L’histoire du Kronprinzenpalais, dans sa lente émergence vers la reconnaissance de son existence, ainsi que du rôle majeur qu’il joua sur la scène muséale allemande, en tant que premier musée d’art moderne, demeure étroitement lié au sort de son unique conservateur, Ludwig Justi. Cet article s’attache à restituer les innovations didactiques et muséographiques menées par Justi, les très nombreuses expositions temporaires aussi bien que l’enrichissement des collections, de même que la fondation de la revue Museum der Gegenwart, lesquels eurent un (...) rayonnement sur l’ensemble des musées d’art allemands. (shrink)

Kristeller's article ‘The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics’ is a classic statement of the view, now widely adopted but rarely examined, that aesthetics became possible only in the eighteenth-century with the emergence of the fine arts. I wish to contest this view, for three reasons. Firstly, Kristeller's historical account can be questioned; alternative and equally plausible accounts are available. Secondly, ‘the modern system of the arts’ appears to have been neither a system nor (...) an agreed upon entity, but only a historical construct of Kristeller's own making that matches up with no known historical reality. Thirdly, while the concept of the fine arts existed in the eighteenth century, the assumption that it had an impact on the rise of aesthetic theory remains unproven and unnecessary. A more satisfactory account of aesthetic thought in antiquity can be given, once the ‘fine-arts’ objection has been cleared away. (shrink)

Abstract…observations of skylfull pylotts is the onlye waye to bring it in rule; for it passeth the reach of naturall philosophy. – Michael Gabriel, 1576 (Collinson, 1867, p. 30)Abstract The tension between empirical data and formal theory pervades the entire history of geomagnetism, from the Middle Ages up to the present day. This paper explores its early-modern history (1500–1800), using a hybrid approach: it applies a methodological framework used in modern geophysics to interpret early-modern developments, exploring to what extent formal (...) conjectures shaped observation and vice versa. A range of pertinent case studies supports classification of this entire period as proto-scientific, characterised by the initial formation of theories being largely disconnected from observational constraints, and their subsequent evolution being advanced primarily by their empirical falsification, and not necessarily associated with the introduction of an alternative. The few exceptional instances of purely data-driven discovery were essentially due to an improved signal-to-noise ratio. (shrink)

Transparence et opacité fut écrit à la fin des années 1960 et parut pour la première fois en 1975. Cet essai majeur sur les fondements théoriques de l'art moderne avait disparu des librairies depuis près de vingt ans. Partant d'une analyse de la théorie de l'art de Konrad Fiedler, qui écrivit entre 1876 et 1895, Philippe Junod se livre en fait à une archéologie de la modernité et envisage l'ensemble de la théorie de l'art et de l'esthétique depuis Platon et (...) Aristote. Il établit que l'idée d'art moderne naît quand sont abandonnées aussi bien la voie du réalisme que celle de la peinture d'idées, le naturalisme comme le symbolisme, pour en venir à une troisième voie, celle de l'opacité où l'œuvre opère dans son autonomie, sans transparence ni référence, en faisant prévaloir les droits de la vision et du visible sur ceux de la reconnaissance et du déchiffrement. À un moment où le moderne apparaît comme un moment de l'histoire de l'art, l'enquête riche et minutieuse de Philippe Junod permet de comprendre les questionnements et les enjeux de toute une époque dont nous sortons à peine. (shrink)

