In this essay, I will examine Henri Maldiney’s phenomenological aesthetics, focusing on his claim that “art is the truth of the sensible.” This claim is presented by Maldiney in the context of a two-fold critique of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s respective attempts to phenomenologically elucidate the experience of artworks. According to Maldiney, both Husserl and Heidegger fail to recognize what he, following Erwin Straus, terms the “pathic” moment of sense experience, which is also the key moment of the aesthetic reception of (...) art. Drawing on this concept of the pathic and its way of engaging what Maldiney calls the “transpassibility” of receptivity, I argue that his phenomenology of art can be viewed as an attempt to bring together the two senses of the aesthetic in the Kantian sense, namely as an aesthetics of sense experience and as an aesthetics of art, from within the domain of sensibility itself. I develop this idea by turning to Maldiney’s notion of rhythm and examining how he thinks that it can be applied to the visual arts. Ultimately, I suggest that Maldiney’s aesthetics imbues art with ontological significance, since he takes the rhythmic presence of artworks to be a sensuous manifestation of the rhythmic ground of the world’s constitution. The truth of art, in this sense, is a revelation of the ontological functioning of rhythm. (shrink)

This paper outlines a truth-conditional view of logical form, that is, a view according to which logical form is essentially a matter of truth-conditions. The main motivation for the view is a fact that seems crucial to logic. As _§_1 suggests, fundamental logical relations such as entailment or contradiction can formally be explained only if truth-conditions are formally represented.§2 spells out the view. _§_3 dwells on its anity with a conception of logical form that has been defended in the past. (...) _§§_4-6 draw attention to its impact on three major issues that concern, respectively, the extension of the domain of formal explanation, the semantics of tensed discourse, and the analysis of quantication. (shrink)

Logical form has always been a prime concern for philosophers belonging to the analytic tradition. For at least one century, the study of logical form has been widely adopted as a method of investigation, relying on its capacity to reveal the structure of thoughts or the constitution of facts. This book focuses on the very idea of logical form, which is directly relevant to any principled reflection on that method. Its central thesis is that there is no such thing as (...) a correct answer to the question of what is logical form: two significantly different notions of logical form are needed to fulfil two major theoretical roles that pertain respectively to logic and to semantics. This thesis has a negative and a positive side. The negative side is that a deeply rooted presumption about logical form turns out to be overly optimistic: there is no unique notion of logical form that can play both roles. The positive side is that the distinction between two notions of logical form, once properly spelled out, sheds light on some fundamental issues concerning the relation between logic and language. (shrink)

‘Form’ was a fundamental category of European philosophy from its beginnings in ancient Greece until the 19th century. As Aristotle’s examples show, it originated in craft. Making a pot out of clay is a paradigm case of giving form to matter. During its long career in philosophy, this concept of humble origin expanded into a category for everything: In the 18th century, vide Kant, cognition could have a form (and even had to have it), or ethical decisions, or the experience (...) of beauty. Yet even vis-à-vis much simpler examples objections arise; already a rock, though it must have a shape, will not have form in the same sense as, e.g., a pot. In terms of being true to worldly phenomena, there is a high prize to pay for Western philosophy’s universalization of the concept of form. (shrink)

This work contains Peter Long's important essay, Logic, Form and Grammar , which resolves many difficulties for the logical form of an argument where the reasoning is hypothetical. Also included are two essays on classical problems in philosophical logic, relating to logical form and formal relations.

Quoi de plus inerte que les objets mathématiques. Rien ne les distingue de la pierre et pourtant, à les considérer dans leur perspective historique, ils semblent bien ne pas être aussi dénués de vie qu’il n’y paraı̂t. Conçus par l’homme, ils laissent entrevoir le souffle qui les anime. Pris dans les rets d’un langage, ils ne peuvent se séparer de la forme que les forces tensives qui les contraignent leur ont donnée. S’ils n’ont pas de vocation biologique spécifique, ils sont (...) pour autant toujours et avant tout des possibilités de vie, des objets de puissance. Bien qu’ils ne connaissent ni la douleur, ni le rire, ils ont par leur mode ou leur style d’existence une forme de vie singulière qui structure le donné ou la matière des autres entités auxquels ils participent. De ce fait, en s’immisçant dans l’armature de ces entités, ils conditionnent leur forme d’espace, les enjoignant de se plier à une charpente qu’elles n’ont pas choisie. (shrink)

This paper argues that time, not space, is the highlight of aesthetic and especially artistic form. Spatial relations must be translated into temporal relations and experienced as such if they are to be experienced as aesthetic form. The reverse is not the case, for aesthetic and artistic forms are not generally there to create spaces, at least not in a literal sense, but to give time in a very literal sense. The meaning of form is time.

