As the first President of the Royal Academy of Arts, Joshua Reynolds played a pivotal role in shaping the course of British art in the 18th century. In these discourses, Reynolds reflects on the nature of art, the role of the artist, and the importance of aesthetic education. With insightful commentary on the works of the Old Masters and a wealth of practical advice for aspiring artists, this volume is a must-read for anyone interested in the history (...) of art or art theory. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This article uses Jeremy Bentham's notion of disambiguation, which links language to power and ‘sinister interest’, to analyse criticisms of the Royal Academy of Arts by Benthamites and Philosophic Radicals at the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures of 1835/6. This practice of disambiguation aimed to produce a distinction between the Royal Academy of Arts and the publicly funded art school. I situate this activity within the linguistic turn taken by Bentham's ethics, and (...) its relevance to a dilemma of pedagogy in commercial society framed by Adam Smith. Smith's dilemma turns on the conflict between the requirement for a pedagogy that conforms to the principle of free trade, and an equally binding requirement for a virtue ethical model of pedagogy that offers a remedy for the corrupting effects of commerce on character. Adam Smith's support for private academies of art asserted a hierarchy of virtue ethics over utility, thus safeguarding autonomous ethical reasoning within capitalist forms of social life. Bentham's thought, in contrast, eschews the link between ethics and character, and places ethics itself within normative rules of language and cognition. (shrink)

‘Antony Gormley’, Royal Academy of Arts, 21 September–3 December 2019.

Quand Colbert fonda l’Académie des sciences dans le but de dynamiser l’industrie, aucun chimiste de l’Académie n’était encore susceptible de rationaliser l’art très empirique de la teinture. Au XVIIe siècle, la teinture n’était pas un sujet traité lors des séances de l’Académie, en revanche l’intérêt des académiciens pour cet art chimique a pris de l’ampleur dans les années 1750 sous l’impulsion de Pierre-Joseph Macquer et du Bureau du Commerce. Dans cet article, la présentation de l’art de la teinture à l’Académie (...) des sciences au XVIIIe siècle est centrée principalement sur les premiers travaux académiques sur la teinture, sur les mémoires de Macquer, ainsi que sur les prix et les publications sur la teinture proposés par l’Académie.Au cours du XVIIIe siècle, la teinture abandonnera le monde des artisans teinturiers pour intéresser le monde savant et les académiciens. La teinture acquerra ses lettres de noblesse, sortant des ateliers pour entrer à l’Académie avant de s’enseigner comme la chimie. (shrink)

Some years ago I came across the following question thrown out almost casually in the course of discussion: How many of us, it was asked, want to call a ‘bad work of art’ a ‘work of art’? The question was clearly rhetorical; the author quite obviously did not consider that anyone in his right mind would suggest that a bad work of art was a work of art. This struck me as rather odd. Surely there can be good and bad (...) works of art, just as there can be good and bad apples or good and bad men. An apple does not cease to be an apple just because it is bad, unless perhaps it has become thoroughly rotten; but the gardener who says ‘The Coxes are bad this year’ does not mean that they have grown rotten on the trees, much less that they are not apples at all. Moreover, if so-called bad works of art are not works of art, what are they? You may not think highly of the works in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition but they are not totally dissimilar to some works in Bond Street next door which are highly regarded. (shrink)

It was the general practice until not at all long ago to look at Turner as one of the moderns, if not as one of the founding fathers of modern art. He was a man straddling the fence between two periods, but he was looking forward. In a history of art that marches through time, forever endorsing what is about to be forgotten, wrapping up, as it were, one style to open eagerly the package of the next, such a position (...) is most enviable for, no matter where the times may be going, it is a hallmark of greatness to be ahead of one's time. There were things to be explained, of course, Turner himself, a keen pessimist, did not approved of the future and had little use for the present.1 His love of art was schooled on Reynolds' Discourses, and he remained loyal to them; his poets were Thomson and Pope and, among contemporaries, the rather frigid but delicate Samuel Rogers, a classicist par excellence. Above all, however, Turner looked back to classical antiquity for training and guidance, and for the delectation of his heart. And the poetry of the ancients, such as he could obtain it in translation, was as important to him as their art. What does one do with a declared classicist whom a historicizing hindsight feels compelled to rescue as a man of the future by making him a Romantic? It is a challenge stylistic analysis likes to meet, for it goes beneath what it declares to be the surface of a work of art to find its style, the essence that must conform to the presumed spirit of the age in question. The triumphant result of such studies in depth is a forgone conclusion as much as it is a surprise to the uninitiated. The facade of the Louvre, for example, used to suffice to make it a building in the classical style; it took the acumen of a Wölfflin to prove that it really was "baroque." The more the artist struggled not to be of his time, the more, poor man, he betrayed to the analyst that he was of his time. The Louvre facade stands convicted of being "classicizing-baroque."2 · 1. On Turner's view of the modern art of his time see John Gage, Color in Turner: Poetry and Truth , pp.97-105. On his literary education and taste see the seminal essay by Jerrold Ziff, "Turner on Poetry and Painting, " Studies in Romanticism 3 no. 4 : 193-215. Turner's poetical writings have been edited by Jack Lindsay, The Sunset Ship: The Poems of J.M.W. Turner . For the most recent and also most elegantly practical introduction to the work and life of Turner, see the catalogue of the Turner Exhibition of the Royal Academy and the Tate Gallery, Turner, 1775-1851 . · 2. This is now a commonplace of art historical teaching. See, for example, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, 6th ed. Horst de la Croix and Richard G. Tansey , p. 632. On the theory behind the application to the particular case, see Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, trans. M. D. Hottinger . Philipp Fehl, artist and art historian, is currently preparing a collection of essays, Art and Morality: Studies in the History of the Classical Tradition. He is a professor in the department of art and design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "Farewell to Jokes: The Last Capricci of Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo and the Tradition of Irony in Venetian Painting" was published in Summer 1979 in Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