Passivité et création est un livre ancré dans une double pratique: la peinture et la philosophie. Sa composition s'inspire du trajet suivi par Maurice Merleau-Ponty dans l'élaboration de son cours au Collège de France de 1954-1955: "Le problème de la passivité: le sommeil, l'inconscient, la mémoire". A partir de l'étude de la pratique de certains artistes et de l'analyse de textes philosophiques, il s'agit de décrire une passivité de forme particulière, une passivité "opérante", corrélative d'une forme dynamique de la subjectivité. (...) Cette passivité, "dimension d'un mouvement dont je suis le médiateur, mais qui d'une certaine façon se fait en moi sans moi, à mon insu", de nombreux artistes du 20. siècle s'en sont faits les témoins (Arp, Bacon, Dubuffet, Klee, Michaux, Rauschenberg, Schwitters, Spoerri, Nicolas de Staël, Bram Van Velde...), appelant aussi cette expérience "inconscient", "hasard", "imprévu", "surprise". Dans la perspective esquissée ici, l'accès aux autres cesse alors d'être un "problème". L'autre a déjà sa part dans mon expérience la plus singulière. Mon expérience peut devenir expérience pour d'autres parce qu'elle s'inscrit au sein d'une dimension phénoménologique qui n'est ni de moi ni d'autrui, mais commune. Quel est le rôle de cette passivité structurelle dans la création comprise comme transformation de la vision et du monde lui-même? Et comment peut-on en retourner la fragilité en pouvoir? (shrink)

In the first part of this paper I explore a recently conceived notion of a modern liberal arts education which brings the ancient Aristotelian search for first principles into a modern metaphysics of Kant and Hegel. In the second part I examine two ways in which this modern conception of a liberal arts education intervenes in important social and political debates in Western culture. My concluding comments centre on the belief that twenty-first-century liberal arts education needs to provide more resistance (...) to a culture of capitalism by orienting itself to the tradition from a modern standpoint. (shrink)

Art In Its Time takes a close look at the way in which art has become integral to the everyday 'ordinary' life of modern society. It explores the prevalent notion of art as transcending its historical moment, and argues that art cannot be separated from the everyday as it often provides material to represent social struggles and class, to explore sexuality, and to think about modern industry and our economic relationships.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

This paper addresses the relations between art and everyday life in the city from the vantage points of urban aesthetics and sociology, where the “city” refers as well to a normative world. The aim is to show how art/artistic life contributed to the normative change and new urban lifestyles. First, I focus on Baudelaire’s theory of beauty and life in modern metropolis or the city as “poetic object” and dandyism as an art of the self, seen as a crucial normative (...) change: the emergence of new norms of excellence and art of living, such as creativity and self-fashioning. Second, I discuss a recent yet related normative change, described by Boltanski and Chiapello as a passage to the “project-oriented city”, seen as a new way of working and living that fuses cultures of creativity and uncertainty. Third, I tackle the “creative city” hailed by Florida, where the creative lifestyle of “creative people” is the new mainstream setting the norms for society: individuality, diversity and openness, but also impermanent relationships and loose ties. I will argue that extending the hyper-mobile and flexible creative lifestyle from the extraordinary figure of the artist to ordinary people, as everyday urban life, triggers both benefits and risks. (shrink)

Hegel’s assertion that, for us moderns, art is a matter of the past has obscured his genuine interest in the art of his time and modern art in general. This article attempts to correct this situation. First, it contextualizes the claim in its historical and conceptual aspects; second, it returns to Hegel’s approaches to modern art, neglected hitherto by interpreters. This revision implies clarifying what for Hegel is the modern, whose concept comes from the freedom and autonomy of thought, and (...) does not conform to what, in developments of Aesthetics, after Hegel, represent tendencies and prescriptions such as the avant-garde or turns such as aesthetic modernity and postmodernity. Modern art is the product of an artist who freely disposes of the means and content of art since he places himself above them. (shrink)

This essay attempts a restatement of the relationship between art and science in terms of “making” and “knowing.” It first surveys the various ways art and science were related in the early modern period, arguing that one result of the new naturalistic representation was the emergence of a new visual culture that reinforced appeals to eyewitness and firsthand experience and in some cases fostered a new examination of European culture. At the same time, art, understood as the work of the (...) human hand in imitating nature, came to be viewed as one of the central characteristics that distinguished European society from the past. Moreover, artist/artisans helped constitute the aims and methods of the study of nature during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, articulating a new kind of authority for nature and providing the artworks that engendered a culture of nature study and collection. Thus art and artisans were fundamental motors of the Scientific Revolution. More attention to the visual culture of early modern Europe, including religious and devotional imagery, and seeking out intersections between making and knowing, as some art historians studying techniques have begun to do, will add to our understanding of the relationship between art and science in the early modern period. (shrink)