This paper is a critical re-examination of the argument in Plato's "Phaedo" for the thesis that all learning is recollection of prenatal knowledge. Plato's speaker Socrates concentrates on the case of 'equal sticks and stones', viewed as striving without complete success to resemble a Form, the Equal itself. The paper argues that (a) this is a rather special case, focused on geometry; (b) Plato is at pains to emphasize that the Form-particular relation need not be one of resemblance at all, (...) a concession which he insists would not, if made, damage his theory of recollection; (c) even if resemblance is assumed to be the correct account of that relationship, the 'striving to be like' gloss is not an integral component of Plato's metaphysics. (shrink)

'Doing an Aristotle' on Form: a highly compressed attempt to explain what we mean by the ambiguous term "form" in visual arts.

This chapter sets out to briefly introduce the theory of the legal form as originally conceived by Evgeny Pashukanis, a famous early Soviet legal scholar. Firstly, it will provide an account of Pashukanis's life, tragically cut short during the Great Terror. Secondly, it will move onto summarising his theory of the legal form through three theses: (i) Commodity Form Thesis, (ii) Bourgeois Law Thesis, and (iii) Withering Away Thesis. Thirdly, it will compare these theses to the positions on law and (...) state advanced by his various interlocutors, past and contemporary, namely Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Petr Stuchka, and Andrey Vyshinsky. Fourthly, it will analyse the similarities and differences identified in the previous section, drawing conclusions as to the cause of Pashukanis's downfall. It will be eventually pointed out that Pashukanis's theory was fundamentally unsuitable to the project of Soviet state-building, which explains why viewing law and state from Pashukanist lens was contested and eventually abandoned. (shrink)

The first unquestionably big idea in the history of philosophy was the idea of form. The idea of course belonged to Plato, and was then domesticated at the hands of Aristotle, who paired form with matter as the two chief principles of his metaphysics and natural philosophy. In the medieval period, it was Aristotle’s conception of form and matter that generally dominated. This was true for both the Islamic and the Christian tradition, once the entire Aristotelian corpus became available. For (...) this reason, although there is much to say about the fate of Platonic Forms in medieval thought, the present chapter will focus on the Aristotelian tradition.1 Aristotelian commentators have been puzzled by form and matter for as long as there have been Aristotelian commentators. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that these are topics about which Aristotelians have never formed a very clear conception, and that their failure to do so was the principal reason why Aristotelianism ceased to be a flourishing research program from the seventeenth century onward. For those who aspire to a modern revival of Aristotelianism, the concepts of form and matter can easily take on the aspect of a kind of Holy Grail, such that if only we could get these ideas clearly in focus, we could see our way forward on any number of philosophical fronts, such as the union of mind and body, the coherence and endurance of substances, the nature of causality, and so on. The historical record, however, suggests that this hope is a snare and delusion, insofar as there has never been any such thing as the theory of form and matter. Although medieval philosophers of all kinds used this terminology incessantly, it had no more of a fixed meaning than does the ubiquitous contemporary philosophical talk of “properties.” Hence, the most a general survey of the topic can do is consider some of the more important areas of agreement and disagreement. (shrink)

This essay has two aims. The first is to offer an explanation concerning the problem of form in Umberto Eco’s philosophical research, showing that he deals with it while admitting that form can be a temporary element connected to a system of relationships which may be subject to variability. Namely, his reflection is open to the issue of structure. The second aim is to identify some principles that, according to this theoretical approach, may be considered a basis for a positive (...) philosophy of the arts whose adoption might also lead to the understanding of their most recent evolutions. Focusing above all on the work Eco carried out in the years preceding the elaboration of his semiotic theory, I will pursue the following two objectives. After introducing some aspects of Eco’s philosophical methodology, I will focus on the theme of form, considering it in meta-operative terms in light of Luigi Pareyson’s ‘theory of formativity’ and in relation to the issue of structure. In the final part of the essay, I will then show how this theoretical approach provides significant resources for a positive philosophy that can successfully address the evolution of the arts. (shrink)

