First and still only philosophy treatise on drawing, explaining the bases of meaning in all kinds of drawings, including technical and informational, design, child, and art drawings--depictive and nondepictive, East and West--engaging cognitive and developmental psychology, philosophy, art history and criticism. Ca 290 double-columned pp., 92 illus. Reviews include: Philosophy--David Hills, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 235-237. Aesthetics--Michael Podro, British Journal of Aesthetics 48, no. 3 (July 2008): 346-347. Art history--Svetlana Alpers, Phi Bet (...) Kappa Society Key Reporter (Summer 2006): 14 http://www.pbk.org/documents/tkrpdf/TKRSummer2006.pdf. General--Amy Ione, Leonardo On-line Reviews: http://www.leonardo.info/reviews/jan2007/draw_ione.html . (shrink)

In this article, we use an entry to an international architectural student competition on future care to explore how social norms about older bodies may be challenged by designs that are sensitive to the spatial contexts within which we age. The power of the My Home design by Witham and Wilkins derives from its hand-drawn aesthetic and thus we consider the architects’ insistence on drawing as a challenge to the clear and unambiguous image-making typically associated with digitally aided architectural (...) designs. The hand-drawn images of My Home prompt a focus on care as enacted through the relations between material environments and things, and the atmospheric qualities these relations evoke. Throughout our analysis, we argue for greater attention to the ways in which embodied practices, everyday affects and materialities can be represented within architectural design, and the role of hand drawing as a creative methodology in this process. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy, 'the line‐drawing fallacy'. Many logic or critical thinking textbooks treat the line‐drawing fallacy as a footnote to or subcategory of another fallacy. They view it as a variation of vagueness, false dilemma, slippery slope, or the perfectionist fallacy. Depending on how one interprets a key premise or central term of the argument, detecting a line‐drawing fallacy can take several forms. The chapter discusses these forms. To (...) correct or to prevent the absurd conclusions, logicians try to identify and/or explain the nature of the line‐drawing fallacy. Several line‐drawing‐related fallacies immediately arise, from false dilemma to straw man. Yet this exercise is too obvious to help a student discern the underlying difficulty in recognizing the line‐drawing fallacy or avoiding the paradox it raises. (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 208-212. … intervals of destructuring paradoxically carry the momentum for the ongoing process by which thought and perception are brought into relation toward transformative action. —Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation 1 Facing a blank canvas or blank page is a moment of pure potential, one that can be enervating or paralyzing. It causes a pause, a hesitation, in anticipation of the moment of inception—even of one that never comes. The implication is that the (...) blank is yours in that moment, and it calls on you to act on it, to think into it, to create on it. Each blank canvas gives you time, of an undefined length, to transform that canvas’ inherent potential into a work. This two-dimensional plane of potential can be projected into a space, which the body can then occupy. When you “destructure” a space in the same way, prepare it to be a blank, much as you build a canvas, you allow your entire body to enter the space of potential, and you rest in anticipation of work, like the hand poised above the page. Artists have found that the deliberate creation of that space of potential through sealing the space and painting it white, thereby erasing details and distractions, can be such a transformative experience as to help define their whole practice. The cessation of distraction, the absence of indicator that a “blanked” workspace provides allows for a new presence of mind, it gives them the room, literally, to move into their work, and from there to move their work into the world. The workspace for the artist, the studio, is often perceived as a lab-like condensation of the gallery or museum, the traditional and idealized white cube. Similarly, with the blank page, a concrete relation between space and time comes forward as the intentional simplification of the architecture changes behavior and perception within the space. The work of “blanking” the studio space is a meditative reduction, an erasure, and in a way, an attempt at drawing away from the world beyond the studio - the sealed space is meant to recede from reality, to become abstracted by its willed lack of details and distractions. Within that space the time for a new beginning is made more present, more attainable, and the focus it fosters becomes another tool to aid creation. At the formative moment of his artistic practice, Tom Friedman used the blank of his studio, saturated in white, sealed off from the world, to fight velocity. He describes how he projected his vision of the end goal, the museum - a place he believes to be defined by slow contemplation - onto his own studio experience. He then sat and reflected on common objects, one by one, framed by the blank box he had created. The domestic objects he brought into the space to study foreshadow his mature works, where often the quotidian object has a single additional element – his intense labor. Friedman makes discrete objects through absurdly intense and focused labor, epitomized, perhaps by his 1,000 hours of Staring , made from 1992-97: Tom Friedman. 