Throughout the present paper, I propose an analysis of René Magritte’s artwork Les mots et les images (La Révolution surréaliste, 1929) in connection with a reflection on the associated theories he formulated in the handout for his London lecture (1937). Read in reference to selected writings (and in erratic observation with other artworks of his oeuvre), the eighteen propositions of Les mots et les images, along with their development in the 1937 document, might help at investigating the aesthetic (...) principles that guide and characterise Magritte’s reflection around language. In this same regard, in the last part of my article I will focus on Michel Foucault’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe (1973) and, particularly, on the distinction between resemblance (ressemblance) and similitude (similitude). These last remarks, I argue, offer the opportunity not only to think about the way in which images and words are related to each other in Magritte’s works, but also to inves- tigate the vital issue of language, which has occupied a crucial place within French thought. (shrink)

In the twentieth century, science and art had a grand paradigmatic shift each other. This study aims at comparing the epistemologies of surrealism and quantum mechanics that emerged in the 1930s and interpreting the paintings from a physical viewpoint, with a focus on the Copenhagen interpretation. In terms of epistemologies, the arbitrary relationship between an object and an image advocated by Magritte may correspond to the indeterminacy between physical entities and measurement. This study analysed the paintings of Magritte (...) from the point of view of the features of the Copenhagen interpretation categories of wave–particle duality, indeterminacy, probabilistic interpretation and quantum hypothesis. Based on such discussions, this study gives some implications for enhancing creativity through an interdisciplinary approach. (shrink)

This essay is prompted, in part, by a spate of alarmist articles in the media over the past several years concerning what journalists have called "the creativity crisis,"2 articles claiming, in other words, that American creativity is in decline. A corresponding call has arisen to seek remedies and determine how creativity might be fostered in the lives of children so as to stem the tide of this (alleged) decline. While taking these dramatic concerns and pronouncements cum grano salis, this article (...) responds, nevertheless, by extracting a set of themes drawn from the childhoods of three individuals whose remarkable contributions to the disparate fields of science, classical music, and visual art are beyond.. (shrink)

L'œuvre de René Magritte est très populaire, c'est sûr. Pourtant, les théoriciens de la peinture affichent parfois à son égard un certain dédain. Mauvaise peinture, ose-t-on dire. Chacun en juge comme il l'entend... mais ces critiques ont-ils saisi l'intention attachée à cette œuvre? Car un travail de la pensée la traverse. J'irais jusqu'à dire que l'œuvre de Magritte est cela même : l'exercice d'une pensée en images. Dans ce livre, je propose une enquête. Prenant appui sur les dits (...) et écrits du peintre, je tente de retrouver cette pensée en images. En eux-mêmes les tableaux 'y donnent pas accès : on aurait beau les interpréter, on ne découvrirait pas encore leur nécessité. Alors je les mets en rapport avec des concepts philosophiques. Je montre, à partir de sept études, que les images créées par Magritte sont comparables à des arguments et qu'elles témoignent, au sein de l'œuvre, d'une ressemblance avec la réflexion de philosophes tels que Platon, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein ou Sartre, sans compter Michel Foucault."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Magritte et les philosophes, written by a Belgian semiotician, puts in dialogue some paintings by René Magritte with some thoughts of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Sartre, Foucault, and, in a chapter on La condition humaine, even Plato. Painted in 1933, La condition humaine represents a garden as seen from a salon, but in the room there is already a painting on an easel that represents the same garden. Because the second-order painting (the painting in the painting) is (...) placed in front of the window, we cannot see the full garden of the first-order painting. In it we see only the bottom of a hill and a part of a hedge, but in the second-order painting we see, in perfect continuity, the rest of the hill and the hedge. Thus we are inclined to think that the second-order painting covers exactly the reality it reproduces from the first-order painting and that, if we removed the second-order painting, we would see the same garden with a tree in the middle—a tree that for the moment we see only in the second-order painting.Therefore, some perceive in La condition humaine (and also in a similar painting, La belle captive) a parable of the transparency of painting. Opposing this position, Badir claims instead that “the pictures that are represented [that is, the second-order pictures] seem transparent; they give the sensation of transparency,... but their nature is totally different, and the painted landscapes in the [second-order] painting cannot make the representation [of the first-order painting] disappear.” We cannot superpose the painting over the reality to see whether the strokes of the painting cover exactly the lines of reality, since, if we do so, the painting gets between us and the garden. Still, we as observers cannot help but think that the second-order painting reproduces the reality behind it. But from where does that irresistible intuition come? Not from the resemblance between the picture and what it represents (since we know nothing about what is hidden by the picture), but from the continuity of the brushstrokes in the second-order painting and the lines of reality in the first-order picture.As in Plato's cave, in Magritte's room we have access to a semblance of reality, but in contrast to Plato, who regarded those shadows as pale imitations, Magritte offers us what may be a method of connecting semblance to reality less invidiously. The relation between the second-order picture and the first-order picture, between painting and reality, is not primarily a relation of analogy, since the analogy between the two orders is insinuated by other, nonanalogical relations—those of continuity and proximity between the brushstrokes of the painting and the lines of the garden. Even if Gilles Deleuze is not mentioned in Badir's book, this option seems to me to capture the gist of his critique of Platonism. When we are inclined to see a relation of analogy, Deleuze, like Magritte, wants us to pay attention to other, more diverse and more creative relations: nonanalogical relations that in some cases induce the sensation of resemblance.The title of Badir's book is Magritte and Philosophers, but it could just as well have been Magritte as Philosopher, because the classical philosophers he deals with play only a minor role as possible interlocutors for the painter. Magritte's thinking, as developed in his artwork, constitutes the main subject of this study. We learn while reading this book that painting can be a powerful tool for developing complex concepts and not merely percepts. Its argument may indeed be a critique of Deleuze's too-categorical distinction between the percepts proper to art and the concepts developed by philosophers. (shrink)