"In ihrer Untersuchung entwickelt Linke eine zeitgemäße Theorie der musikalischen Form aus einer musikphilosophischen und musikanalytischen Perspektive ausgehend von posttonaler Musik nach 1950. Die hier entwickelte musikphilosophische Theorie versteht sich als eine Meta- oder Rahmentheorie für musikalische Analyse von neuer Musik. Im Zentrum der Untersuchung steht eine grundlegende Reflexion über das Verhältnis von musikalischer Form in neuer Musik und ästhetischer Erfahrung: Musikalische Form entsteht in der Interaktion des ästhetisch erfahrenden Subjekts mit dem ästhetischen Objekt im Prozess der ästhetischen Erfahrung und (...) ist daher weder als bloße Objekteigenschaft des musikalischen Phänomens noch als reine Erfahrungskategorie zu verstehen. Zentraler Anknüpfungspunkt ist sowohl in methodischer als auch in inhaltlicher Hinsicht Theodor W. Adornos Modell der Konstellation bzw. des konstellativen Denkens, welches musikphilosophische, erkenntnistheoretische und ethische Dimensionen miteinander in Verbindung bringt. Der Analyse-Teil zu Helmut Lachenmanns Orchesterkomposition "Schreiben. Musik für Orchester" (2002-05) stellt ein exemplarisches musikanalytisches Komplement zur hier entwickelten musikphilosophischen Theorie dar"--Back cover. (shrink)

Forms of thought are involved whenever we name, describe, or identify things, and whenever we distinguish between what is, might be, or must be the case. It appears to be a distinctive feature of human thought that we can have modal thoughts, about what might be possible or necessary, and conditional thoughts, about what would or might be the case if something else were the case. Even the simplest thoughts are structured like sentences, containing referential and predicative elements, and studying (...) these structures is the main task of philosophical logic. This clear and accessible book investigates the forms of thought, drawing out and focusing on the central logical notions of reference, predication, identity, modality and conditionality. It will be useful to students and other interested readers in epistemology and metaphysics, philosophy of mind and language, and philosophical logic. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the study of contemporary physics, and follows the philosophical path in order to conceive the universal principle of the ontological difference between form and Content. The distinction between "form" and "content" is fairly recent. It started with medieval philosophy, which separated substance from accidents and essence from existence, while also conceiving substance no longer as an ontological substratum in an Aristotelian sense, but as an underlying thing. Equating on an ontological level Being and Content as opposed (...) to form leads us back to lines of inquiry investigated in ancient times. Beatitude, truth and power represent a trinity shedding light on a path that allows us to move toward considerations about Christian ontology, which is also associated with Being and Content. The chapter also aims to establish a relationship between the oblivion of Content and the oblivion of Time. (shrink)

This book addresses three major questions about law and legal systems: (1) What are the defining and organizing forms of legal institutions, legal rules, interpretive methodologies, and other legal phenomena? (2) How does frontal and systematic focus on these forms advance understanding of such phenomena? (3) What credit should the functions of forms have when such phenomena serve policy and related purposes, rule of law values, and fundamental political values such as democracy, liberty, and justice? This is the first book (...) that seeks to offer general answers to these questions and thus gives form in the law its due. The answers not only provide articulate conversancy with the subject but also reveal insights into the nature of law itself, the oldest and foremost problem in legal theory and allied subjects. (shrink)

Theories of adverbial modification can be roughly distinguished into two sorts. One kind of theory takes logical form to follow surface grammatical form. Adverbs are treated as unanalyzable logical operators that turn a predicate or sentence into a different predicate or sentence respectively. And new rules of logic are stated for these operators. -/- A different kind of theory does not suppose that logical form must parallel surface grammatical form. It allows that logical form may have more to do with (...) deeper structures that might be studied in transformational grammar. Adverbs are treated as surface forms of the underlying predicates represented by corresponding adjectives and verbs. 'Slowly' is derived from 'slow'; 'intentionally' from 'intentional' or 'intend'; etc. And new rules of logic are avoided where they can be. -/- In this paper I attempt to state some of the advantages of the second sort of theory. My procedure will be this. First, I will try to say in outline what theories of logical form are. Then I will state five principles for evaluating such theories. Next, I will sketch the sorts of analyses acceptance of principles (1)-(5) leads to. In particular I will talk about adverbial phrases (e.g. locatives) that are best analyzed in terms of implicit references to events, relative modifiers (like 'large') which relate something to a comparison class, and 'that' clauses taken as names of propositions. By appealing to principles (1)-(5) I will defend these analyses against certain others, one that appeals to many logical operators, a second that treats all sentences as names of propositions, and a third that sees implicit reference to possible worlds in the language being analyzed. Finally, I will offer a pragmatic defense of my approach in terms of principles (1)-(5) as against a different approach that appeals to possible world semantics. (shrink)

This article describes the development and validation of a diagnostic test of German and its integration in a programme of formative assessment during a one-year initial teacher-training course. The test focuses on linguistic aspects that cause difficulty for trainee teachers of German as a foreign language and assesses implicit and explicit grammatical knowledge as well as students' confidence in this knowledge. Administration of the test to 57 German speakers in four groups (first-year undergraduates, fourth-year undergraduates, postgraduate trainees, and native speakers) (...) provided evidence of its reliability and validity. (shrink)

Chapter. 1. Logical. Form. as. a. Level. of. Linguistic. Representation. What is the relation of a sentence's syntactic form to its logical form? This issue has been of central concern in modern inquiry into the semantic properties of natural ...