Sir Joshua Reynolds RA FRS FRSA (1723-1792) was an important and influential 18th century English painter, specialising in portraits and promoting the "Grand Style" in painting which depended on idealisation of the imperfect. Showing an early interest in art, Reynolds was apprenticed in 1740 to the fashionable portrait painter Thomas Hudson, with whom he remained until 1743. From 1749 to 1752, he spent over two years in Italy, where he studied the Old Masters and acquired a taste for the "Grand (...) Style." Unfortunately, whilst in Rome, Reynolds suffered a severe cold which left him partially deaf and, as a result, he began to carry a small ear trumpet with which he is often pictured. From 1753 until the end of his life he lived in London, his talents gaining recognition soon after his arrival in France. He was one of the founders and first President of the Royal Academy. George III appreciated his merits and knighted him in 1769. He was one of the earliest members of the Royal Society of Arts, helped found the Society of Artists, and, with Gainsborough, established the Royal Academy of Arts as a spin-off organisation. (shrink)

Mihai Ralea was a university professor and prominent representative of the Romanian interwar literary intelligentsia. M. Ralea taught psychology, sociology and aesthetics, and was at the same time the director of a reputed literary magazine (Viaţa românească-Romanian Life). Ralea was also a politician, initially an important member of the National Peasant Party, representing its centre left wing. In his case, one may notice the contradiction between his moral arguments in public and his deeds after he reached positions of power (Minister (...) of Labour under the royal dictatorship, Minister of Arts under the pro-communist Petru Groza government, etc.). Ralea was also called “the moralist without morals”, and the compromises he made – manifested through his adherence to anti-democratic regimes – can be documented by numerous archival documents. Due to strong political connections, Ralea survived in the high ranks of cultural bureaucracy even during cultural Stalinism. He maintained important positions both at the University of Bucharest and with humanities research institutes of the post-1948 Soviet-style Romanian Academy of Sciences. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he also gained posi-tions of international cultural representation with the Romanian branch of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNES-CO) and the Romanian Institute for the Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (IRRCS, the Romanian VOKS). His survival (as a professor of psychology after 1948) had a significant price – Ralea’s collaboration with the Stalinist regime. Using open sources and also newly declassified archival documents, the article is an attempt to approach M. Ralea’s case of survival in the high cultural bureaucracy in the East European context. (shrink)

Comment une école publique d’art en Grande Bretagne a-t-elle été créée, comment a-t-elle évolué au XIXe siècle et quelle fut sa place vis-à-vis de la Royal Academy of Arts? Quelles furent l’incidence et l’importance de l’économie politique utilitariste et plus particulièrement des écrits de J. Bentham sur le goût, l’éthique et l’utilité, dans le développement d’une institution subventionnée par l’État et destinée à l’éducation artistique de la nation? Quels furent les débats et les apories..

Seventeenth-century English virtuoso attitudes to the visual arts have often been contrasted with a putative eighteenth-century culture of connoisseurship, most notably in a still influential 1942 article by Walter Houghton. This essay revisits Houghton's thesis and argues that English virtuoso culture did indeed allow for an incipient notion of artistic connoisseurship but that it did so in a manner different from the French model. The first section details a virtuoso aesthetic in which a modern approach to the cultural heritage (...) of antiquity was central. The instructive ethical and historical attributes of an art work were deemed more important than attribution to a master artist, although one can discern an incipient notion of a virtuoso canon of great artists. The second section examines the social and institutional position of the English virtuosi and argues that the lack of a Royal Academy of Arts in the French manner made virtuoso attitudes to the arts unusually receptive to outside influences such as the Royal Society and other private clubs and academies. It concludes by considering the ways in which some eighteenth-century concepts of taste and connoisseurship defined themselves in contrast to an earlier and wider-ranging virtuosity even if they failed to fully supplant it. (shrink)

A famous painter of the 18th century, Joshua Reynolds presented throughout the years 1769-1790 speeches to the Royal Academy of Arts. In them, he exhibits a conception of painting that privileges historical paintings. However, Reynolds himself practices portrait painting. Analyzing to what extent the making of portraits does not contradict the argument that historical pictures are the ones that best represent the pictorial genre is what we seek to problematize in this text.