The rise of big digital data is changing the framework within which linguists, sociologists, anthropologists, and other researchers are working. Semiotics is not spared by this paradigm shift. A data-driven computational semiotics is the study with an intensive use of computational methods of patterns in human-created contents related to semiotic phenomena. One of the most promising frameworks in this research program is the Semantic Vector Space (SVS) models and their methods. The objective of this article is to contribute to the (...) exploration of the SVS for a computational semiotics by showing what types of semiotic analysis can be accomplished within this framework. The study is applied to a unique body of digitized artworks. We conducted three short experiments in which we explore three types of semiotic analysis: paradigmatic analysis, componential analysis, and topic modelling analysis. The results reported show that the SVS constitutes a powerful framework within which various types of semiotic analysis can be carried out. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 459-460 [Access article in PDF] Reinhard Brandt. Philosophie in Bildern: Von Giorgione bis Magritte. Hamburg: Dumont, 2000. Pp. 470. Paper, NP. Reinhard Brandt, professor for Philosophiegeschichte, offers in his latest book a multi-faceted history of philosophy and art through his detailed interpretations of major paintings in the European tradition, beginning with Giorgione's "The Three Philosophers" and a young Raphael's "The (...) Dream of the Knight,"and stretching to René Magritte's "La condition humaine." In these paintings, as Brandt claims, different philosophical positions are expounded, which he then, in the role of interpreter, attempts to elucidate.In the introduction Brandt explains how this paradoxical phenomenon of philosophizing paintings can even exist. That one can find not only philosophical themes but well-wrought positions in such paintings, and, most importantly, not read these positions into them, is shown in more than thirty short essays, spanning from ancient Greek philosophy and literature, through the Renaissance and on to present-day Italian, French, Spanish, and German literature/philosophy. In almost every interpretation, Brandt critically reviews previous research, exposing and correcting some deeply rooted mistakes and constantly providing new impulses; in light of his philosophical-philological method, some major paintings in the European tradition are interpreted anew.His detailed analysis of Raphael's "The School of Athens" forces a persuasive revision of previous interpretations; the sitting figure in the foreground is not, as previously assumed, Heraclitus, but Democritus. On account of this carefully proven and convincing allotment, an unnoticed field of vision is discovered between the materialist and solid-state physicist Democritus, who with the gestus melancholicus is concentrating on a problem, and Plato, standing perpendicularly over him. Could this problem be the stone cube, on which the philosopher is leaning? From this conjecture we now have a bridge leading to Albrecht Dürer's engraving "Melancholia."Diego Velazquez's "Las Meninas" is interpreted anew on account of the surprising solution to the painting's puzzling construction. Brandt shows that the whole picture is viewed from the vantage point of the princess inside the painting, not of an observer outside it. The princess stands before a mirror and Velazquez paints everything exactly as the princess sees it. So the painting, which hangs in the Prado Museum, is the mirror image of a complete reflection of the Self; perhaps it is no coincidence that the painting belongs to the same historical period as Descartes' famous cogito ergo sum dictum. Or Jacques Louis David's "The Death of Socrates": although the painting has been correctly referred back to Plato's Phaidon, until now a Platonic ground position was falsely attributed to the painting. Brandt shows that the painting was conceived with Stoic philosophical positions in mind: death is portrayed as immanently present, coupled with the un-Socratic maxim mortem spernere. The virtuous stance that Socrates still shows on the threshold of death is decisive. And as an added bonus he includes his influential, previously published essay on the title-page emblem of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan.Perhaps the greatest strength of this book is Brandt's technical know-how. He combines an encyclopedic knowledge of the European intellectual tradition with a [End Page 459] fluid, easy-to-read style, which not only instructs the reader, but entertains as well. At no time does this book approach mere philosophical pedantry; his treatment of some of the lesser known, albeit important, figures in the history of philosophy, e.g., Justus Lipsius and Diogenes of Sinope, is not a lesson in obscurity. The reader feels himself taken on a journey through a history of Western philosophy, always being provided with thought-provoking material. His style, however, is in no way used to mask the often shaky scholarship that has a tendency to go hand-in-hand with such interdisciplinary studies. In every essay Brandt exhausts all the sources; he works with razor-sharp exactness, proceeding with the meticulousness of an outstanding and seasoned scholar.A problem which always accompanies such books is the question: Cui bono? Are either the philosophers... (shrink)

