This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Competency Aesthetic Practices Inter‐Subjective Validity Project Conclusion Notes.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Wine as a Moving Target Wine as a Vague Object 2030 ‐ A Thought Experiment Wine as “Pure Experience” or as “Rich Object”? The Taster of the Future Conclusions Notes.

Taste is a central sense for humans and animals, and it has been largely studied either from physiological and neurological approaches or from socio-cultural ones. This paper adopts another view, focused on the activity of tasting rather than on the sense of taste, approached within the perspective of ethnomethodology and multimodal conversation analysis. This view addresses the activity of tasting as it is interactionally organized in specific social settings, observed in a naturalistic way, on the basis of video recordings. Focusing (...) on video recorded improvised tastings of cheese in gourmet shop encounters, the paper offers a systematic analysis of the way in which tasting is orderly achieved in an intersubjective way. It follows the various steps characterizing tasting, from the invitation to taste, to the grasping of a bit to taste, which is put in the mouth, chewed, and swallowed; it details how an interactional moment offering the taster a priviledged, individual, focused space in which to devote exclusive attention to the object tasted is actively tailored by all parties. By contrast, the completion of tasting is marked by a return to mutual gaze, the animation of facial expressions and nods, and the final production of a judgment of taste. By offering a systematic reconstruction of how these tasting moments are organized, the paper invites to a multimodal approach of sensoriality in social interaction. (shrink)

Experts from wine tasters to radiologists to bird watchers have all undergone perceptual learning-long-term changes in perception that result from practice or experience. Philosophers have been discussing such cases for centuries, from the 14th-century Indian philosopher Vedanta Desika to the 18th-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, and into contemporary times. -/- This book uses recent evidence from psychology and neuroscience to show that perceptual learning is genuinely perceptual, rather than post-perceptual. It also offers a taxonomy for classifying cases in (...) the philosophical literature. In some cases, perceptual learning involves changes in how one attends; in other cases, it involves a learned ability to differentiate two properties, or to perceive two properties as unified. Connolly uses this taxonomy to rethink several domains of perception in terms of perceptual learning, including multisensory perception, color perception, and speech perception. -/- As a whole, the book offers a theory of the function of perceptual learning. Perceptual learning embeds into our quick perceptual systems what would be a slower task were it to be done in a controlled, cognitive manner. A novice wine taster drinking a Cabernet Sauvignon might have to think about its features first and then infer the type of wine, while an expert can identify it immediately. This learned ability to immediately identify the wine enables the expert to think about other things like the vineyard or the vintage of the wine. More generally, perceptual learning serves to free up cognitive resources for other tasks. This book offers a comprehensive empirically-informed account, and explores the nature, scope, and theoretical implications of perceptual learning. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Taste and Discernment Delicacy of Taste and the Supertasters Practices and Comparisons Who Are the True Judges of Wine? Experts and Projects Experts and Evaluation Ideal and Izeal experts ‐ And You The Canon and Ideal Critics: The Special Relationship Levinson's Problems The Canon and Wine Wine Canons and Ideal Wine Critics Taste, the Competencies and Trust Iconic or Iconoclastic Critics Conclusion Notes.

While studies on wine tasting are abundant, particularly in sensory marketing, few analyses focus on the wine glass as a specific object. This object has been examined from various perspectives, including alcohol consumption (Banwell 1999), social practices (Lo Monaco et al. 2009), and even more intriguingly, the influence of the glass on the perception of wine aroma (Cliff 2001, Delwiche & Pelchat 2002). The purpose of this article, however, is to to analyze the linguistic and communicational object (...) of the "wine glass" in its discursive contexts, particularly within the digital space, in order to understand the representations associated with it and how the object is staged from a discursive perspective. (shrink)

This paper provides an account of the nature of our appreciation of wine, and a defence of the aesthetic value of tastes and smells. Focusing primarily on Roger Scruton’s recent claims, I argue against him that our appreciation of wine meets his own constraints on aesthetic interest and, moreover, that the cultural significance he grants to wine is in large part grounded in its aesthetic value. I show that Scruton’s claims are thus in tension with each other, (...) not because he has misunderstood the nature of aesthetic interest, but because he fails to appreciate the aesthetic capabilities of wine. Appealing to a well-known argument of Kendall Walton’s, I defend the aesthetic interest and value of tastes and smells by demonstrating that our judgements of wine can be correct or incorrect relative to the categories that govern its production and proper appreciation and understanding. I thereby show that tastes and smells can attain aesthetic significance in virtue of the types of objects they constitute. In particular, I hold that this significance, in the case of wine, rests in large part on its ability to be expressive and to embody certain kinds of meaning. (shrink)

The object of our paper is to examine how wine-related knowledge and practices play an important role in determining the respective flavour experiences of novice wine drinkers and sommeliers. We defend the idea that sensation is informed by knowledge, as it circulates in a cultural environment. Biosemiotics has developed appropriate concepts helping us understand how the same wine can generate diverging experiences. Within a biosemiotic framework, we consider wine flavours as relational, semiosic experiences produced by the (...) convergence of sensory-discriminative, motivational-affective and cognitive-evaluative factors. Drawing from fundamental biosemiotics we argue that these factors vary according to the creature and its simultaneously biological and cultural umwelt. We conclude by examining a series of empirical studies consolidating the idea that sensation is informed by knowledge and language. (shrink)

The One remains, the many change and pass;Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,Stains the white radiance of Eternity,Until Death tramples it to fragments.At its widest, ‘pluralism’ signifies simply the variety of life, the teeming multitude of forms and entities, the many different properties that living beings manifest. Life is not everywhere the same but impressively differentiated, and without it eternity would be all of a piece, uniform. That is enough for life to stain (...) the white radiance of eternity. But within the multiplicity of specifically human life there are not merely differences. There are tensions, oppositions, conflicts. In contemporary philosophical debate ‘pluralism’ then comes to signify one problematic aspect of this. Groups of people have perhaps always subscribed to very different values, and in consequence favoured very different forms of behaviour from one another, at least on a global scale. But the groups are no longer geographically separated: we live in distinct but overlapping cultures, and get in one another's way to a far greater extent than previously. Shelley's ordered image of the dome may then seem inappropriate, and it may seem unnecessary for death to trample it to fragments. Life is already fragmented, and the practical problem facing us as living creatures is to go beyond the fragments, to achieve at least a modus vivendi in the light of all our differences and incompatibilities even if not the orderliness and cohesion of a dome. Somehow, we have to live together. That is a practical problem which confronts us at every level, as members of families, neighbourhoods, departments, countries and increasingly simply as members of a world-wide human race. (shrink)

This essay examines several ethical and epistemological issues that arise when philosophers conduct empirical research focused on, or in collaboration with, community groups seeking to bring about systemic change. This type of research can yield important policy lessons about effective community-driven reform and how to incorporate the voices of marginalized citizens in public policy debates. Community-based reform efforts are also particularly ripe for philosophical analysis since they can demonstrate the strengths and shortcomings of democratic and egalitarian ideals. This type of (...) research also raises unique ethical dilemmas that challenge central tenets of research ethics. We focus on two foundational questions: What does informed consent mean in the context of community-based research when CBR may dissolve differences between researcher and research participant, and its parameters can be hard to delineate? And what ethical, democratic, and epistemic issues arise when conducting research with and on community groups, given potentially competing commitments to respect the epistemological contributions of all participants while also meeting research norms to warrant findings and conclusions? Our examination has two aspects: we grapple with these issues through examples from our work to reveal their significance in our own philosophic practice, and more broadly, to reveal their significance as problems within traditional research ethics. We believe that this approach will demonstrate the utility of philosophic engagement with dilemmas in research ethics as a reflective matter, and in the course of empirical research itself. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:18 HUME AND THE STANDARD OF TASTE David Hume's critical theories, although fragmentary, have drawn increasingly serious attention in the twentieth century, yet even in 1976 Peter Jones, in reassessing Hume's aesthetics, can describe one of the most substantial of his critical essays, "Of the Standard of Taste," as underrated. Jones praises it as "subtle and highly complex," but while I agree with that judgment I also find the (...) essay quite puzzling. I am struck by certain features which look like structural weaknesses and by what seem to be inconsistencies, even contradictions, in Hume's argument. But perhaps the gravest difficulty facing interpretation of this essay is the irony which Hume seems to use, for this raises the question of just how seriously we are to take some of the more conventional views contained in "Of the Standard of Taste." I can begin to illustrate my uneasiness by considering Hume's use of a tall tale from Don Quixote, Part II, chapter xiii. Hume introduces this in a lighthearted way as part of his definition of delicacy of taste. It is the story of Sancho Panza's two kinsmen, who are such sensitive judges of wine that they can detect the taint of iron and leather imparted to a hogshead by the presence in it of a key on a thong. Now there are some interesting differences between Hume's version of this tale and the original. For example, where Hume has the two tasters deliberate over their wine before pronouncing it good, except for the slight taste of leather or iron, Cervantes says the first merely tried it with the tip of his tongue and the second just sniffed it, without tasting any at all. Further, Hume says "both 2 were ridiculed for their judgment," but there is no such 19 reaction mentioned in the original. Lastly, Hume calls the cause of the taint of iron "an old key," where 3 Cervantes describes it as "little." In short, while in the original interest is in the sensitivity of the taste of Sancho' s kinsmen for its own sake, Hume's emphasis is more on the relation of their taste to that of other people. He makes the procedure of tasting the wine as normal as possible and he gives prominence to the reactions of other people. Hume both tones down the more fabulous aspects of the story, making it less extraordinary and hence a better starting-point for a generalization about taste, and makes more explicit the conflict of opinion about the wine. He is using the story not just to define delicacy of taste but also to relate it to the problem of aesthetic judgment and the standard of taste. This is confirmed by the application Hume makes of his example. First, he uses the analogy between physical and aesthetic taste to claim that delicacy in both consists of the ability to detect minute effects and make fine discriminations. But the crucial question is what serves, like the key on the thong in the story, to confirm to outsiders that a man's aesthetic judgment is in fact more delicate than his neighbours'. Hume's answer is "the general rules of beauty... to produce these general rules or avowed patterns of composition is like finding the key with the leathern thong; which justified the verdict of Sancho' s kinsmen, and confounded those pretended judges who had condemned them" (273). But of course producing a general rule is not exactly like finding a physical key on a thong, and Hume's use of the word "avowed" here, which he repeats later, raises the difficulty of how the principles of art become accepted, and by whom. But, that apart, there is something odd about the discussion since the avowed principle is used, with support from examples, to 20 convince a bad critic that he is wrong, on the grounds that his judgment does not accord with the general judgment. This is the opposite of Sancho's story, in which his kinsmen were in a minority, derided, adds Hume, by the dull majority, and only vindicated by the discovery of the tainting key and thong. The aesthetic equivalent of... (shrink)

During a Barolo en primeur tasting session, a seasoned wine taster is assailed by a procedural unease which leads him to question the foundations on which his work rests. Sparked off by his reading of Michel Le Gris’ pamphlet Dionysos crucifié, the taster’s objections and perplexities are directed towards teasing out the rules and coordinates of a tasting aesthetic which has become tamed and domesticated, at the service of a narcissistic “tyranny of instant gratification”. Such an approach translates into (...) wines that are beaten into submission by interventionist winemakers, wines that derive from a tasting model that has been pre-emptively cleansed of tension or dissonance so as to exalt products that are easy, reassuring, docile to marketing logic, and increasingly similar. What sort of doubts, what interpretative friction can hope to reacquaint wine criticism with its true and original aims? What relations between the tongue that tastes and the tongue that speaks can respond to the needs of a new approach to wine appreciation, a ‘tasting different’? (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Cognitive Background to the Aesthetic Problem Wine, Cognition and Philosophy The Phenomenology of “Projects” The Aesthetic Project Notes.

Is the taste of a wine in our minds or in the glass? Can knowledge make a difference to the pleasure a wine gives us? Do the elaborate descriptions of wines in terms of fruits or spices, their "suppleness" or "brawniness," really mean anything? Questions of Taste is the first book to examine the philosophical issues surrounding our experience and enjoyment of wine. Featuring lucid essays from philosophers, a linguist, a biochemist, a wine producer and a (...) wine critic, these leading thinkers use their critical and analytical skills to address these controversial issues. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate how knowledge and experience influence aesthetic perception. We begin with a discussion of recent evidence from perceptual research in wine tasting that turn out to have significant implications for aesthetic perception. We argue that these results suggest not only that knowledge and experience (what we call “competencies”) are central to determining what is tasted and how, but that this happens because such competencies are an important part of the type of “project” that is undertaken (...) with respect to the object. Our analyses suggest that there must be a distinct aesthetic project for wine tasting, and that this project must include specific competencies. We believe this conclusion holds also for aesthetic experience more generally. (shrink)

Background Artificial intelligence-driven Clinical Decision Support Systems (AI-CDSS) are being increasingly introduced into various domains of health care for diagnostic, prognostic, therapeutic and other purposes. A significant part of the discourse on ethically appropriate conditions relate to the levels of understanding and explicability needed for ensuring responsible clinical decision-making when using AI-CDSS. Empirical evidence on stakeholders’ viewpoints on these issues is scarce so far. The present study complements the empirical-ethical body of research by, on the one hand, investigating the requirements (...) for understanding and explicability in depth with regard to the rationale behind them. On the other hand, it surveys medical students at the end of their studies as stakeholders, of whom little data is available so far, but for whom AI-CDSS will be an important part of their medical practice. Methods Fifteen semi-structured qualitative interviews (each lasting an average of 56 min) were conducted with German medical students to investigate their perspectives and attitudes on the use of AI-CDSS. The problem-centred interviews draw on two hypothetical case vignettes of AI-CDSS employed in nephrology and surgery. Interviewees’ perceptions and convictions of their own clinical role and responsibilities in dealing with AI-CDSS were elicited as well as viewpoints on explicability as well as the necessary level of understanding and competencies needed on the clinicians’ side. The qualitative data were analysed according to key principles of qualitative content analysis (Kuckartz). Results In response to the central question about the necessary understanding of AI-CDSS tools and the emergence of their outputs as well as the reasons for the requirements placed on them, two types of argumentation could be differentiated inductively from the interviewees’ statements: the first type, the clinician as a systemic trustee (or “the one relying”), highlights that there needs to be empirical evidence and adequate approval processes that guarantee minimised harm and a clinical benefit from the employment of an AI-CDSS. Based on proof of these requirements, the use of an AI-CDSS would be appropriate, as according to “the one relying”, clinicians should choose those measures that statistically cause the least harm. The second type, the clinician as an individual expert (or “the one controlling”), sets higher prerequisites that go beyond ensuring empirical evidence and adequate approval processes. These higher prerequisites relate to the clinician’s necessary level of competence and understanding of how a specific AI-CDSS works and how to use it properly in order to evaluate its outputs and to mitigate potential risks for the individual patient. Both types are unified in their high esteem of evidence-based clinical practice and the need to communicate with the patient on the use of medical AI. However, the interviewees’ different conceptions of the clinician’s role and responsibilities cause them to have different requirements regarding the clinician’s understanding and explicability of an AI-CDSS beyond the proof of benefit. Conclusions The study results highlight two different types among (future) clinicians regarding their view of the necessary levels of understanding and competence. These findings should inform the debate on appropriate training programmes and professional standards (e.g. clinical practice guidelines) that enable the safe and effective clinical employment of AI-CDSS in various clinical fields. While current approaches search for appropriate minimum requirements of the necessary understanding and competence, the differences between (future) clinicians in terms of their information and understanding needs described here can lead to more differentiated approaches to solutions. (shrink)