Formes simples : présentes dans l'art avant l'histoire, inspirées de la nature ou des outils élémentaires, de l'évolution des techniques, des avancées en mathématiques, en biologie ou encore des découvertes archéologiques, elles sont réapparues au XIXe siècle en Occident. Ce livre explore la fascination qu'elles suscitent, leurs significations et leurs influences sur l'invention des formes modernes."--Page 4 of cover.

This essay notes a resurgence of interest in rhetorical studies on the appeal of form, grounded in the work of rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke. The essay argues that form is not only a way to structure discourses, it is a way to structure experience. Form is foundational in creating perceptions and thus experiences. Form is also highly rhetorical, in that how we structure our world carries social and ideological implications. The essay thus argues that an understanding of form as foundational (...) and rhetorical should be central to the educational curriculum. This way of understanding form is then a way of making rhetoric central to education in ways surpassing even the efforts of the ancient Greeks and Romans. A rhetorically centered curriculum based on teaching students how to understand form in their lives is empowering and liberating for students at the same time that it instills in them a strong awareness of ethics. (shrink)

“Life” has become an enigmatic keyword in diverse fields of contemporary philosophy in the past years – from political thought and its reflections on biopolitics to practical philosophy and its recourse to forms of life, to aesthetics and its reflections on the modes of life and liveliness in aesthetic representation. The contributions included in the following special section investigate the peculiar way this keyword functions in a diversity of fields, in order to bring to light the underlying conceptual and structural (...) implications of this term in these different domains. As these contributions show, the use of the marker “life” is more than a fleeting fashion – it articulates a modern predicament with deep historical roots. (shrink)

Possibility and reference have been central topics in metaphysics and the philosophy of language in the past decades. Wolfgang Freitag’s Form and Philosophy provides a novel approach to these notions and their interrelations, based on the concept of form as the key modal concept: form is the possibility space of objects. In its historic dimension, the book analyses the role of form in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In its systematic dimension, the book offers (...) an alternative ontological basis to David Armstrong’s combinatorial theory of possibility and rejects David Lewis’ analysis of possibility in terms of possible worlds. Representation is shown to rest on the idea of direct reference as proposed by David Kaplan and Saul Kripke. It is argued that the problem of reference links up with Wittgenstein’s rule-following problem, the nature of which is extensively discussed. It emerges that form and reference are complementary with respect to the notion of representation. Once their individual roles are seen, many metaphysical puzzles appear in a new light or disappear altogether. (shrink)

This book investigates the thought of two of the most influential philosophers of antiquity, Plato and his predecessor Anaxagoras, with respect to their metaphysical accounts of objects and their properties. The book introduces a fresh perspective on these two thinkers' ideas, displaying the debt of Plato's theory on Anaxagoras's, and principally arguing that their core metaphysical concept is overlap; overlap between properties and things in the world. Initially Plato endorses Anaxagoras's model of constitutional overlap, and subsequently develops qualitative overlap. Overlap (...) is the crux to our understanding of objects participating in Forms in Plato's metaphysics; of Plato's account of relata without relations; of the role of Forms as causes; of the metaphysics of necessity; and of the role of the Great Kinds and of the paradeigma in the development of Plato's thought. Anna Marmodoro argues that Plato is ground-breaking in the history of metaphysics, in different ways from those acknowledged so far, and with respect to more metaphysical questions than had been hitherto appreciated; e.g. Plato's treatment of structure as property; of complexity; and his introduction of the first ever account of metaphysical emergence. In addition to these results, Marmodoro makes Anaxagoras's and Plato's systems philosophically accessible to us, today's philosophers, by applying conceptual tools from analytic metaphysics to the study of ancient metaphysics. In this way, the book brings Anaxagoras's and Plato's ideas to bear on todays' philosophical discussions and opens up new venues of research for current philosophical discussions. (shrink)

The phrase ‘Lebensform’ had a long and varied history prior to Wittgenstein’s use of it on a mere three occasions in the Philosophical Investigations. It is not a pivotal concept in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. But it is a minor signpost of a major reorientation of philosophy, philosophy of language and logic, and philosophy of mathematics that Wittgenstein instigated. For Wittgenstein sought to replace the conception of a language as a meaning calculus by an anthropological or ethnological conception. A language is not (...) a class of sentences that can be formed from a set of axioms, formation and transformation rules and the meanings of which is given by their truth-conditions, but an open-ended series of interlocking language-games constituting a form of life or way of living. Wittgenstein’s uses of ‘Lebensform’ and its cognates, both in the Investigations and in his Nachlass are severally analysed, and various exegetical misinterpretations are clarified. (shrink)