1000 Hours of Staring (1992-1997) His labor, to use his own words, is his way to “bring all of who you are to the experience.” Friedman shares his labor, allows the slow, deliberate pace of his work born in the studio to penetrate the museum. Nothing seems effortless, or a gesture, the labor is apparent, displayed, and tangible. He gives us the labor, the personal investment in the physical that saved art for him, that divorced the work from the language he cites as a factor of alienation. When we see his work we do not see words, we see acts, we see objects. He has forced the studio as workspace into the exhibition space, as he stuffs hundreds of more hours of labor into his shows with each new piece, filling the space with material and labor, material and labor – his involvement, his investment, is his gift to us as the viewers, as he introduces the laborious and contemplative pace he feels belongs to the museum. He saves us also from the alienation of language, which first drove him into the sealed studio and away from the discourse of his school. He presents us with his real, the object which stands in stark contrast to the white slate of the studio, the sealed white box he started from, where his individual, self-contained objects begin and end, completed through the intensity of isolation, first of the individual artist, and then of the material he chooses to slowly, slowly, slowly work: Tom Friedman. Untitled (1992) In his in-depth analysis of galleries as a blank white cube, Brian O’Doherty emphasizes the religious connotations implied in the strict laws of the exhibition space and the valuation, aesthetics and elements of control he feels it imposes upon the work. Like Friedman, he recognizes the power of the restricted space – indicating the “perceptual fields of force” – that act on any object introduced into it. Going beyond Friedman’s assessment of the space as highly utilitarian for focusing his perception, O’Doherty emphasizes the rejection of the physical body of the artist or observer, saying that the cube allows for only observation - eyes and mind. He later parallels the picture frame as a psychological container for the artist with the room as the same for the observer. In both cases, this is an emphasis on the alienating nature of the relationship – just as the artist is kept out of the frame by the picture, in the gallery the art forces the body of the spectator out, calling for a self-referential purity. Patrick Ireland. White Cube (1998) O’Doherty makes a point of saying that the installation shot of the gallery without figures is “one of the icons of our visual culture.” In recent years, however, installation shots have begun to include figures, in some cases they are essential to understanding the scale and even the nature of the work, specifically with work that captures the experience of the space and the way that it varies from a white cube. The work of Olafur Eliasson is a case in point, as the Danish artist uses elements of scientific and natural phenomena to alter perception within the controlled gallery environment, tweaking and redirecting O’Doherty’s “perceptual fields of force” to make points about the act of seeing, or seeing yourself seeing, to quote the artist. This indicates a shift in the role of the artwork, not to exclude the body and stand discretely and self-sufficiently, but to include it, to manipulate it and to make the observer aware of the nature of that manipulation and the work’s ability to manipulate. Olafur Eliasson. 360º room for all colours (2002) So though in O’Doherty’s analysis, the intense blankness of the gallery pushed the observer out in favor of the artwork’s isolation, artists can replicate this inhumane sterility in their own workspace to focus their work on the influence of the gallery right from inception. This can be interpreted as an almost opposite understanding of the purpose of sealing and whitewashing the workspace as stated by Friedman. He sought a refuge from the critical language of the art school, and a space that, like the museum, gave him a protracted sense of time, and, he felt, welcomed him in, “to bring all of who you are,” as opposed to O’Doherty’s feeling that the museum was asking you, at least in body, to leave, and allow the work to take on its own life. Friedman does not seem to imply the tension with the cube and critical stance that O’Doherty prioritizes. Where Friedman finds a refuge, O’Doherty defines an opponent. In a third position, Robert Irwin describes his sealed studio space as “the world.” Though he made the same effort as Friedman to seal out all influences and distractions, he implies that he is in dialogue with the world through his own concentration and perception. This is reminiscent of the nature of the monad, as interpreted by Deleuze, a unity that envelops a multiplicity, a sealed container that contains the universe. He went through the same ritual described by Friedman, sealing up the space, painting it white, and then forcing himself to remain inside, staring at his own work, training his concentration relentlessly. But he found that the room became the distraction: …he became aware that a thin crack along the wall a few yards away from the canvas likewise exerted its presence; that when he plastered that crack over and repainted the wall, the canvas itself presented an entirely new aspect.2 The context was in a relentless dialogue with the work, and trying to neutralize that dialogue, to mute the conversation between space and object, became part of his ritual as he “fixed” his space each day in the hope of total concentration on the work. Ultimately, Irwin shaped the trajectory of his art by relinquishing the studio, establishing a post-studio practice, where the work is conceived and created out in the world, in dialogue with the world and reflective of the conditions it finds surrounding it. The white cube failed to ever achieve neutrality, his heightened concentration prevented him from ever neutralizing the space, so, instead of continuing to try to maintain the charade of a perfect blank, he acknowledged the unstoppable voice of place and turned all his efforts onto the object and the world, as a constant dialogue. Some artists push their studio space far from purity, domesticating it like a lair or a living room, and others destroy it, fill it with chaos or detritus, blacken or clutter it so as never to be starting from a blank, and thereby try to avoid the anxiety of facing that void. Similarly artists may never prepare a white canvas, a clean page, a marble block, or other form that is intentionally lacking, in order to try to escape the dialogue with emptiness. But Irwin, like O’Doherty, found an opponent in the white cube, and he learned not to fight it, rather he ended the conflict by making it an ally, an interlocutor, a collaborator. We can vainly strive to start from nothing, to find the lull, the clearing, and to always consider what we do in balance with the empty set. Somehow that intangible cloud of hazy nothingness, that softness of a lapse continually offers a place to bounce off of, to react to, to wrestle with, to rest with, in tension, or a place to begin. Robert Irwin. Excursus: Homage to the Square3 (1998) NOTES 1 Massumi. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. p271. 2 MOMA, NY. Eliasson, 360 ? Room for All Colours . Installation. 2002. (shrink)