Objectives: To collect information on the involvement, legal understanding and ethical views of preregistration house officers regarding end-of-life decision making in clinical practice.Design: Structured telephone interviews.Participants: 104 PRHO who responded.Main outcome measures: Information on the frequency and quality of involvement of PRHO in end-of-life decision making, their legal understanding and ethical views on do-not-resuscitate order and withdrawal of treatment.Results: Most PRHO participated in team discussions on the withdrawal of treatment or a DNR order . Of them, 46 participants had themselves (...) discussed the DNR order with patients. In all, it was agreed by 84 respondents that it would be unethical to make a DNR order on any patient who is competent without consulting her or him. With one exception, it was indicated by the participants that patients who are competent may refuse tube feeding and 101 participants thought that patients may refuse intravenous nutrition. The withdrawal of artificial ventilation in incompetent patients with serious and permanent brain damage was considered to be morally appropriate by 95 and 97 thought so about the withdrawal of antibiotics. The withdrawal of intravenous hydration was considered by 67 to be morally appropriate in this case.Conclusions: PRHO are often involved with end-of-life decision making. The results on ethical and legal understanding about the limitations of treatment may be interpreted as a positive outcome of the extensive undergraduate teaching on this subject. Future empirical studies, by a qualitative method, may provide valuable information about the arguments underlying the ethical views of doctors on the limitations of different types of medical treatment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.3 (2002) 425-446 [Access article in PDF] Giving Orders: Theory and Practice in the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina Vicki Hsueh Indians. Of Edisto Ashapo and Combohe to the South our friends. Of Wando Ituan Sewee and Sehey to the north came to our assistance and were zealous and resolute in it 1000 bowmen In our want supplied us. Q. Spaniards. What we (...) shall doe to the Spaniards if we invade them we brake the peace, if we sit still we loose our reputation with the Indians our friends. Westoes. Inland man eaters. Country. To the northward more sickly, about Ashley River fertile and of a wonderful growth. Tatchequea. A very fruitfull Country 8. days jorney by the North west the Emperor our friend and enemy to the Westoes and to hard for them. Q. Settlem't. 500 people will secure the settlement 1000 perfect it. desires supplys of necessarys till that time Excerpt from Carolina Memoranda in the handwriting of John Locke, Esq., 15 September 1670 Within the last decade, scholars such as James Tully, Barbara Arneil, and Bhikhu Parekh have performed a crucial intervention on modern constitu-tionalism's behalf. 1 Not only has constitutionalism in the modern age been [End Page 425] plagued by assumptions of cultural uniformity and an on-going inability to adjudicate between competing cultural claims, but it has been unable effectively to diagnose those limitations and dilemmas. The root of the problem, James Tully suggests, is ultimately a matter of historical perspective. "[T]he tendency," he writes, "is not to notice the philosophical and ideological debates over the last three hundred years... only the result of these debates is seen—the victorious modern language of constitutional uniformity—and claims for recognition are viewed through its framework as if it were impartial and universal." 2 In response Tully and others have sought to tackle this predicament at its historical root. Identifying modern constitutionalism's colonial origins as a significant part of the problem, their studies address the development of constitutionalism and colonialism as an entwined phenomenon in the early modern period, focusing particularly on the British-American context. In this sense, Locke's Two Treatises of Government stands as an exemplary illustration of the period's entangled colonial and constitutional temperaments. Well-known for its influential articulation of compact and resistance, the Two Treatises, Barbara Arneil argues "were written as a defence of England's colonial policy in the new world against the sceptics in England and the counter-claims of both the aboriginal nations and other European powers in America." 3 Accordingly, present-day constitutionalism continues to bear the weighty legacy of those colonial rationales. "[T]he language of modern constitutionalism," Tully further explains, "which has come to be authoritative was designed to exclude or assimilate cultural diversity and justify uniformity. The design is difficult to see because this 'modern' language has become the customary way of thinking about, reflecting on and envisioning a just constitutional order." Ultimately, Tully submits, citing Wittgenstein, "A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably." 4This much-needed thickening of constitutionalism's historical context has enriched our awareness of constitutionalism's vexed origins, as it has proffered potent tools for interrogating current cultural adjudication. Yet, a troubling predicament persists. As if caught within the tenacious grip of the language of modern constitutionalism, Tully, Arneil, and Parekh insistently portray seventeenth-century British-American colonialism solely as a straightforward process of appropriation and assimilation without addressing or incorporating the [End Page 426] complex and contingent elements of that history in its emergence. Lacking the various negotiations and accommodations between settler and indigene in ambition and actualization, their portrayals crucially underplay the dynamic relationship between theories of constitutionalism and practices of colonialism—an approach that ultimately serves to reinscribe the narrative of triumphalist progress within their critiques. 5This problematic is the context for my reading of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina,1669... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Role of Glass in Interior Architecture:Aesthetics, Community, and PrivacyMatthew Ziff (bio)Design education seeks to infuse students with knowledge, skills, and attitudes, regarding the design of the built environment. In the areas of knowledge and attitude, sophistication and competence are developed through both practice (largely carried out in the design studio environment), and engagement with critical analysis (largely carried out in seminar classes and traditional lecture format class environments). (...) For design students the world of design is both to be known and understood, and to be created, at their own studio desk. In order to both know and create design, students often behave like nocturnal predators, seeking what is necessary in a mode that is often unobserved, and then returning to digest their catch, to produce responsive and synthetic work. One arena in which design students find rich fields of information is that of material characteristics. Materials used in the design and construction of the built environment form a significant portion of the skeleton of a designer's body of knowledge, skills, and attitudes toward design. A current hotbed of material character and application is that of the world of glass. This essay is an exploration of some of the issues that the architectural uses of glass raise from the point of view of design student exploration.Materials evoke physical and psychological responses. Human beings are complex creatures and an individual's response to specific material applications can be unpredictable. Even so, it is reasonable to expect that there are shared attitudes that form the basis for responses to the physical character of the built environment. From delight, to confusion, materials used in the architecture of things large and small, from buildings to fountain pens, contain literal meaning, or expression of method, as well as possible symbolic and cultural meaning. The contemporary use of glass, particularly in interior architecture, presents a vivid arena for emotional and intellectual stimulation and response. [End Page 10]Glass planes that are sheer, opaque, translucent, colorful, brittle, imposing in mass, irregular in surface texture, flawlessly smooth, deformed through casting or by application of pressure and heat, are being used to create spaces that convey ambiguous relationships between private experience and public display. What is an ambiguous relationship? It is one to which a reasonable response is a high degree of uncertainty regarding the course of action one might take, or in the degree of understanding of the context one can develop. To know that the stair in the train station leads to track 4 is a condition that can be created by the use of unambiguous design; a visual connection from where one has to make a choice of paths to follow to the destination, track 4, creates a clear understanding of where track 4 is to be found. If track 4 can be seen from the position at which a choice is required, then certainty, clarity, is possible, if not probable. Visual connection is exactly what clear glass allows, and provides, yet ambiguity results because of the physical, hard barrier, transparency aside. "I can see track 4, but I cannot get there". The clarity provided by being able to see through glass, or even by being able to see light coming through translucent glass, is not sufficient to offset the uncertainty, or the mixed message, of not being able to get there, to touch what we can see.Glass in interiors offers a tactile and sensory titillation; the excitement of knowing that with a single swing of a hammer, or an umbrella handle, the beautiful sheet of curved frosted lemon ice colored tempered glass can be shattered into fragments.Windows have long been the predominant interior and exterior architectural element in which glass has played a major role. The glass used in Windows on the World, the famous restaurant atop the World Trade Center, destroyed during its collapse, and the glass used in a simple double hung window in a one story ranch house each share architectural duties of providing view from inside to outside, light transmission from outside to inside, heat gain, and acoustical isolation. Human eyes are sometimes described as "windows to the soul," which suggests the ability to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:164 BOOK REVIEWS "was presented with wine in the name of the whole University." That evening, one of the feasters recalled that this was the man who had written the foremost theological defense of the Royal Supremacy: the following morning, when Gardiner asked for vessels and vestments to say Mass before proceeding on his way, they were refused him, as to an excommunicate or a schismatic. This incident (...) is significant for a number of reasons: it shows that, whatever anyone else might have thought, Gardiner certainly thought he was a Catholic. The ambiguity of that label, and how far exactly it extended, is also quite evident. Some explanation of the difficulty and some consistency of usage in the text of the biography would have been welcome. The text itself appears to have a number of editorial flaws: p. 201 begins in the middle of a paragraph, and the opening lines are omitted. In the second paragraph of p. 176, numbers are transposed so that what is printed as 1534 should read 1543 (in the context, a significant difference). The book is, on the whole, a contribution to scholarship that is long overdue. That a man who was so powerful (not to say feared) during his own lifetime should wallow in oblivion is confusing. Redworth 's biography, for all its incompleteness, is of great value in piecing together the life of this leader, both political and ecclesiastical, who sought to fashion the emerging English Church and nation into a recognizably Catholic form. Dominican House of Studie$ Washington, D.C. W. BECKET SOULE, 0.P. Art and the Word of God (Arte e la Parola di Dio): A Study of Angelico Rinaldo Zarlenga, O.P. Edited by VINCENT I. ZARLENGA, O.P. (text in English and Italian). River Forest, Illinois: Fra Angelico Art Foundation, 1990. Pp. xiv + 109. The religious order of the Dominicans (Order of Preachers) was founded in the thirteenth century by St. Dominic with the specific purpose of preaching the Gospel or " ministry of the Word." With the Franciscan Order it shared in the creative, artistic impulse that produced the medieval cathedrals. It is often said that the great Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas, for all its intellectual rigor, is also a work of art comparable to the gothic masterpiece of Chartres cathedral. Dominicans and Franciscans thought that the Gospel should find expression not only in words, but in poetry, music, architecture, and BOOK REVIEWS 165 the plastic arts. Among the artists who were members of the Dominican Order are the recently beatified Fra Angelico (BL Giovanni da Fiesole ), Bartolommeo della Porta, an important influence on Raphael and other High Renaissance painters, Juan Mayno the gifted Spanish contemporary of El Greco, Pere Couturier, the advocate of modern church art and friend of Matisse, and the American sculptor, Thomas McGlynn. Carrying on this Dominican tradition, Angelico Rinaldo Zarlenga (1919-1986), a native of Italy, worked in the United States from 1949 until his death. The present work, edited by his brother Vincent, also a member of the Order, makes available a chronological catalogue of his paintings, sculptures, and designs in glass, with many illustrations in full color, along with a biography and critical appreciations by others, including Cardinals Joseph Bernadin and Mario Luigi Ciappi. It is an important contribution to the history of Catholic religious art in the United States. The noted German theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar built his whole theology not on the goodness and truth of God, but on His beauty, or in biblical terms, God's "glory." According to St. Thomas Aquinas, " beauty " is the " radiance of truth," that is, it is truth as truth is related well to our knowing powers. Like the fit between the key and the lock, beauty is the fit between known and the knower. That is why a landscape on a cloudy day looks dull and uninteresting, but when the sun comes out it appears strikingly beautiful. The sun's illumination has made the dim objects vividly visible, radiant to our eyes. This is what the artist does for us. He does not clothe the facts of reality with an adventitious beauty, but he illumines those facts so that... (shrink)

The question of aesthetic judgment is related to a lot of paradoxes that have marked sustainably the reflection on arts, and even arts as such during their modern history. These paradoxes have found a first formulation, apparently clear, in the very famous Hume's essay: "On the standard of taste", but without to lead to a real resolution. In this paper, I would like to approach the question of Hume by starting from what Wittgenstein suggested about aesthetic judgment in his Cambridge (...) lectures. To this end, I will try to give a wittgensteinian reading of Hume's essay, in order to show that though the question of aesthetic judgment makes certainly sense, the way of considering it - like the way Kant shall consider it later - can be regarded as typical of difficulties Wittgenstein tried to overcome in his investigations on rules. By giving an alternative formulation to this question, we should be able to examine differently the problems of the aesthetic judgment, to underline more precisely the originality of Wittgenstein's approach, and perhaps to better grasp what are its consequences, not only for a better comprehension of the relationship between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and art, but for the type of perplexity to which we must face everytime we meet the paradox inherent to the question of aesthetic appreciation as such: how can we conceive the very idea of a standard involving a normative meaning without making to faint what gives to a work of art its value. We shall see that Wittgenstein’s suggestions, though their contribution to a better understanding of this question is still affected by some ambiguities, are to be reconsidered under the light of his anti-essentialism, and that these ambiguities can be dissipated by dissociating, on one hand, what belongs to his own tastes or to his related thoughts and on the other hand what we can conceive through the ways which were opened by his philosophy beyond his personal inclinations. Despite what gives to the sphere of Wittgenstein's artistic interests its limited character; despite also what drives his attention towards another kind of problems, it may well be that his thought cast a bright light on current artistic practices and therefore on the questions they ask to philosophy. (shrink)