Paperback. This volume finds its origin in a colloquium on Logic and Argumentation, held in June 1994 in Amsterdam and sponsored by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. The papers included have been selected for the role they can play in illuminating current thinking about the various kinds of relations between logic and argumentation.Aiming to provide some background to the academic endeavour of exploring the connections between logic and argumentation this volume offers the reader some (...) representative specimina of current thinking about this subject. (shrink)

Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) was an eminent theorist across the fields of philosophy, physical chemistry and economics. Elected to the Royal Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, his contributions to research in the social sciences, and his theories on positivism and knowledge, are of critical academic importance. The three lectures included in this comprehensive volume, first published in 1959, argue for Polanyi’s principle of ‘tacit knowing’ as a fundamental component of knowledge. They were intended to (...) accompany Polanyi’s earlier work, Personal Knowledge , and as a tribute to the philosophical and educational work of Lord A. D. Lindsay. (shrink)

This collection brings together a selection of writings on art by the internationally acclaimed novelist, historian and critic Marina Warner. For 30 years Warner has published widely on a range of art-world subjects and objects, from contemporary installation and film works to paintings by Flemish and Italian Renaissance masters, through Victorian photography and twentieth-century political drawings and prints. Warner's extraordinary curiosity in art and culture is conveyed in writing that is at once poetic and playful, elegant and rigorous, training our (...) eyes on the smallest of details while painting a broad-brushstroke landscape of art past and present. Themes familiar to Warner's readers--myth and fantasy, psychic and sexual experience, the vast and marvelous expanse of the human imagination--are treated in the lectures and articles, stories, interviews and essays contained here, some of which are published for the first time or republished from out-of-print sources. For the first of two volumes, editor Vivian Sky Rehberg has assembled themed sections titled "Playing in the Dark," "Telling Tales" and "Phantom Technologies." Texts include interviews with Tacita Dean and Paula Rego; catalogue essays on Leonora Carrington, Henry Fuseli, Zarina Bhimji, Tony Oursler and Fischli/Weiss; articles on Tracy Emin, Marlene Dumas, Louise Bourgeois; stories for artist's books by Kiki Smith and Helen Douglas; and lectures on Francis Bacon, Hieronymous Bosch and William Kentridge. "The Symbol Gives Rise to Thought" invites us to explore new ways of seeing and engaging with the traces of our artistic heritage. Marina Warner is a writer of fiction, criticism and history. Holder of 12 honorary degrees and two honorary fellowships, Warner is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature. She has judged the The Jerwood Drawing Prize and the Turner Prize; she is a regular broadcaster on the BBC, and has taught and given lectures worldwide, including the National Gallery and ICA, London and the Prado in Madrid; she has delivered the Presidential Lecture at Stanford University and the Carpenter Lecture at Harvard. She has been awarded a CBE, Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France and Commendatore dell'Ordine della Stella di Solidareità, Italy. Warner is a winner of the Aby Warburg Prize and a Getty Scholar. Vivian Sky Rehberg is an art historian and critic based in Paris and Rotterdam. A founding editor of "Journal of Visual Culture," she is a contributing editor of "Frieze," and has written for numerous contemporary art publications. Previously Chair of the department of Critical Studies at Parsons Paris School of Art + Design, where she taught modern and contemporary art, Rehberg is currently Course Director for the Masters in Fine Art at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam.. (shrink)

This edition of Michael Scot’s Latin translation of Aristotle’s De partibus animalium is part of a vast project, under the supervision of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, to publish the Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew translations of Aristotle’s works, of the Latin translations of these works, and of the medieval paraphrases and commentaries made in the context of this translation tradition. After a general introduction, the Latin text is presented, followed by a good number of (...) excellent notes, an Index latino-arabus, an Index of proper names of animals and an Index arabo-latinus. This is followed by an Index of the Greek names of plants and animals. (shrink)

Science presents us with a variety of accounts of the world. While some of these accounts posit deep theoretical structure and fundamental entities, others do not. But which of these approaches is the right one? How should science conceptualize the world? And what is the relation between the various accounts? Opinions on these issues diverge wildly in philosophy of science. At one extreme are reductionists who argue that higher-level theories should, in principle, be incorporated in, or eliminated by, the basic-level (...) theory. According to this view, higher-level theories do not ultimately exhibit conceptual integrity or provide genuine explanations. At the other extreme are pluralists who take higher levels of description and explanation seriously and argue for their independence and indispensability. It was the aim of the first Sydney–Tilburg conference on “Reduction and the Special Sciences”, which took place at the Tilburg Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science (TiLPS) in Tilburg, The Netherlands, over the 10–12th April 2008, to bring researchers working on these questions together and provide a platform to discuss them in a focused way. The papers in this special issue were presented at this conference. We would like to thank the Royal Netherlands Academy of Art and Sciences (KNAW), the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science at the University of Sydney and TiLPS for financial and institutional support. We also thank the authors and referees of the papers for their work, and Hans Rott for his support of this project. (shrink)