This thesis is to make sure the art's political possibility especially in the age of the technological reproduction. Since Benjamin declared the death of the 'aura' in the modern art, the concept of the art has been criticized and changed, that of the simulacre which Plato had blamed in his 'republics' newly appeared passing through the post-modern application of Baudrillard. But the simulacre is not negative any more here, even though it was the side effect of the mimesis(the poetic process, (...) so long as it is not oblivious that simulacre is just the fake reality as Plato and Baudrillard said, it was different from the real. The artwork could not be free from the destiny of the dream, for it is available after awakening out of it. In the post-modernism the distinction between the dream and the real disappeared, which could be linked to understanding the fetishism of the technological reproduction widely spreading among the highly industrialized people. The semiology of Saussure could be borrowed to make people isolated of it awakened to the revolutionary subject. That is to say, if the simulacre is like the dreaming, to draw the social revolutionary possibility of it, they need to overcome these fetishism, that is, the learning that this dream is not the reality, and after that they can leap as another subject perceiving the power of that dream. According Freud, the dream is based on the unconscious process of the empty signs. And the teaching of 'the signs of the equivalent differences' in Saussure makes us free from the essentialism of the word(a sort of the fetishism), know that we are so much as the sign or the citizen empty in it, and so get to know that we need another signs, or neighbors even though, and for they are empty, too. The revolutionary subject is not based on the great individual subject but the empty(lost) 'us' that so need to associate each other. And the post-modern art, popular mass art can help us being social subjects. That is what Benjamin had dreamed in post-aura art through 'the artworks in the age of the technological reproduction'. (shrink)

In this publication, the author attempts to develop an aesthetic theory from Heidegger's phenomenological concepts. She analyzes Heidegger`s concepts of truth, world, space, and related concepts and establishes a formal, contextual and material method of analysis for the purpose of examining works of art. This new method of analysis is applied to three pieces by the artist Joseph Beuys as a case study.

Examines how the modern city is portrayed in art and literature, discusses modernism, futurism, and expressionism, and looks at the work of Rilke, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Brecht.

When, in 1735, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten added a new discipline to the philosophical system, he not only founded modern aesthetics but also contributed to shaping the modern concept of art or 'fine art'. In The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment, Stefanie Buchenau offers a rich analysis and reconstruction of the origins of this new discipline in its wider context of German Enlightenment philosophy. Present-day scholars commonly regard Baumgarten's views as an imperfect prefiguration of Kantian and post-Kantian aesthetics, but (...) Buchenau argues that Baumgarten defended a consistent and original project which must be viewed in the context of the modern debate on the art of invention. Her book offers new perspectives on Kantian aesthetics and beauty in art and science. (shrink)

Contents Acknowledgements vii Illustrations ix Preface xi Further Bibliography of A.C. Crombie xiii 1 Designed in the Mind: Western visions of Science, Nature and Humankind 1 2 The Western Experience of Scientific Objectivity 13 3 Historical Perceptions of Medieval Science 31 4 Robert Grosseteste 39 5 Roger Bacon [with J.D. North] 51 6 Infinite Power and the Laws of Nature: A Medieval Speculation 67 7 Experimental Science and the Rational Artist in Early Modern Europe 89 8 Mathematics and Platonism in (...) the Sixteenth-Century Italian Universities and in Jesuit Educational Policy 115 9 Sources of Galileo Galilei’s Early Natural Philosophy 149 10 The Jesuits and Galileo’s Ideas of Science and of Nature [with A. Carugo] 165 11 Galileo and the Art of Rhetoric [with A. Carugo] 231 12 Galileo Galilei: A Philosophical Symbol 257 13 Alexandre Koyré and Great Britain: Galileo and Mersenne 263 14 Marin Mersenne and the Origins of Language 275 15 Le Corps à la Renaissance: Theories of Perceiver and Perceived in Hearing 291 16 Expectation, Modelling and Assent in the History of Optics: i, Alhazen and the Medieval Tradition; ii, Kepler and Descartes 301 17 Contingent Expectation and Uncertain Choice: Historical Contexts of Arguments from Probabilities 357 18 P.-L. Moreau de Maupertuis, F.R.S. : Précurseur du Transformisme 407 19 The Public and Private Faces of Charles Darwin 429 20 The Language of Science 439 21 Some Historical Questions about Disease 443 22 Historians and the Scientific Revolution 451 23 The Origins of Western Science 465 Appendix to Chapter 10: 479 Sources and Dates of Galileos Writings [with A. Carugo] Pietro Redondi, Galileo eretico [with A. Carugo] Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier Corrections to Science, Optics and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought 495 Index 497. (shrink)