“Artworks are not being but a process of becoming” —Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory In the everyday use of the concept, saying that something is grotesque rarely implies anything other than saying that something is a bit outside of the normal structure of language or meaning – that something is a peculiarity. But in its historical use the concept has often had more far reaching connotations. In different phases of history the grotesque has manifested its forms as a means of (...) subversive resistance against society’s prevailing notions of form and power. What aids this impact and distinguishes two of its basic stylistic features is the grotesque’s dissolution of form and its hyperbole. Such grotesqueries, however, soon solidify into new forms, new structures of meaning, hierarchy and practice, and in this sense the history of the grotesque is, on one hand, a continual opposition and transgression of the prevailing notions of art as well as of God and humanity, while on the other hand it offers continual resistance to its own solidifying process. As such the grotesque will not and cannot be contained in form without it losing the very thing that makes it grotesque. Even though it is somewhat easy to point out certain stylistic features of the grotesque, the sum of those features tell us very little about what is at play within it. Definitions concerned with the grotesque’s content rather than its form faces similar difficulties. Throughout history, expressions relating to the grotesque have been used in defense of a whole host of different social and cultural discourse including, for instance, Catholicism (See Erhard Schön’s Der Teufel mit der Sackpfeife , 1536), Protestantism (See Lucas Cranach’s Der Papstesel , 1523), a material folk culture (see Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World , 1984) and an idealistic romantic structure of meaning (see Wolfgang Kayser’s The Grotesque in Art and Literature , 1957). Thus though the grotesque cannot be reduced to the expression of certain forms or meanings, in order to examine what the grotesque is about one has to try to see how it’s relationship to flow and process and how, by maintaining this relationship, it attempts to avoid solidifying into form and meaning. The process of the grotesque alluded to here revolves around a play between periphery and center, the marginalized and the dominant. Most often this is expressed as a direct negation of the center of power. In the medieval grotesque tradition of the carnival, for example, it is expressed by its emphasis on the nether regions of the body as the center of creation of meaning. Spirit does not come from above, but from the belly, buttocks and genitals, and there is, expressed in this manner, a mockery of the predominant Christian notion of truth and meaning. Such inversions of the sites of meaning most often explicitly express an increased interest in materiality instead of ideal content which comes to the fore through the play between periphery and center. Even in early grotesque Renaissance art (for example in the works of Raphael) the depiction of the mythological or ideal reveals an exploration of the possibilities of the material. The works of art thus explore their own boundaries rather than act as vessels of the divine and in this way the grotesque explores the limits of form and materiality. This in turn brings to the fore a metaphysical dimension in the workings of the grotesque: It is an immanent exploration of its own boundaries. Materiality and metaphysics are joined together, because it is through the awareness of itself as a structuring (dis)order that it places itself in opposition to the prevailing notions of form and power. This way the grotesque expresses an awareness of the division of sign and reality and a search for this reality. It implicitly expresses the awareness that meaning is not something God-given and static, but fluctuating and man-made. In modern explorations of the history of the grotesque it is commonly seen as a form of realism that manifests a shift from the ideal towards the material, freeing art from representing some hidden higher order and instead making the work of art the very site of creation and meaning. Going even further, the grotesque actively opposes the notions of the ideal by marking a shift from an ahistorical view of the world towards the historical. However, this also makes clear why the grotesque has a tendency to solidify into new static forms of meaning, for by establishing itself as a subversive counterforce there is an idea of transgression and emancipation. That is why the grotesque often historicizes and relativizes only to repeat the mistakes of that which it negates: putting itself in the king’s chair. The exploration of the material seems to create new forms and notions of the ideal. The representation of an otherness outside the prevailing notions of meaning and truth becomes a positive manifestation of this otherness as truth itself. Thus the historical “truths” of the grotesque are superseded by history itself. When the expressions of the grotesque solidify into static form and meaning, they become mere objects like anything else in the world. Instead of being this elusive thing of process and flow, it becomes tangible to the existing hierarchy of power as well as history itself. In this way the grotesque can be expunged, included or simply revealed as yet another false notion of truth, which is precisely what has happened with the grotesque throughout the course of history. If from the beginning the expression of the grotesque has not already been in the service of some structure of meaning and truth, it has quickly been included or has quickly included itself in such a structure. But by doing so it rejects its own basis: the tension between periphery and center is replaced by the attempt to create a new center, a new structure of meaning and truth. The doubleness, ambiguity and flow of the grotesque are then rejected by the grotesque itself. THE NON-FORM OF FORM In the critical thinking of Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69) the problem of art, caught between a reductive and prevalent notion of truth and meaning and a peripheral and alienated otherness, is reexamined and reformulated. For Adorno, the instrumental rationality of Enlightenment itself reverts into a new form of mythology which is every bit as static and exclusive as the hierarchies of religion it supersedes. All is excluded that is non-identical to the instrumental mastery of the objects of the world, "For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry." 1 As such the non-identical has been banished from the realm of thought and action, and banished specifically to the realm of art. But the realm of art is not able to provide a decent home for it because even modern art is not something entirely autonomous. While it is excluded from the notions of truth and meaning provided by instrumental rationality, it still originates from society. Just like instrumental rationality art is about mastery, structuring and exclusion. Therefore, the problem for art is that it cannot directly provide a space for the non-identical because its mode of operation is similar to that of instrumental rationality. Even worse, art has very few possibilities to free itself from this. If it becomes l’art pour l’art it is at the same time reduced to the very thing instrumental rationality claims it to be: a subjective judgment of taste.expressionism also stands as an example of this. Conversely, art cannot work within the framework of the identity-thinking of society, because any notion of freedom or emancipation would reproduce the exclusive practices of instrumental rationality. For example: Explicit socialist literature may establish itself in opposition to instrumental rationality while at the same time reproducing it. Its language may seem different, but in reality it merely provides a different set of reductive schematics for human life and experience. The problem for the art of the grotesque was, as I mentioned earlier, that far too often it was merely a symbolic manifestation of a notion of otherness—not otherness itself. Because of this the subversive character of the grotesque ends up shaping and containing otherness instead of providing a space for it. According to Adorno the only way to avoid this is to radicalize the grotesque. In order to avoid solidifying into form the work of art has to be an object which cannot be contained in thought or form—a non-form of form. The work of art has to work in a way that it strives for autonomy but without entirely leaving a discernible reality. In other words, it has to pull in two directions at once. Thus the work of art is a paradox. It is autonomous in the sense that it closes itself off from everything outside of the work of art, trying to shy away from the contaminating influence of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality. At the same time though the work of art is heteronomous in the sense that it originates from a specific historical context and is bound to be what society is not. Autonomy and heteronomy are inseparably intertwined. Unable to display otherness itself, but still trying to be a refuge for it, there is only one option for art: It has to turn against itself and destroy its own logic of form, thereby demonstrating how any representation of otherness is impossible. Art becomes a lamentation of the victims of the identity thinking of instrumental rationality and shows the traces of the otherness that is unable to appear. Adorno’s pessimistic theory of art and history stages art as a negative dialectical process where the work of art closes itself off and rejects everything outside, while the individual elements in the work of art destroys its very own logic of form from within: Artworks synthetize ununifiable, nonidentical elements that grind away at each other; they truly seek the identity of the identical and nonidentical processually because even their unity is only an element and not the magical formula of the whole […]. The resistance to them of otherness, on which they are nevertheless dependent compels them to articulate their own formal language, to leave not the smallest unformed particle as remnant. This reciprocity constitutes art’s dynamic; it is an irresolvable antithesis that is never brought to rest in the state of being. 2 Relative to a traditional understanding of the grotesque, Adorno radicalizes the tension between center and periphery, autonomy and heteronomy. In the traditional understanding of the grotesque, as we find it for example in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, the grotesque establishes the display of otherness as a new center of meaning and truth. However Adorno rejects such notions and argues instead for a modernism of the grotesque in which both center and periphery are included in a negative dialectical process and continually synthesizing and destabilizing each other’s positions. A modernism of the grotesque works on the inside of the sign or the artwork, continually outlining and questioning the boundaries between materiality and form. This moves the focus away from the relation between the sign or work of art as a conceptual manifestation on one side and the object it refers to on the other side. Instead it implicitly points to the amorphous mass from which the signs and thereby meaning have been carved, the remnants that have been left behind. Modernism of the grotesque does not imply that it is emancipatory or that it reconciles man with nature, and does not represent a new position or a new ideology. It merely remembers and insists on the double nature of man and art: to write or paint yourself or an artwork whole by inscribing meaning in life or by applying form on a canvas is at the same time both creation and destruction. The very signs we use to center meaning in our lives carry its own alienation in them. Meaning surfaces only when process and flow comes to a halt—solidifying, but at the same time excluding parts that do not fit into that particular structure of meaning. NOTHING DONE AND NOTHING UNDONE It has always been difficult for art historians to find a suitable category for the works of the Danish artist Leif Lage (b. 1933). In his paintings the sensitive figuration seems so fragile that it is on the verge of turning into abstraction. Or conversely: the figurative emerges cautiously and hesitantly out of abstraction. As an art critic once wrote, he can almost paint things away. 3 Working in some undefinable space between abstraction and figuration, the Lage’s works shy away from the realm of words, and as a result few critics have been able to write anything meaningful about his works. In fact even fewer have been able to write more than one or two pages. The Danish author and art critic Leif Hjernøe is one of those few, but even he starts off by saying how impossible it is to write about Lage, confessing that his works exist both as process and in a field of in-between which words cannot reach. He writes: Always you find yourself in a place where nothing is done and nothing left undone, and where the elements of the work of art rest in a continuous motion. Always there is the open wound, where infection rather than surgical intervention is considered as an opportunity. And the conflict between matter and antimatter makes all diagnoses uncertain and allows conditions of uncertainty to spread in a place of raw presence. 4 The art works against the diagnosis and the certainty. Words are being eaten up by what is outside the realm of words: tension, process and doubleness. An approach to an understanding of the work of Lage could be to follow his connection to Samuel Beckett (1906-89). One can note, therefore, that Lage has illustrated several of the Danish translations of Beckett’s works. Though one is an author and the other a painter both seek a place where figuration, where the word, erodes. For both this entails an attempt to question and examine and so move in behind the façade of the surface in an exploration of that something or nothing that may be behind representation. At the same time even in the vanishing point of figuration or words, the meaningless words or the disjointed lines still stand as signs of human activity—signs of movement in emptiness. With very few exceptions Lage’s artworks revolve around one motif: Man—most often “en face.” But unlike traditional portraitures Lage’s people are found within. The artworks do not sense the reality of appearances, but rather the existential dimensions within man. As a seismograph they are sensitive to the utmost subjectivity in order to display an objective, sensuous depiction of the very problem of subjectivity. Instead of a static façade of a man, Lage’s “en face” shows the process-character of man. The people in Lage’s paintings are always in process—in the midst of becoming or dissolving. I will take a closer look in the following at the ways in which Lage establishes this sense of being in constant process, of being in-between modes or categories. THE DOUBLENESS OF THE STROKE Lage’s etchings attract attention in particular for the tension conveyed there between the material and the form. The material physically opposes the violence of the needle. But instead of embracing the violence of the needle and the victory over matter—instead of making the artistic creation and figuration express a heroic mastery of the background it is made out of—Lage uses the stroke to express the very tension between stroke and material, figuration and background. In the drypoint etching Untitled from 1983, which illustrated the Danish translation of Beckett’s Ill Seen, Ill Said , the needle tears up the material in long rough lines: Together, the primarily horizontal and vertical lines form a face. Thus the force needed to etch a line in the metal-plate draws attention to itself: It is there in the absence of curves and nuances. Man emerges on the metal-plate after great exertion and in a very simplistic form. This way Lage enhances the nature of the material, as the material’s resistance is not something to overcome. On the contrary the figuration is smitten by its very resistance and as such expresses the violence of its own becoming. Even more pronounced is the fact that the lines do not just show the violence of creation—it actively erases figuration in the same process that creates it. For example the mouth consists of 8-10 horizontal strokes, of which some seem to be connected to each other as if the mouth has been quickly scratched out. The mouth speaks of the inability to speak. In the same way, the eyes are black holes due to a large amount of criss-cross cuts, which together form a dark middle. Those lines, at the same time, form the eyes of the figuration and scratch out the eyes of the figuration. The extroverted aspects of the face—connected to speech and sight—are portrayed as introverted as well. Just as the etchings down into the metal-plate makes something appear. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1983 (etching) The figuration of the etching is connected to creation. It expresses that something is wrought into existence out of nothing by sheer artistic force. However, this force is at the same time presented as a violence of creation, which makes it impossible for form to truly emerge. Herein lies one of the basic principles of Lage’s art, namely that art cannot be that nothing or something behind the realm of words or signs. Without form, art would lose its ability to express anything at all. Form is a necessity if art is to avoid becoming as devoid of expression as the reality is that we cannot reach behind the appearance of things. On the other hand, art cannot raise itself above its own material in joyous celebration of the beauty of form. This would use the material in the manner of an instrument and thus would suppress the otherness it attempts to rescue. When art becomes mere form, any traces of otherness will have dissolved. Then art would be a question of technique, in no way different from the instrumental rationality of society. Therefore art works in a particular space between form and non-form. As Hjernøe says of the works of Lage, it is in the center of the event, in the in-between where things neither are nor are not, "And everything takes place just before it changes character. As the blood just before it coagulates, as the milk just before it separates, as fried egg just before it turns white […]." 5 The precise emphasis on the in-between of Lage’s art points in particular to the work of art as both outside of and in time. The work of art is a singular point in time, but at the same time it is continually in process. In the borderland between form and non-form, between creation and destruction, it shimmers like a fata morgana . The work is done but at the same time undone. It is only there as a cry in response to the inability to come into being. Akin to the etching is the drawing, but while both, of course, use the stroke or line as their main instrument, the paper does not resist the line in the same sense as the metal-plate of the etching. As a result in Lage’s drawings the stroke frolics in a space with almost no tension at all. There is nothing there to keep the pencil stroke at bay, but at the same time this means that there is nothing there to keep it together. One of the more expressive examples of this is found in an untitled drawing from Tegninger og Text ( Drawings and Text ) from 1999. The drawing consists of one unbroken pencil stroke. It is as if the stroke is confused—it darts around on the paper making doodles on the way or gathers itself in more straight lines in the center of the paper. It is in this manner that the semblance of a body is established. A couple of small circles serve as eyes and are the reason that the rest can be read as both face and body instead of pure abstraction. In fact the unbroken stroke serves as both abstraction and figuration as on the one hand it is the stroke that seemingly outlines the shape of a figure, while on the other hand the unbroken stroke dissolves any truly recognizable figuration by continuously, without end or aim, overflowing the boundaries of the figure. Seen again here is a doubleness to the stroke and the act of creation. In the etching it was all about the tension between the resistance of the material which created the doubleness. Here it is the opposite. It is the lack of tension. The stroke is free to do anything, but has no aim: without some kind of resistance, there is nothing to hold figuration together. It threatens to dissolve into nothingness. Conversely, the drawing can also be seen as a process of becoming. Like a form of automatic writing, the pencil darts around until it finds a point of densification. But even in such an interpretation of the drawing, the figuration appears artificial—it points to itself as the result of the artistic act of creation. The stroke is primarily stroke and only secondarily figuration. With its wild movement it calls attention to itself as stroke. Thus the figuration never becomes something in its own right. It points to the basic principle of creation: Someone has drawn me, I am the result of artistic endeavors, and therefore I am not for myself but always overflowing the boundaries that contain me. It is the stroke that in the very same movement creates figuration and dissolves it. Leif Lage, Untitled , 1999 (drawing) THE LIGHTNESS OF COLOR, THE DENSITY OF PAPER Often the watercolor is used as a precursor for larger paintings, because it has an immediacy in which one can quickly paint the main lines of a composition. However, Lage’s watercolors are not temporary points in a process leading to another final painting. They are not sketches, later to be filled with details in another material. For him watercolor is an end in itself. This also implies that he doesn’t try to work against the paper’s absorption of the water color and its tendency to absorb detail. On the contrary, he examines the possibilities inherent in this blurring of the line and absorption of color. As in the previous examples, there are of course recognizable shapes in Lage’s water colors. But these shapes are rarely separable from color, line or even paper. In other words: the figurative and the abstract more or less become one. One of the reasons for this is that Lage often works on wetted paper which means that the paper hungrily absorbs color into its fabric instead of it being on top of the paper. The paper becomes line because it is the absorption of the color which, together with the brush stroke itself, separates the colors from each other. The line is also color and the color is also line, because there is no separation between the different colors other than the colors themselves. At times this results in almost complete abstraction. In such cases Lage add lines with a pencil as if he wants to hold some sort of figuration together. At other times it is the other way around: the strokes of the pencil are a being dissolved by the water color blurring out the figuration. Untitled 1 from 1999 displays various tones of green. The contour of the colors appears unusually rough. Most of all it is reminiscent of a shoreline which has found its form through the work of thousands of years between water and land. Pockets of resistance surface as islands not yet drowned in color—as paper or color not yet consumed by the dominant color. The shape of the colors does not seem created by the hand of the artist, but rather by the inner workings of the watercolor: color against color over time has resulted in this very image, as if it is all a part of a natural process of change and decay. Despite the fact that there are no strong differences in color there seems to be a struggle taking place in the watercolor. For example, inexplicable holes in the dark color, which cover most of the right side of the watercolor, appear as if the underlying color is eating away the dark color, or that the dark color is in the process of covering up the underlying color. The small pockets of resistance demonstrate a process and development that, almost as a happy accident, evokes a couple of small eyes and a large mouth. Behind the colors a few slanted lines can be discerned, but the hand of the artist has long ago disappeared behind the life of the colors. Thus the watercolor seems to be held at precisely the point in time where figuration randomly appears. The small eyes and wide mouth seemingly express the realization of the figuration’s temporality. It is just a moment in time, soon to be consumed again in the life of the colors. The nature, the background it stems from and is part of, moves on undeterred, continuing its everlasting process of creation and decay. In this sense, the watercolor provides an experience of how neither artist nor man is able to transcend the materiality they consist of. The colors of man, the materials man consists of are “becoming” and “progress” but also “decay” and “disappearance”. The artist’s pencil strokes have been eaten up long ago, and the figuration is living on borrowed time. Human or artistic activity is about creating form, transcending mere matter by shaping and applying meaning to it. But Untitled 1 shows the doubleness of such creation: the transience and fragility of human life. Should the figuration come into being, should it rise and transcend the material, which binds it to its temporal existence, it would become nothing because its very existence is conditioned by the life and work of the colors. In the same sense man cannot escape his own temporality. He too, for better or worse, must accept a life in the volatility of sensation. Leif Lage, Untitled 1 , 1999 (watercolor) In most of Lage’s watercolors there seem to be a stronger artistic control than in Untitled 1 . Most often both the arrangement of colors and the technique in which they are painted express the hand of the artist. An example of this is Untitled 2 from 1999. While figuration in Untitled 1 seemed to appear as a happy accident, the figuration is much more “created” in Untitled 2 . Here the most important parts of the figuration, the eyes, the mouth and part of the skull, are colored black and painted on top of the background’s play of colors. The background primarily consists of blue and yellow tones. Only parts of the paper are covered in color, however, which yet again stresses the act of painting: There is a surface which is being filled by color by an artist. The blue tones are concentrated in the figuration, while the yellow tones surround it. All this means that the figuration stands out more clearly in this watercolor. This is also underlined by the fact that the blue and dark tones cover part of the yellow tones as spots here and there. Thus it is not a background which is in the process of consuming figuration, but rather the emerging figuration which blots out the background. Such an understanding is even suggested by how the mouth and eyes are placed in the larger blue color field. The eyes and mouth are in the center of the watercolor, while the blue color field is placed from center out towards the left side. This gives the impression of a face turned slightly to the right and slightly upwards, which again makes the mouth appear to emerge from the paper. It also helps that the mouth cuts the center axis of the watercolor. In other words, the arrangement of the blue and black colors create some depth and perspective which gives the illusion of a figuration, seen partially in profile, emerging from the background. Seen in profile, the eyes and mouth seem extroverted—they almost seem as if they are put on top of the face. But at the same time they are painted as black holes, sucking in the gaze of the onlooker. The watercolor is even more challenging if one follows what may be the faint outline of the skull, which, on the right side of the watercolor, no longer works together with the blue color, but rather alone postulates the outline of the skull. If not the blue color field, but this line, is the outline of the skull, then all of a sudden the face is not in profile but “en face”—staring directly towards the onlooker. Outline and color seemingly work against each other and establish two different expressions. Without the slightly upward tilted expression of the profile, the eyes and mouth do not seem to emerge from the paper. On the contrary, seen “en face,” the eyes and mouth are really gaping pits of darkness. In this sense Untitled 2 is at the same time surface and depth of perspective. The line gives form but at the same time it dissolves the form created by the colors, and vice versa. Leif Lage, Untitled 2 , 1999 (watercolor) As the last example of Lage’s artistic method, I have chosen another untitled work (as indeed nearly all of Lage’s artworks are)—this time from 2000. This is perhaps one of the most figurative watercolors Lage has created, though that doesn’t tell us too much. The painting depicts a human face in blue and green tones on a yellow toned background. The colors create a clear demarcation between the figure and the background, which compensate for the watercolor’s lack of outline. Beneath the face darker tones imply the beginning of the torso, and nuances of color even hint at something which could be a collar. The hair is in even darker tones and its structure is emphasized using pencil strokes on top of the water color. One eye is marked by a brown spot with a darker spot in the middle, while the other eye is added by pencil. The mouth is a round, red dot. In Untitled from 2000 the work between abstraction and figuration is much less pronounced than in the previous examples cited here. Nonetheless the watercolor has a delicacy to it which almost makes the figuration disappear, even as it appears. This has something to do with the fact that all the individual brush strokes have dissolved. The only outlines are those created by the clash of colors. Even the red mouth seems to be more paint than mouth—unable to be formed truly as anything other than a speck of color with some small semblance to a mouth. In contrast to the other watercolors, there is no movement, no progress or decay, just a vibrating standstill. The figure is not emerging or disappearing but embedded in and as surface, and as such it makes the figure seem stuck in its condition rather than freed by the act of giving form: mouth open as a wound. Pencil strokes add detail and life to the hair as an attempt to help the figure emerge. But all this does is create two levels in the watercolor: The pencil strokes are put on top of the figuration rather than being part of it. Thus they end up highlighting the endless distance between the movement and form-giving of the pencil strokes and the static and stuck figure behind these strokes. Leif Lage, Untitled , 2000 (watercolor) MAN AND THE VIEW OF THE ONLOOKER Lage’s works seem at the same time to be an examination of tensions between form and material in art and a display of an image of man full of the same tensions. This is because the people who are emerging in Lage’s images are not just in his works, They are his works. This means that man is not something emerging from a background but is part of this background and vice versa. The art of Lage inscribes man in its surroundings and background. Man is not the ruler of nature. Man does not rise above matter; there is no truly transcendent position for man to occupy in the art of Lage. Instead man is a part of the very matter, it, at the same time, tries to distance itself from in order to distinguish itself from its surroundings. Man emerges in an attempt not to be line, stroke, color. In an attempt to free itself of matter. Should it succeed in this, however, it would turn into nothing. On the other hand, if man fully accepted itself as mere matter it would disappear in it—in instincts, urges and lack of reflection. The appearance of man is thus subject to a state of being in-between. Only in the tension between material and its negation can the outlines of man be traced. However this also means that in the art of Lage man is never something in itself but always in process—on the way to its freedom and its loss. However, Lage’s art is not just about showing the tensions inherent in man but also about showing such tension on the verge of breaking point. In the moment before everything is done, or when nothing yet has been done, the delicate tension between form and material has been stretched to its utmost in such a way that man’s character of process emerges and is contained on the paper or canvas. Therefore, Lage’s art contain traces of human life. Not only is it an autonomous unity of tensions where man is stretched out between its singularity and the surroundings it is a part of. It is also this pulsation between figuration and material which brings about the traces of human endeavor and activity. Even when man almost seems to have disappeared into the material, strokes and lines are still there as a reminder of human activity and potential creative power—as a reminder that hope is still possible and that man is still there. The view of the onlooker seeks out forms and meaning. It seeks outlines and edges. But first and foremost it is the eyes in Lage’s works of art that allow the onlooker to decode the figuration at play. This creates a distinctive relationship between the onlooker and the artwork. The onlooker tries to wrest the enigma from the artwork, tries to reduce it to solid, meaningful form. But the very same moment that hints at such a possibility sees the view of the onlooker confronted with a gaze of its own. The eyes of the figure in the work of art are most often dark pits, as if they were an illustration of the violence committed against the eyes of the onlookers and their search for meaning. Or as if they were a dark reflection of the onlooker’s failed attempts to delineate the traces of life in the artwork to a solid meaningful form. Therefore, the gaze of the figuration speaks not only of its own powerlessness but also of the powerlessness of the onlooker. When the view or sight has trouble finding solid meaningful forms, it has something to do with the fact that the precondition for sight, light, no longer stems from something transcendent. In Lage’s art there is nothing outside the works of art, nothing outside of human life, and as such nothing to shed light on the works of art or human life and reveal solid meaningful forms. All light comes from within. In a western context, light as a medium for sight is central to the understanding of meaning. People speak of the clarity of thought, while knowledge is tied together with enlightenment, and so forth. But the light no longer originates from a divine point of view. It originates from man, who has created himself in the image of God. The problem with this is that light always covers up its own base. Light illuminates something but at the same time it hides itself. 6 While it was previously God who was unknowable, now it is man. It is also problematic that sight and the medium of sight stem from the same place. Following this thought one can posit two final problems. Firstly, the immediacy and presence established by light by making forms and objects accessible to sight is fake. Light is not some independent entity which present things in a neutral manner for the onlooker. It is inextricably tied together with the gaze’s desire after meaning. In other words: Light perverts the appearance of things because it doesn’t originate from some objective entity which allows them to appear as they are. Instead light is based upon and originates from the subject and its conquering gaze, seeking out meaning and form constantly. Secondly, the joining of sight and light makes introspection within human life impossible. Everything can be illuminated by its use value for the subject but only as long as it is separated from the subject, as long as it is an object. But the subject itself cannot be illuminated. Lage’s art tears down such a dividing line between subject and matter, but it does so without reestablishing a divine position from where the light emanates. Therefore, the light in Lage’s art may not illuminate very well. It may not have the certainty presented by modern science or the religions of yesterday. But it does show what such light tries to hide, namely, the subject as it is in its material reality—inscribed in time and death, which are the basic conditions of materiality, but at the same time also full of life in its joy and will to create. For the onlooker the meeting of the gaze in Lage’s works of art is thus also a destruction of the view of the onlooker. The ability to see is challenged in a radical way. Those outlines will not solidify into static form, as if the light was too dim to see. Just as in Lage’s figurations, the view of the onlooker turns to black: turns towards the onlooker in recognition and becoming—or disappearance. NOTES Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment . (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002): 4-5. Theodor W. Adorno. Aesthetic Theory . (London & New York, 2002): 176. Carsten Bach-Nielsen. “Mere glæde end gru.” Kristeligt Dagblad . September 24, 2002. Leif Hjernøe. “Den yderliggående inderlighed.” LEIF LAGE—Retrospektiv udstilling 1983 . (Copenhagen: Brøndum, 1983): 18. Ibid. Maurice Blanchot. The Infinite Conversation . (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): 162-163. (shrink)