Science presents us with a variety of accounts of the world. While some of these accounts posit deep theoretical structure and fundamental entities, others do not. But which of these approaches is the right one? How should science conceptualize the world? And what is the relation between the various accounts? Opinions on these issues diverge wildly in philosophy of science. At one extreme are reductionists who argue that higher-level theories should, in principle, be incorporated in, or eliminated by, the basic-level (...) theory. According to this view, higher-level theories do not ultimately exhibit conceptual integrity or provide genuine explanations. At the other extreme are pluralists who take higher levels of description and explanation seriously and argue for their independence and indispensability. It was the aim of the first Sydney–Tilburg conference on “Reduction and the Special Sciences”, which took place at the Tilburg Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science (TiLPS) in Tilburg, The Netherlands, over the 10–12th April 2008, to bring researchers working on these questions together and provide a platform to discuss them in a focused way. The papers in this special issue were presented at this conference. We would like to thank the Royal Netherlands Academy of Art and Sciences (KNAW), the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science at the University of Sydney and TiLPS for financial and institutional support. We also thank the authors and referees of the papers for their work, and Hans Rott for his support of this project. (shrink)

In a career extending over almost six decades, Nicholas Rescher has conducted researches in almost every principal area of philosophy, historical and systematic alike. In this extraordinary volume, two dozen scholars join in offering penetrating discussions of various facets of Rescher s investigations. The result is an instructively critical panorama of the many-faceted contributions of this important American philosopher. Born in Germany in 1928, Nicholas Rescher came to the U.S. at the age of nine. He is University Professor of Philosophy (...) at the University of Pittsburgh where he has also served as Chairman of the Philosophy Department and as director (and currently chairman) of the Center for Philosophy of Science. In a productive research career extending over six decades, he has established himself as a systematic philosopher of the old style. His work represents a many-sided approach to fundamental philosophical issues that weaves together threads of thought from continental idealism and American pragmatism. And apart from this larger program Rescher has made various specific contributions to logic (the conception autodescriptive systems of many-sided logic), the history of logic (the medieval Arabic theory of modal syllogistic), to the theory of knowledge (epistemetrics as a quantitative approach in theoretical epistemology), and to the philosophy of science (the theory of a logarithmic retardation of scientific progress). Rescher has also worked in the area of futuristics, and along with Olaf Helmer and Norman Dalkey is co-inaugurator of the so-called Delphi method of forecasting. Ten books about Rescher s philosophy have been published in four languages. Rescher earned his doctorate at Princeton in 1951 while still at the age of twenty-two a record for Princeton s Department of Philosophy. He has served as a President of the American Philosophical Association, of the American Catholic Philosophy Association, of the American G. W. Leibniz Society, of the C. S. Peirce Society, and of the American Metaphysical Society. He was the founder of the American Philosophical Quarterly. An honorary member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he has been elected to membership in the European Academy of Arts and Sciences (Academia Europaea), the Royal Society of Canada, the Institut International de Philosophie, and several other learned academies. Having held visiting lectureships at Oxford, Constance, Salamanca, Munich, and Marburg, he has been awarded fellowships by the Ford, Guggenheim, and National Science Foundations. Author of some hundred books ranging over many areas of philosophy, over a dozen of them translated from English into other languages, he is the recipient of eight honorary degrees from universities on three continents. He was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984, the Belgian Prix Mercier in 2005, and the Aquinas Medal of the American Catholic Philosophical Association in 2007.". (shrink)