Richly illustrated study drawing on art, literature and science to explore Victorian attitudes towards sight.

The first sustained phenomenological approach to modern art, taking a new approach and drawing upon an unsual selection of thinkers.

Passivité et création est un livre ancré dans une double pratique: la peinture et la philosophie. Sa composition s'inspire du trajet suivi par Maurice Merleau-Ponty dans l'élaboration de son cours au Collège de France de 1954-1955: "Le problème de la passivité: le sommeil, l'inconscient, la mémoire". A partir de l'étude de la pratique de certains artistes et de l'analyse de textes philosophiques, il s'agit de décrire une passivité de forme particulière, une passivité "opérante", corrélative d'une forme dynamique de la subjectivité. (...) Cette passivité, "dimension d'un mouvement dont je suis le médiateur, mais qui d'une certaine façon se fait en moi sans moi, à mon insu", de nombreux artistes du 20. siècle s'en sont faits les témoins (Arp, Bacon, Dubuffet, Klee, Michaux, Rauschenberg, Schwitters, Spoerri, Nicolas de Staël, Bram Van Velde...), appelant aussi cette expérience "inconscient", "hasard", "imprévu", "surprise". Dans la perspective esquissée ici, l'accès aux autres cesse alors d'être un "problème". L'autre a déjà sa part dans mon expérience la plus singulière. Mon expérience peut devenir expérience pour d'autres parce qu'elle s'inscrit au sein d'une dimension phénoménologique qui n'est ni de moi ni d'autrui, mais commune. Quel est le rôle de cette passivité structurelle dans la création comprise comme transformation de la vision et du monde lui-même? Et comment peut-on en retourner la fragilité en pouvoir? (shrink)

Aesthetic alienation may be described as the paradoxical relationship whereby art and truth have come to be divorced from one another while nonetheless remaining entwined. J. M. Bernstein not only finds the separation of art and truth problematic, but also contends that we continue to experience art as sensuous and particular, thus complicating and challenging the cultural self-understanding of modernity. Bernstein focuses on the work of four key philosophers—Kant, Heidegger, Derrida, and Adorno—and provides powerful new interpretations of their views. Bernstein (...) shows how each of the three post-Kantian aesthetics to construct a philosophical language that can criticize and displace the categorical assumption of modernity. He also examines in detail their responses to questions concerning the relations among art, philosophy, and politics in modern societies. (shrink)