Don't tell terrible stories—everyone here has enough of their own. Everyone here has a whole bloody sack of terrible stories, and at the bottom of the sack is a hammer the narrator uses to pound you on the skull the instant you dare not believe your ears. Or to pound you when you do believe. Not long ago I saw a tomboyish girl on Khreshchatyk Street demand money of an elderly woman, threatening to bite her and infect her with syphilis. (...) Don't stroll through Volodymyr Hill Park, don't stroll around the botanical garden, and especially don't stroll on Kontraktova Square. Don't stroll anywhere. Don't go to the pavilion with the Golgotha panorama near St. Alexander's Church. Not even the twelve-meter-tall crucified Christ will save you. Don't go outside when it's dark and people turn into shadows a shade darker than dark. Also don't go where you can be seen from far away. Not to imply that people used to be like a bunch of lilies, but now they stink like a cellar of cabbage.The city, which earlier might have had some fun, is now going crazy. It's like a fish in warm water: it doesn't react to anything, swims slowly like it doesn't care if it swallows a hook or not. The excitement and exaltation pass into oppression, just as our necks have sunk into our shoulders, our shoulders into our lumbars, our lumbars into our nether regions. The holiday turns into a funeral, the parades into explosions, depression into mania. Winter passes into summer, people turn into beasts, the hours into ages, and the ages into hours. It's worth simply walking around the city to see a soldier from an unknown army taking a piss near the opera. Farther on is a row of identical old widows selling ball gowns and candelabra. Then there are the aristocrats and manufacturers who throw so much at the prostitutes that they'll soon be richer than their wives.I returned late through the Kyryliv Wood, not heeding all the warnings that I myself have given here. It really is dangerous—the place is famous for it. There's a madhouse nearby, caves where criminals and the sick can hide out. Also, once upon a time, as they say in fairy tales, the great dragon Zmei Gorynich lived here beside the Puchai River. The stench in these places drives away the most committed misanthropes and even one type of philanthrope—that is, perverts. It sounds dumb, but the stench is cleansing. I don't know where it comes from. After the operating theaters and the rooms with amputees, the stench no longer repelled or attracted me; it just was. And this was a great place to think. As I walked, I considered an incident with our patient.The patient, a respectable individual whose name carries too much weight for me to state it directly, one day began to assault people. He nearly strangled a merchant who he believed asked too much for a beaver coat. He likewise wanted to kill his business partner when he didn't say hello loudly enough. But the worst was, he lost all shame of his own nakedness. At first it was the police who took care of it. When our future patient slipped off his pants and undergarments, he was taken to Kyrylivska, which has had means for dealing with such cases dating back to the day when unhinged Cossacks and composers from Kyiv Mohyla Academy were taken there.During the examination we determined that the patient was experiencing a severe breakdown. His wife added that lately, more than once, he had allowed himself strong words in front of the children and often suffered from ennui. Furthermore, she said, the patient had been undergoing treatment for “the French disease” for some years—which was, obviously, where we needed to start.“Syphilis!” Skorsky spat out the matchstick he was chewing on. He was a specialist on the psychological aspects of diseases related to the venereal. “Tertiary syphilis! When poorly treated, over time ‘the French disease’ can destroy the central nervous system. Hence the patient's chicanery. Such theater!”Skorsky and I had not spoken since the incident at Bilinsky's. Meanwhile, something significant had happened to him. The most boring person on earth, Skorsky had simply caught fire. He said hello and kibitzed. I even heard the doctor got drunk alone in his office, then wandered through the forest. Could he be using narcotic substances?“Cocaine!” was the doctor's second proclamation. It was his favorite treatment for the psychological complications of syphilis. Skorsky himself never took what he called “the universal drug”—good for alcoholism and toothaches, neuroses and morphine dependency—though he had read in an article by a respectable Viennese physician, who used cocaine as a panacea, that it was not addictive. That doctor subsequently recanted, but Skorsky paid no attention. He believed the retraction was made under pressure from pharmacologists who had no incentive to cease production of the medications that cocaine might supplant. Their representatives either paid or threatened the Viennese to repent.As the patient was escorted to his room, he assaulted the orderly, Alevtyna. They tried pulling him off her, but, though he released his fingers from her neck, he buried his teeth in her leg. The poor orderly, who had not until then been attacked by a psychotic, nearly died of fear. Later, panic set in over Skorsky's diagnosis. He told her about the consequences of syphilis: grotesque patterns on one's face due to infection of the skin, mucous membranes, cartilage, and bones. He went on about the devastation to the central nervous system, which they had just observed in real life: “The face starts to look like lace some mangy dogs fought over before rolling in the mud.”Alevtyna, who had not yet regained her faculty of speech, straightened up. Ignoring the slavering male orderlies, she bared her leg to get a better look at the wound. She then ran down the hall and out into the garden, where she fell on the ground to rip up grass and small bunches of daisies. Alevtyna ate them along with the soil in their roots.“Minor hysteria. She needs fifteen milligrams of cocaine.”Skorsky took a snuff box out of his pocket and scooped up some white powder with a toothpick made from a goose feather. He gave the order to close Alevtyna's mouth and one of her nostrils, forcing her to snort the medication.We fretted over her so long that evening fell. I decided to walk down, along the ravine, behind the church.It was unlikely there were any large beasts there, but something was rustling. The pits and mounds, ravines, paths, graves of witches whose living sisters flew in the treetops from time to time, the whispers of the forest spirits, the spirits of the nutcases who died in the hospital, the spirits of the monks from the St. Cyril Monastery, Zmei Gorynich and the bogatyrs who wanted to defeat him. The city would be calmer without this forest. I saw the gaps between the trees and went off in the direction of the tram tracks.As I was coming out of the forest, there was a patch of Amanita muscaria that had been trampled into porridge. A bit farther on, the body of Professor Bilinsky lay killed in the blackberry bushes. The way he was lying it looked as though he had not struggled before death. I quickly examined his body but saw nothing out of the ordinary. There were no wounds, no dirt under the fingernails. Animals had not yet smelled the carrion, but swarms of various insects covered him. Oh, why did I have to find the putrid body?The best thing would be to take the tram to his house to inform his relatives. The doors closed, and I noticed my own calm. This death had not evoked any emotions in me other than a feeling of responsibility, the need to tell the family. But also—some alarm at the thought of who the murderer could be. I knew that it was murder.“Your nose is bleeding.” A woman as round as an onion, carrying two baskets full of strawberries, offered me an ironed and starched handkerchief.“Have I dirtied my shirt?”“No, it's as neat as a pin. It's just your nose that's dirty. Wipe it now before you spray blood on my strawberries.”“No one will see the red on red.”“Ah, but it's salty!”“You know why it's not sweet? We'd drink it like syrup.”“Those with Christ in their heart do not talk that way.”“Are your strawberries expensive?”“Why? What?”“I'm checking to see if you have God in your heart.”“Child, if you knew how I have to work for this berry! I have to weed it a hundred times. In a week, the quitch grass grows as high as a horse. And I water it with water I carry from the stream, it kills my arms... ”“How much are the berries?”“They're not for sale. Anyway, soon money won't mean a thing. Soon all money, all these papers made from the skins of sinners on their satanic presses will be annulled. What matters is how we treat each other.”“So if I try your strawberries for free, my ‘thank you’ will be enough?”“Hands off!” she said and thwacked my fingers.I heard loud laughter behind me—same laughter as from the café near the Continental. There was no one sitting near Alina. (This is what fate looks like, remember.) Without asking, I sat next to her, away from the old lady.“Excuse me, but the night before last didn't you, yes, didn't you intrude on my privacy?” She started right away.“I saw it a little differently. Who was that young man with the mustache who paid me for you?”“Are you checking to see if you can flirt?”The tram stopped. People got on and off.“Are you coming back from the hospital?” she asked. “Don't be shocked. My uncle works there. He's told me all about you.”“An uncle by the name of Skorsky?”(Remember: this is what fate looks like.)“Yes. Skorsky's been strange recently—says things that make me wonder if he hasn't lost his mind. Have you noticed anything?”“I don't know.”“You know perfectly well.”“Where are you going?” I tried to change the subject.“I have to send something to my theater friends in Odesa. By the way, they'll be putting on Oedipus Rex soon in Kyiv—in Ukrainian.”“Greek tragedy in Ukrainian! That's a first.”“Exactly. The troupe is rehearsing now in Odesa. The theater where they will perform this fall is being remodeled.”“Wait. Now I remember where I've seen you before—it was at a performance! Vynnychenko's Black Panther and White Bear, at the Bergonier on Fundukleivska.“The same director is doing the Oedipus. He's my friend.”“He's your friend in what sense?”“Again with that tired subject. By the way, I've been thinking about you.”“And I about you.”“That's good. I was thinking not about you, to be precise, but about that elevator you invited me on.”“Who was that man with you?”“Like a broken record! Even if he had been my fiancé, I'm not bought or inherited. I'm not a brooch or a hundred acres of land, and I'm not a house in Kaniv!... Who was with you when you saw Black Panther?“Ah, so.”“Answer!”“That was my mother. She looks very young. She is coming to Kyiv the day after tomorrow. I can introduce you.”“Oh, this is my stop.”I looked out the window and realized that I had long since passed the stop for Bilinsky's.“Can we see each other again?”“We can. But you have only one chance.”Alina the anarchist wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to me.Morning, not morning but a thick porridge (I hate porridge). Dew, thick spit, crushed fruits, urine, all on the sparkling cobblestones. The sun, just barely having made its appearance, is already scorching. The human masses scurry and grumble like poorly digested food inside a stomach.I walked diagonally across St. Sofia's Square, then along the perimeter, then one edge, then again diagonally across. I went underground. The basement café of the Continental Hotel was practically empty. I again asked the server to bring the cloth with the embroidered portrait, but I couldn't remember the musician's last name, only that it ended with -sky. The server said that -sky was currently in the southern cities of Yalta and Odesa. I added that Kurbas, the director, Alina's friend, was also in Odesa, rehearsing Oedipus Rex, and that he'd previously put on Black Panther.I was bored, so I walked along Khreshchatyk and then headed down, calling to mind all the Kyiv churches of Podil: there's Birth of Christ, St. Nicholas on the Shore, Intercession, Pyrohoshcha, Holy Presentation, St. Dymytrii Rostovsky, St. Illia's. And also the Epiphany Brotherhood Monastery, Ascension Convent, and St. Katherine's, all these whipped-cream churches on the waffles of our streets. A few of them reminded me of themselves by appearing suddenly out of nowhere.The smells on Kontraktova Plaza where commerce buzzed were like multicolored light bulbs turning on one after another. Here you could catch the aroma of Balabukha jam, which blended with the next smell, English shoe polish at the Raiskys’ shop. Then the crunchy-smelling cabbage from old women standing in a row like herons and spitting out the shells of sunflower seeds. Farther on, the stench of a good-sized rat that crawled under Mrs. Shevchuk's shop where she sells broadcloth. Oh, she can't scream: no, she'll quietly dig that rat out herself so as to not scare off her clients.I bought a paper and two pairs of underwear. I asked two laughing young chambermaids who were secretly puffing in a grape-filled yard for a smoke. I wandered around Podil until evening when I came across a sawmill near the Dnipro that surprisingly smelled pleasantly of mazut fuel oil. The weather was dry, yet in the middle of the road was an enormous puddle, a deep dark black. A forty-year-old woman in a pale pink dress stood near it. The theatricality of it all provoked me to pose her a question,“Ma'am, what should I do?”But she paid me no attention. I shouted,“What should I do?”“What to do, what to do?” she said in Polish. “Jump in the water and swim so far away that you cannot return.”I quickly crossed a section of the forest. The wind brought a mixture of unpleasant air, like a stinky handkerchief held under one's nose. Passing the trees, I saw light in the spaces between them and exited at the hospital.Outside the windows, two orderlies lay in chairs with their heads thrown back. Two others—fools—ran around the yard in different directions, peering out at... something. The lights on the first floor of the hospital were on, and the staff milled about.“You're just in time!” said Ivan, a tall, young orderly.“For what?”“Your patient ran away! We went into his room and he wasn't there.”“What patient?”“The one who bit Alevtyna,” said Danylo, the other orderly, short and middle-aged.“That's Skorsky's patient, not mine.”I had no intention of helping them. This was all history—like my family, Kyiv, and my previous life. I had no intention of thinking about it. I wanted to go to my office, pack up my field surgery kit, and get out. So what? Their psychotic syphilitic ran away—it happened.Of course, that patient could have something to do with Bilinsky's murder. But that was no longer my problem.“What a strange coincidence!” the doctor on duty said. “Comrade doctor, the other one responsible for this patient was just here.”“And where is he now?”“He took off toward the church to look for the patient.”“Didn't the patient escape earlier?”“Don't know.”“How do you not know? You had better call the police, moron, before he kills someone. And get those sleeping orderlies to look for him.”“They can't... ”“Why not? Should I go wake them?”“They're on morphine.”“And you, I can see, have lost your mind. Go, catch your psycho! If it turns out that he killed Bilinsky—and on your watch—you can't imagine what's in store for you.”I adjusted my homburg and set off in the direction of St. Cyril's, that unwelcoming monolithic cube. I glanced around—what if our escaped syphilitic were to jump out of the bushes and bite or strangle me. I looked around because I wasn't sure of my actions, wasn't sure of my choices. Tripping over a clump of clover, I reached the open doors of the church. I couldn't stop myself from going in.The walls and ceiling were covered with frescoes. There was what used to be an angel rolling up the sky on the southern column of the narthex. But also graffiti: people scratched their names on it so as not to be forgotten—their idea of eternity. Prince Volodymyr the Great compared this activity to the desecration of graves. The vandals paid a fine and were beaten with canes. During the raids of Batu Khan, the church was deserted and cracks appeared all over it. Wild martens and feral dogs sought shelter here; insects swarmed under the ceiling with its red mosaics. Birches grew in its midst. Water seeped in the cracks, the water became ice, the ice widened the cracks, more water seeped in the cracks, becoming more ice that further widened the cracks, the wall split and nearly fell over, and then the wall fell over. Yet the angel is still rolling up the sky... When I reached the exit, I heard a rustling behind me. I turned after I stepped outside: in the depths of the church, like a stick in a pot of tar, stood a man with a large bag thrown over his shoulder and a revolver pointed right at me.“Is that you, Doctor?“Don't move!”“What's... Skorsky, what's with you?”“Don't move, I say!”“What are you doing here?”And finally I understood... Skorsky was himself the psycho! (Really, I had known for a while.)“You are the murderer! I knew it! But—why?”“Shut up.”“It was you. You! The stolen cigarettes, the strange behavior, Bilinsky. If I shout, everybody will come running. They've already called the police!”There was heavy breathing behind me. And then a gun rang out.The city is overgrown with new buildings. They encircle everything that was once on the periphery. Kyiv has become an old lady that can no longer restrain herself in the face of pastries. The city climbs farther. It steps over the swamps, turns the old rivers into a series of lakes; the other bodies of water it drives into canals. The grain that falls from the wild wheat is black. When the sun heats it, the grain melts and trickles into the earth. St. Cyril's stands indestructible. No one spackles the small cracks in its walls with either expensive putty or glues, nor with cheap cement and whitewash. One day a small fox appears in the doorway. It runs inside and along the floor of simple gray tiles. The gods watch from the walls, watch and fall into ruin. The fox runs to the iconostasis. Before it is a time-darkened Virgin Mother and Child in oil on sheets of zinc. The fox runs the metal steps that wind up to the second floor. The fox runs past all the vaults, naves, all the frescoes. A buckthorn seed flies in through a broken window. It will be the first. Soon the buckthorn will grow everywhere. A dumb hare will make its nest in the buckthorn bushes and nightingales will settle in the upper branches to sing until the end of the world. The fox runs between the thick rays that penetrate the windows. It catches one of the rays, squints its eyes, and warms itself in the sun.The shot rang out, but I did not fall. I looked around—and on the church threshold was our syphilis patient bearing a rod. His head lay on the rocks by the doorway.“If only he'd been at the stage of nose deformity! Just imagine: a hole instead of a nose plus a hole from the bullet—like an extra pair of eyes!” Skorsky laughed at the corpse.“We need to call the orderlies.”“They heard the shot. They'll run here on their own. You see, Professor Bilinsky believed it would take two or three years to wrap up this patient's case,” Skorsky told me. “But I took care of it much faster!”“Excuse me, but I'm going crazy in this city. I thought that you were Bilinsky's murderer.”“Just so. Why not? I am Bilinsky's murderer.”“Don't tease. You've changed a lot recently, so... ”“Yes, I've started killing people. You might term such a change significant.”“You have the right to irony.”“I am not being ironic.”“Let's call it sarcasm.”“It's the honest-to-God truth.”“And yes, you have the right to mock me.”“Well then, let's be done. To the horses!”“What horses?”“Alina's waiting!”Alina, her uncle Skorsky, a few others I didn't know, and I rode like the wind that ripped off my homburg and carried it back to Kyiv.“There's a fresco in the choir loft at St. Cyril's where Vrubel painted himself and patients from the hospital as the apostles. When I came across it by accident, I really believed they were saints,” Alina said.“I've never been up there. I've only seen the church from below.”“Remember the way back so you can see it sometime.”“The Puchai River used to flow here. You shouldn't trust the landscape,” Skorsky said, reaching for something, perhaps his bag, just when we left the darkness of the trees and saw the endless steppe ahead of us.We rode all night without stopping. Though no one was chasing us. Though we had nowhere to be. We rode like beasts released from a cage. The promises of the horizon turned what we'd left behind into a cage fit for those from whom freedom had been severed, like an anomaly, at birth.The pre-morning sky looked at first like a sack of turnips—filled with something heavy. But with each verst, the sky became lighter. When it was finally light enough to see clearly, we arrived at a knoll at the foot of a stone wall that from a distance had appeared to be a gigantic piece of halva. The exterior ruins of the castle gave no hint of how it was when all was fine here, when people defended themselves successfully from the nomads’ raids. From far off, the wreckage looked like a natural agglomeration of stones—a rocky elevation, no more: a cluster of cliffs. It would rain a few hundred more times, a few hundred more winds from a few hundred directions would blow on this heap, and it would collapse as though nothing had ever been here.A few stalks of wheat grew from one of the rocks. Someone had probably cast a handful of grain here for some birds that forgot to eat it.“Who could this castle belong to?” I asked Skorsky.“I reckon the Swan Princess,” the doctor rejoined, hoping to sound knowledgeable.From behind one of the piles of gray sandstone emerged a young man in a black reptilian coat and a white papakha as lush, bright, and out of place as a dahlia. His name was Artem. The heat was melting our brains, but he was dressed like that, in rooster fashion, which was popular among the otamans. Artem helped Alina dismount her horse and tried to kiss her on the lips, but she offered him a cheek instead.Had she been racing to see this clown?We entered the yard—the ruins had fashioned an internal space that was more or less protected, at least from strangers’ eyes. It turned out that there were even places where it was possible to hide from the rain, and from there the ruins didn't look half bad.In the center of the court was a table, and on it a wooden bucket with pink gladiolas. How romantic! It all looked like it came from outer space. Where on earth, in the middle of the steppe, far from any village or town, did this table, this simple table, come from? And the gladiolas? The steppe hadn't been plowed in so long that any cultivars would have gone wild, degenerated, dried up completely.A campfire crackled nearby—a little preview of what we would soon do to the houses, villages, and cities. Artem the otaman brought over a cezve from the fire and poured the first portion into a small, copper cup for Alina. He also got out a porcelain cup with images of rosy cherubim—but how...?“Who else would like coffee?”Only Skorsky and I responded. The question excited me, even distracted me from the thought of the kiss I had recently witnessed and the Kyiv I had recently left.“It's obvious who the professors here are; cultured people drink coffee. Are you both doctors?”“Uh-huh.”“For wolves of the steppe, like us, doctors are gold, even more precious than gold. Actually, a Hippocrates like you should eat more, because those in your profession will soon be worth your weight in gold. Work on your figures, both of you.”“Who will take pity on the horses that have to carry us?”“We'll find the horses. And very large doctors can be transported on machine-gun carts. We'll need to seat the otamans near you. Only a fool would shoot at a doctor.”“I think we'll find quite enough fools here.”“With your beard, Doctor, you look like Tsar Nicholas II. But even so you won't be shot. You might even be canonized!”“We've only just arrived and you're going on about executions,” Skorsky grumbled and checked to make sure that he still had his bag.“Apologies, apologies, pardonnez-moi. But you are not merely a doctor. A venereologist! Skorsky, you're a specialist! A venereologist is the most important person in wartime. The most valuable! You are the botanists of war. You can't imagine what varieties of flowers grow here, and these beds have long awaited a proper gardener. Or even just a man with a scythe!”