Introduces philosophers to John Willats' effective new drawing systems vocabulary for describing drawings and related images, also stresses topological-space values in pictures, vs psychology's projective tendencies (illus).

In Drawing the Line, philosopher Samuel Gorovitz examines the ethical questions that permeate the daily lives of medical professionals: Who should be making life and death decisions? How should scarce medical resources be allocated? What rules should govern the use of fetal tissues in research? Where should we draw the line?The questions are rooted in the author's seven-week observation of events at Boston's Beth Israel hospital. Gorovitz shares with readers an intense, disturbing, and insightful account of operating rooms, intensive (...) care units, surgeons' meetings, and administrative discussions of competition in the health-care market. His unusual look at contemporary health care combines startling reality with the provocative reflections of a highly respected philosopher. Author note: Samuel Gorovitz is Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University. He is also the author of the widely hailed Doctors' Dilemmas. (shrink)

There are as many meanings to drawing and painting as there are cultural contexts for them to exist in. But this is not the end of the story. Drawings and paintings are made, and in their making embody unique meanings that transform our perception of space-time and sense of finitude. These meanings have not been addressed by art history or visual studies hitherto, and have only been considered indirectly by philosophers. If these intrinsic meanings are explained and further developed, (...) then the philosophy of art practice is significantly enhanced. The present work, accordingly, is a phenomenology of how the gestural and digital creation of visual imagery generates self-transformation through aesthetic space. (shrink)

Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices explores how the changing modes of representation in architecture and urbanism relate to the transformation of how the addressees of architecture and urbanism are conceived. The book diagnoses the dominant epistemological debates in architecture and urbanism during the 20th and 21st centuries. It traces their transformations, paying special attention to Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s preference for perspective representation, to the diagrams of Team 10 architects, to the critiques of functionalism, and the (...) upgrade of the artefactual value of architectural drawings in Aldo Rossi, John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman, and Oswald Mathias Ungers, and, finally, to the reinvention of architectural programme through the event in Bernard Tschumi and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Particular emphasis is placed on the spirit of truth and clarity in modernist architecture, the relationship between the individual and the community in post-war era architecture, the decodification of design process as syntactic analogy and the paradigm of autonomy in the 1970s and 1980s architecture, the concern about the dynamic character of urban conditions and the potentialities hidden in architectural programme in the post-autonomy era. This book is based on extensive archival research in Canada, the USA and Europe, and will be of interest to architects, artists, researchers and students in architecture, architectural history, theory, cultural theory, philosophy and aesthetics. (shrink)

Fifty years ago Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion revolutionized philosophical and scientific study of visual representation by thoughtful -application of research from the modern vision sciences. Since then those sciences – recently including neuroscience – have greatly developed, and it is now common to attempt direct translation of their findings to depiction, even treating its perception as a branch of visual perception.Unfortunately, rather than advancing Gombrich’s project, many of these applications – often reductive in nature – involve elementary logical fallacies. (...) These fallacies are mostly due to overlooking Gombrich’s main idea, that image makers – like other technologists – use natural principles for their own purposes, and that their first purpose is to make artifacts, which are perceived as such. With better context, it should be possible to find more constructive directions for recent cognitive research, related to drawing. (shrink)

© by Journal of the History of Ideas. Federico Commandino can be considered the personification of the renaissance of mathematics in sixteenth-century Italy. Previous scholars have generally reduced the philosophy of mathematics developed by Commandino in the preface to his translation of Euclid’s Elements to a superficial synthesis of Neoplatonic and Aristotelian elements. Until now, no attention has been paid to Commandino’s use of the sixth-century commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima by John Philoponus. In his article I will argue that, (...) in depicting imagination as a mental drawing board for geometrical figures, Commandino directly relies on Philoponus’s concept of mathematical imagination. (shrink)

Scientific images represent types or particulars. According to a standard history and epistemology of scientific images, drawings are fit to represent types and machine-made images are fit to represent particulars. The fact that archaeologists use drawings of particulars challenges this standard history and epistemology. It also suggests an account of the epistemic quality of archaeological drawings. This account stresses how images integrate non-conceptual and interepretive content.

