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41. 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.
42. 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.
43. 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.
44. 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.
45. 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.
46. 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.
47. 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.
48. 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.
49. 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.
50. 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.
51. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
María Cristina Vilariño The Aesthetic Creation of the World
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The process of a changing world supposes that at every moment something new acquires actuality, so as to persist in the same state, and the recurrence of disappeared elements are both unthinkable in a free-flowing and creating reality. There’s a sacrificial order in this world, always dying for living; so this should be the mission of refreshing metaphysics: to overthrow those limits that confine some secret truth unable to be known, travelling further just by the means of intuition, because our suspicious minds realized that there’s no knowledgeable reason that it should go beyond the sensitive perception. Sailing οn the river of Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Whitehead and Bergson, who dedicated their lives to fight against the static categories of thought, and as the Greeks said, they went on, always prepared for something unexpected: «ἐὰν μὴ ἔλπηται ἀνέλπιστον οὐκ ἐξευρήσει, ἀνεξερεύνητον ἐὸν καὶ ἂπορον». They all created remarkable philosophies based on human sensibility that would appear in those days as something wild and provocative, and that made them deserve the honorable title of vitalists. They knew that there is an unending mystery that reveals itself as an infinite possibility, inviting us to create the world at every step. They showed us the way back home to thinking, the way to returning to immanence.
52. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Helen Tatla The Function of Ornament: A Philosophical Discussion in Relation to Contemporary Architecture
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Within modernist architecture technology supported by abstract aesthetic principles held sway over culture and history. In this milieu, ornament was deprived of any claim to truth and morality. Functionalism, implying the subordination of form to usefulness, became the sworn enemy of ornament. As such, it haunted architecture throughout the 20th century. In contemporary pioneering architecture, ornament seems to regain the lost ground, not as something externally added to architectural form, but as an essential quality which permeates the work from its structure to the minimum detail. In fact, ornament has become the materialization of the concept of function. Function is still operating within rationalism by being closely related to mathematical relations and technology. However, detached from usefulness, it is anchored in sensation and materiality and identified with the action of forces which possess things located in their essence. This essay attempts to investigate the meaning of the term ornament and its relation to function in contemporary pio­neering architecture, compared to modernist architecture. Adorno’s critique of the modernist opposition between functionalism and ornament as well as the suggestion for a ‘logic of sensation’ grounded on the materiality of a work by Gilles Deleuze will be vital to our research.
53. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 1
Fay Zika The Revival of Multimodal Aesthetics
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One of the recent areas of discussion in aesthetics and the visual arts is the tension between the so-called “ocularcentric” tradition, on the one hand, and the tendency to move in a multisensory, multimodal direction, on the other. My aim in this paper is to bring out this tension by tracing it in a number of moments; firstly, in the late 19th-early 20th century discussion, concerning the “total art work” and the contribution of synaesthesia; secondly, the reaction to what Clement Greenberg called the modernist “reduction to the visual”, expressed in a variety of multimodal art forms in the latter half of the 20th century. The weight of my paper is given to two contemporary discussions with significant repercussions in aesthetics: a. the opposition between “disembodiment” and “embodied immersion” in the area of new media; and b. the debate between modularity and plasticity of perception in neuroscience. The conclusion to which I am led is that the possibilities of sensory integration offered by new media and of sensory plasticity - offered by synaesthesia - suggest new creative ways in which our senses may interact and enhance our experience of the world, as well as elucidate artistic creativity and aesthetic appreciation.
54. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 10
Türker Aksun Three Counter-arguments against Divine Command Theory
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The relation between morality and the existence of God is explicitly or implicitly presupposed not only in the ethical theories of different philosophers and thinkers but also in many politicians’ addresses to public, in the interviews of famous authors and columnists, in the sermons of priests or even in the most well-known masterpieces of world literature. We are often told by these social leaders that the idea of God and that of immortality are indispensable for morality, and that in an atheistic or naturalistic world there can be no ethics at all. What underlies this widespread conviction is actually the great debate on the foundation of morality, which has been a major issue in ethics for a long time. This paper aims first of all to examine the relation between morality and the existence of God within the framework of Divine Command Theory (contrary to the common confusion, not of belief in God); and then to criticize that claim based on William Craig’s arguments (Craig being one of the most influential Christian moralists). The arguments for the Divine Command Theory will be intentionally restricted to Craig’s ideas because, although he attacks humanism and naturalism in his debates with Kurtz, Nielsen, Harris and Taylor, he does not have to defend his position. This paper mostly targets his ideas based on religious terms, not philosophy.
55. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 10
Emanuele Antonelli Mimesis and the Trace: Ancient Perspectives on Social Ontology and Religion
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Recovering an ancient debate on the meaning of the Latin word pomoerium, I will show that if John Searle has offered the standard version of social ontology, Maurizio Ferraris has good reasons to claim that his ‘Theory of Documentality’ can go further. Nonetheless, his anti-post-modernism and his blindness about the religious origins of the social objects he deals with, reduce the width of his argument. Complementing his hasty analysis of mimesis with the mimetic theory of religion, violence and the sacred, put forward by René Girard, I will try to show that social objects always hide a scapegoating event and not just a document, as Ferraris would say. Recovering the underlying Derridean paradigm and adding a Girardian reading, such an investigation would turn Ferraris’ static and insufficient analysis into a dynamic ontology of actuality. Thus my aims are: 1) to verify to what extend Ferraris’ theory holds ground, 2) point out, through the application of mimetic theory, certain limits of the theory pertaining to the origins of the social objects investigated, and 3) hint at a new paradigm based on the graft of Derridean thought with the trace of Girardian thoughts on mimesis.
56. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 10
Javier Agüero–Águila Derrida: Heidegger and Sartre’s Anthropological Limits
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This article represents an interpretation of Jacques Derrida’s work Les fins de l’homme (The ends of the man). The first part of the article is an analysis of the implications of Derridian criticism to a kind of human-ism present in France after the Second World War. This humanism, called by Derrida “Philosophical Anthropologism”, is mainly expressed through the figure of Jean Paul Sartre, for whom, according to Derrida, the notion of man is a descriptive and structural one, and as such different from Heidegger’s metaphysical notion that involved an examination of the being in its ontolog-ical dimension. Thus, it is important to scrutinize Derrida’s interpretations of Heidegger’s thought. The second part of the article emphasizes the analysis of the metaphysical deficiencies of “Sartrean humanism”, which implies the division between the ontic and onto-logic, favoring the historicity of the first one. That is why the concept of “neighborhood” between the man and the being has been introduced, which sees everyone as the aim of the other. One’s aims, in this way, appear as defined by the impossibility of thinking about the being beyond the man himself and vice versa. Finally, some ideas related to the Derridian project and its Heideggerian inspirations are discussed. They represent a criticism of logocentricism in its latest version. They are consid-ered, according to Derrida, as Sartrean ones.
57. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 10
Andreia Margarida Pires Carvalho Deconstructing the Privilege of the Voice: The Thought of Archi-writing of Jacques Derrida
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This brief presentation, guided by the thought of archi-writing of Jacques Derrida, has the double purpose of, on the one hand, showing how the Greco-Western philosophical tradition is based on the irreducible privilege of a supposed living word (phoné) – logo-phono-centrism – and, on the other hand, showing how the thought of archi-writing deconstructs this privilege, pointing out that every mark, spoken or written, occurs already in a scene that makes it, in advance, a response. With this in mind, it becomes essential, in a first moment, to elucidate the concept of logo-phono-centrism, assuming it as the fundament of the privilege of the living word (phoné) and consequent secondarization of the writing, under its traditional conceptual-ization. In a second moment, deconstructing the logo-phono-centric orien-tation enunciated before, the way in which the thought of archi-writing is highlighted, leading to the impossibility of any originary fullness of sense reveals a singular notion of response that shows a deconstruction already operating in every mark, written or spoken.
58. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 10
Elena Bolotnikova Philosophy as Self-care
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The paper states that an individual, once it has discovered the problem of meaning of its own existence, uses solutions offered by the cultur-al experience of civilization: religion or philosophy. The study of philosophy is understood, along with religious choice, as a way of self-care. Religion and philosophy are compared according to structural elements of self-care marked by Michel Foucault, such as: telos, ethical substance, mode of subjection and ascetic practices. The differences are confirmed by historical examples. In this paper I criticize the current state of social reality, that, due to the development of technology and communication strategies, complicate the interpretation of the individual’s own being. By facilitating transfer of any knowledge of the self and the world as a discursive mode, network tech-nology multiplies the hum of everyday life, making society the “silent ma-jority.” The original self-care isn’t focused on collecting “likes” and reposts on the net, but assumes motion in discursive/non-discursive knowledge area, thus creating the space where an individual realizes himself and his being.
59. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 10
Nikolay Biryukovv Varieties of Determinism: Spinozist Meditations
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The paper distinguishes between two varieties of determinism: a strong one and a weak one. Weak determinism asserts that whatever happens is caused and that cause necessitates the effect; strong determinism is not satisfied with this assertion, but goes further stating that whatever happens can be traced to just one universal cause. If we define freedom as a capacity to start a new causal chain, strong determinism would allow only one properly free agent; it is thus indistinguishable from fatalism. Weak de-terminism, allowing a plurality of free agents, preserves whatever we need to account for our possession of scientific knowledge (the notion of necessity), but evades fatalism with its characteristic identification of determination and predestination. The discourse on freedom and necessity is often presented as controversy between compatibilism and incompatibilism. The above argument would normally fall under the former category; I prefer, however, an incompatibislm, albeit of a different kind, viz. that free will is incompatible with indeterminism. For free will, if it is seen as real ability, is not mere intention to do something on one’s own; it is only feasible in a deterministic world.
60. Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 10
Boris Chendov The Interdisciplinary Positivism: Third Stage of Development of Positivistic Philosophy
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The most distinctive feature of the third period of the history of science (since Wiener’s “Cybernetics”, 1948) is the essential role of the inter-disciplinary investigations which represent a specific form of manifestation of the integrative tendency in the history of science. The result was a cardinal re-organization of the system of science: together with the further development of the canonical sciences, such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. as well as of their branches of various degrees. What also took place is a pro-cess of formation of complex theories, or even of complex sciences, involving in a new synthesis problems of various canonical sciences. They became rel-evant problems of philosophy of science. This process of peculiar solution of the philosophical problems in different complex fields of investigation resulted into disintegration of the united system of philosophy into various fragments, seen in a close connection with relevant problems from special sciences. This tendencies lead to different forms of positivistic philosophy.This disintegration of the system of philosophy is not a rough rejection of the united system of philosophy of science, nor does it represent the united positivism.