What does it mean to write "This is not a pipe" across a bluntly literal painting of a pipe? René Magritte's famous canvas provides the starting point for a delightful homage by the French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault. Much better known for his incisive and mordant explorations of power and social exclusion, Foucault here assumes a more playful stance. By exploring the nuances and ambiguities of Magritte's visual critique of language, he finds the painter less removed than previously (...) thought from the pioneers of modern abstraction—"confronting them and within a common system, a figure at once opposed and complementary." Foucault's brief but extraordinarily rich essay offers a startling, highly provocative view of a painter whose influence and popularity continue to grow unchecked. _This is Not a Pipe_ also throws a new, piquantly dancing light on Foucault himself. (shrink)

Šiame straipsnyje siekiama atsakyti į klausimą, kas galėtų susieti filosofiją ir vizualiuosius bei žodinius menus. Ar įmanoma ir jei taip, tai kaip įmanoma reflektuoti visus menus kaip vieno kūrybinio įvykio momentus? Siekiant atsakyti į šį klausimą, pirma, aptariamas logikos ir kūrybiškumo susikertant menui ir filosofijai susidūrimas, antra – žodžio ir vaizdo nebendramatiškumas, surastas / išrastas belgų siurrealisto René Magritte’o ir reflektuotas Michelio Foucault. Čia sugrįžtama prie klasikinio F. Niezsche’s disputo su Sokratu apie logikos ir kūrybiškumo priešpriešą ir siekiama (...) atsakyti į klausimą, kurią pusę – Sokrato ar F. Nietzsche’s – paremia šioje diskusijoje Gilles’is Deleuze’as ir Félixas Guattari. Atrodytų, kad jie suderina logiką ir kūrybiškumą, pastebėdami, kad menas nėra nei mokslinio mąstymo, nei filosofijos koreliatas ar papildas, kad trys minties formos – menas, mokslas ir filosofija – turi po nepriklausomą specifinę kryptį, Kita vertus, interpretuodamas I. Kantą, G. Deleuze’as pastebi disharmoniją tarp vaizduotės, supratimo ir proto, ir, sekdamas Antonino Artaud’o įžvalgomis, jis išskiria naują minties tipą kaip tarpinę teritoriją tarp žodžio ir vaizdo. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:An Egg Takes Flight: The Once and Future Life of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission*Alexander Morgan Capron (bio)Attempting to describe the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) is comparable to the surreal feat performed by the artist in a famous painting by René Magritte. The artist (Magritte himself) sits with his back to the viewer, a palette in his left hand. The brush in his right hand (...) is raised to a canvas, blank except for a bird in flight that he is in the process of painting. The artist is looking to his left at a tabletop, bare except for a single, plain egg.Having held its second formal meeting in mid-January, NBAC is certainly still embryonic, its future mysterious within its shell. Yet answers to four major questions that will determine not just what kind of bird the Commission turns out to be but the heights to which it will fly should be evident by April or May 1997. First, will the White House take the sort of interest in NBAC that is needed if it is to succeed? Second, will the Commission’s term be extended beyond October 1997—and will the decision come early enough to allow it to start soon on projects that will take more than a single year to complete? Third, will the Commission take a broad view of the issues it addresses, reexamining widely accepted assumptions and going back to basic premises, or will it respond primarily in bureaucratic terms, guided by its charter’s focus on improving the policies and practices of federal departments and agencies? Fourth, will the Commission move beyond its initially mandated topics—the rights and welfare of human research subjects and the management and use of genetic information—and become what its name promises, the nation’s advisory body on the full range of bioethical issues that arise in the organization and management of health services and research?The Origins of the Egg: NBAC’s PredecessorsThe creation of a national bioethics commission has been demanded for years, at the least since its most recent predecessor, the Biomedical Ethics [End Page 63] Advisory Committee (BEAC) finally expired in 1990. BEAC’s statutory authority lapsed after the hapless committee had spent several years itself like an in vitro embryo in a vat of liquid nitrogen. BEAC’s opponents in Congress froze its appropriation and forbad it to meet until the Biomedical Ethics Board of six senators and six representatives to which it was supposed to report resolved the chaos resulting from the Board members’ ideological differences and personal distrust; this never occurred, and the Board proved unable even to choose its chairman. 