Mendelssohn's Philosophical Writings, published in 1761, bring the metaphysical tradition to bear on the topic of 'sentiments' (defined as knowledge or awareness by way of the senses). Mendelssohn offers a nuanced defence of Leibniz's theodicy and conception of freedom, an examination of the ethics of suicide, an account of the 'mixed sentiments' so central to the tragic genre, a hypothesis about weakness of will, an elaboration of the main principles and types of art, a definition of sublimity and analysis of (...) its basic forms, and, lastly, a brief tract on probability theory, aimed at rebutting Hume's scepticism. This volume also includes the essay 'On Evidence in Metaphysical Sciences', selected in 1763 by the Berlin Royal Academy of Sciences over all other submitted essays, including one by Kant, as the best answer to the question of whether metaphysical sciences are capable of the same sort and degree of evidence as mathematics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.2 (2002) 239-259 [Access article in PDF] Original Sin and the Problem of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe Peter Harrison It is not the philosophy received from Adam that teaches these things; it is that received from the serpent; for since Original Sin, the mind of man is quite pagan. It is this philosophy that, together with the errors of the senses, made (...) men adore the sun, and that today is still the universal cause of the disorder of men's minds and the corruption of men's hearts. Nicolas Malebranche 1In his Éloge du Pere Malebranche, delivered to the Parisian Academy of Sciences on 22 April 1716, Bernard Fontenelle recounted the story of Nicolas Malebranche's somewhat controversial conversion to Cartesianism. When friends and colleagues had taken him to task over his new-found commitment to the doctrines of Descartes, Malebranche responded with this question: "Did Adam have the perfect science?" It was agreed that this was the common view. Malebranche responded that he, too, aspired to the perfect science, and that his quest for this knowledge could not be satisfied by following the historical or critical pursuits of his colleagues, but by adopting the procedures set out by Descartes. 2 For Malebranche, the Cartesian method offered a means of overcoming the limitations of the fallen intellectual faculties of Adam's seventeenth-century descendents, and thus of restoring the fabled encyclopedic knowledge of the first man. [End Page 239]Aspirations to recover the science of Adam provided a common motivation for a number of early-modern philosophical projects. Earlier in the seventeenth century Francis Bacon had famously observed in his Novum Organum (1620) that the human dominion over nature which Adam had lost at the Fall could be restored in some measure by the sciences: "For man by the fall fell at the same time from this state of innocency and from his dominion over creation." The moral losses of the human race were to be restored in some measure by "religion and faith"; Adam's lost knowledge, and the dominion which it made possible, by "arts and sciences." 3 Bacon's vision of a reconstructed knowledge of nature during the period which he regarded (somewhat prematurely) as "the last times" clearly played an important role in legitimizing the goals and methods of the new natural philosophy. Indeed the program of the Royal Society of London from its inception in 1660 explicitly relied upon a Baconian rhetoric of the restoration of that human knowledge and dominion over nature which Adam had once enjoyed.While historians such as Charles Webster have alluded to the ways in which the myth of an original perfect philosophy motivated projects for the advancement of learning in a rather general way, little attention has been paid to the manner in which early-modern views of the nature of the original fall from knowledge directly informed the methods of the new sciences, determined the scope of their enquiry, and provided ammunition for use against traditional learning. 4 Moreover, most commentators, following Webster's lead, have restricted their attention to Francis Bacon, and to the Baconian aspirations of subsequent reformers of knowledge in seventeenth-century England. In this paper I shall suggest that the biblical narrative of the Fall played a far more direct role in the development of early modern knowledge—both in England and on the Continent—than has often been assumed, and that competing strategies for the advancement of knowledge in the seventeenth century were closely related to different assessments of the Fall and of its impact upon the human mind. While confirmation of this claim would require a more comprehensive study than space here permits, this paper will set out a number of preliminary considerations which establish the plausibility of such a thesis, showing how the biblical narrative of the Fall directly informed the epistemological projects of the seventeenth century, and prompted various rationalist and empiricist solutions. [End Page 240] The Mind of Adam There was an almost universal consensus in the sixteenth... (shrink)

À travers l’exemple des architectes, au moment de leur recherche d’un statut juridique face à leurs concurrents directs, les artisans maçons, nous nous interrogeons sur les raisons qui vont orienter cette profession naissante à se saisir de la coutume comme savoir juridique essentiel et structurant. Que ce soit dans la littérature pratique manuscrite, puis publiée, ­depuis le début du xviie siècle, ou bien à travers les volontés didactiques de leur Académie royale, la coutume semble être convoquée comme l’unique source du (...) droit de ces professions du bâtiment. Pourquoi ce choix alors que le droit romain, la jurisprudence, la réglementation technique présentent les règles de l’art de bâtir? La coutume d’abord, celle de Paris très rapidement, devient le soubassement d’une profession nouvelle. En effet, elle est enseignée aux architectes et elle leur est commentée, sous le titre emblématique des « loix des bâtiments ». Nous entrevoyons deux fondements à ce choix : d’une part, une raison politique extrinsèque donne accès via l’expertise à la possibilité pour l’architecte, comme le maçon depuis toujours, de dire la position juste dans le cadre du conflit judiciaire comme dans celui du conseil amiable ; d’autre part, une raison pratique intrinsèque – faisant écho à sa plasticité – permet de rendre efficace les éléments matériels qu’elle traite et réglemente. Toujours est-il que si la coutume apparaît comme exposant le « bon sens », elle n’existe que parce qu’elle est relayée par une certaine doctrine. Que serait la coutume sans ses commentaires? Notre étude est basée sur l’analyse de l’environnement politique et institutionnel de l’installation de la coutume comme source spécifique et utile de ces professions et des commentaires de coutumes réalisées successivement – et de plus en plus largement – par un charpentier, un médecin, un ingénieur et architecte du roi et par le professeur d’architecture de l’Académie et ses suiveurs. La coutume permet ainsi de réguler habilement les droits et obligations des différents titulaires des droits réels. (shrink)

Paperback. This volume finds its origin in a colloquium on Logic and Argumentation, held in June 1994 in Amsterdam and sponsored by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. The papers included have been selected for the role they can play in illuminating current thinking about the various kinds of relations between logic and argumentation.Aiming to provide some background to the academic endeavour of exploring the connections between logic and argumentation this volume offers the reader some (...) representative specimina of current thinking about this subject. (shrink)

Pontus de Tyard may be well known as a poet of la Pléiade, also as the bishop of Chalon-sur-Saône towards the end of his life, yet throughout all these, he was a philosopher. He played an important part in the Royal Academy in promoting philosophy in the French language, being one of the first to write in French. His metaphysics is a good example of the poverty of philosophy in the Renaissance. His first philosophical works were devoted to (...) the arts: Solitaire premier (1552) and Solitaire second (1555). Metaphysics appears for the first time in the Second Curieux (1578), when De l’Univers ou Discours de la nature du Monde et de ses parties, published 20 years prior, was divided into two parts. Hence one of the first metaphysics in French was born of physics and astronomy. There are three characters in Tyard’s Curieux: Curieux gathering all opinions he can find, Hieromnime expressing an orthodox theology, and Solitaire proposing in first person generally skeptical philosophical conclusions. The metaphysics of the future-bishop sometimes resemble a cabinet of curiosities, but with a theological guardrail. For metaphysical reasons, Tyard overpasses geocentrism and infinite universe to a universe in expansion of modern sciences. (shrink)