“Bite your tongue,” Alina said. “I don't need to listen to this.”“Yes, yes, of course. Excuse me, my r—. ” He almost said “rose.”We rested all day. We went down to a surprisingly close river overgrown with lilies. We rowed the boats left by fishermen. I talked to Skorsky. He took his bag everywhere, refusing even to swim so he wouldn't have to part with it. I asked him what he had in it, but he said it wasn't my damned business.Alina rowed with the otaman to the middle of the river. They were having a loud discussion. She was waving her hands. The current carried their boat downstream slowly and smoothly. What a nuisance, that current!I tried to meet with Alina one-on-one, but she was avoiding me. In the morning I was confused, by lunch I was sad, and after lunch I got angry.In the evening, I lay on the hot grass and drank another cup (I have no idea where they got such good coffee), which had no effect at all on my sleep. I watched the Perseids. Every year, the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle. People can see the meteor shower and make a wish. I wished. I counted forty-seven falling stars. All forty-seven of my wishes were for the same thing.Around the campfire, they were sitting, talking. I saw how he tickled her face with a piece of grass and she brushed him off in annoyance. Then they were screaming at each other. Later they again spoke kindly, after which they again quarreled. My joy grew after each tiny mistake that Artem made. I wanted him to show the worst he was capable of.They were screaming at each other, but all I could hear was beautiful opera singing. The stars fell to the sound of their screaming. The stars blessed my joy.Then this happened: Alina kicked the fire, scattered burnt kindling, and burned some of the grass. Artem grabbed her by the arm, but she broke away from him and ran off to the horses.“Go then! I guarantee you'll get to Katerynoslav and return with your tail between your legs.”“I'm going to Huliai-Pole! To Father Makhno!”I jumped up and ran after her.“Where do you think you're going?” Artem shouted.Really—where was I going? I was going after her: to Huliai-Pole, to Katerynoslav, to Rome, to Washington, to Istanbul, to Montevideo... “Go to sleep,” he said. “Come morning, this coquette will be here, right as rain. We've already been through this show. Tomorrow she'll be right here next to my boot!”... No, she won't.In some sort of shape we entered some town. There were some buildings that were some colors, some trees, some streets, some roads, and some signs. Posts, flustered birds’ nests, echoes, colors, shapes—each of some kind. A wedding procession was coming toward us. If you want to make orange, you need to add yellow to red, and then bam—it's black. If you want to salt the soup, shake in a little, and then bam—two handfuls. You want to say a kind word, and then bam—a punch in the face. I was rocked around like a watermelon on a boat and threw up my breakfast straight into the horse's fluffy mane. Sanko found this hilarious, but I said I'd pulverize him. So Sanko sped ahead.No one knew anything about Alina. The daytime sky was like a poorly washed bowl. The sun was a squashed, rotten apricot. The night sky looked like the sole of a boot to me. The moon was a dirty cheap copper coin that had gotten stuck to the sole. Everything seemed spoiled to me, irrelevant, unnecessary. Without her, this journey was a waste of time.“You'd better stay away from everyone,” Artem said. “You'll infect us with your pining, and pining is worse than the clap.”The wedding procession was before us. The young couple, still utter children, walked so calmly it was as if they didn't see us. As if we were made of a light breeze—our bodies, clothes, our horses and their iron shoes—of the lightest gasses. As if we were visible only to ourselves and the coal-black dog that barked, panting and gasping.The wedding was headed straight for us. We were in the middle of the road, and so were they. We approached each other slowly, a wave going toward a wave. Some ten meters before their indifferent faces, I noticed the color of the bride's eyes. And the coral-colored tulips that fell on the road before her. Round goose eggs on meaty stems, the flowers were falling and falling before her. The bride's eyes were almond shaped.“Hey there,” Artem shouted at me. “Wake up!”I came to and saw the whole village, everyone there, not realizing my group had turned left onto a side street away from the procession. The tulips disappeared—where'd they get tulips in the fall? I was sitting alone on my horse in the middle of the road, and the entire wedding procession came to a stop. I moved to the side, and the throng marched on, cutting off our escape route. We rode a few more meters and came across the synagogue.“You know what, you're right,” said the otaman.“Who is?”“Oleksii is the only one here who's right.”“About what?”Artem turned his horse and raced back. Everyone stood still while he ran his horse into the crowd and began firing his revolver. People scattered in all directions. Artem trotted, cackling like an imbecile. The horse kicked an old guy in the mouth. The man fell, spitting out his gold teeth. We rode up to the commotion and formed ranks, but none of us wanted to join the otaman.The bride stopped in the middle of the street. On both sides were buildings and trees, as well as dust, sky, and sun. She stood still, beautiful, as if nothing had happened. Then she adjusted her garland and walked calmly on.“Well, should we get some sugar now?” Artem laughed, looking at the bride, and off he went toward the sugar factory.It was then I noticed that all of the houses had shutters—fuchsia, blue, ocher—and that all the shutters were closed.We flew toward the dirty building, whistling and shouting. If there had been aesthetes among the otamans, they would certainly have razed the abomination in this field after seizing it. They would have spread soil on top and sown buckwheat. Long live buckwheat!, that wonderful crop. Like hunting dogs hot on the trail, we raced to our defenseless victim, with the baying of hundreds of hounds behind us. The field shook beneath us. We became an artist's canvas, evolving from Realism to Romanticism, Romanticism to Expressionism, Expressionism to Suprematism. If we had been painted in black and white, we would have been splotches (until the ink ran, annihilating all remaining patches of white).Two men stood near the gate—unarmed and undressed, in nothing but their undershirts and boots. Our fervor, our kinship with the elements, our entirety, were all for naught.“Jesus Christ! What bores!” Artem exclaimed. “How boring you are!”“Maybe boring for us, but fireworks for them,” Sanko said, dismounting his horse.“The fear of death engenders creativity,” our otaman—a distinguished philosopher of the early twentieth century, that demonic breed—prophesied.He went on, “Excuse me, but with all due respect, we are not going to search you. Just show us right away where the money is. Why are there so few of you? Don't say there's not much money. I want piles and piles of money! If you don't show it to us, we'll print our own on your skin. Believe me, we will.”We entered the factory grounds. There were no workers, only an enormous mountain of sugar beets that looked like a pile of coal from a distance and a pile of dead rats from up close.“So, did you have a good year?” Artem asked a man in an undershirt.“Not really—too dry.”“Nah, that's fine. You wouldn't have been able to gather most of the harvest this year anyway. There's a fire burning across all of Ukraine, all of Russia. The whole world!”While Artem tossed thoughts like well-chewed sunflower seeds into the crowd, the two men quietly stepped aside and then ran fast ahead to the factory's main hall. The gigantic door slammed shut. The gate was locked behind us! The windows were smashed! The factory roared from inside like a cumbersome machine starting up. Bullets whirred through every window.“Bastards! It's a trap! Quick, after me!”Still on horseback, Artem bounded over to a vast window, low to the ground, and smashed it mercilessly. He broke the frame and jumped inside on his horse. I and a few others followed. We broke into their lair, threw open the doors, and let the other warriors inside.Iron vats of hot sugar were steaming, pipes were clattering; machinery groaned.“Parasites!” Artem gritted his teeth. “I'll get you. I'll get you red sons of bitches. Painted whores!”At the word “painted,” his horse fell to the ground. Lying prone, Artem continued fighting, but the red soldiers wouldn't let him stand. Fighting nearby, I rode over to assist but did not know where to aim. Artem got up, ran forward, and brought his sword down on the head of the closest soldier, all the way to the middle of his skull, to the bridge of his nose. It was like butchering a pig. Artem thrust the sword into the buttock of another who was fleeing and cut off his leg at the bend in the knee.“I'll cut off every last one of your asses! Cut off your asses!” Artem bellowed.A half hour later, the dead were lying, the captured sitting, and the victors doing anything they pleased.“Skorsky, are there a lot of casualties?” I asked the doctor, whose hour it was. I hoped not, because I was too tired to help him.“Just a few. The dead are already dead, and the wounded are not ours.”Though Skorsky rarely asked my help, and though I'd become an ordinary soldier, the doctor in me was still present in the most unpleasant attribute—knowledge. Others saw an eviscerated man, pieces of dusty flesh smeared with clay, soil, sand, and straw. I saw a perfectly formed kidney hanging perfectly from the rest of its body like a child's mitten from its coat. You could try this death on for size. Wear it like a sanbenito of the Inquisition.Artem counted the money and then lay on the floor alongside the gigantic sugar mountain in the middle of the room. From time to time, the crystals rustled as they fell.“I didn't think you'd be such a fighter!” the otaman said without turning toward me. “I thought you'd be healing us. You'd keep to the rear and we'd hide you like a girl. But here you are, in the vanguard, like a lion!”“I got excited,” I told him, choosing not to react to the “girl” part.“’Cause Alina said there was no sense counting on you to fight.”“Really?”“Does that sting?”“Why would it? I'm a doctor—not everyone is. It requires a brain. Unlike waving a sword.”“Yeah, yeah. I gave her gladiolas. We were lying in the boat near that castle, doing all manner of things, and she told me all about you. How you met.”“You were lying in that boat talking about me?”“It was the day before you left Kyiv. You agreed to go with the anarchists so quickly!”“Were you surprised? Doctors make fast decisions.”“But you probably had great prospects. Your parents are rich, right?”“And who are your parents?”“Probably all your relatives fled abroad—bourgeois. Why did you stay?”“What the hell's your point?”“Alina, by the way, died a while ago. Probably.”“Don't jinx her.”“Listen here,” he said, staring at the ceiling. “And listen good. If you have designs on her—dead or alive—it's best you castrate yourself now.”“After you.”“If I want to kill somebody, you know, I just do it.”At last he looked at me. I was lying on the floor nearby and looking in his direction, sweaty and relaxed, my appearance complemented by my disdain for his opinion, his authority, his stupid hat. His everything.Artem raised his arm above his head, stuck a finger in the sugar mountain, and licked it. We both got up. Had I anticipated this turn of events, I would have readied a gift for him. Artem held his revolver. Under my hand I found a knife the workers used for gathering beets: it was a deliberately sharpened arc they sank into the swollen brassicas. I jumped up and quickly stepped around the sugar mountain.Artem's bullet hit a pane and broke the glass.“Not man enough for hand-to-hand?”The otaman shot again.“You should've challenged me to a duel, you romantic!”Encrusted with white crystals, I charged Artem from the sugar mountain. We fell in, and the sugar stuck in our hair, mustaches, nostrils, armpits.The gang ran in to get us apart, then backed off because it had nothing to do with them. By now the sugar mountain had burst its banks. Of the once perfect pyramid, a deformed mound remained.Wounded, Artem fell on the sugar mound, turning the white red.I stood before the gang sugar-coated and holding a bloody hook. The old otaman was drawing his last breath. Blood trickled from the corner of Artem's mouth and streamed from the left side of his breast.“What's the commotion?” Old Roman had just come in.“Be quiet,” the boys told him. And a good thing they did.“You killed him? You killed the otaman!”“Shut your mouth,” the boys told him.“You... ”I slugged Roman's stinky herring mouth. How did that son of a bitch find pickled herring in a sugar factory? My fist was now bigger and stronger than ever before, a steel anvil that could split nails and shatter memorial plaques. The unfortunate man's jaw twisted like an upper millstone that had gone off track from the lower.“Let's get out of here and go to Makhno's camp,” I gave my first order.We galloped so fast the grass burned beneath us. The birds and bugs had no time to fly out of the way; hooves trampled the burrows of rodents who didn't dare crawl out of their holes for a long time after. We raced like no one had ever raced before.The steppe, that sly fox, pretended to be an innocent fool. The steppe said, “I'm like Adam: I don't even know my own name.” But its grass harbored the tracks of thousands of armies and the heels of Herodotus, the crunch of Trypillia vessels, and the smell of Scythian hemp, Roman coins, clay figures of wolf people, the chevrons of Denikin's army, glass from the Chekists’ ruby stars, traces of uranium from flying saucers. I threatened it: “Steppe, show me your layers, or I will burn you, plow you under, flood you.” But it just replied: “I'm like Adam: I don't yet know my name.”I lost geography as if it were a silver coin. It fell out of my pocket and rolled through the feather grass that blanketed the steppe in white foam. The open space ahead was so endless that the whole world might as well have been steppe. If people ended up here from somewhere else, they would conclude they were on another planet. The coin fell and became an argentum, became one with the ring on the hand of the princess who had one green eye and one blue, with the twisted candlestick at the monastery on the other side of the steppe, with melted ingots. It broke down into simpler elements, simpler and simpler yet. The horse carried me spreading the seeds of northern plants to the south, just as southern riders had once brought flowers and weeds to the north. And then I turned back. Just as I had no geography, I had no time. Every night I fell asleep with the thought that the next day I would again race. Through all spacelessness, all timelessness. I exchanged one horse for another, got on a train, on a boat, traversed forty versts on foot—in rain that brought the river up to the road, in heat that overturned cattle. The earth I walked on became mine. Mine was the water in the lakes and springs, clean water, dirty water, enlightened water, contaminated with oil, stinking of algae, of fish that died in wells, stinking of the memory of atrocities, water as clean as broken bread. The water did not become Alina.I was doing this for her: I got the basturma out from under my saddle, sodden with the horse's sweat, sliced the throat of a rich man whose daughter I had danced with at a ball, climbed into a vat of beet juice and took a sugar bath, carried out the expropriation of the savings banks, wiped the sweat from my face with my shirt—and the cloth turned red; I didn't know from what. If it was someone else's blood, I didn't care; if it was my own, even less.We mostly came across Reds. We scraped them up like old red paint on a door in order to repaint the boards black. Black looked better. Red is tasteless, but black has style. Healthy men died before us of myocardial rupture like bunnies found in the nest. The ones whose hearts were sewn of steel wire envied the deceased. Seizing estates, banks, distilleries, and prisons reminded us of gathering in the harvest. If you're too lazy to pick an apple, you can shake the tree; some of the fruit gets bruised when it falls. We seized buildings like we were shaking apple trees. No one picked the fruits, we just shook: shook under the beds, under the tables, behind the curtains. No, there was no picking. We just shook until the red juice spurted from the apples.Near the Khorol River with Father Makhno and me in charge, we captured sixteen machine guns and four cannons, as well as five hundred prisoners who immediately came over to our side. The villagers voluntarily gave us bread and cheese, chickens and kvas. People joined us. The front of the machine-gun cart said “You can't run,” and “You won't catch us” at the back. We took factory after factory. Millions of karbovantsi, thousands of poods of sugar, weapons. We smashed the telephone exchanges and captured the telegraphs. We made alliances with some and then with others. Lenin, Wrangel, Frunze, the Germans, Chinese, Australians, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Cleopatra, Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina. We ran the steppe. There were a hundred thousand of us. There were three hundred thousand of them. There were three hundred thousand of us. There were a million of them. There were two million of them. We were all of humanity. We were so many that we were none.The nobles’ estates were long ago forsaken. In the people's deepest trunks lay silks and guipure laces that were once perhaps used only to cover a table. Five steps from the barn in the direction of the pear tree, some silver candlesticks are buried; there's a plaster figure of an angel in the chicken coop, covered with shit and feathers.I was reluctant to be going to my home, but I didn't see any way out. Fate intended me to be a different being from the one I was before.Here my grandfathers and great-grandfathers were born. Here the ones who caused my grandfathers and great-grandfathers to flee had stopped. When we were still far off I noticed that someone was in the house. It was our men—Skorsky had brought them here, about twenty in all. I asked Sanko, whom I had walked with side by side more than once, where the doctor was now. All the men answered that he was around somewhere, but I didn't see him that evening.In 1918, the spirit of my great-grandfather Stepan, along with my mother and uncle, had gotten into a britzka and scrambled off to Paris, to Napoleon, against whom my great-grandfather had fought with the Cossacks, to whom the Russians promised to return self-rule. Following him in the cart went the soul of Grandpa Oleh, who lost a finger when he cut down the old linden near the house; his second finger was blown off by a cannonball near Balaklava, and later his entire hand was cut off by some Turk. Next went the spirit of my father, also Stepan, who did not take part in any war but died of measles at the age of forty. They all got the hell out of here. First, they went to Kyiv, led by my mother, Tamara Makarivna, in order to collect Uncle's family and me, their son. And their son, it turns out, has now come back to rob his own home (I didn't drive my war buddies away, did I?). It's a shame that I didn't know where the bathtub was, or whatever they bathed me in when I was small. It would have been good to walk through the ranks of anarchists with that basin and tell them all to spit into it.Remembering every room, I carried Alina upstairs to my mother's bedchamber. There was no longer furniture or pictures, only bare walls. The bed and mattress remained, but that was enough. Mother hated noise, so she set up her room far away from the running in the halls and the creaks on the stairs. I adjusted the mattress; in a gap, looking like a stalk of wheat, there lay a gold bracelet that she lost in the haste and that the thieves could not find in the mayhem. I tucked it into my pocket.The place could still be saved. It was strong, built under the leadership of my grandfather, who knew how to do it right. He built a sawmill, a gristmill, a dress factory (today it's probably been ransacked, maybe even by our own men).Alina had a complete, displaced break in her right fibula. We needed water first. I went downstairs—the guys were dragging out the piano like an old cow to the slaughter.“What are you doing with that?”“Taking it out.”“Why?”“What's it to you? We want to have fun.”“Can you play?”“We're not your bourgeois lily-handed bitches.”They couldn't play, but they were famous at destruction. “Noise is the music of the new time,” one of the smarter among them might have said. “But noise is the opposite of music. Just as a rose is the opposite of your ugly mugs,” I'd have responded if there was anyone to say it to. I could also have said that this was a Bosendorfer grand piano, that it was very valuable—but do the guys not deserve such a luxury?“Why are you so boring? We're relaxing.”“Then let me play a little first.”“Go ahead, but fast. One-two.”So I played. As before. My fingers ran up and down the black and white keys, which weren't simply keys of these, the simplest, colors. These were the keys that remembered my fingers specifically—achieved by that slovenly German Katerina, our governess. She knew a bundle of languages, could play the piano, and was interested in the latest scientific discoveries. But she had not an ounce of sympathy for anyone who couldn't master anything on the first try. More than once she hit my pinkie against the black key that remembered every one of its four thousand touches. She would pound it on the key and shout, “Si bémol! Si bémol,” and later bang my fingers and translate, “B flach! B flach!”I played. I could not expose myself, so the only thing I could do was believe in miracles. What if these coarse men saw value in this bit of furniture so unintelligible to them? And what if they didn't destroy it, this emblem of my childhood, my land, my air, which I could protect in no other way? My air. My water.“Shchedryk, shchedryk, shchedrivochka,” one of them who recognized the tune began to sing along.“Look at you.” They did not expect music from me, who had until recently been drinking blood like water.They said, “Again, again!”A group of curious men gathered around me. They were ordinary farmers, thieves, and recidivists, peasants and workers, everyone except for Skorsky. They needed this music as they needed baths. The music cleansed them from the inside, perhaps. They had not heard anything besides the whistle of a bullet, the neighing of a horse, or the knocking of a chisel and the whirring of a saw, amputating limbs, for a long time.But it could not go on long. I did not close the piano lid, just stood and went to fetch water for Alina, leaving the unfinished song for later. The well was to the north—that is, at the “Head.” My father once promised to give me a compass if I could learn to identify the ends of the earth by means of the sun. And to make it easier to remember, I gave each one of them a name: the east where the day begins was “Right” (my right hand), the west “Left,” the north “Head,” and the south “Feet.” Back when I could still do whatever I wanted all day long, I would wake in the morning and say: I'm going to the Feet. The mound was at the Feet, Left had the river, Right had the forest. It was only to the Head that I rarely went, because a village was located there. When the villagers saw me, they would speak in whispers and avoid the master's son.... I wiped her brow and her burning, sunken cheeks. I lay down next to her to feel the heat of her skin.When the fire in Alina calmed slightly, I went out into our orchard. My father had once been given a gift from Japan—a tulip tree that blossomed with yellow-green flowers. It had to have grown in the time that I was away. It would have been fatal had it been cut down. I again took the stairs down into the drawing room and came across nobody—they had all disappeared in search of food or were hidden away in their burrows. In the middle of the hall, like an opened rib cage, was the piano, irreparably shattered.B Flach! B Flach!Translation © Ali Kinsella 2022. (shrink)