This is a fresh and vitally important step past stymied debate on what is arguably the most pressing issue in cross-disciplinary feminist theory.

This paper describes methods for generating interactive Euler diagrams. User interaction is needed to improve the aesthetic quality of the drawing without writing tedious formal specifications. More precisely, the user can modify the diagram’s layout on the fly by mouse control. We prove that the satisfiability problem is in \ and we provide two syntactic fragments such that the corresponding restricted satisfiability problem is already \-hard. We describe an improved local search based approach, a method inspired from the gradient (...) method and a hybrid method mixing both and. A software tool was implemented and its implementation is described. We also experimentally compare the different methods. We first see that the improved local search and the hybrid method outperforms the local search from the literature and the gradient method for generating a diagram. Concerning interaction, the local search approach is not suitable but hybrid method and gradient method give both good results in terms of quality of drawings and stability. Specifications are written using region connection calculus ), radius constraints and disjunctions. Euler diagrams are described as set of circles. (shrink)

Drawing the line on physician assistance in physician-assisted death (PAD) continues to be a contentious issue in many legal jurisdictions across the USA, Canada and Europe. PAD is a medical practice that occurs when physicians either prescribe or administer lethal medication to their patients. As more legal jurisdictions establish PAD for at least some class of patients, the question of the proper scope of this practice has become pressing. This paper presents an argument for restricting PAD to the terminally (...) ill that can be accepted by defenders as well as critics of PAD for the terminally ill. The argument appeals to fairness-based paternalism and the social meaning of medical practice. These two considerations interact in various ways, as the paper explains. The right way to think about the social meaning of medical practice bears on fair paternalism as it relates to PAD and vice versa. The paper contends that these considerations have substantial force when directed against proposals to extend PAD to non-terminally ill patients, but considerably less force when directed against PAD for the terminally ill. The paper pays special attention to the case of non-terminally ill patients who suffer from treatment-resistant depression, as these patients present a potentially strong case for extending PAD beyond the terminally ill. (shrink)

Drawing the Line examines the ways in which cultural, political, and legal lines are imagined, drawn, crossed, erased, and redrawn in post-apartheid South Africa through literary texts, artworks, and other forms of cultural production. Under the rubric of a philosophy of the limit and with reference to a range of signifying acts and events, this book asks what it takes to recalibrate a sociopolitical scene, shifting perceptions of what counts and what matters, of what can be seen and heard, (...) of what can be valued or regarded as meaningful. The book thus argues for an aesthetics of transitional justice and makes an appeal for a postapartheid aesthetic inquiry, as opposed to simply a political or a legal one. Each chapter brings a South African artwork, text, speech, building, or social encounter into conversation with debates in critical theory and continental philosophy, asking: What challenge do these South African acts of signification and resignification pose to current literary-philosophical debates? (shrink)

The subject of "Seeing Physics" is our understanding of the physical universe as organized into 51 one thousand-word essays each anchored in a drawing that conveys a key idea. Each essay expands on the science of the drawing and places it in a broader human context. Many people have an interest in the latest in science and technology. But many, even among this group, do not understand basic principles from the 2600-year old intellectual tradition of physics. The old (...) ideas are still new to those who don't understand them. Some of the classic discoveries and theories Lemons discusses include Archimedes' Principle, Alhazen's early theory on the optics of vision and refracted rays, Oresme's Triangle, how Copernicus was able to discover heliocentricism, and Rontgen's accidental discovery of X-rays. (shrink)