Mendelssohn's Philosophical Writings, published in 1761, bring the metaphysical tradition to bear on the topic of 'sentiments'. Mendelssohn offers a nuanced defence of Leibniz's theodicy and conception of freedom, an examination of the ethics of suicide, an account of the 'mixed sentiments' so central to the tragic genre, a hypothesis about weakness of will, an elaboration of the main principles and types of art, a definition of sublimity and analysis of its basic forms, and, lastly, a brief tract on probability (...) theory, aimed at rebutting Hume's scepticism. This volume also includes the essay 'On Evidence in Metaphysical Sciences', selected in 1763 by the Berlin Royal Academy of Sciences over all other submitted essays, including one by Kant, as the best answer to the question of whether metaphysical sciences are capable of the same sort and degree of evidence as mathematics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward the Materiality of Aesthetic ExperiencePeter de Bolla (bio)Over the last twenty years or so it has become a commonplace in discussions of "aesthetics" or of "art" in the most general sense to note that the term "aesthetics" was only very recently invented by Alexander Baumgarten in 1735, where it appears in his Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus [see Menke 40; Dickie; Eagleton]. But the force of (...) this observation in regard to the relative youth of the concept is rarely, if ever, commented upon. As many philosophers and critics have pointed out, Baumgarten's use of the term was not primarily angled at what today might be unproblematically called "artworks"—say, paintings in the European grand master tradition—since his new kind of investigation was to be a "science of sensual recognition," that is, a general inquiry into how we come to know the world from the evidence of our senses. But, as is also frequently remarked, early on in the tradition of speculation now associated with "aesthetics as the study of art" the mutual attraction (to put it in the most anodyne terms) of "art" and "aesthetics" seems to have been extremely strong. As Jonathan Ree remarks, "the real begetter of the philosophical doctrine connecting the arts with the empirical senses—what we might call the aesthetic theory of the arts—was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing" [58]. From this point on (for heuristic purposes it may be identified with the date of publication of Lessing's Laokoon in 1766), artworks, which heretofore had not required a specific branch of inquiry in order for them to make sense or be conceptually grounded as art, are almost universally assumed to require "aesthetic" contemplation or appreciation.1 It is curious, then, that before 1766 such a mode of experiencing artworks had not been felt to be lacking.One might understand this observation both historically and philosophically, and both approaches, it seems to me, are needed. In the case of the first, a number of material effects conspired across mid-eighteenth-century Europe to produce what was in essence the modern art market. These include the legal establishment of copyright, first in England in 1709 but only by the end of the century in France and Germany; the foundation of various institutions whose primary purpose was the promotion and establishment of the fine arts: academies of painting, sculpture, or letters either with or without royal patronage; the public exhibition of paintings (from 1737 in France and 1761 in England); the opening of royal collections to public view (during the second half of the century in London, Paris, Munich, Vienna and Rome); the development of public concerts of secular music (in small scale from the 1670s in England but only becoming fully integrated in fashionable social life by mid-century); the construction of purpose-built concert venues (the Gewandthaus in Leipzig, a former cloth merchant's hall, was remodeled in 1781 in order to accommodate a resident orchestra, in effect becoming the first dedicated concert hall in Europe); the foundation of literary periodicals and review media; the emergence of social spaces and rituals encompassing polite discussion of [End Page 19] literature (coffeehouses, the construction of dedicated library rooms in domestic settings); and the promotion of architecture to a fine art through various societies, competitions, and the public display of architectural drawings in exhibition contexts (the Royal Academy yearly show included both drawings and models). These and other material conditions helped define the fine arts and construct a market in and for them.2 By the 1770s the category of the "fine arts" was well established in Britain, Germany, and France: Charles Batteux's Les beaux arts reduit a un meme principe, first published in France in 1746, was quickly translated into English as The Polite Arts; or, a Dissertation on Poetry,Painting, Musick, Architecture, and Eloquence in 1749 and into German in 1751. By 1771 a four-volume General Theory of the Fine Arts had been published for the German public by J. G. Sulzer.All of this points to the fact that the concept of the "artwork" is subject to both historical and material pressures. Prior to the mid-eighteenth... (shrink)