Higher order unification is a way of combining information (or equivalently, solving equations) expressed as terms of a typed higher order logic. A suitably restricted form of the notion has been used as a simple and perspicuous basis for the resolution of the meaning of elliptical expressions and for the interpretation of some non-compositional types of comparative construction also involving ellipsis. This paper explores another area of application for this concept in the interpretation of sentences containing intonationally marked focus, or (...) various semantic constructs which are sensitive to focus.Similarities and differences between this approach, and theories using alternative semantics, structured meanings, or flexible categorial grammars, are described. The paper argues that the higher order unification approach offers descriptive advantages over these alternatives, as well as the practical advantage of being capable of fairly direct computational implementation. (shrink)

In this paper I compare two models of expert judgment: the art critic in Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste” and the “wise man” in “Of Miracles.” The art critic is a true judge of beauty because he has made himself into a person who is optimally receptive to beauty. He possesses the virtues of taste: “Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice” (“Of the Standard of Taste,” 241). But the (...) virtues of the art critic, I argue, are also those of the “wise man,” the person who consistently “proportions his belief to the evidence” (EHU 10.4; SBN 110). Comparison of these two characters reveals that for Hume the virtues fundamental to the art critic’s critical competence are also epistemic virtues. Hume’s exposition of aesthetic excellences should thus be of interest for virtue epistemology. Because contemporary virtue epistemologists have tended to focus almost exclusively on the relationships between intellectual and moral virtues, Hume offers something new: an account of epistemic virtues based on aesthetic virtues. (shrink)

We study the first-order theories of some natural and important classes of coloured trees, including the four classes of trees whose paths have the order type respectively of the natural numbers, the integers, the rationals, and the reals. We develop a technique for approximating a tree as a suitably coloured linear order. We then present the first-order theories of certain classes of coloured linear orders and use them, along with the approximating technique, to establish complete axiomatisations of the four (...) classes of trees mentioned above. (shrink)

BackgroundThe values and attitudes of healthcare professionals influence their handling of ‘do-not-attempt-resuscitation’ (DNAR) orders. The aim of this study was a) to describe attitudes, perceptions and practices among Swedish physicians and nurses towards discussing cardiopulmonary resuscitation and DNAR orders with patients and their relatives, and b) to investigate if the physicians and nurses were familiar with the national ethical guidelines for cardiopulmonary resuscitation.MethodsThis was a retrospective observational study based on a questionnaire and was conducted at 19 wards in (...) two regional hospitals and one county hospital.Results210 physicians and 312 nurses (n = 522) responded to the questionnaire. Every third (35%) professional had read the guidelines with a lower proportion of physicians (29%) compared to nurses (38%). Around 40% of patients had the opportunity or ability to participate in the DNAR discussion. The DNAR decision was discussed with 38% of patients and the prognosis with 46%. Of the patients who were considered to have the ability to participate in the discussion, 79% did so. The majority (81%) of physicians and nurses believed that patients should always be asked about their preferences before a DNAR decision was made.ConclusionsSwedish healthcare professionals take a patient’s autonomy into account regarding DNAR decisions. Nevertheless, as 50% of patients were considered unable to participate in the DNAR discussion, questions remain about the timing of patient participation and whether more discussions could have been conducted earlier. Given the uncertainty about timing, the majority of patients deemed competent participated in DNAR discussions. (shrink)

The prevention, treatment and management of disease are closely linked to how the causes of a particular disease are explained. For multi-factorial conditions, the causal explanations are inevitably complex and competing models may exist to explain the same condition. Selecting one particular causal explanation over another will carry practical and ethical consequences that are acutely relevant for health policy. In this paper our focus is two-fold; the different models of causal explanation that are put forward within current scientific literature for (...) the high and rising prevalence of the common complex conditions of coronary artery disease and type 2 diabetes mellitus ; and how these explanations are taken up within national health policy guidelines. We examine the causal explanations for these two conditions through a systematic database search of current scientific literature. By identifying different causal explanations we propose a three-tier taxonomy of the most prominent models of explanations: evolutionary, lifecourse, and lifestyle and environment. We elaborate this taxonomy with a micro-level thematic analysis to illustrate how some explanations are semantically and rhetorically foregrounded over others. We then investigate the uptake of the scientific causal explanations in health policy documents with regard to the prevention and management recommendations of current National Service Frameworks for CAD and T2D. Our findings indicate a lack of congruence between the complexity and frequent overlap of causal explanations evident in the scientific literature and the predominant focus on lifestyle recommendations found in the mainstream health policy documents. (shrink)

One of the most challenging issues, essential for the actual state of science, is the search for a fragile balance between scientific normativity, openness, methodological proliferation and other key concepts, associated with the modern world of research. Paul Feyerabend understood science not as a detached and hermetic self-sufficient reality, but as a structural part of the social world, liable to politicization, discrepancies and inconsistency. His analysis of science, its strategies and institutions involved and, in a way, undermined a long living (...) concept of science as an objective, rational and neutral domain. Following his discoveries, today researchers in general, philosophers of science and social epistemologists in particular, face the problem of corrupted practices, which jeopardize the acquisition of true knowledge. According to the ideas of professor S. Turner, there are two strategies of approaching epistemic coercion: conformity or resistance. Aimed at scientific progress and sustainable development the scientists strive to overcome obstacles of technological, organizational and administrative nature. It presents the case of epistemic resistance. In other circumstances, when the mechanisms of epistemic coercion function without recognition and impediment, the epistemic environment conforms. Professor S. Turner’s article gives an in-depth analysis of epistemic coercion as a ubiquitous phenomenon, pervading intellectual and institutional practices of science and public life. Having stated the existence of the new instruments of epistemic control, he also sheds light on the requirement of the new forms of resistance. In the following article the author consequently scrutinizes the types of epistemic coercion offered by S. Turner. In order to highlight a technological perspective on all three types of epistemic coercion (information deprivation, normalizing/stigmatizing, legitimating/delegitimizing), the author places the emphasis on algorithm – based practices as a distinctive type of information deprivation. Presented from the standpoint of technological design, an algorithm could be seen as a technologically embodied form of epistemic coercion. Further on, the author argues that some of the means of resistance, given by prof. S. Turner, are more suitable to perform epistemic coercion, rather than resisting it. For instance, transparency has compromised itself as an untrustworthy concept put in use to conceal more information than to reveal. Tribalism is proven to be another arguable means of resistance because of its limiting effect on practices of open internal and external scientific communication. Finally, the author augments the list of means of epistemic coercion with construction of ignorance and coercive effect of expertise. (shrink)

At least four different frameworks — psychiatric, cognitive, functional and decision-making — are used in the evaluation of competence, all of which remain more or less unrelated in the literature. In the first section of this paper we consider various meanings of competence, in order to arrive at a definition of the term relevant to the medical and legal setting. Patient or client competence, we conclude, refers to the practical abilities that individuals employ in pursuing their own autonomous goals in (...) life. We then show how a systematic categorization of these practical abilities — which we call a taxonomy of practical judgment — allows us to show when the traditional frameworks for the evaluation of competence may or may not be useful in the evaluation of a particular competence.In the final section we explore some of the normative considerations underlying the taxonomy. For instance, competence is not only related to intrinsic abilities but to resources available in the community. Here we touch on questions related to the fair distribution of community resources. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:384 BOOK REVIEWS Philosophy and.Atheism: In Defense of.Atheism. By KAI NIELSEN. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1985. Pp. 231. $18.95. Kai Nielsen is among the most prolific, trenchant, and articulate critics of religion now working in the world of English-speaking philosophy. In a steady spate of articles and books, including (to mention a few) Contemporary Critiques of Religion, Scepticism, Reason and Practice, Ethics Without God, and An Introduction to (...) the Philosophy of Religion, he has mounted a relentless and sophisticated attack on religious belief. The collection called Philosophy and.Atheism: In Defense of.Atheism brings together essays written over a number of years for audiences of various kinds. The wpics range from popular or autobiographical material to the complex technicalities of competing theories of rationality and justification. Of the eleven essays, seven have appeared previously. There is no index, but the notes and bibliographies appended to the more scholarly essays constitute a useful guide to a major segment of the literature in philosophy of religion. Nielsen's language sometimes betrays scorn for at least some types of religious belief. But typographical inconsistencies sametimes diminish the power of his phrases, as for example when on facing pages he alludes to certain conceptions of God as "a kind of cosmic mickey-mouse" and "a kind of cosmic Mickey Mouse." The number of typographical errors and inconsistencies in the book-not all of them as pregnant as this one with theological contrasts-is annoying. The reader of these essays is constantly reminded of the sustained attacks that some of the greatest minds of modern philosophy (Hume, for example) have mounted on religious belief. But one also thinks of the remark in Wittgenstein's On Ce1·tainty: "Very intelligent and welleducat ~ people believe in the story of creation in the Bible, while others hold it as proven false, and the grounds of the latter are well known to the former." This remark suggests, perhaps, why issues in philosophical theology tend w regress : Is there a God? Is it rational to believe in the existence of God? What are the criteria of rationality appropriate to the assessment of religious belief? Can we sensibly inquire about and compare alternative or competing theories of rationality? Readers of Nielsen's essays will find much to admire in his intricate deployment of complex arguments, many of which operate at one or two removes from the question of theism or atheism. But the energy and complexity of his treatment contrasts sharply with the complex question he poses in the last essay: " Why... is the philosophy of religion so boring? " (p. 224). Nielsen's own response, that there is little to be said for theism, suggests that he misunderstands something basic-not the point of arguments in favor of theism, but the nature of the interests that BOOK REVIEWS 385 underlie religious belief and the sensibilities, among religious people, that make his argumentation unpersuasive. Is the philosophy of religion boring~ Wittgenstein penned a note, published in Zettel: "Some philosophers... suffer from what may be called 'loss of problems.' Then everything seems quite simple to them, no deep problems seem t-0 exist anymore, and the world becomes broad and flat and loses all depth....'' One need not embrace the fideism Nielsen attributed to followers of Wittgenstein, in essays now nearly 20 years old, in order to hold that a sympathetic entertainment of the interests and sensibilities at stake in an undertaking is an essential ingredient in any fair and useful assessment of its rationality, legitimacy, or defensibility. It is that sympathetic entertainment that Nielsen lacks in the case of religious belief. And so he falls prey to the tendency Wittgenstein diagnosed in the case of Sir James Frazer: " His explanations... are much cruder than the sense of the observances themselves.'' There is a delightful characterization of C. D. Broad's philosophical method in A. J. Ayer's A Part of My Life: "He does not buITow under the surface, but only few can do this with profit, and it is much to have the surface properly scrubbed.'' In a similar way, Nielsen offers, in these essays, a thorough scrubbing-perhaps scouring-of the surface of theistic belief... (shrink)

In order to re-make the world in its own image, neoliberal expansionism is predicated on the dominance of a particular regime of reason. The dominance of economic-juridical rationality relies in no small part on education to reproduce itself. In this sense, how and why a populace is educated in the law becomes a locus of struggle and of alternative and competing constructions of normative and political orders. Over the last decade the United Kingdom’s justice policy has become more attentive (...) to the role of citizens’ knowledge of the law in the context of a reinvigorated drive toward competition in the legal services market. Reformism in legal services thereby emerges as a strategy geared toward the economisation of the state by propagating specific types of legal knowledge. This reorientation of legal education is considered through, on the one hand, the insights of recent theories of neoliberalism and, on the other, a wider lens relating the intersection of legal education to the juridical-political realm. Finally, the paper outlines alternative strategies of community-based educational practices rooted in resistance to legal and economic orthodoxies. (shrink)

I argue here that in the end Bourdieu's theory of practice fails to overcome the problem on which it expressly centers, namely, subject-object dualism. The failure is registered in his avowed materialism, which, though significantly "generalized," remains what it says: a materialism. In order to substantiate my criticism, I examine for their ontological presuppositions three areas of his theoretical framework pertaining to the questions of (1) human agency (as seen through the conceptual glass of the habitus), (2) otherness, and (3) (...) the gift. By scrutinizing Bourdieu's powerful and progressive social theory, with an eye to finding fault, I hope to show the need to take a certain theoretical action, one that is patently out of keeping with the usual self-presentation and self-understanding of social science. The action I have in mind is this: because the problem of subject-object dualism is in the first place a matter of ontology, in order successfully to address it there must take place a direct shift of ontological starting point, from the received starting point in Western thought to one that projects reality in terms of ambiguity that is basic. With this shift the dualism of subject and object dissolves by definition, leaving a social reality that, for reasons of its basic ambiguity, is best approached as a question of ethics before power. (shrink)

The book examines the relation of individual freedom to the economic arrangements of society. It explores both the theory and practice of the competing paradigms of capitalism and socialism, as well as the moral frameworks—justice and social justice—correlative to them.