1 BEAC, which met only twice, had laid preliminary plans to study the issues raised by the new genetics, but the politics of abortion—which had greatly complicated and slowed the Board’s naming of the BEAC members—was strong enough to interfere even with the topic of genetics, on which the difference among committee members actually gave no sign of dividing on pro-life/pro-choice grounds.The disappearance of BEAC left the nation without a mechanism for “public bioethics,” and several efforts were undertaken in the early 1990s to generate a new commission that could carry on in the tradition of the two previous, successful bioethics commissions. (The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research operated under a Congressional mandate in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from 1974 to 1978, and the President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, which had been authorized by Congress in 1978, actually operated as an independent body with government-wide purview from January 1980 to March 1983.) The Institute of Medicine established a committee to assess the mechanisms available not only to the federal government but also to states, professional bodies, and the public for deliberating about and resolving ethical issues stemming from developments in biomedicine (Bulger, Bobby, and Fineberg 1995). In September 1992, Senators Mark O. Hatfield (R-OR), Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA), and Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ) requested that the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) evaluate the... (shrink)

ABSTRACTWriting in 2007, in The Wordsworth Circle, Jeffrey Robinson remarked on the “ephemerality” of improvisational poetry, its fundamental resistance to being “preserved.” Printed poetry is typically regarded as “fixed” and static: what any poem represents as improvisation is, at best, only a record, executed in a fixed medium, of a performance whose infinite variability is inherent in the nature of improvisation itself. Partly an homage to Rene Magritte’s This is Not a Pipe and to Michel Foucault’s 1973 essay on (...) that painting, and using as a test case The Improvisatrice, the long poem by Letitia Elizabeth Landon, herself a devotee of interdisciplinary and multimedia performance, this essay considers the physical, structural, and methodological challenges and limitations posed to printed “word art” by works that purport to be, or aspire to the condition of, “improvisations.” The improvisatrice who is the poem’s narrator claims to be both a painter and a songstress, but her “speech,” ca... (shrink)

Photomontage, the combining of two or more negatives, can be traced back to the 1850s. Scott Mutter is a modern master of the art. His subtle images have enthralled viewers in exhibitions and galleries, mainly in the Midwest, for a decade. "The response has been overwhelming," curator Martin Krause commented of an exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. "I've had people calling me on the telephone telling me what a great show this is. That happens so rarely. For whatever (...) reason, Scott's work is connecting with people." In the past year his work has attracted attention nationwide, and his posters are now available in galleries from coast to coast. Richly and immediately accessible, yet deeply resonant, Mutter's photomontages provoke strong responses: curiosity, awe, laughter, and then contemplation. They are creative fusions of elements that draw us irresistibly to look again at what first appears unbelievable. Boundaries dissolve miraculously; the impossible becomes seductively tangible. But the logic of his images is exact, reasoned - in his own term, "surrational." Although his work shares the recursive wit of Rene Magritte and M. C. Escher, Mutter never relies simply upon ironic effects. With precision and authority his art explores the ideals and mythologies of our culture, history, language, and art, both lamenting and celebrating contemporary civilization. "From the very beginning," states Mutter, "I tried to make images that people would find accessible and exciting. Art is no idle thing; people want to see something and be held in wonder." In short, he is a master at turning a glance into a gaze. In his foreword Martin Krause reviews the hundred-year history of photomontage and examines Mutter's unparalleled influence within that tradition. (shrink)