Our image of Herbert Spencer is that of a bald, dyspeptic bachelor, spending his days in rooming houses, and fussing about government interference with individual liberties. Beatrice Webb, who knew him as a girl and young woman recalls for us just this picture. In her diary for January 4, 1885, she writes: Royal Academy private view with Herbert Spencer. His criticisms on art dreary, all bound down by the “possible” if not probable. That poor old man would miss (...) me on the whole more than any other mortal. Has real anxiety for my welfare—physical and mental. Told him story of my stopping cart horse in Hyde Park and policeman refusing to come off his beat to hold it. Want of public spirit in passers-by not stopping it before. “Yes, that is another instance of my first principle of government. Directly you get state intervention you cease to have public spirit in individuals; that will be a constantly increasing tendency and the State, like the policeman, will be so bound by red-tape rules that it will frequently leave undone the simplest duties.”1 Spencer appears a man whose strangled emotions would yet cling to a woman whose philosophy would be completely alien to his own, as Webb’s Fabian Socialism turned out to be. Our image of Darwin is more complex than our image of Spencer. We might think of him nestled in the bosom of his large family, kindly, and just a little sad. The photo of him taken by Julia Cameron reveals the visage of an Old Testament prophet, though one, not fearsome, but made wise by contemplating the struggle of life on this earth. These images have deeply colored our reaction to the ideas of each thinker. The pictures are not false, but they are cropped portraits that tend to distort our reactions to the theories of each. If we examine the major features of their respective. (shrink)

(1994). Introduction to the special issue on art and science: Studies from the world academy of art and science. World Futures: Vol. 40, Art and Science: Studies from the World Academy of Art and Science, pp. 1-1.

ArgumentThis paper aims to understand the emergence of comparative anatomy in the eighteenth century in the Parisian Académie Royale des Sciences. As early as the 1670s, a program centered on animal anatomy was conceived, which was a first attempt to give some autonomy to studies on animals and to link anatomy with natural history, but it declined after 1690. However, a variety of studies on animals was published in theMémoiresof the Académie during the eighteenth century. We propose a descriptive typology (...) of them in order to explore the status of animals and the significance of anatomy in each type, and to determine, in particular, which elements of Perrault's program were passed on at the Académie throughout the century. We discuss the influence of this legacy on the development of comparative anatomy after 1750, especially in Daubenton's work. (shrink)

This report aims to offer insights into cutting-edge research on digital well-being. Many of these insights come from a 2-day academic-impact event, The Future of Digital Well-Being, hosted by a team of researchers working with the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in February 2024. Today, achieving and maintaining well-being in the face of online technologies is a multifaceted challenge that we believe requires using theoretical resources of different research disciplines. This report explores diverse perspectives (...) on how digital well-being can be actively cultivated, while also emphasising the importance of considering individual differences, societal contexts, and nuanced cultural factors. We aim to offer a holistic view of the future of digital well-being, one that will inspire the next generation of designers of online tools, as well as policymakers who will regulate these tools. We start by asking what digital well-being is – how we can best define a concept that is used by diverse stakeholders and researchers from many disciplines in various ways. To do this, we explore the classic ethical theories of well-being, showing how they can give us insights into how the term digital well-being is currently deployed. We then move to look at the existing strategies that have been proposed to actively cultivate digital well-being, exploring the business models that threaten digital well-being and the relative advantages of the digital and non-digital solutions that are currently proposed. On the one hand, digital tools – such as Apple’s Screen Time and app blockers such as Opal and Forest – integrate seamlessly with the digital lifestyles of users. They also create precise metrics for digital well-being, which facilitates their solutions to reduce screen time. On the other hand, non-digital solutions, including mindfulness practices, digital detoxes, and digital well-being coaching, offer a new set of tools to reconnect individuals to their natural rhythms and help to actively promote offline activities. We then move to discuss diversity and how various groups of users have strikingly different digital well-being needs. Embracing neurodiversity in digital well-being is crucial as it strongly impacts the users’ experience of online technologies. When designing for diversity, organisations and designers alike need to prioritise customization for people with physical disabilities, mitigate harmful content for users with mental well-being conditions, address gender stereotypes and online harassment, and be designed in ways that recognize the very real risks of online technologies. This report closes by examining cultural differences. We believe that non-Western conceptions of well-being offer rich sources for enhancing digital well-being insofar as these traditions can inform and inspire the designers of future online technologies. We focus on East-Asian and South-Asian traditions, although in further work we recognise it would be useful to investigate conceptions of well-being that are influential in the Gulf region, Africa, and South America. Each of these areas have ethical frameworks that discuss well-being in depth as well as a rich cultural heritage. In conclusion, this report’s insights underscore the imperative of recognizing diversity in digital well-being, both in terms of cultural contexts and disciplinary perspectives. It emphasises the need for culturally responsive design methodologies and the integration of non-Western philosophical perspectives into current digital well-being research. Embracing this diversity, we believe, offers the best chance to create digital environments that prioritise well-being for users and the societies they live in across the world. Ultimately, we believe that it is not only about designing better online products; it’s about shaping a digital landscape that promotes well-being and flourishing for everyone. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.1 (2000) 115-132 [Access article in PDF] Schiller's Theory of Landscape Depiction Jason Gaiger This paper offers a critical discussion of the theory of landscape depiction which Friedrich Schiller developed in an important but neglected article on the work of Friedrich Matthisson, published in 1794. 1 The question of the value and status of landscape painting and poetry was far from settled at (...) the end of the eighteenth century, and Schiller's essay should be seen as making an important contribution to an ongoing debate. 2 The second half of the eighteenth century is marked by a profound ambivalence towards the natural world. On the one hand there is a remarkable "rediscovery" of nature, evidenced in such diverse but related phenomena as the vogue for English gardens and the appreciation of wild and "untamed places," such as the Alps and the Herz mountains. It is also the age of "sentiment," embracing a heightened sensitivity to all aspects of the physical world. And yet when we turn to the visual arts, we find landscape painting ranked far below history painting and portraiture. Precedence is given to the representation of human actions and emotions, and the depiction of the human figure remains the highest goal of ambitious art.The modern hierarchy of the genres was first established on a firm theoretical and practical basis with the founding of the French Royal Academy in the seventeenth century. The painter of living animals is ranked higher than the [End Page 115] painter of inanimate nature who depicts "choses mortes et sans mouvement." 3 The painter of human subjects, who imitates "the most perfect work of God," stands higher still. The highest achievement to which the artist can aspire, however, is history painting, the depiction of groups of figures in themes derived from biblical and mythical sources. To achieve this, the artist cannot depict what he sees but must employ both knowledge and imagination. The fundamental opposition here is between painting as a merely imitative or mechanical art, which is addressed to the eye alone, and painting as a work of "invention" or "imagination," which is addressed to the mind. Only the latter constitutes a properly liberal art, entitling the painter to stand alongside the poet as "un auteur ingénieux et savant" over and above the mere artisan or skilled laborer.The great popularity enjoyed by landscape painting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not met by any comparable elevation in its status as a fine art. Addressing students of the Royal Academy in London in 1770, Joshua Reynolds could continue to dismiss landscape and still-life as the "meaner walks of painting" which require only "mechanical" expertise. 4 For Reynolds the status of painting as a fine art is established through its treatment of the great subjects of history painting, that is, the depiction of human passions and the intellect. Only in tackling such themes does the artist succeed in addressing the imagination, which Reynolds describes as the "great end of art." 5 Although of comparatively recent origin, the genre of "landscape poetry" remained equally problematic and could not easily be reconciled with classicist ideals. New categories seemed to be required to comprehend the work of poets such as Albrecht von Haller and James Thomson, in which the varied and ever-changing aspects of the natural landscape were made the central protagonists of the poetic drama. While traditional forms such as the bucolic, the Arcadian, and the pastoral allowed the depiction of rural existence, the new "descriptive poetry" sought to celebrate the life of nature independently of man's intervening presence: it is nature itself rather than man's relation to nature which is made the poet's primary concern.Schiller's review of the third, expanded edition of Matthisson's poetry appeared in two parts in the Jenaer Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, 11-12 September 1794. While the second half of the review is given over to a detailed discussion of Matthisson's poetry, the first part is reserved for an extended theoretical discussion in which Schiller... (shrink)