According to the monitoring theory of consciousness, a mental state is conscious in virtue of being represented in the right way by a monitoring state. David Rosenthal, William Lycan, and Uriah Kriegel have developed three different influential versions of this theory. In order to explain colour experiences, each of these authors combines his version of the monitoring theory of consciousness with a specific account of colour representation. Even though Rosenthal, Lycan, and Kriegel disagree on the specifics, they all hold that (...) colours are represented by a single type of mental state. The main goal of this paper is to show that a more complex account of colour representation is needed for the monitoring theory of consciousness to do justice to the phenomenology of colour experiences. In particular, I will argue that the fine-grained character of colour experience—that is, the fact that perceivers can become conscious of small differences between colours—requires that colour representation be construed in terms of two different types of mental states, namely sensory states that represent appearance properties and colour representations that represent physical colours. (shrink)

This paper focusses on colour terminology as a tool for achieving ἐνάργεια in the Latin poetry of the first century c.e. After briefly outlining the developments in the concept of ἐνάργεια from Aristotle to Quintilian, the paper considers the use of Latin terms for black in three descriptive passages from Statius’ epic poem, the Thebaid. It is observed that the poet privileges the juxtaposition of the two adjectives ater and niger in a pattern of uariatio, where ater often carries a (...) figurative meaning and repeats established poetic clichés, while niger is part of unparalleled collocations that evoke a material notion of blackness. Further analysis of the uariatio in the context of each passage reveals that the juxtaposition of the two-colour terms enhances the vividness of the objects described not only by increasing their chromatic impact but also by establishing connections with other parts of the poem, and by inviting a reflection on the competing practices of imitation and transgression of poetic models. The analysis of one stylistic feature shows that this stylistic feature is used by Statius for achieving ἐνάργεια as an artistic effect, for reflecting on ἐνάργεια as an instrument through which poetic models are challenged, and for tying his own poetic practice to contemporary rhetorical discussions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Paradoxical Pleasures of Human ImaginationOmar Sultan HaqueHow Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like, by Paul Bloom. W. W. Norton, 2010, 280 pp., $26.95.Have you heard about that chump who dished out $48,875 for John F. Kennedy's dusty old tape measure? The rock star who allegedly snorted his father's ashes with some cocaine? The creepy German guy who put out an advertisement for (...) someone who would let themselves be eaten by him (only to have hundreds volunteer)? The story about the man who was tired with his wife, but powerfully aroused when he was convinced he was with an exact duplicate of her? How can a staunch atheist also believe in the numinous? Why do people buy expensive wines, and bottled water, even though in blind taste tests, they can't distinguish them from the cheap stuff? Why buy pâté when your palate can't distinguish it from dog food? Why do people pay hundreds of dollars to hear the famous violinist Joshua Bell perform, but then cannot even spare a dime when a disguised Bell plays the same music on the subway in regular garb? Why might someone who trains people to prevent falls and injury enjoy watching a comedian fall and hurt himself? Why would someone pay a few hundred thousand dollars for art that consisted of someone else's unmade bed?It may be is easy to feel smug when thinking about this panoply of apparent irrationality in individual decisions and general human propensities. But the things that uniquely delight us may not be as [End Page 182] capricious as they seem. Many of the pleasures (curious or ordinary) that we get from our relationships with food, sex, irreplaceable objects, performances, safety and pain, music, literature and the imagination may have a deeper logic. They may be explicable by a better understanding of how our evolved minds work, and don't work, amidst our historically novel environments. Or so argues Paul Bloom—a cognitive developmental psychologist at Yale University—in How Pleasure Works, a brilliant and articulate synthesis of philosophy, psychology, evolutionary biology and the arts that elucidates the seemingly whimsical and once mysterious sources of our uniquely human hedonic satisfactions.The theory Bloom utilizes to systematize aspects of a number of pleasure phenomena is called psychological essentialism. This is an idea that has been developed in the last two decades by Bloom and the psychologists Douglas Medin, Andrew Ortony, Frank Keil, and Susan Gelman, among others.1 Psychological essentialism claims that, as Bloom puts it, people reliably, at a very young age, cross-culturally and throughout history, think that "things have an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly and it is this hidden nature that really matters." We assume that objects, artifacts, non-human animals, people and groups have invisible essences and unseen orders that account for their surface properties. In one of Keil's experiments, for instance, children thought that a dog made to look like a toy dog, a porcupine that had a surgery to make it look like a cactus, and a tiger stuffed into a lion suit were still a dog, porcupine and tiger, respectively. However, when each animal had its 'innards' altered, children said the animals changed into different categories, like objects or plants.2 Psychological essentialism for artifacts or tools is somewhat different from that for animate entities; the essence of artifacts is their history and the intentions of their creators.3According to How Pleasure Works, because of psychological essentialism, many human delights seem to arise that cannot be explained by simply appealing either to their low-level sensual qualities or their practical utility. Thus, the theory helps clarify some of pleasure's paradoxes. Like parents who affectionately keep tokens of their children's time as a baby, someone can enjoy owning a tape measure from a famous person because of its history of uses or other associations with important places or people. Snorting dad's ashes (however noxious to the nostrils), or pigging out on someone whom you admire, can be deeply meaningful because it feels as if one is... (shrink)

The paper aims to analyse the structure of the formed models of congruence of personal and organizational values, opportunities of their application in order to conceptualize the guidelines for the formation of an integrated model. The models for analysis were selected from the articles published in international databases with the keywords associated with value congruence models and grouped by the types of models: models that represent the origin of the phenomenon of value congruence and methodology of evaluation, and models, which (...) depict the impact of value congruence on the employee and activities of the organization. The main result of this research is a complex analysis of all models of congruence of personal and organizational values presented in the scientific literature, in the aspect of their structure, content and practical application. It was found that the essential elements of the models analysed are personal values, organizational values, congruence of personal and organizational values and the influence of congruence on the person and the organization. However, the models lack not only the scientific substantiation of the influence of the phenomenon of value congruence on the person and the organization, but also practical recommendations on how to achieve strong value congruence in the organization. This article exclusively presents the analysis of models developed by different scientists, but the obtained results of empirical studies are not compared statistically, applying certain models in practice. Such criteria as the sample size, the nature of activities of the organizations were not analysed and the states, in which the studies were carried out with the application of the analysed models, are not emphasized. This study also does not aim to determine the most appropriate diagnostic instrument for evaluation of value congruence, leaving the open way for the further discussions. The originality of this research is presupposed by the fact that it presents most of the models described in the scientific literature that evaluate the congruence of personal values of employees and the values prevailing in the organization. This will help the researchers of value congruence form a clear view about the models published in scientific literature, not to be disorientated in the diversity of the presented models and look for new directions for improvement of models of value congruence. A newly developed complex model of value congruence also offered to executives of organizations will help perceive the process of formation of this phenomenon and its benefits, and understand how to manage this phenomenon in practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Pathology of the Mind: Disorder Versus DisabilityRichard G. T. Gipps (bio)Keywordsorder, disorder, ability, disability, mental illnessAlfredo Gaete (2008) describes mental disorders as impairments in intentionality, phenomenal consciousness, and intelligence that cause harm to the affected person. I found persuasive Gaete’s claim that the concept of ‘mental disorder’ is best understood as nontheoretical and nontechnical. I also find compelling his argument that a previous contribution of my own—which relied in (...) part on specifying different senses of ‘disorder’ in psychological, physiological, and social cases—was misguided. Further, his suggestion that we ought at least to attempt analysis in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions before we seek out less definitive characterizations (in terms of family resemblances) also persuades me, although I find myself less sanguine than he about the general possibility of achieving such analyses.One of Gaete’s principal claims is that mental disorder is helpfully understood in terms of an absence of a capacity—that is, as a disability. There are two related objections—or two aspects of the same objection—that I would like to offer the author with respect to this claim. These may well not be conclusive, but will I hope at least function as foils against which the author can usefully sharpen his argument. One objection suggests that there is a viable distinction between the concepts of mental disorder and mental disability, as commonly used in clinical contexts, which the account offered seems unable to respect. The second suggests that the account may not be able to theorize what is argued to be the essential contribution of the concepts of order and disorder (as opposed to ability and disability) to the everyday concept of mental disorder. Accordingly, it questions the power of a disability approach such as Gaete’s to capture the essential nature of mental disorder.In his paper, Gaete classifies mental retardation and developmental, or (what in the United Kingdom are known as) learning, disabilities (autism, etc.) as cases of mental disorder. I found this surprising because it is not common linguistic practice in the psychological circles in which I operate. It would also seem to make a nonsense of commonly accepted ideas like: “Mental disorders are more likely to occur in patients with developmental disabilities (e.g., in autism, Asperger, or Down syndrome) than in the general population.” (For an example, see Campbell and Malone [1991]). On Gaete’s classification, it would appear that people with autism eo ipso have a mental disorder, and [End Page 341] hence the commonly accepted idea would need to be interpreted as merely a statement about comorbidities of different disorders of the same general (i.e., mental) type. But that is not, I believe, how the term is commonly used, and Gaete’s suggestion must therefore be treated as revisionary rather than descriptively analytical.One way of reconstructing a rationale underlying the distinction between mental disabilities and mental disorders is as follows. A developmental disability involves a failure of (certain aspects of) the mind to grow and reach an expected level or type of organization. A mental disorder by contrast involves a disturbance or disorganization (not simply an impoverishment) within the mind at whichever level of organization it has reached. As the mind develops, and reaches new levels or types of organization, the forms which mental disorders may take accordingly change.Autism and schizophrenia provide helpful illustrations of this distinction. Autism represents a failure of (among other things) the social mind to develop in childhood. The person with moderate to severe autism may attain at best a very shaky grasp on the realities of other minds and social conventions. That is, the degree of mental structure they obtain—their social competencies or capacities—will likely remain limited. It is this fundamental deficit that marks out the disability, and not the social anxieties or other such disturbances that can beset the autistic person.Schizophrenia, by contrast, tends to occur at late adolescence, when the individual has developed higher levels of—albeit often fragile—mental structure. Yet it is not the fragility of such mental structure, but rather the disruptions that can occur within such structures as have developed, that mark them out... (shrink)

Abstract. This paper argues that the “Argument from Moral Peer Disagreement” fails to make a case for widespread moral skepticism. The main reason for this is that the argument rests on a too strong assumption about the normative significance of peer disagreement (and higher-order evidence more generally). In order to demonstrate this, I distinguish two competing ways in which one might explain higher-order defeat. According to what I call the “Objective Defeat Explanation” it is the mere possession of higher-order evidence (...) that explains defeat. I argue that this type of explanation is problematic and that it at best collapses into another explanation I call the “Subjective Defeat Explanation”. According to this explanation, it is coming to believe that one’s belief fails to be rational that explains defeat. Then I go on to argue that the Subjective Defeat Explanation is able to provide a straightforward explanation of higher-order defeat but that it entails that peer disagreement (and higher-order evidence more generally) only contingently gives rise to defeat, and importantly, that the condition it is contingent upon is very often not satisfied when it comes to moral peer disagreement specifically. As a result, it appears that moral knowledge is seldom threatened by moral peer disagreement. (shrink)

Seeing philosophy as conversation with a number of fruitful avenues of discourse, Rorty seems to be caught in limbo, unwilling to follow through or commit himself to any particular line of discourse for fear of closing himself off to alternative discourses. Choosing to adopt this particular attitude he still has made a choice: he has made a commitment to non-commitment, or as Ortega puts it, “decided not to decide.” Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, trans. anonymously (New (...) York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1957), p. 48. Such a commitment or decision is in no way neutral, for it attempts to enforce, by moral requirement, Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 394. a new vocabulary which views philosophy as conversation between speakers, with a whole range of obligations and implications included. Thus the Rortian alternative, like the alternatives he criticizes, plays the role “of the cultural overseer who knows everyone's common ground — the Platonic philosopherking who knows what everybody else is really doing whether they know it or not, because he knows about the ultimate context ... within which they are doing it.” Ibid., pp. 317–318. In fact, Rorty even refers to “conversation as the ultimate context” Ibid., p. 389. In assuming to know everyone's common ground, that every-one is participating in the conversation of humankind whether they realize it or not, Rorty seems to fall prey to a similar “self-deceptive ... absurdity of thinking that the vocabulary [he uses] ... has some privileged attachment to reality which makes it more than just a further set of descriptions.” Ibid., p. 361.One implication of such a position is that despite its holder's claims that he or she will at least attempt to incorporate abnormal discourses of all sorts, the conversationalist will not be able to consider seriously a number of types of discourse. If the edifying, hermeneutical philosopher were really “willing to pick up the jargon of the interlocutor rather than translating it into his own terms,” Ibid., p. 318. it would often be necessary to drop the notion of conversation as being a fundamental practice or moral obligation. Rorty is obviously unwilling to really pick up the jargon of the epistemologist and the meta-physician he criticizes, or of Nietzsche and Stirner, for each of these does not have contained within them, at least as a primary consideration, the continuing of the conversation of humankind. Because he imposes his vocabulary and descriptions on them - they are merely speakers in a conversation - he will see them as merely threads in a larger social fabric, he will be translating their “jargon” into his own, and thus will never be able to take their position seriously, never be prepared to adopt their position as his own. Being possessed by the notion of continuing the conversation, he is closing himself off to traditional epistemological and metaphysical projects, as well as to the perspectives of thinkers like Stirner and Nietzsche, despite his claim to be open to all of them. He can only consider them as topics of conversation as long as he remains committed to conversation, and thus never consider them as live options, or consider them as alternative life-projects to be pursued on their own terms. In insisting on the moral obligation of philosophers to continue the conversation of the West, he is insisting on the moral obligation of philosophers not to whole-heartedly adopt any of the alternatives which would tend to close off this conversation. Therefore, instead of decrying “the very notion of having a view, while avoiding having a view about having views,” Ibid., p. 371. Rorty has a rather clear view about having views: one should not hold any view whole-heartedly except the view that philosophy should be conversation, and this conversation should be the way to decide among views; that is, the way to decide among all views except the view that conversation should be the way to decide, which for Rorty is not open to discussion, but is a moral obligation. All perspectives are encouraged in the conversation, but the conversational morality has already prescribed that these views should not be whole-heartedly adopted by responsible individuals. Requiring that philosophy be conversation, Rorty closes off numerous possible life-styles, and almost all traditional philosophical projects: he merely saves the appearances of these alternatives. Morally required to continue the conversation, philosophy becomes just talk. Along the same lines, when Rorty claims that the normal and abnormal discourses “do not compete, but rather help each other out,” Ibid., p. 346. he assumes that the epistemological and metaphysical discourses will be helped by various abnormal discourses, and assumes thinkers like Nietzsche and Stirner will be helped by being made to see the significance of societies which have fallen together and are united by civility. Yet, in doing this, Rorty is not attempting to understand - either sympathetically or intellectually - what it would mean to help these projects on their own terms, and as such is not trying to understand and assimilate these alternatives as he claims he is. Rather, he is holding each of these alternatives up to his own ideal of an “open conversation,” and judging what it would mean to “help out” these alternatives only according to his own particular standards. In continually translating what others are offering into his own particular frame of reference, he does not appreciate these philosophical alternatives for their worth as individual activities which can contribute to life and/or society, but values them only for what they can contribute to his larger project, the conversation of humankind. However, if these alternatives were taken seriously, then they would surely be seen to compete with his view which advocates social criteria for adjudicating disputes, thereby denying many of the fundamental aspects of the above-mentioned alternative philosophical under-takings. It should be seen that contrary to what Rorty suggests, edification also “provides only some, among many, ways of describing ourselves,” Ibid., p. 361. and is only one type of human project among many others. In suggesting that we shift our focus “from the relation between human beings and the objects of their inquiry to the relation between alternative standards of justification, and from there to the actual changes in these standards which make up intellectual history,” Ibid., pp. 389–390. Rorty neither breaks free from traditional concerns, nor brings the focus of attention onto our own lives. As Bernstein notes, “there is a sense in which Rorty himself is obsessed. It is almost as if he can't quite ‘let go’ and accept the force of his own critique. It is as if Rorty himself has been more deeply touched by what he is attacking than he realizes.... He himself is obsessed with the obsessions of philosophers.” R.J. Bernstein, “Philosophy in the Conversation of Mankind,” pp. 767, 775.As a result of this, Richard Eldridge correctly notes that Rorty is unable to realize that “[c]riticism matters just insofar as it enables us fruitfully to develop our lives and our practices out of the past.” Richard Eldridge, “Philosophy and the Achievement of Community: Rorty, Cavell and Criticism,” Metaphilosophy 14, No. 2 (1983), p. 124. As an alternative to the Rortian attitude, I invite the reader to entertain a perspective which is not primarily concerned with identifying oneself in accordance with, or in opposition to, particular traditions, but rather with assimilating and utilizing all previous philosophical labors in order to achieve the greatest appreciation of one's own personal possibilities, and the fullest expression of one's own powers. (shrink)

