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21. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Quynh Nguyen On the Beautiful and the Creative of Commonplace
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The aesthetic or experience of the beautiful, coming from our everyday taste, does not capture the meaning of thing-in-itself and, essentially, it cannot be independent from social, economic, cultural, educational and political factors. However, out of such a paradox we realize the exigency of liberating ourselves for our creative and individual pursuit. In this paper I will argue that our experience of the beautiful deserves its ideological right against the dominion or hegemony of the ruling power. Furthermore, I will briefly discuss Marx’s aesthetic theory that nurtures ‘revenge’ due to ignorance and tyranny. I will turn to the concept of beauty initiated by the Neomarxists. I will also agree with Buber’s ideologically individual taste that could reveal something creatively never existed before. This allows me to investigate the ontology of creative technique and the transfiguration of the common objects from the experiences of Chardin, Duchamp and the pop artists. As such, our experience of the beautiful has reality, but no category. Finally, inclusively for this report only, I will support the idea of “the creative without creation” held by Benjamin’s aesthetic of aura - whether it is absurd or not - we can preserve what we believe to be true.
22. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Vicente Ordonez Roig “Freilich Hängen Musik und Bücher Zusammen”: Brahms’s Music in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophy
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Challenged by the decline of Western culture, Wittgenstein wrote some reflections on music. The aim of this paper is to consider in detail the role that music, more specifically, the music of Brahms, played in Wittgenstein’s thought. To this end, the author studies Wittgenstein’s impressions on classical and modern music. Special attention is given to Wittgenstein’s comparison between the works of Brahms and other composers’ works, such as Bruckner’s or Mahler’s. In addition, the author reflects on the function that classical music could play as a means to express values or ethical principles.
23. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Maria João Neves The Phenomenon of Inspiration in Maria Zambrano’s Aesthetics
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My research on María Zambrano’s phenomenology of dreams has been going on for some years, having involved students of Clinical Psychology, researchers in the Laboratory of Sleep Studies, Chronobiology and Telemedicine at the University of Lisbon Medical School and also of the Neurology Department at Faro Hospital. The results of the applications of this theory in peoples’ lives have already been published in several articles and, finally, condensed in the book Método RVP (Raciovitalismo-Poético), Prática Filosófica no Quotidiano, Institute Piaget, Lisbon 2009. The research direction now evolves into testing Zambrano’s dream phenomenology thesis, regarding inspiration and artistic creativity. Focusing on the third stage of Zambrano’s phenomenology of the dream form - the lucidity stage - we find that the artist already knows the completion of the work still to be created, and precisely this realization of the work of art would dictate the necessary procedures for the construction of the object of art. The beginning would be informed by the end, meaning that the artist would follow information that is being supplied from the future, the already complete piece of art guiding its own creation. Exactly this paradox is how we can understand the phenomenon of inspiration in Zambrano’s aesthetics.
24. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Anna Carolina Domínguez Pallach Food and Philosophy Through José Vasconcelos’s Aesthetics
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Food is an essential part of human life; it shows the most elementary way of socializing and mixing elements for them to reach the most pleasure possible. But that is not enough to defend food as aesthetically relevant. Vasconcelos’s aesthetics introduce the concepts of harmony, proportion and experience to make a defense of the sense of taste. His purpose is to show that pleasures in food go beyond the necessity of eating. When searching for pleasure itself, the end of eating changes and leaves the alimentary aspect as mere accidental. These pleasures are related with the way the ingredients are cooked and disposed on the table, not only revealing the aesthetic part of the sense of taste, but also the social and anthropological root of human nature.
25. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Debora Pazetto Ferreira Art or Works of Art: An Ontological Approach of Arthur Danto and Vilém Flusser
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When we investigate what are the philosophical meanings of art or works of art, it is advisable to search for the background conceptions inherent to the practice and common language concerning art. In this paper, I suggest that there are, generally speaking, at least two basic conceptions used to approach art: one, more rigorous and more restricted, considers art as a series of works of art circumscribed in the history of art, made by individuals known as artists, and frequently located in artistic institutions. The other, vaguer, but more comprehensive, considers art as the innovative or creative element existent in every culture. The philosophy of art of Arthur Danto is presented as an example of ontological definition based on the first conception. The philosophy of Vilém Flusser, on the other hand, is a competent conceptual development representing the second approach. Nevertheless, both of them are grounded in common language and practice, which includes both meanings of the word art. I propose that clarifying these different meanings, comprised by the same word “art”, is an interesting way to start a philosophical investigation on art.
26. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Mihaela Pop Some Aspects of the Performance: Art and the Bodily-Being-in-the-World
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This paper aims at highlighting some changes in the meaning of certain traditional aesthetic concepts used in analyzing performance art events. We consider that Nietzsche’s philosophy of life as well as the phenomenological analysis of perception and the bodily involvement in the world described by M. Merleau-Ponty light the way to a better understanding of this contemporary art. Associated terms, such as artist-spectator, subject-object, art-nature, art-culture or concepts as perception, culture, time, space, presence, self-referentiality, constitutive acts, artistic ‘aura’ or art as a way of “sculpting people” will be analyzed, considering the fundamental condition of bodily-being-in-the-world. In our opinion performance art succeeds in keeping its autonomy not only because of its institutional evaluation, but also because of the cumulative cultural meaning of these events. The performance artist succeeds in the “transfiguration of the commonplace” in a symbolic action, using his body not only as an object, but also as the human way of being-in-the-world.
27. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Constantinos V. Proimos Immanence and the Tragic Scission: Reiner Schürmann’s Phenomenology of Ultimates
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In this paper I plan to draw on Reiner Schürmann’s book Broken Hegemonies posthumously published, in 1996, after his death. I shall examine the role that Schürmann attributes to tragic denial of the law for the generation of law in general. Schürmann’s model for tragic denial is the Greek tragedy. In many instances, besides the study under consideration, Schürmann finds recourse to Agamemnon, Oedipus, Antigone and other tragic heroes in order to delineate the hero’s mortal dilemma in front of two intersecting and conflicting laws. In front of the tragic scission the hero is obliged to select without avoid­ing committing hubris and to a certain extent blindly and not after rational or moral deliberation. Agamemnon’s destitution of paternal duty makes him a sovereign leader of the Hellenic fleet. The story is used by Schürmann in order to model the function of all laws. Combining the late Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jean Francois Lyotard, Schürmann defines the situation of conflicting laws as a contradiction or a differend out of which the law emerges as such. Schürmann employs the same model to phenomenologically explain the emergence of all ultimate foundations of experience: he apparently uses his own precept to read Heidegger from the end towards the beginning and thus employs Heidegger’s term Ereignis, appropriation, as the original strategy of being, controlling its appearance and withdrawal in terms of ultimate foundations. Schürmann refers to hegemonic phantasms in order to describe the transmutations by which a referent is declared sovereign by philosophers. Such transmutations depend upon but also describe our tragic condition, namely that always one but in contrast to itself being which we confusedly summon and fantasize upon. Drawing from a close reading of some of Schurmann’s seminal texts, I shall characterize Schürmann’s thinking as immanent and will inquire in the role of singulars therein.
28. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Evi Prousali The Translation of Existentialist Concepts into Scenic Signification
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The world-renowned Italian theatre director Romeo Castellucci and his company, named Societas Raffaello Sanzio, has created over the past 20 years theatrical performances, imbued in philosophical thinking. In the summer of 2011 they presented, in different European cities – including Athens – his performance entitled On the concept of the face, regarding the Son of God. A performance strongly influenced by the existential philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre as this is expounded in his essay Being and Nothingness. Taking the statements of Theodor W. Adorno as our guide that “aesthetic form is sediment content” and that “only artworks that are to be sensed as a form of comportment have a raison d’être” we shall approach the above theatrical performance, which seems to satisfy both these statements. It is a performance that is not based on the text, but one which is structured exclusively on “scenic images” amounting to specific and “iconoclastic” gestures. The scenic signs of these images directly refer to fundamental concepts of the existential philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre: the look, we-object, us-subject, freedom in situation, being and doing, expounded in his essay Being and Nothingness. The present announcement attempts to demonstrate the way by which these concepts are being transcribed into scenic-signification in this particular performance.
29. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Dan Ratiu The State of Aesthetics: Between Art and Everyday Life
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Today there are various claims that aesthetics should be redefined and practised differently than the former branch of Western philosophy dealing with ‘fine’ arts. One major discontent regards the continuous association between aesthetics and art by which the aesthetic dimension and the artistic institution are conflated, then insulated from ordinary human life. This paper analyses some recent strategies to rethinking aesthetics and its status: from accounts that hold a ‘naturalistic’ approach of aesthetic facts whose proper horizon is anthropological (Schaeffer) or try to redefine aesthetic thinking in accord with the new regime of contemporary art thus extending it from an “art of seeing” to some ontological and sociological language-games (Michaud), to those - mostly in Anglo-American space - that tend to expand the realm of aesthetics by focusing on the aesthetic character of everyday life and argue that this should be examined on its own terms (Saito). My claims are, firstly, that anthropological-sociological challenges do not dismiss philosophical aesthetics; secondly, that extending the scope of aesthetics towards everyday life does not dismiss concepts of the aesthetic and aesthetic experience as shaped in relation to the arts. Instead, the corresponding practices of everyday life and contemporary art should be examined through a comparative approach that could disclose both their common features and specific modes of manifestation. I conclude that for overcoming tensions and inconsistencies within these accounts, a broader conception of aesthetics is needed, able to include both art and everyday life in a compelling conceptual framework.
30. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Rosy Saikia The Aesthetics of Creative Process: A Cross-Cultural Study of Visual Art and Literature in Rainer Maria Rilke
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The term ‘aesthetics’ consists of the philosophical study of a system that appeals to the senses. It deals not only with the nature and the value of the Arts, but also with those responses to natural objects that find expression in the language of the beautiful and the ugly. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was one of the leading poets and philosophers of European modernism. Rilke was embedded with German aesthetics since his childhood. This paper addresses the relationship between Rilke’s poetry and the visual arts, which involves an intimate transference of aesthetic means and definitions of the form in the creative process of writing. Rilke’s connection with Auguste Rodin made him learn that a person who can ‘see’ things, could realize the beauty of a ‘thing’ and could, subsequently, write. To ‘see’ the ‘thing’ or ‘object’ rather than representing emotion was considered as more important by Rodin and that was the way he cracked the old aesthetic mould. It will also look at how Rilke created own poetics against the background of German aesthetic tradition. Rilke admitted to the constant reference to the Bible, the books of the Danish poet Jens Peter Jacobsen and Auguste Rodin, who all had given him the experience of the essence of creativity, its depths and eternity. Rilke’s association with philosophers, such as Nietzsche, and artists, starting from Worpweders and Rodin to Cezanne’s paintings, made him almost an ap­prentice in visual art.
31. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Peter A. Safronov In The Middle of Nowhere: City, Space and Real Estate Billboards
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Contemporary city is not only a place for consumption of different sorts of goods. Now it is consumed as such working as a generalized machine of pleasure. Since everything that happens in a particular city follows the logic of commercial enterprise its squares and gardens, streets and parks are turning into showcases for tourist gaze (Cronin & Hetherington 2008). Attempting at being attractive for an idle sightseeing built environment shatters into thousands of pieces each of them crying for attention. Buildings are regarded spectacularly for their more or less intriguing external appearance. Nevertheless, people still live in the cities although their lives are now sold at the marketplace in their naked authenticity (Zukin 2010). How does this entrepreneurial strategy impacts on the visual representation of architectural objects and city environment in general? Since commercialization of contemporary cities is an overall trend of urban development real estate advertisement should be evaluated as a core instance for understanding of ongoing transformations. My assumption is that fragmentation of a city is most clearly documented in such advertisements explicit in their intention to sell this or that building. Architectural objects are, therefore, isolated from reality and put exactly in the middle of nowhere, exemplifying ontological dissection of a thing and its snapshot.
32. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Andrea Sakoparnig Hegel’s Account on Aesthetic Objectivity
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In my paper, I argue that we have to reconsider what is meant by aesthetic objectivity in order not to lose the validity of our concept of ‘art’ and the differentiation in ‘arts’. We are to reflect upon the turn to an aesthetic praxis that not only bids farewell to the object but to all forms of invalid objectifications. By consideration of Hegel’s theory of art, I argue that the recent ‘de-artification’ should be understood as art’s immanent and dynamic work-in-progress upon its own objectivity. I argue that the dissolution of the borders between the fine arts is directly related to a process of developing different objectifications of aesthetic objectivity. The formation of a new, transformed understanding of aesthetic objectivity that no longer coincides with the aesthetic object leads us to cognize new connections and relations in the arts that ground this objectivity. I argue that Hegel’s theory, which is usually characterized as binding aesthetic objectivity to the aesthetic object, has the potential to break with precisely such binding. Hegel’s ideas on aesthetic objectivity imply that the stable and closed object has the potential to lead us to an understanding of a self-consuming and self-annulling objectivity.
33. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Manjula Saxena Psychical Distancing: Its Meaning and Role in Aesthetic Attitude
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Aesthetic attitude like aesthetic delight or relish is ‘disinterested’ or free from all thoughts about worldly concerns. The Indian aesthetician Bharata Muni holds relish or ‘Rasa’ to be ‘nijsukhdukhadivivashibhava’, i.e., free from the thoughts of personal pleasures and pains, as also ‘vedyantarsparshshunyo’, which means free from all awareness of all that is knowable. Positively, such a state of mind is a self-composed, undisturbed by sensations, state which is yet experiencing delight. The seeming contradiction involved in a self-composed mind, appearing to be getting disturbed by an experience of delight, gets dissolved the moment we, following Bullough, realize that aesthetic attitude is necessarily characterized by a kind of ‘distancing’. This ‘distancing’ is not physical and not even spatial as during aesthetic experience we remain very much grounded in reality. It is a deliberate withdrawal of the whole psyche from the thoughts of mundane affairs. Without this disinterested contemplation would be impossible. Showing that this ‘psychical distancing’ can be attained either through the medium of a work of art as in poetry or drama or through forms as in musical melodies, that is the purpose of the paper and an attempt to realize that this has been made with the help of apt illustrations.
34. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Edijs Šauers Kantian Schematism and the Ethics of the Image (Remarks on J.L. Nancy)
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In this paper, I defend the thesis that although recent French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy agrees with Immanuel Kant that schematism is the unity of the sensible manifold according to the concepts of pure understanding, he asserts that the schematism lies at the ground of image as ontological force, deforming this manifold rather than simply reflecting already-existing objects. First I show that Kant’s conception of schematism of pure concepts of understanding presented in the “Critique of pure reason” (CPR) explains how categories could be applied to the reality asserting that the representation of the object must be homogeneous with the concept, therefore refuting Hume’s scepticism. Second, I demonstrate that Nancy’s analysis of Kantian schema­tism is based on postmodernists’ distinction between presentation (Darstellung) and representation (Vorstellung). It allows Nancy to treat the kantian schematism (pure image of all images) as the ‘claw’, the violent act of representation or image that is treated as force. I argue that Nancy, interpreting presentation and representation in ontologically constitutive sense, shows the ethical dimension of Kantian schematism and proposing the ethics of other, although it is a radical interpretation of Kant and far from Kant’s use of schematism.
35. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Stefan Lorenz Sorgner Beauty Naturalized
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In this paper, I wish to put forward some aspects of the ethical relevance of two concepts of formal beauty today, which are of particular relevance for music and architecture, as these two arts are mainly non-representational. What concern me here are the two formal concepts of beauty, which correspond to two types of numerical ratios, the harmonic ratio and the ratio of self-similarity. In the Pythagorean and Platonic tradition these ratios have been explained by reference to perfect ratios which exist in some other worldly realm. Many people today, including myself, no longer find such an explanation as plausible. Consequently, I am putting forward an evolutionary account of the relevance of these ratios whereby their ethical importance reveals itself. In this way the ethical relevance of these two concepts of formal beauty - when they turn up in works of art - also becomes clear. My analysis does not aim to present the final answer to the question of formal concepts of beauty, but hopes to be a basis for further discussions and investigations.
36. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Tatiana Shatunova Aesthetics as Metaphysics and Passion
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The subject of the paper is the metaphysical potential of modern aesthetic theory. Aesthetics in the situation of the ontological turn solves today’s ontological and anthropological problems. It investigates life (Sein), human nature and the person’s essence. It is found that aesthesis is born anew in modern culture as a supersocial phenomenon. Moreover, a person can be a supersocial being, if looking at the world aesthetically. Such a person brings up the feeling of tragic optimism in itself. The human who passed the school of tragic optimism is capable to endure the feeling of “alive life” too, to feel pleasure of life, to be happy because he lives. It is a catharsis from life. The dual – both physical and metaphysical – nature of beauty allows it to fulfill an important cultural task: to introduce the absolutes of Being (Sein) into everyday life. It is possible only when the absolutes accept aesthetic form. If there is any theoretical force which can estimate and save beauty (physical, corporal, visible beauty of the world and of human being) from the imperious relations of temptation, from falling in metaphysical vacuum, that is the power of the aesthetic thought acting as passionate metaphysics of beauty rescue.
37. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Lisa Katharin Schmalzried A Metatheoretical Solution of the Paradox of Fiction
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Person x believes that y is a fictional character and does not exist (P1). X has a y-directed emotion (P2). If one has an emotion, one believes that the intentional object of this emotion exists. Otherwise, the emotion vanishes or, if not, becomes irrational (P3). These three, initially plausible assumptions constitute the paradox of fiction. To solve this paradox, one must negate one of them. The theory of illusion rejects P1, assuming that one temporally loses the nonexistence-belief. The theory of projection denies P2, claiming that the object of the emotions is only prima facie a fictional character. The theory of quasi-emotions also abandons P2. The fictional-character-directed emotions are no real, but quasi-emotions. Nowadays, most writers attack P3 and assume that a mere thought about x is enough to have an x-directed emotion. The paper intends to show how these solutions are connected with different theories of emotions. A feeling-theory of emotion and also a wide cognitive theory leads to the rejection of P3 whereas a strict cognitive theory defends P3. The crucial insight is that no matter which theory of emotion one accepts the paradox dissolves. So the paper presents a metatheoretical solution of the paradox of fiction.
38. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Brit Strandhagen The Sublimity of Alien Space: Aesthetics of the Unknown
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In his analysis of the concept of home the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan makes the distinction between homeplace, home space, and alien space. Subsequently, he relates the different living spaces to different kinds of aesthetic experience. Alien space, representing the remote regions of unknown, even hostile environment, is connected with the aesthetic category of the sublime. According to Tuan, reports by adventurous explorers of extreme environments, disclose a mixture of ambivalent feelings, most appropriately described as sublime. Using Tuan’s conception of alien space as a point of departure, the paper sets out to explore some aspects of the aesthetic category of the sublime, especially as developed by Kant and Burke. The connecting of aesthetic experience to spaces, implying different degrees of homeliness, introduces an interesting perspective to the understanding of the sublime. By looking more closely into the conception of alien space, the aim of this paper is to show that Tuan’s proposal is able to throw some new light on the traditional concept of the sublime.
39. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Despina Spyridaki Wittgenstein’s critique of the scientism of aesthetics
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Given the extreme importance that Wittgenstein attached to the aesthetic dimension of life, it is surprising that he wrote so little on the subject. It is true that we have the notes assembled from his lectures on aesthetics given to a small group of students in Cambridge (Wittgenstein 1966). For Wittgenstein aesthetics is conceptually expansive in its important linkages to the philosophy of language, to the philosophy of mind, to ethics. Aesthetics is a multi-faceted, multi-aspected human cultural phenomenon, where connections of diverging kinds are more in play than causal relations. The form of explanation we find truly satisfying will thus strikingly diverge from the form of explanation in science – the models of explanation in Naturwissenschaften are misapplied in Geisteswissenschaften, and the viewing of the latter through the lens of the former will yield reduction, exclusion and ultimately distortion. Thus, the humanities are for Wittgenstein in this sense autonomous. Wittgenstein in his mature later work generated a vast body of work perhaps united only in its therapeutic and intricately labored search for conceptual clarification. One sees the same philosophical aspiration driving his foray into aesthetics. In this paper, I will refer to Wittgenstein’s critique of scientism of aesthetics.
40. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Tatiana Ivanovna Suslova The Problem of Symbol in Contemporary Art
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The actualization of aesthetic consciousness of the elements of traditional culture in modern society performs stabilizing and security functions. Aesthetic consciousness does not lead to archaism of values and regress. On the contrary, it has a backbone in relation to culture and nature.