God in the Mirror reconsiders the place of law in the existing bodies of knowledge. Navigating the texts of Ovid, Augustine, Roman jurists, medieval canon lawyers, Freud, Lacan, the notebooks of Leonardo de Vinci, and the paintings of Rene Magritte, this is a crucial landmark within Legendre's reconsideration of a 'revolution of interpretation'.

Excerpt: In 1995, the Leo Apostel Centre in Brussels, Belgium, organised an international conference called ``Einstein meets Magritte''. Nobel prize winner Ilya Prigogine held the opening lecture at the conference, and Heinz von Foerster's lecture was scheduled last... Heinz von Foerster was enchanted by the conference theme and -- in the spirit of surrealist Belgian painter René Magritte -- had chosen an appropriate title for his talk: ``Ceci n'est pas Albert Einstein''. ... [H]e was delighted to grant (...) the organisers the following interview, in which he tells us about an even longer journey -- that of his remarkable life and scientific career. (shrink)

Adjustments in the understanding of the relation of religion and science since the Enlightenment require new considerations in epistemology and metaphysics. Constructionist theories of knowledge and process theories of metaphysics better provide the new paradigms needed both to preserve and to limit the significance of each field of human understanding. In a course taught at Moravian College, this perspective is applied to the concepts of nature, reality, and the sacred, with a view to showing how we might develop one such (...) paradigm. Key resources for this task are to be found in the work of artist René Magritte; theologians Langdon Gilkey, Arthur Peacocke, and John Haught; philosophers and historians of science Alfred North Whitehead, Timothy Ferris, Ernan Mc Mullin, and Ian Barbour; philosopher of religion Paul Ricoeur; and historians of religion Rudolph Otto and Mircea Eliade. Such a new paradigm calls for an ecologically sensitive religious awareness which is both sacramental and holistic. (shrink)

In Literature, Art and the Pursuit of Decay, Timothy Mathews examines work by a range of writers and painters working in France in the twentieth century. The well-illustrated book engages with canonical figures - Guillaume Apollinaire, Marguerite Duras and Jean Genet, Roland Barthes, Pablo Picasso and René Magritte - as well as more neglected individuals including Robert Desnos and Jean Fautrier. Mathews draws on psychoanalysis, existentialism and poststructuralism to show how both literature and fine art promote the value (...) of generosity in a culture of anxiety and intolerance. Decay emerges as a surprising ally in this quest because of its ability to undermine intellectual complacency and egoism. Integrating theoretical and material approaches to reading and viewing, Mathews engages with the distinctive features of different literary genres and different types of painting to develop an original history of artistic ambition in twentieth-century France. (shrink)

Résumé Accéder au mode de production de l’œuvre d’art est dans certains cas une nécessité pour qu’il y ait appréciation esthétique ; comme si le cadrage de l’œuvre permettait un cadrage de l’attitude du spectateur sans lequel l’expérience esthétique ne pourrait avoir lieu. À partir d’une série de peintures de René Magritte confrontée à des œuvres contemporaines, la contrainte poétique est abordée pour les qualités stratégiques et programmatiques de la réception de l’œuvre : une réception qui serait sans (...) elle impossible justement parce que le spectateur ne saurait pas quelle attitude adopter devant l’œuvre. (shrink)

FramesIn 1934 the Belgian artist René Magritte painted a room with a view. On an easel in front of the window stands a painting depicting the very piece of landscape blocked from sight. Magritte named his painting La Condition Humaine (“The Human Condition”), which is quite apt, for the life of everyone is determined by windows, doors, mirrors and many other frames. Indeed, to avert anxiety, one actually cultivates social behavior born of the fear of being “outside (...) the frame.” Because of this apprehension, we organize all reality into a series of preestablished frames. (shrink)

What does it mean to write "This is not a pipe" across a bluntly literal painting of a pipe? René Magritte's famous canvas provides the starting point for a delightful homage by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. Much better known for his incisive and mordant explorations of power and social exclusion, Foucault here assumes a more playful stance. By exploring the nuances and ambiguities of Magritte's visual critique of language, he finds the painter less removed than (...) previously thought from the pioneers of modern abstraction. (shrink)

Concerned in part with the act of collecting, The Tears of Things is itself a collection of exemplary art objects—literary and cultural attempts to control and possess things—including paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe and René Magritte; ...