Mandala drawing was first practiced by Tibetan buddhists and then developed by Carl Gustav Jung, who felt certain that mandala drawing has the function of integrating psychological division, enhancing psychological harmony, and preserving personality integrity. Previous studies on mandala drawing have mainly focused on alleviating people’s negative emotions, such as anxiety and depression. Therefore, this study explored the effect and mechanism of mandala drawing on the improvement of subjective well-being (SWB), mindfulness, and spirituality from positive psychology’s (...) viewpoint and compared the different effects of cooperative mandala drawing (CMD) and individual mandala drawing (IMD) on mindfulness, spirituality, and SWB. A total of 76 students were recruited from Chang Gung University, and the aforementioned three main variables were measured before and after the coloring experiment. The results indicated that both CMD and IMD significantly enhanced the subjects’ spirituality. Compared with IMD, CMD has a more significant improvement and promotion effect on SWB of subjects by affecting PA, while IMD had no significant effect on PA, and the enhancement effect of SWB was weaker than that of CMD. Mindfulness, spirituality, and SWB all positively correlated with each other. This study highlights the mechanism of mandala drawing and the theoretical understanding of the relationship between mindfulness and SWB. Mandala drawing especially CMD has a positive effect on spirituality and SWB, which may provide individuals with a simple and easy method to improve their happiness. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Chapter One: Wrong Question, Right Answer -- Exercise 1: Getting right into it -- Exercise 2: Watching your hand -- Exercise 3: Marking practice -- Chapter Two: Realistic Drawing -- Exercise 4: Picking an object to draw -- Exercise 5: Attentive looking -- Exercise 6: Noticing awareness -- Exercise 7: Marking from the sense of sight -- Exercise 8: Simple rendering -- Exercise 9: Try perspective -- Exercise 10: Working inward -- Chapter Three: Systematic (...) class='Hi'>Drawing -- Exercise 11: The circular arrow - a visual mantra -- Exercise 12: Improvising between two points and finding the world in between -- Exercise 13: Thought as art -- Exercise 14: All four pixel images -- Exercise 15: Book of compositions -- Chapter Four: Improvisational Drawing -- Exercise 16: Going outside the box -- Exercise 17: Not-breath awareness -- Exercise 18: Growing improvisation -- Exercise 19: Chasing the Coltrane Effect -- Exercise 20: Drawing to reveal inner conditions -- Exercise 21: Noticing Intuition -- Exercise 22: You are the universe drawing -- Chapter Five: Reading the Drawings -- Exercise 23: An exact physical description -- Exercise 24: Feeling the meaning -- Exercise 25: The story we tell ourselves -- Exercise 26: Connecting our story to a larger story -- Chapter Six: The Search for the Source of Creativity -- Exercise 27: Priming the source -- Exercise 28: Sitting still at the origin -- Exercise 29: Embedded sources -- Exercise 30: Mindful of the path -- Chapter Seven: Meta-Drawing -- Exercise 31: Sharing with yourself -- Exercise 32: Sharing with a trusted friend -- Exercise 33: Sharing with the world. (shrink)

Bioethics traditionally focuses on establishing moral limits between different types of acts. However, boundaries are established by communities and individuals who differ in the constraints shaping their moral world. Phase boundaries, the sites of transition between two physical phases such as a liquid and a gas, provide a metaphor for ‘drawing a line’ in bioethics discourse. Phase boundaries occur where the physical constraints allow both phases to coexist in stable equilibrium. This relationship can also be considered in reverse, using (...) the known position of the phase boundary to disclose the physical constraints. By analogy, instead of trying to locate the ‘correct’ moral boundary, the alternative perspective of ‘reverse ethics’ works from a commonly accepted boundary to examine the constraints of the moral world that are being used to establish it. Genetic interventions into the human body provide interesting examples of boundary establishment. In gene therapy, focusing on boundaries has resulted in a model of moral permissibility that ignores some alternative standpoints and increases the potential for conflict between them. Reverse ethics examines such conflicts in terms of the nature of the moral worlds that have come into contact with each other, taking seriously the diversity of factors governing the location of a boundary, in ways that might help shift some entrenched lines of conflict. (shrink)

The argument set out here provides a new understanding of the methods followed by the Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio for depicting the monuments of classical antiquity—in both his drawings and the plates of his seminal architectural treatises, the Quattro libri dell’architettura. It accepts the now-established view that Palladio’s early studies were frequently copied from the drawings of previous practitioners, but it reasons that his later output was also heavily dependent on past achievements. This is contrary to the claims Palladio made (...) in the Quattro libri, which contend that his drawings were based on surveys he had carried out himself, and to the confirmatory presumptions of modern-day scholars. The article first examines the ancient temples Palladio illustrated in the treatise, and observes that they have numerous features that are unsupported by the archaeological record but are also seen either in Palladio’s earlier copy drawings or in the graphic works of his predecessors or contemporaries. Secondly, it considers Palladio’s drawings of bath complexes, which remained unpublished only because of his death, noting that some of them are still reckoned to be invaluable and reliable records of then-accessible remains that Palladio was able to inspect but no longer exist. The conclusion here, however, is that his reconstructions were again based on earlier surveys that he judged dependable, but which he often then adapted and adjusted in line with his personal preferences. The article then continues with a discussion of his probable debts to older architects such as Michele Sanmicheli and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, and his relationship with his contemporary Pirro Ligorio, whose drawings are often markedly similar to Palladio’s. It concludes by considering whether Palladio’s coverage of ancient architecture reveals the extent of such knowledge at the midpoint of the sixteenth century. (shrink)

The connection between art therapy and specific theories of positive psychology such as Antonovsky's theory of salutogenic sense of coherence (SOC) has been less articulated in the literature. This paper draws a methodological connection between arts therapy and SOC, that is, meaning, manageability and comprehensibility, as the components of coping. This theoretical and methodological connection is then explored with a group of participants dealing with the health-stress of cancer. Method We conducted a large-scale, qualitative study that included fifty transcribed hours (...) of thematically analyzed arts processes and one hundred art works, used to explore salutogenic theory within a support group for recovering oncological patients. Results The results point to the arts as including mechanisms that enhance meaning, manageability, and comprehensibility in an embodied and synergetic way. The art makes it possible both to separate and to 'fill' these three components, while on the other hand, integrating them into a cyclical element. We outline theoretical and methodological implications of understanding art therapy as a methodology to enact and concretize positive psychology theories, as well as presenting a protocol for using arts to enhance salutogenic coping. (shrink)