The questions ‘Do I know p?’ and ‘shall I take p as a reason to act?’ seem to belong to different domains — or so claims Ernest Sosa in his Judgment and Agency, the latest version of his virtue epistemology. According to Sosa, we may formulate the first question in a purely epistemological way — a matter of knowledge “full stop” —, while the second one is necessarily intruded by pragmatic factors — a matter of “actionable knowledge”. Both should be (...) answered, in his view, considering the reliability of my belief, but the former could be faced in total abstraction from my personal practical concerns. In this paper I dispute Sosa’s view, and claim that no purely epistemic level of knowledge “full stop” is conceivable, at least within a reliabilist framework. A case is put forward in order to show that some given belief may not be considered as reliable by itself, as a token, but always as a member of a type, belonging to some class of reference of other beliefs. And the relevant class of reference may only be chosen considering personal practical interests. (shrink)

Towards the end of her famous 1971 paper “Causality and Determination”, Elizabeth Anscombe discusses the controversial idea that “ ‘physical haphazard’ could be the only physical correlate of human freedom of action”. In order to illustrate how the high-level freedom of human action can go together with micro-indeterminism without creating a problem for micro-statistics, she provides the analogy of a glass box filled with minute coloured particles whose micro-dynamics is subject to statistical laws, while its outside reliably displays a recognisable (...) variation of a certain image created by an external cause. Anscombe’s example is somewhat enigmatic, and she provides no details to support its viability. In this paper we discuss the context of Anscombe’s analogy, and we provide basics of the theory and practice of building an Anscombe box. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Practice of SurgeryKaren DevonThere’s no one on the snowy road driving beside me. It’s Christmas Eve, the night the newest attending surgeon on staff gets to be on call. Tonight feels like an anniversary of sorts. The first time I performed an appendectomy “alone” was on Christmas Eve. I can’t recall if it was snowing back then since I hadn’t left the hospital in days. I had assumed (...) that while I was operating on that 26–year–old woman with new abdominal pain that moved towards the left lower quadrant, my attending staff on call was sleeping soundly. I didn’t even know where he lived, or how long it would take if something catastrophic were to happen. I phoned the white–haired man to get his blessing just before midnight. “Have you done this operation before?” he asked. “Yes, several, but not completely alone” I confessed. “Go for it and call me when you are done. Oh, and be safe!” Click. Gulp.As I drive in tonight, again past midnight, I reflect upon that night. Was it practice? A right of passage? The most appropriate treatment for the patient? Perhaps it was even safer this way since my attending really had never done this operation the way it is now done—laparoscopically—by residents. I clearly recall telling the patient and her mother, “We do this all the time! The staff surgeon on call will come in if I need him, but the chief residents always do this operation and I feel comfortable taking care of you.” Sign on the dotted line and make sure you read the part where you are told this is a teaching hospital. Not only was independence an expectation, but I was also supposed to teach the more junior house staff how to emulate what I was so expertly performing.That night I took out the rotting appendix without incident and called the grey haired surgeon in the wee hours. “Merry Christmas Doctor. Sorry to bother you. I just wanted to let you know that the patient is awake and doing well.” “Yes I know. Good work” he replied. “I was in my office. Just in case.”As a resident, I was often torn between the need to gain independence in order to learn and grow as a surgeon, and the idea that I was practicing. As most budding surgeons do, I wanted to be the person doing the surgery. Working on my technical skills was clearly an important part of expertise. Surgery is inherently different than other types of medicine. It seemed slightly more difficult for someone to stop my cutting, than to catch the error in a prescription, before some damage is done. Perhaps a little more like driving a car, than learning to use a calculator. Recently a more modern surgical education is evolving, whereby students practice by simulations on machines. Yet educators know that ultimately many “firsts” need to occur with real patients. That proficiency and expertise are more than a diagnosis, a steady hand, or even the two combined. If the experience of operating as the primary surgeon without immediate supervision, on a patient with acute appendicitis never occurred until we passed licensing exams wouldn’t that be more harmful? I may have been the least legally responsible for outcomes, that night of my own first, when the grey–haired surgeon took the [End Page E1] responsibility of trusting me. But in fact, the obligation I felt was enormous. We cannot simulate the weight of responsibility that comes when responsible for another human being, who you have met and who provides their trust in you. Furthermore, as the teachers of this art and science, we need to balance our obligations to each individual patient with our obligation to society to train competent and caring future surgeons. Surgery would have no history if the “practice” of surgery had nothing to do with practice, defined in its simplest form, yet how do we cover all of this during the late night conversation that is called informed consent. Interestingly since that December evening and for the next 200 laparoscopic appendectomies before my graduation in to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Ethics and Economies of Inquiry: Certeau, Theory, and the Art of PracticeTony Schirato (bio) and Jen Webb (bio)In this paper we will look at what Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life, calls “Theories of the Art of Practice.” Certeau is perhaps best known as a theorist of the ways in which everyday practices inhabit the institutions and sites of power and official culture, while not being in (...) any sense recuperable or explicable to these “proper places.” In “Theories of the Art of Practice” he concerns himself not with cultural practices themselves but, rather, with the specific relationship between theoretical discourse and the object of that discourse. In order to do this he takes as examples certain cultural theorists—most obviously Foucault and Bourdieu—whose work is strongly underpinned by an emphasis on the relation between discourse and practice. He offers a detailed consideration and critique of their theories of practice and the tactics those theorists use to escape the theory/practice dichotomy.In the first two paragraphs of “Theories of the Art of Practice,” Certeau identifies the two points which, taken together, constitute the broad narrative of this section of Practice. The first relates to the theoretical basis from which we can approach practice. “Everyday practices,” he writes:depend on a vast ensemble which is difficult to delimit but which we may provisionally designate as an ensemble of procedures. The latter are schemas of operations and of technical manipulations. On the basis of some recent and fundamental analyses (those of Foucault, Bourdieu, Vernant and Détienne, and others) it is possible, if not to define them, at least to clarify their functioning relative to discourse (or to “ideology,” as Foucault puts it), to the acquired (Bourdieu’s habitus), and to the form of time we call an occasion (the kairos discussed by Vernant and Détienne). These are different ways of locating a technicity of a certain type and at the same time situating the study of this technicity with respect to current trends in research.[43]An important issue here is Certeau’s critique of the extent to which each theorist applies a specific technicity (Foucault’s disciplinary procedures, Bourdieu’s habitus) in an attempt to delimit the field, to reduce the multiplicity of practice—or the theorizing of practice—to a singularity. As he points out in his essay on Nicholas of Cusa [“The Gaze” 6], such “ways of proceeding are subject to a common problematics,” because they inscribe a particular way of thinking and seeing and, in that process, risk excluding other ways of understanding. However, Cusa’s praxis: [End Page 86]does not presuppose a language proper to theory, an autonomous metalanguage that would provide a distinct linguistic space for speculation.... A task related to each singularity liberates, as it were, and develops... the “impulsion” which is integral to each and which is revealed to be infinite by the very impossibility of finding a hierarchical unity among singularities.[“The Gaze” 7]What Certeau looks for in the work of Bourdieu and Foucault is the moment, or the “impulsion,” which allows a theoretical engagement with practice. If practice can’t be called up, defined, or finally explicated, what can be done is to plot the relationships between power and its structures, logics, places, and discourse and the objects of power (practices) it seeks to identify and regulate. This allows us to identify both how power seeks to exclude the heterogeneity that is practice and the ways in which practice, despite these acts of exclusion and regulation, leaves its mark on official places (discourses, institutions, the objective structures of cultural fields). What Certeau does is to explore how others (Foucault and Bourdieu in particular, Vernant and Détienne) have explored this terrain.The second move Certeau makes is to contextualize those theories of practice, not so much as metadiscourses or generalized maps but as practices themselves, specific to a time and place and informed both by their theoretical antecedents and by the politics, logics, and discourses of the field(s) within which they operate. This allows Certeau to exemplify both how bodies of theory (as well as intellectual fields) come about and develop and... (shrink)

There is a common practice of providing natural-language ‘glosses’ on sentences in the language of higher order logic: for example, the higher-order sentence ∃X(X Socrates) might be glossed using the English sentence ‘Socrates has some property’. It is widely held that such glosses cannot be strictly correct, on the grounds that the word ‘property’ is a noun and thus, if meaningful at all, should be meaningful in the same way as any other noun. Against this view, this paper argues that (...) natural languages feature pervasive type-ambiguity in such a way that the relevant English sentences are in fact semantically equivalent to the higher-order sentences of which they serve as ‘glosses’. It also responds to some objections that have often been taken to be fatal to such type-ambiguity, such as the challenge of accounting for the meaning of ‘mixed disjunctions’ like ‘Either Mars or the property of being red is interesting’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:332 BOOK REVIEWS toral inventions (such as basic Christian communities), and the religious backgrounds of millions who help to make up the churches, Catholic and Protestant, of the United States. Providence College Providence, RI EDWARD L. CLEARY, O.P. Springs of Action: Understanding Intentional Behavior. By ALFRED R. MELE. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. 272 + ix. $39.95 (cloth). Alfred Mele's overarching aim in this book (...) is to offer an account of the role of intentions in the explanation of intentional action. He works within the familiar terms of causal theories of action, and is particularly indebted to Donald Davidson. In Part I, Mele borrows a set of theses from Davidson's desire/belief model of intentional action, and in the process of addressing problems associated with these theses, he progressively refines an account of action that understands an agent's reasons to have explanatory force by virtue of being among the causes of action. In Part II, Mele argues that desire/belief models are insufficient as they stand and need to be filled out by recognizing that intentions provide a crucial link between reasons and actions. The discussion begins with the vexed question of how the content of mental states can be relevant to the causal explanation of action. We constantly appeal to our desires, beliefs, plans, and so on (i.e., to various propositional, or intentional, attitudes) in explaining our behavior. But how does, say, my appetite for good wine and my belief that the house chardonnay is such a wine figure in the causal order that brings about my act of ordering a glass of it? Presumably, these intentional states supervene upon certain physical states of my body, and the latter do the causal work of producing wine-ordering behavior. However, there are good reasons to think that, with certain sorts of changes in my history and environment (viz., of the sort described in twin earth thought experiments), these physical states could be the realization of different intentional states. So can a causal theory of action actually accord my desires and beliefs any role in explaining my action? Mele argues that even if we hold (with externalists) that the agent's history and environment help to fix the content of her intentional states, we can nonetheless say that unless the agent had intended what she did, she would not have acted as she did. The behavior is intentional action by virtue of issuing (in the right way) from physical processes BOOK REVIEWS 333 that realize the agent's reasons for acting, and these processes realize these reasons only if the processes have an appropriate causal history. The result is that what we desire, believe, and intend does after all make a systematic difference in what we do. Mele makes some helpful refinements in the standard account of the causal role of desire in intentional action. It has typically been claimed that when an agent's wants compete, the "strongest" of them deter· mines the action; if an agent wants to do A more than anything else that she takes herself to be able to do, then if she acts intentionally she will do A. Mele points out that this general claim must be qualified so as to index desires to times, to accommodate both unsuccessful at· tempts and the agent's estimates of the likelihood of success, and to deal with the complex relations between desires. He explores the way in which agents are able to control the motivational strength of their desires, and he works out a definition of irresistible desire. One of the deepest challenges to the claim that action is caused by what we most desire arises in considering "motivational ties." How, on this account, is intentional action possible when we equally desire each of two incompatible alternatives? An arbitrary decision procedure can be adopted (e.g., a coin toss), but this alone does not en· hance the attractiveness of the randomly selected alternative. Here Mele introduces his thesis about intentions: viz., that intentions have an "executive quality that is not reducible to desire-strength" (p. 72), so that even when there is no preponderant motivation to do A... (shrink)

Differentiated instruction is an approach that centers on the fact that every student is different and shapes the teaching process according to this reality. Students in the learning environment differ from each other in terms of characteristics such as prior knowledge, interest, needs, learning style, socio-cultural background, cognitive-affective-psychomotor readiness. In order for students with different characteristics to benefit from education in the best way, it is necessary to diversify education in terms of content, teaching-learning process and measurement-evaluation dimensions, taking these (...) differences into account. In this diversification, students' readiness, interest and learning profiles are taken into account as a whole. Although educational programs are prepared by taking the similarities between individuals into account in practice, teachers are expected to diversify the process by taking the individual differences of the students into account and design different learning paths for students with different characteristics. One of the areas that needs to be planned and implemented with a differentiated teaching approach within formal education is religious education. Differentiated religious teaching is to diversify religious teaching in terms of content, learning-teaching process and measurement and evaluation dimensions, taking the individual differences of students into account such as their prior religious knowledge, interest and attitudes towards religion, cultural affiliations and learning profiles. In this study, the self-efficacy perceptions of Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge (“Din Kültürü ve Ahlâk Bilgisi”, abb. DKAB in Turkish) teachers towards differentiated teaching were examined. Determining the self-efficacy perceptions of DKAB teachers regarding differentiated instruction is important in terms of providing information about their success in planning, implementing and evaluating according to differentiated instruction in the Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge course. The research sought answers to the following questions: 1. What are DKAB teachers' self-efficacy perceptions towards differentiated instruction? 2. Is there a significant relationship between DKAB teachers' self-efficacy perceptions towards differentiated instruction and teachers' gender, age, years of service, graduated higher education program and the type of school they work in? The research is a descriptive study and is of quantitative type and survey model. The population of the research consists of DKAB teachers working in primary and secondary education institutions in the 2nd semester of the 2021-2022 academic year. The sample of the research consists of 425 DKAB teachers selected from the population using the appropriate sampling method. Differentiated Instruction Self-Efficacy Scale developed by Mutlu, Öztürk and Aktekin was used to collect the data used in the research. The data collected in the study was analyzed using the SPSS 25.0 package program. According to the findings obtained in the study, DKAB teachers' self-efficacy perceptions regarding differentiated instruction are at a high level. The characteristics of DKAB teachers' age, years of service, and the type of school they work in do not have a significant effect on teachers' self-efficacy perceptions regarding differentiated instruction. There is a significant relationship between DKAB teachers' gender and the characteristics of the higher education program they graduated from and their self-efficacy perceptions. Male teachers consider themselves more competent in differentiated instruction. The self-efficacy perceptions of the teachers who graduated from the primary education DKAB Teaching program are at a higher level than the teachers who graduated from the theology (Ilahiyat) program, which is described as the faculty of theology. It is thought that the research will contribute to the field of differentiated religious teaching. (shrink)

This study aims to grasp the two distinct artworks one is from the literary field: Penal Colony, written by F. Kafka and the other one is from painting: The Large Glass, designed by M. Duchamp. This text tries to unravel the similarities betwe- en these artworks in terms of two main significations around “The Officer” from Penal Colony and “The Bachelors” from The Large Glass. Because of their vital role on the re-production of status-quo, this text asserts that there is (...) a similarity between them in the name of being part of the dispositions of body and desire. First of all, the text focuses on Penal Colony, especially on “The Officer” in or- der to observe his obsession towards the order that ruled by former and the late officer of colony. Deleuze & Guattari conceptualize it as “abstract-machines” and it refers to a contingent state of being which is produced as an obligatory entity. Besides, The Officers’ application via a “labeling machine” on inmates creates a framewok of a dispositif in Foucauldian terminology. Secondly, it is emphasized that The Bachelors from the Large Glass for his context, due to its reference for the concept of desire and a metaphorical connotation for desire as “cocoa”. The Large Glass is also turn around the dispositif in a different way: love. It is stated that criticizing the love to nowhere which belongs to The Bachelors and it can be found that there is an abstract-machine again in back of this practice and it converts The Bachelors’ energeia to make an apparatus possible and operative. (shrink)

This volume brings together philosophical and interdisciplinary perspectives on improvisation. The contributions connect the theoretical dimensions of improvisation with different viewpoints on its practice in the arts and the classroom. The chapters address the phenomenon of improvisation in two related ways. On the one hand, they attend to the lived practices of improvisation both within and without the arts in order to explain the phenomenon. They also extend the scope of improvisational practices to include the role of improvisation in habit (...) and in planned action, at both individual and collective levels. Drawing on recent work done in the philosophy of mind, they also address questions such as whether improvisation is a single unified phenomenon, or whether it entails different senses that can be discerned theoretically and practically. Finally, they ask after the special kind of improvisational expertise which characterizes musicians, dancers, and other practitioners, an expertise marked by the artist's ability to participate competently in complex situations while deliberately relinquishing control. Philosophy of Improvisation will appeal to researchers working in philosophy, aesthetics, and pedagogy and the arts as well as practitioners involved in different kinds of music, dance, and theater performances. (shrink)