In his latest book about art Arthur Danto claims that aesthetic appearance-visuality in the visual arts-has become more and more irrelevant for most of contemporary art. This essay first immanently critiques the distinction between the aesthetic and artistic properties underlying this claim. Danto's claim about the irrelevance of the aesthetic is not compatible with the spirit of his own writings: what Danto denies in After the End of Art has been a cornerstone of his theoretical work since The Transfiguration of (...) the Commonplace, namely, that the aesthetic is indeed both an elementary and a defining property of art. Examples ranging from Duchamp's Fountain to a recent installation by the Art & Language group are discussed to support this critique. Second, the essay defends Danto's contention that developing a "definition of art" is a sensible enterprise. But it turns out that Danto's "essentialism" concerning art has no essentialist implications in any specific sense. (shrink)

This paper first appeared in Modern Theology, Vol. 6, No. 3, July 1989. Copyright (c) Basil Blackwell Publisher Ltd., Oxford. Reprinted by permission.

THIS BOOK is, in effect, a sequel to the author’s Models for Modalities and purports to carry forward the case for the feasibility of a "possible-worlds" semantics. The main contention of the book is that such a semantics has its chief application in the study of propositional attitudes. But a good deal more than this is claimed, namely, applicability to the study of epistemic notions in general, to the study of causality and the language of the sciences, to the exact (...) study of phenomenology, to the linguistics, to the problem of "representation" in the arts, and even to the foundations of statistics and probability theory. (shrink)

Professor Skutsch has convicted me of one error—the inclusion of Eun. 465 in my list on p. 208. I do not feel, however, that he has proved that Phaedria is a dactyl in Terence. The essence of his argument, as I see it, depends on the figures in the last two rows of the first two columns on p. 90, and may be stated as follows: ‘Forms undeniably dactylic, such as Pamphile, are always followed by a disyllabic thesis. The thesis (...) after all critical examples of Phaedria is disyllabic. Therefore “Phaedria is proved to be a dactyl”.’ My objection to this argument is not that it is not a logical syllogism, but that it seeks to establish the prosody of Phaedria without considering the prosody of the other Phaedria-typt1 names in Terence. These are listed on p. 208 of my article . The following cases, I suggest, merit consideration. (shrink)

Editors and writers on the prosody of Plautus and Terence disagree about the prosody of the final -a in the nominative and vocative of proper names taken from the Greek First Declension. The fact that they are often quoted as examples of syllaba anceps either at the diaeresis of longer iambic lines or at loci Iacobsohniani would seem to imply that they normally scan as Latin First Declension nouns with short -a in the nominative and vocative singular. So R. Kauer (...) in the commentary of his edition of Terence's Andria on line 301 writes ‘die griechischen Eigennamen auf -a —Sosia, Byrria, Chaerea, Phaedria usw.—haben bei Terenz stets kurzes -a’. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Designing Academic Conferences in the Light of Second-Order Cybernetics” by Laurence D. Richards. Upshot: The aim of this commentary is to emphasize connections between conversation-based conferences and the foundations of radical constructivism. The Richards article needs no defense - everything said here is already implied within his text. Nevertheless, drawing out the context may be helpful in showing how his suggestions are rooted in the constructivist project.

The "mountain of eternity" is very much like the logician’s tense of timelessness, so that here there is strictly no temporal meaning for "simultaneity." God cannot "see" the whole sequence of our past, present, and future simultaneously, but can do so only tenselessly, so to speak. His remembrance, foresight, and vision-indeed, his whole "knowledge"—must likewise be viewed as atemporal. It is not just that tensed statements concerning his knowledge are false; it is that in the strict sense they are meaningless—meaningless (...) in that such statements are not allowed by the formation rules of the language and are indefinable in terms of its primitives. Knowledge in the tense of timelessness does not then precede temporally the actual events and objects constituting the physical cosmos and its history; it is above them primordally, this knowledge itself being one of the creative factors of the cosmos. This knowledge is pre-temporal but contains implicitly the divine, predestined plan for all contingent happenings. (shrink)

Originally published in 1958. A study in the logical foundations of modern theoretical semantics, this book is concerned with notions of designation and consistency as well as denotation and truth. It presents several semantical theories, each of which with what were new concepts or treatments from the author. Talking at a time when semantical theory was gained great ground, this book also looks at the methodology of the sciences and the semantics of scientific language alongside analysis of meaning and expression. (...) It is influenced by the writings of Carnap, Church, Frege, Goodman, Quine, Russell and Tarski. (shrink)