Urbanization is the mechanism for the entanglement of things and experiences as commodities, an interminable restlessness of disorientation, a suspended state, where the capacity to maintain a hold on things and attain a sense of emplacement increasingly necessitates enforced resilience, of people embracing rather than warding off their imminent expendability. As such, what are the possibilities for the city to become a space of communing as an intersection of complex ecologies, common sensibilities and new forms of provision and care? This (...) response to Adrian Parr’s reflections on these issues in her article, ‘Urban Debt, Neoliberalism and the Politics of the Commons’, draws upon various African American practices for inhabiting the city as a vehicle of strategic indifference to efforts to render collective life expendable. This indifference has long been deployed to insulate experimental practices of care, economic and social collaboration, and to ‘honour the city differently’. (shrink)

Felicia Ackerman argues that it is often wrong to use real people in fiction because it harms them. I argue that even when drawing from life is wrong, the unethical use of real people as literary material may nonetheless be rationally justified, and not in purely self-interested, instrumentalist terms. Either ethical considerations are always overriding, and much of our creative and appreciative practices are morally corrupt, or ethical and aesthetic values are incommensurable. I defend the plausibility of the incommensurabilist (...) alternative, and indicate how creative and appreciative choices might be rational even when the values in play are incommensurable. (shrink)

Two hundred years after its publication, The Phenomenology of Spirit (PhS) remains an enigmatic and challenging text, subject to a variety of interpretations. In this paper I seek to open up an additional interpretative space by emphasizing the influence of Hegel’s study of the Bible at the Tübingen Stift (1790–1793) on PhS. In a letter written to Schelling in 1795, Hegel had wondered what it might mean to »draw near to God.« It is the hypothesis of this paper that answering (...) that question was at least part of Hegel’s intent for PhS. (shrink)

Drawing could be considered the oldest known art form. However, art and its understanding has come to evolve so much that it has derived a multitude of forms that are almost unclassifiable today. The aesthetic discourses of the public, social and political have also been prejudiced and their true essence has been altered. In the present research work, we explore a series of artists who work with art as a language and tool for change and improvement of public life (...) in general. We analyse the messages they address, the aesthetics and material form they use, the methodologies they practice or the social changes they cause. In this regard, through a selection of contemporary projects, we can identify more effective representative artistic characteristics that are consistent with our current world. In conclusion, we emphasize that the practice of public art is more significant and necessary than it seems. (shrink)

Figurative drawing is a skill that takes time to learn, and it evolves during different childhood phases that begin with scribbling and end with representational drawing. Between these phases, it is difficult to assess when and how children demonstrate intentions and representativeness in their drawings. The marks produced are increasingly goal-oriented and efficient as the child’s skills progress from scribbles to figurative drawings. Pre-figurative activities provide an opportunity to focus on drawing processes. We applied fourteen metrics to (...) two different datasets (_N_ = 65 and _N_ = 344) to better understand the intentional and representational processes behind drawing, and combined these metrics using principal component analysis (PCA) in different biologically significant dimensions. Three dimensions were identified: efficiency based on spatial metrics, diversity with color metrics, and temporal sequentiality. The metrics at play in each dimension are similar for both datasets, and PCA explains 77% of the variance in both datasets. Gender had no effect, but age influenced all three dimensions differently. These analyses for instance differentiate scribbles by children from those drawn by adults. The three dimensions highlighted by this study provide a better understanding of the emergence of intentions and representativeness in drawings. We discussed the perspectives of such findings in comparative psychology and evolutionary anthropology. (shrink)

Since the first offender rehabilitation treatments, all theoretical approaches have been focusing on reducing risk factors that may influence recidivism, without satisfactory results. Recent resilience research has instead shown the important mediating or moderating role of protective factors and provided the theoretical principles for the Good Lives Model Comprehensive. This holistic model suggests the importance of integrating the reduction of risk factors with the reinforcement of protective factors in offenders' treatment programs. This combined action is considered the main condition through (...) which offenders are motivated to change their life and develop a sense of agency on their current life conditions. This article presents a pilot study, aimed at analyzing the feasibility of a psychosocial intervention, based on graphic workshops. The purpose of the intervention is helping prisoners strive toward adaptation in jail, and facilitating the redesign of their life beyond bars. Drawing activities allowe... (shrink)