For much of its history, philosophy was not merely a theoretical discipline but a way of life, an "art of living." This practical aspect of philosophy has been much less dominant in modernity than it was in ancient Greece and Rome, when philosophers of all stripes kept returning to Socrates as a model for living. The idea of philosophy as an art of living has survived in the works of such major modern authors as Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Each of (...) these writers has used philosophical discussion as a means of establishing what a person is and how a worthwhile life is to be lived. In this wide-ranging, brilliantly written account, Alexander Nehamas provides an incisive reevaluation of Socrates' place in the Western philosophical tradition and shows the importance of Socrates for Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Why does each of these philosophers—each fundamentally concerned with his own originality—return to Socrates as a model? The answer lies in the irony that characterizes the Socrates we know from the Platonic dialogues. Socratic irony creates a mask that prevents a view of what lies behind. How Socrates led the life he did, what enabled or inspired him, is never made evident. No tenets are proposed. Socrates remains a silent and ambiguous character, forcing readers to come to their own conclusions about the art of life. This, Nehamas shows, is what allowed Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault to return to Socrates as a model without thereby compelling them to imitate him. This highly readable, erudite study argues for the importance of the tradition within Western philosophy that is best described as "the art of living" and casts Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault as the three major modern representatives of this tradition. Full of original ideas and challenging associations, this work will offer new ways of thinking about the philosophers Nehamas discusses and about the discipline of philosophy itself. (shrink)

An engaging account of how Shaftesbury revolutionized Western philosophy At the turn of the eighteenth century, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, developed the first comprehensive philosophy of beauty to be written in English. It revolutionized Western philosophy. In A Philosophy of Beauty, Michael Gill presents an engaging account of how Shaftesbury’s thought profoundly shaped modern ideas of nature, religion, morality, and art—and why, despite its long neglect, it remains compelling today. Before Shaftesbury’s magnum opus, Charactersticks of Men, (...) Manners, Opinions, Times, it was common to see wilderness as ugly, to associate religion with fear and morality with unpleasant restriction, and to dismiss art as trivial or even corrupting. But Shaftesbury argued that nature, religion, virtue, and art can all be truly beautiful, and that cherishing and cultivating beauty is what makes life worth living. And, as Gill shows, this view had a huge impact on the development of natural religion, moral sense theory, aesthetics, and environmentalism. Combining captivating historical details and flashes of humor, A Philosophy of Beauty not only rediscovers and illuminates a fascinating philosopher but also offers an inspiring reflection about the role beauty can play in our lives. (shrink)

Debates over the 'end of art' have tended to obscure Hegel's work on the arts themselves. Benjamin Rutter opens this study with a defence of art's indispensability to Hegel's conception of modernity; he then seeks to reorient discussion toward the distinctive values of painting, poetry, and the novel. Working carefully through Hegel's four lecture series on aesthetics, he identifies the expressive possibilities particular to each medium. Thus, Dutch genre scenes animate the everyday with an appearance of vitality; metaphor frees language (...) from prose; and Goethe's lyrics revive the banal routines of love with imagination and wit. Rutter's important study reconstructs Hegel's view not only of modern art but of modern life and will appeal to philosophers, literary theorists, and art historians alike. (shrink)

A psychoanalytic psychology and art of unconscious emotion -- An inward turn : Vienna 1900 -- Exploring the truths hidden beneath the surface : origins of a scientific medicine -- Viennese artists, writers, and scientists meet in the Zuckerkandl Salon -- Exploring the brain beneath the skull : origins of a scientific psychiatry -- Exploring mind together with the brain : the development of a brain-based psychology -- Exploring mind apart from the brain : origins of a dynamic psychology -- (...) Searching for inner meaning in literature -- The depiction of modern women's sexuality in art -- The depiction of the psyche in art -- The fusion of eroticism, aggression, and anxiety in art -- A cognitive psychology of visual perception and emotional response to art -- Discovering the beholder's share -- Observation is also invention : the brain as a creativity machine -- The emergence of twentieth-century painting -- A biological science of the beholder's visual response to art -- The brain's processing of visual images -- Deconstruction of the visual image: the building blocks of form perception -- Reconstruction of the world we see : vision is information processing -- High-level vision and the brain's perception of face, hands, and body -- Top-down processing of information : using memory to find meaning -- The deconstruction of emotion : the search for emotional primitives -- The artistic depiction of emotion through the face, hands, body, and color -- Unconscious emotions, conscious feelings, and their bodily expression -- A biological science of the beholder's emotional response to art -- Top-down control of cognitive emotional information -- The biological response to beauty and ugliness in art -- The beholder's share : entering the private theater of another's mind -- The biology of the beholder's share : modeling other people's minds -- How the brain regulates emotion and empathy -- An evolving dialogue between visual art and science -- Artistic universals and the austrian expressionists -- The creative brain -- The cognitive unconscious and the creative brain -- Brain circuits for creativity -- Talent, creativity, and brain development -- Knowing ourselves : the new dialogue between art and science. (shrink)