The standard view of logical form is that logical forms are synthetic structures which are the forms of sentences and of other linguistic entities. This is often associated with a more general linguistic view of logic which is articulated in different ways by various authors. This paper contains a critical discussion of such linguistic approaches to logical form, with special emphasis on Quine’s formulation of a logical grammar in Philosophy of Logic. An account of logical forms as higher-order properties, which (...) essentially builds on Frege’s analysis of quantification as higher-order predication, is suggested at the end. (shrink)

Pragmatism can be understood as a position that conceives of epistemic and moral claims in the terms of a realization within the framework of our collective forms of activity. In this respect, it on the one hand proves to be compatible with current discussions in anthropology, which take Aristotle and German Idealism as their starting point. At the same time however, the two seem to be in tension with regard to the concept of form presupposed in the neo-Aristotelian debates which (...) seems to block a practice-theoretical reading. This article argues for a reconciliation of the two concepts: The human form of life is realized in collective practices that further define the concept of this form of life. For such a reconcilement, both pragmatist as well as neo-Aristotelian accounts however must partially be re-engineered. (shrink)

Multitude of strangely beautiful natural forms: Radiolaria, Foraminifera, Ciliata, diatoms, calcareous sponges, Siphonophora, star corals, starfishes, Protozoa, flagellates, brown seaweed, jellyfishes, sea-lilies, moss animals, sea-urchins, glass sponges, leptomedusae, horny corals, trunkfishes, true sea slugs, anthomedusae horseshoe crabs, sea-cucumbers, octopuses, bats, orchids, sea wasps, seahorse, a dragonfish, a frogfish, much more. All images black-and-white.

Questions on Form and Interpretation PdR Press Publications in Philosophy of Language.

When Aristotle argues at the Metaphysics Z.17, 1041b11–33 that a whole, which is not a heap, contains ‘something else’, i.e. the form, besides the elements, it is not clear whether or not the form is a proper part of the whole. I defend the claim that the form is not a proper part within the context of the relevant passage, since the whole is divided into elements, not into elements and the form. Different divisions determine different senses of ‘part’, and (...) thus the form is not a part in the same sense as the elements are parts. I object to Koslicki’s (2006) interpretation, according to which the form is a proper part along the elements in a single sense of ‘part’, although she insists that the form and the elements belong to different categories. I argue that Koslicki’s reading involves a category mistake, i.e. the conjunction of items that do not belong to the same category (Goldwater 2018). Since for Aristotle parthood presupposes some kind of similarity of parts, the conjunction of form and elements requires treating these items as somehow belonging to the same category, e.g. ‘being’, but no such category exists. (shrink)

In _Form, Matter, Substance_, Kathrin Koslicki defends a hylomorphic analysis of concrete particular objects (e.g., living organisms). The Aristotelian doctrine of hylomorphism holds that those entities that fall under it are compounds of matter (hulē) and form (morphē or eidos). Koslicki argues that a hylomorphic analysis of concrete particular objects is well-equipped to compete with alternative approaches when measured against a wide range of criteria of success. A successful application of the doctrine of hylomorphism to the special case of concrete (...) particular objects, however, hinges on how hylomorphists conceive of the matter composing a concrete particular object, its form, and the hylomorphic relations which hold between a matter-form compound, its matter and its form. Through the detailed answers to these questions Koslicki develops in this book, matter-form compounds, despite their metaphysical complexity, emerge as occupying the privileged ontological status traditionally associated with substances, due in particular to their high degree of unity. (shrink)

Rahel Jaeggi argues that forms of life ought to be the main reference point for a critical theory of society because the internal normative structure of life forms allows for immanent critique. In this article, I extend her model by systematically considering the possibility of oppressive forms of life. Oppressive forms of life are clusters of practices in which subordinated groups are systematically excluded or disabled from participating in the social processes of interpretation through which the values and purposes of (...) those very practices are determined. The possibility of oppressive forms of life poses a challenge to the method of immanent critique because it seems that any such critique must rely on immanent norms that are at least partly constituted by interpretations and that can therefore be distorted by oppression. I argue that Jaeggi’s model of immanent critique can be extended to respond to that challenge, either by recovering a constitutive form of freedom within all forms of life or by consciously adopting a partisan stance in favour of oppressed and marginalised self-understandings. (shrink)