In vitro gametogenesis (IVG) might offer numerous research and clinical benefits. Some potential clinical applications of IVG, such as allowing opposite‐sex couples experiencing infertility to have genetically related children, have attracted support. Others, such as enabling same‐sex reproduction and solo reproduction, have attracted significantly more criticism. In this paper, we examine how different ethical principles might help us to draw lines and distinguish between ethically desirable and undesirable uses of IVG. We discuss the alleged distinction between therapeutic and non‐therapeutic uses (...) of assisted reproduction in the context of IVG, and show how it is both problematic to apply in practice and theoretically dubious. We then discuss how the ethical principles of reproductive justice and beneficence apply to IVG for opposite‐sex reproduction, same‐sex reproduction, and solo reproduction. We suggest that these principles generate strong reasons for the use of IVG for opposite‐sex and same‐sex reproduction, but not for solo reproduction. (shrink)

Physics says that it cannot deal with the mind-brain problem, because it does not deal in subjectivities, and mind is subjective. However, biologists still claim to seek a material basis for subjective mental processes, which would thereby render them objective. Something is clearly wrong here. I claim that what is wrong is the adoption of too narrow a view of what constitutes objectivity, especially in identifying it with what a machine can do. I approach the problem in the light of (...) two cognate circumstances: the measurement problem in quantum physics, and the objectivity of standard mathematics, even though most of it is beyond the reach of machines. I argue that the only resolution to such problems is in the recognition that closed loops of causation are objective; i.e. legitimate objects of scientific scrutiny. These are explicitly forbidden in any machine or mechanism. A material system which contains such loops is called complex. Such complex systems thus must possess nonsimulable models; i.e. models which contain impredicativities or self-references which cannot be removed, or faithfully mapped into a single coherent syntactic time-frame. I consider a few of the consequences of the above, in the context of thus redrawing the boundary between subject and object. (shrink)

The children of today live in a time when the images of themselves and their childhood, their needs, interests, and skills, are discussed, researched, challenged, and changed. Childhood, education and educational settings for young children are to a great extent governed by temporality. In this paper, temporality and temporal notions in education are explored and discussed. We especially illuminate two different ways of thinking about children in education and care for younger children in the West— the predominant biased notions of (...) the child as becoming or being. The child as becoming, is manifested primarily in classical developmental psychology while the notion of the child as being, has been highlighted mainly by sociological researchers in their critique of developmental psychology. This latter notion is also visible in a totally different manner in the philosophy of Rousseau, emphasizing the free and natural child. In addition, we explore an alternative way of thinking about temporality and children. Drawing upon the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze, we argue for a rethinking of temporality beyond linear views on time and biased notions of children as ‘either or’. A movement towards a perspective which not only combines notions, but where the whole is more than merely the sum of the parts, is proposed. This leads to an ambiguous, intertwined and ongoing connection between the temporal notions of have been, being and becoming, described by a novel concept—a chiasmic be(com)ing. We suggest that this alternative may be a fruitful way to overcome binary approaches and expand the discussion of temporality, and temporal notions of children, in education. Such an alternative could function as a counterweight to the predominant notions of education and teachers’ work. It may also be seen as a significant foundation for an ethical education since it is built upon ongoing and intertwined relationships, which appreciate openness and unpredictability. (shrink)

Art and pornography are often thought to be mutually exclusive. The present article argues that this popular view is without adequate support. Section 1 looks at some of the classic ways of drawing the distinction between these two domains of representation. In Section 2, it is argued that the classic dichotomies may help to illuminate the differences between certain prototypical instances of pornography and art, but will not serve to justify the claim that pornography and art are fundamentally incompatible. (...) Section 3 considers those definitions of pornography that make an a priori distinction between pornographic and artistic representations. The difference between the ‘merely’ erotic and the pornographic is also discussed in this context. Section 4 provides a critical assessment of the most recent and elaborate arguments against the compatibility of pornography and art. Finally, in Section 5, a case is made for the existence of pornographic art, as a subcategory of erotic art. (shrink)

The literature on drawing provides a justification for using drawing in the teaching of philosophy. The aim of the essay is to show how drawing as a pedagogy, though unusual in philosophy, fulfills high-quality teaching desiderata: make it personal, go beyond the text, allow students to show and explain their work, and unify the work of the course. I explain these four desiderata and how students complete drawing exercises to develop understanding, generate insights, and make philosophic (...) discoveries. I begin by explaining and justifying the pedagogical desiderata. I discuss the literature on drawing-to-learn and concept mapping and apply its insights to teaching philosophy. Finally, I describe my exercises on color theory, two-point perspective exercises, my modifications to concept mapping, and the use of summative drawings. (shrink)

This paper incorporates the work that Jeffrey Gold, Jim Robinson, and Jonathan Schonsheck have done into an innovative method for teaching Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The method involves breaking students into small groups and asking them to draw three images that depict the plot of the Allegory of the Cave. In addition to giving a description of this activity and detailing the pedagogical benefits, the paper considers possible objections to this exercise and suggests that this method provides a model (...) that can be used to teach other highly descriptive images that are found in philosophical texts. (shrink)