Historians of economic thought have long recognized the possibility that the "science" of economics owes more to cultural influences than we are usually prepare to admit. Econ Art offers the first detailed study of this contradiction, highlighting the cultural and aesthetic influences of surrealism, cubism and abstract art on both economic theory and method in the twentieth century.Arguing that economics has developed more as an art form than as a science, the author looks not only at what economists have produced (...) but how they have produced it, uncovering the cultural preconceptions which have shaped economic theory and method in the last one hundred years. At a time of increasing dissatisfaction with the discipline and the practice of economics, Szostak argues that the time is now ripe —- and right —- to embarrass the profession into a whole-sale reconsideration of what economics is for, how it should be done and what might make it better and more useful to the academy and to the world at large. (shrink)

For Malraux, modernity in art is not only about modern art; it is also about the birth of what he aptly terms “the first universal world of art.” This event was a consequence of the process of metamorphosis which is central to Malraux’s account of the relationship between art and time. The article explains this event, noting also that modern aesthetics has not provided an explanation. (This is the English version of the final which will be in French.).

Neither art nor philosophy was kind to beauty during the twentieth century. Much modern art disdains beauty, and many philosophers deeply suspect that beauty merely paints over or distracts us from horrors. Intellectuals consigned the passions of beauty to the margins, replacing them with the anemic and rarefied alternative, "aesthetic pleasure." In Only a Promise of Happiness, Alexander Nehamas reclaims beauty from its critics. He seeks to restore its place in art, to reestablish the connections among art, beauty, and desire, (...) and to show that the values of art, independently of their moral worth, are equally crucial to the rest of life.Nehamas makes his case with characteristic grace, sensitivity, and philosophical depth, supporting his arguments with searching studies of art and literature, high and low, from Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Manet's Olympia to television. Throughout, the discussion of artworks is generously illustrated.Beauty, Nehamas concludes, may depend on appearance, but this does not make it superficial. The perception of beauty manifests a hope that life would be better if the object of beauty were part of it. This hope can shape and direct our lives for better or worse. We may discover misery in pursuit of beauty, or find that beauty offers no more than a tantalizing promise of happiness. But if beauty is always dangerous, it is also a pressing human concern that we must seek to understand, and not suppress. (shrink)

This is a new release of the original 1953 edition.

Seeks to replace the dominant approaches to the question of the nature of art in contemporary English-speaking (analytic) philosophy with a historicist approach that emphasizes localized, cultural-historical narratives.

In the twentieth century one interpretative perspective is curiously and strikingly absent: spatiality of narrative. Philosophical thought saw fundamental ontology as founded on temporality with space as decoration. Johannine inquiry has tended to follow in philosophy's temporal footsteps. However, it is plausible to assume that New Testament writers were spatially oriented while modern interpreters have been ensconced in temporal consciousness. Furthermore, as anthropology has long recognized, conceptions of space and place are central to any culture's sense of self. The undue (...) hermeneutic privileging of linearity and causality may have forced biblical texts into a temporal mode of reading that their original authors may not have intended.In understanding biblical worlds it is necessary to again explore spatiality. This essay will introduce textured spatiality as it applies to John 9. It will briefly review temporal thought and consciousness and explain how visual imagery is an essential component to the transmission and preservation of tradition. Textuality will also be used to tell the tale of the man born blind. Using the nature of Shabbat as a pivot, and a narrative juxtaposition of two contrasting Sabbath spaces, the paper will point to a possible Urcarnivalesque element in the chapter. (shrink)