Our article aims to analyze the different stages of the Fang culture, particularly the one of Equatorial Guinea in order to know the current situation of the aforementioned culture. It should be said that the Fang is a social group, an ethnic group that belongs to the Bantu trunk. These Fangs developed their culture from an original perspective; that is to say in a raw state before they made contact with Westerners. Culture is a concept that has gone through many (...) studies, hence it has a variety of definitions. According to the dictionary of the Spanish language of the Royal Academy, culture is the set of ways of life and customs, knowledge and degree of artistic, scientific, industrial development, in a time, of a social group. It is estimated that the term culture carries with it what is identity, and precisely a culture’s identity. Thus, no culture can develop outside a society. With respect to our reference, which is the Fang culture of Equatorial Guinea, it can be said that a cultural profile has been developed and it is measured through cultural elements and manifestations such as dances, beliefs, art, religion, language, myths, funeral rites, etc. they all constitute a rich knowledge from a raw state. Thanks to this research we are going to look chronologically at the stages of the said culture from its original stage reaching colonization to the end with decolonization. The impact that Western culture has had on Fang culture is analyzed from another angle. In accordance with the general objective that consists of studying the Fang culture. Well, it can be seen that the contact with Western culture has greatly adulterated the Fang culture, and today, with the processes of globalization, it is fading even more. As it is a research that addresses a sociocultural issue such as the current situation of the fang culture, we have found it necessary to adopt a qualitative methodology. Well, the reasons that have led us to take this methodology are due to the fact that said methodology consists of the study of social relations. (shrink)

The paper discusses the publications of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (RSAS) as part of a wider network of publication exchange, linking learned societies, libraries, and archives. The periodicals of the RSAS went through several reorganisations between 1813 and 1903, all to some extent related to their role in publication exchange. Although subject to many of the same deliberations of commercial value and institutional prestige as the expanding book trade, publication exchange offered a means of communication for (...) institutions with widely differing financial, linguistic and scientific status, and a forum for articulating a wide range of values significant in scientific publication. In the context of publication exchange, the roles of producers and consumers, and of publishers and repositories of scientific knowledge overlap, and librarians emerge alongside editors as central actors in scientific communication. Scientific editorship should be viewed not only as a means of disseminating scientific findings to wider audiences, but as designing a product that could be used to forge institutional connections, to acquire publications, and to build collections. The case of the RSAS periodicals highlights the importance of publication, not only for the distribution of scientific knowledge, but for its acquisition. (shrink)