In this article we provide a mathematical frame to the generation of class taxonomies suggested by Hébert in his analysis of the poem > (‘A Sorry Business!’) by Gilles Vigneault (b. 1928) as well as a formalization of the structure of semic isotopies in his reading of The golden ship by Émile Nelligan (1879–1941). We also examine the characteristics of inter- and intra-semic molecules at work within Réne Magritte’s painting La clef des songes. Our mathematical frame is Ganter and (...) Wille’s extension of lattice theory called formal concept analysis, for which we explore various formalisms and constructs that allow us to reason on semic structures. (shrink)

More than a decade ago, Edward Wilson investigated how to link the sciences and arts in Consilience (1998),1 in which he argues that consilience—the unification of facts—is possible between every subject across the intellectual spectrum. Wilson claims that the sciences, humanities, and arts are linked by reduction from the fine arts, down to the humanities, down, finally, to the natural sciences. For example, René Magritte’s Reckless Sleeper can be understood to be composed of the paints on the canvas, (...) their physical construction, and the feelings the work induces when one looks at the painting. Consilience induced some courses taught on the subject worldwide immediately after its publication; but, most notably .. (shrink)

For the moment, I assume that we have some rough idea of what “title” is supposed to mean: the large letters on the spine of a book, the words on the center of the first page of a musical score, or the little plate on the museum wall to the right of the painting . Thus examples of titles would be The Taming of the Shrew, “Mapleleaf Rag,” or The Birth of Venus, but that generates a rather complex set of (...) answers.Let us start with what is undoubtedly the simplest situation: where an inscription of the title is physically part of the work. The most familiar of the aquatints of Francisco Goya which collectively are called Los Caprichos—the forty-third—is titled The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, or, more precisely, the Spanish equivalent of those words, for the Spanish words appear as a large and significant element on the plate, indeed occupying more than 10 percent of its surface. In such cases titles are not given: they are elements of works, not by inference or subtle metaphor but in a most literal way. No other title fits in that way. That print could not be called Bats and Cats and Sleeping Man with the expectation that those words should serve as its title. Some works—most works—on the other hand, allow for a range of acceptable titles. Guernica could have been titled The Bombing of a Basque Village or Luftwaffe Hell. Neither of these would, I suspect, have been as good a title as Guernica, but they remain possibilities, even though the familiar title is not physically part of the work. Some works, incidentally, contain words, even sentences, and are not titled accordingly. Several familiar works of René Magritte include a most realistic representation of a tobacco pipe and the large words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Examples of the titles given by Magritte to paintings in this series are L’Air et la chanson and Le Trahison des images. Obviously, not all works of visual art which contain linguistic inscriptions have titles which correspond to those inscriptions. The simplest situation is hardly much help. John Fisher is professor of philosophy at Temple University and editor of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. He is also the editor of Perceiving Artworks and Essays on Aesthetics. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty's essays on aesthetics are some of the major accomplishments of his philosophical career, and rank even today among the most sophisticated reflections on art in all of twentieth-century philosophy. His essays on painting, "Cezanne's Doubt", "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence", and "Eye and Mind", have inspired new approaches to epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of history. Galen A. Johnson has gathered these essays for the first time into a single volume and augmented them with essays by distinguished (...) scholars and artists, including M.C. Dillon, Mikel Dufrenne, and René Magritte. Together the essays demonstrate the continuing significance of Merleau-Ponty's ideas about art for contemporary philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Driven from Home: Protecting the Rights of Forced Migrants Edited by David Hollenbach, SJ, and: Kinship across Borders: A Christian Ethic of Immigration by Kristen HeyerRené M. Micallef SJDriven from Home: Protecting the Rights of Forced Migrants EDITED BY DAVID HOLLENBACH, SJ Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2010. 296 pp. $20.46Kinship across Borders: A Christian Ethic of Immigration KRISTEN HEYER Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2012. 