In this article, I analyze discourse and identity relations within so-called ‘conventional’ agri-food networks as well as how the conventional sphere perceives, constructs and responds to alternative food movements in Canada. The paper is structured around three primary research questions: How are conventional actors understanding conditions, changes, and challenges within conventional networks? How do conventional actors apply this understanding in advancing conventional interests and discourses, and defending conventional networks? How do conventional actors and discourse construct AFMs? For this research, I (...) draw from survey, focus group, and in-depth interview data alongside text analysis from online sources. I elucidate the interests and motivations behind the identities, stories and messages emerging from the conventional sphere. I conclude that relationship building and communication between diverse agri-food actors may help to expand the range of agricultural knowledge, philosophies and solutions available to farmers, especially those whom are currently quite divided. (shrink)

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1864 Edition.

This article discusses the epistemology of design as a process, arguing specifically that sketching and drawing are essential modes of thinking and reasoning. It demonstrates that the commonly accepted notion of a spontaneous and intuitive vision in the mind’s eye—encapsulated in the cliché of the napkin sketch—obscures the exploratory inferences that are made while scribbling with a pencil on a sheet of paper. The draughtsperson, along with their work tools, modes of notation, specific techniques, and epistemic strategies as well (...) as the resulting design artefacts form milieus of reflection that facilitate complex processes of exploration. Case studies, including the genesis of the Mini by Alec Issigonis, samples of work by Alvar Aalto, and a reinterpretation of student sketches from a classical design study by Gabriela Goldschmidt, serve to illustrate how drawing inferences with pencil and paper occurs. (shrink)

The use of words to label concepts is a weak point in CMT but one which is little discussed. This article considers the relative merits of image and writing as semiotic modes for identifying conceptual metaphor domains and whether image can offer an alternative to target is source formulae. It reports on an experiment in which MA translation students draw composite drawings to represent orientational metaphoric aspects of a UK government press release. Conventional metaphoric language deriving from the orientational metaphors, (...) especially good is up/bad is down, plays a significant role across this text, forming a “metaphor chain” pattern. The drawings and post-task interviews with the participants reveal details of the internal structure of the source domain up and how it is conceptualized. Particularly of note is the strong horizontal forward aspect of orientation which emerges when the written text is represented pictorially. The article demonstrates how drawing can be used as a tool in metaphor-led discourse analysis. (shrink)

Paul Grice’s theory of Conversational Implicature is, by all accounts, one of the great achievements of the past fifty years -- both of analytic philosophy and of the empirical study of language. Its guiding idea is that constraints on the use of sentences, and information conveyed by utterances of them, arise not only from their conventional meanings (the information they semantically encode) but also from the communicative uses to which they are put. In his view, the overriding goal of most (...) forms of communication is the cooperative exchange of information -- the pursuit of which generates norms for its rational and efficient achievement. Among them are Grice’s conversational maxims. (shrink)

Recent research has brought to light substantial fragments in Egyptian demotic, Old Coptic and Greek of manuals of divination by means of drawing lots. Typically, the lots carry a number, and each is attributed to a particular deity. This article presents the documentation known today, including some strips of palm leaf which could have served as the actual lots. It also discusses the degree of variation between the different manuscripts, and possible specific links between the gods and the answers (...) to which they are linked. (shrink)

Sand drawings are introduced in relation to the fieldwork of British anthropologists John Layard and Bernard Deacon early in the twentieth century, and the status of sand drawings as mathematics is discussed in the light of Wittgenstein’s idea that “in mathematics process and result are equivalent”. Included are photographs of the illustrations in Layard’s own copy of Deacon’s “Geometrical Drawings from Malekula and other Islands of the New Hebrides” (1934). This is a brief companion to my article “Wittgenstein on string (...) figures as mathematics” (2022), published in the journal Philosophical Investigations. (shrink)

The concept of performance has gradually become established in health policies. Presented as necessary and positive, it is often reduced to efficiency, which results in policies and management styles aimed at optimisation. While they are supposed to guarantee the sustainability of our healthcare systems, these practices have made them fragile. Insights from the life sciences help us understand why. Indeed, biologists observe that living beings do not prioritise optimisation but robustness. To cope with fluctuations, a robust organisation operates with redundancies, (...) apparent waste, heterogeneity, organised fluctuations, slowness, and hesitation. It functions sub‐optimally. This article offers a theoretical reflection and management directions for more robust healthcare systems. (shrink)

Traditional medical ethics and law draw a sharp distinction between allowing a patient to die and helping her die. Withholding or withdrawing life sustaining treatment, such as by abating technological nutrition, hydration or respiration, will cause death as surely as a lethal injection. The former, however, is a constitutional right for a competent or once-competent patient, while the latter poses a risk of serious criminal or civil liability for the physician, even if the patient requests it.