of this marginalized youth attempted by inventing and putting into public circulation a new name, the tag, to assert their subjective presence, to disrupt the planned invisibility, to escape political exclusion and to force their violent daily experiences into public view. Graffiti writers also built inclusive communities, the crews, where they learned the value of both self and community, and developed collective identity based on collaborative work. Additionally, graffiti as a subcultural, vernacular art form was produced, for the most part, by racial and ethnic minorities. Therefore, our concern is to indicate this precise creole process that requires the ability to recognize the point where two cultures, the marginalized and the mainstream, meet. When graffiti entered the mainstream art world in the early 1980s, a critical discourse was informed that established writing as galleried “graffiti art”. The scope of this paper is therefore to examine the principles on which the critique was grounded; whether and to what extent the critical discourse was class and race colored; the numerous contradictions between and within the culture of writing and the culture of galleried art.
13. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Haruhiko Fujita Art as a Way of Life and Life as a Way of Art
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Two different kinds of art exist in Japan: ‘geijutsu’, the English equivalent to ‘arts’ or ‘fine arts’ and ‘geidō’, which does not have a literal equivalent in any Western languages. “Geidō” literally means the “way of arts”. During the 15th century the term ‘geidō’ first appeared. In the 17th century similar terms such as ‘sadō’ (way of tea), internationally known as “tea ceremony” and ‘kadō’ (way of the flower), also known as “flower arrangement” appeared. In the Edo period, adding ‘dō’ at the end of the name of any art form, including martial arts, was a common practice, although these terms such as ‘sadō’ or ‘kadō’ did not supersede the more common terms ‘cha-no-yu’ or ‘ikebana’. In the early 20th century many types of ‘geidō’ became household words. These ‘geidō’ were not taught at art schools or universities where Western arts were mainly taught. However, ‘shodō’ (calligraphy) became a regular course in teachers’ colleges. Many forms of ‘geidō’ flourished in cities. Many of these “ways of arts” were revived in a rapidly industrializing nation, where Western arts were replacing traditional arts. ‘Geidō’ was in a sense an antithesis to ‘geijutsu’, which literally means the “technique of arts” or the “art of arts”, or, in other words, “art for art’s sake”, then a major trend in Western art. Although “ways of arts” are sometimes criticized for their monopolizing attitude toward teaching by school heads, contemporary art can learn something from the philosophy of ‘geidō’ such as the appreciation of the process, denial of completion or indifference to results, since daily activities are without end or completion and will continue until the end of one’s life. In the course of de­voting one’s life to these activities, one comes to realize that they are relevant to the shared values of human life.
14. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Augusta O. Gooch Ingarden’s Quasi-Judgment as Aesthetic Ontology
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Some contemporary analyses of the nature of artistic works have been too narrowly focused to establish the ontological status of the literary work. In her many books and articles Amie Thomasson reflects on the variety of problems involved in establishing clarity on the ontological status of an artistic work. Her conclusion is that the ontological status is either unanswerable or that the question is ill-formed. It is only because of a limited em­pirical model of evaluation that the ontological integrity of the literary work is unseen. I propose to use Roman Ingarden’s work to provide a more substantial direction for an aesthetic ontology. Polish phenomenologist Roman Ingarden wrote the Literary work of Art in 1931 and wrote The cognition of the Literary work of Art in 1937. Both these texts are largely ignored by philosophers today (though they were influential in the Wellek and Warren theory of literature in the 1940’s). Ingarden’s work provides a multi-layered reality which defines the ontological status of a literary work of art. Two specific issues characterize the literary work for Ingarden: the nature of the quasi-judgment and the metaphysical qualities that transcend individual works.
15. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Christos Grigoriou The Fusion of Aesthetics With Ethics in the Work of Shaftesbury and its Romantic Corollaries
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In this paper, I am trying to reconstruct Shaftesbury’s views on natural beauty, writing and painting. Thus, the term ‘aesthetics’ I am using refers to both aesthetic experience and artistic creativity, to both natural and artistic beauty. As, however, in Shaftesbury’s work aesthetics cannot be considered irrespective of his overall philosophy, I am obliged to examine in parallel with aesthetics Shaftesbury’s ontology and moral theory. It is the concern for this last one that gave the occasion for the emergence of an aesthetic theory in Shaftesbury’s work. My argument is that Shaftesbury’s view on natural beauty and his deep appreciation of natural scenery opened extremely fertile prospects for aesthetics, prospects that were meant to give their seeds both in enlightenment and in romanticism The concepts of disinterestedness, of natural sublimity and genius, for example, are some of Shaftesbury’s main contributions to the newborn discipline of aesthetics that were to have great future in the relevant conversation. In the case of writing, while the paradigm Shaftesbury uses comes undoubtedly from Horace and his advice to the poets to study philosophy, the place reserved for the true poet, his apotheosis indeed, anticipated the romantic appreciation of artists. The analysis of painting, finally, retains the strong link between art and morality and is based mainly on the Aristotelian concepts of unity and probability. It is thus undoubtedly a typical example of neoclassical analysis. It remains, however, a strong testimony of Shaftesbury’s pertinent commitment to empiric reality against those views that would present him as a high-flown Neoplatonist metaphysician.
16. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Svetlana L. Gromova Criteria of Philosophical Interpretation of Works of Art
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Philosophical interpretation of works of art can be done by quite definite criteria. The symbols taken from traditional art might be such criteria; they form sense and image of works. We will elaborate a method of analysis of philosophical interpretation of works of art through eliciting symbols that form the core of an image and a plot of a given work by philosophical categories, such as ‘motion’, ‘form’ and ‘image’. 1) Motion – is an active element of the art work. 2) Form is a passive element lined up by the trajectory of motion. 3) Image stems from the combination of motion and form. Motion organizes the inherent parts of art work to one rhythm, and the sounder and more compact the rhythm, the brighter the image. Then the symbol can be elicited from the image as something archetypal, existing independently from our ideas and concepts. With this method of philosophical interpretation it is possible to develop a new scientific category – “philosophical sense of work of art”. To make this method useful and applicable in practice we need an extensive empirical base of symbols and signs.
17. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Thomas Heyd Re-reading Kant on Free and Adherent Beauty
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Paul Guyer has proposed that, despite Kant’s apparent avowals that judgements of beauty of things are made without consideration of the purposes that we have for them, purposes do enter into aesthetic judgements of “adherent beauty.” He even attributes to Kant the view that functionality is a necessary condition for the beauty of objects that have certain ends or functions. I consider his claims and propose that, according to Kant, the degree to which an object fulfills its ends may pose a psychological – rather than a logical – factor in its aesthetic appreciation. I agree that judgements of beauty, with regard to many things, certainly are made in relation to the functions that we attribute to those things, but argue that these judgements, as such, are logically independent of whatever judgements are made regarding their functionality, even if in practice their functionality may impinge on our aesthetic judgements.
18. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Pia Maria Houni The Changing Positions of the Artist in Society
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My presentation will open a window into the artists’ daily life from a political philosophy perspective. I ask: what is an artists’ work? We can look this question from different perspectives. From the aesthetics perspective we can ask: do an artist’s works represent the real world and life or are they a mimesis? Usually we accept that imagination and creativity are separate from authentic realism (which is also a very difficult issue, as Charles Taylor noted), but when artists create something that is “politically hot” we define this piece of work as realism. This leads us to understand that an artist’s main mental tools (imagination and creativity) might be values that are controlled by the values of society. The idea of freedom is thus questionable. Also in the social philosophical framework, a question ever since the times of Plato has been: what is the position of the artist in society? Plato thought artists might be dangerous for the order of the Polis, especially for the concept of paideia: many unsuitable ideas could damage young men. Throughout history this viewpoint has been alive and reflected in various artists’ positions. The work they do as professional members of society seems to be connected to the time at hand, and to power. Different kinds of ethical or moral values usually determine artists as persons, and define their works, in social spaces. My theoretical and philosophical perspective will touch on ancient names such as Plato and Aristotle, but my main focus is on contemporary philosophers such as Adorno, John Rawls, Alain Badiou, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Jean-Luc Nancy. I will also briefly demonstrate empirical examples from research materials on artists in Finland.
19. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Margaret Hodges A Hybrid Approach to the Aesthetics of the Natural Environment
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I offer a Kantian model for an aesthetic of ecology with ethical implications. I begin with the example of a landscape rehabilitation project, the Bordelais Bog (St. Lazare, Quebec) an 8000-year-old landscape of rare species, in which an architectural framework has been constructed to preserve nature. I examine the work against the use of the natural landscape for residential development, what Emily Brady has termed, the hedonistic model of aesthetic appreciation. In residential development aesthetic appreciation becomes purely instrumental and indistinguishable from pleasures connected to practical use. I expand on Brady’s Kantian model to elaborate the aesthetic of the Bordelais Bog. The architectural structure designed to protect the bog acts as a programmatic whole, protecting the organic wholeness of the site and therein lays its fittingness to purpose. This is analogous to the concept of ‘functional fit’ as articulated by Allen Carlson, involving the way in which the natural environment is composed of, many-layered and interlocking ecosystems. In his theory a particular fit is essential for the survival of organisms and whole systems. It is necessary to formulate the appropriate fit in terms of the functionality of the human ecosystem in balance with natural ecosystems.
20. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Abdullah Kaygi Philosophy of Art and the Art of Cinema
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Even if it is easier to see a branch of art by looking at particular works of art, to define the features of a branch of art is different from to define the feature of art in general. Even if the essence of art can only be investigated by considering what art is in general, the only thing that remains concretely visible are individual works of art. Nevertheless, it is the art in general – not merely any particular branch of art– what is to be defined, when we do philosophy of art. Particular works of art and the essence of art constitute two different poles seen thorough different perspectives. These two perspectives are constituted by the concept of art as skill and the concept of art as fiction about human possibilities. Since some philosophers, who investigate what art is, are not able to handle both poles simultaneously, they unwittingly investigate art from within one of these perspectives. Most of the problems in the philosophy of art arise from this unwitting one sidedness. This is at issue in the philosophy of cinema as well. The debate between Bill Nichols and Carl R. Plantinga on the characteristics of documentary seems to be an example of that problem.