210 pp. (...) $29.23Although based on a conference held at Boston College in November 2008, Driven from Home is no less timely today, given the context of current debates on immigration in the United States, the European Union, Australia, and the Middle East. David Hollenbach’s introduction explains how the book brings together Christian (mostly Catholic) theologians, human rights activists, humanitarian practitioners, and legal scholars to help us focus on a class of persons referred to as “forced migrants” or “persons needing protection.” These individuals are neither classical “convention refugees” (according to international law definitions) nor are they simply “migrant workers” (in the classical sense) since their basic human rights to security and subsistence cannot [End Page 230] be adequately guaranteed in their home country or region. They do not emigrate merely in search of a higher standard of living; rather, forced migrants enter and settle in foreign lands seeking some sort of “protection” similar to that afforded to “conventional” refugees. More concretely, the book focuses on persons on the move—individuals fleeing violence and the extreme poverty rampant in regions devastated by ecological degradation and natural disasters.Extending the logic of the 1952 Refugee Convention and adapting it to the realities of today, one can argue convincingly that the international community has a duty to protect such persons when their states of origin are structurally unable or unwilling to afford protection (as argued in Susan Martin’s essay). However, paternalistic approaches that diminish rather than augment the agency of local governments and migrants are to be avoided (as maintained in M. Brinton Lykes’ essay). The book helps us reflect on what can be done to guarantee the basic rights of forced migrants not only at the level of international law and institutions but also through domestic and regional policymaking spurred and inspired by both Christian and secular global-humanitarian values. Such values are eminently compatible when applied to this particular issue (see Silvano Tomasi’s contribution). Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator’s essay—which offers insightful reflections (albeit rather general ones) from Christian ethics, ecclesiology, and biblical theology—likewise points to the need for a truly interdisciplinary approach to the issue. The other authors help the book achieve precisely this. Theological ethics finds its own distinctive place and voice in dialogue with a range of perspectives: legal and political sciences and case studies (Frank Brennan, Daniel Kanstroom); philosophical approaches (Arash Abizadeh); and sociological research on particular migrant populations (M. Brinton Lykes, Maryanne Loughry). The book includes essays that integrate case studies, technical reflections, useful summaries of theological principles and doctrines (J. Bryan Hehir, Mary M. DeLorey, and Tomasi), and philosophical stances (Abizadeh, Thomas G. Weiss), and present practical and legal proposals (see Martin’s essay). A stimulating read for scholars and for the general public, the volume provides good training material for faith-based activists and practitioners.The argumentation strategy in many of the essays in Driven from Home is to appeal to the reader’s sense of solidarity with the needy or suffering neighbor. It promotes the virtues of hospitable citizenship and hospitable disciple-ship while carefully trying to convince national and international policymakers to reinforce and expand the international protection regime. Emboldened by the 2005 “Responsibility to Protect” breakthrough at the United Nations, the authors seek to remain acceptable to a wide audience in an atmosphere of resurgent nationalism, nativism, and protectionism. The authors generally avoid harsh critiques of Westphalian models of sovereignty and do not dwell [End Page 231] on the Catholic doctrines of the universal destination of created goods and the (circumscribed) right to immigrate (and not only to emigrate). Rather, they seek to introduce a new protection niche without fundamentally challenging the prevailing ideology of sovereignty, gently proposing new legal instruments as though they... (shrink)

In _Battling to the End _René Girard engages Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian military theoretician who wrote _On War_. Clausewitz, who has been critiqued by military strategists, political scientists, and philosophers, famously postulated that "War is the continuation of politics by other means." He also seemed to believe that governments could constrain war. Clausewitz, a firsthand witness to the Napoleonic Wars, understood the nature of modern warfare. Far from controlling violence, politics follows in war's wake: the means of war have (...) become its ends. René Girard shows us a Clausewitz who is a fascinated witness of history's acceleration. Haunted by the French-German conflict, Clausewitz clarifies more than anyone else the development that would ravage Europe. _Battling to the End _pushes aside the taboo that prevents us from seeing that the apocalypse has begun. Human violence is escaping our control; today it threatens the entire planet. (shrink)

10. Physico-mathematica. Compendium musicae. Regulae ad directionem ingenii. Recherche de la vérité. Supplément à la correspondance.