The conflict between aesthetic experience and the modern vision of the world frames aesthetic experience as a defender of the plurality derived from the perspectives of individuals. This signifies that aesthetic experience confronts the unilateralism of modernity’s vision. This article propounds that this role of aesthetic experience is based on its defense of subjectivity and individuality. This defense, when investigated, reveals the compatibility between phenomenology and pragmatism. This compatibility also demonstrates that aesthetic experience should be understood as a phenomenological experience. (...) Therefore, phenomenology and pragmatism reveal a comradery that permits them to work in tandem, defending subjectivity and pluralism in the face of modernity. (shrink)

Hume presenta su teoría estética en el ensayo Sobre el criterio del gusto [On the Standard of Taste], en el que propone la existencia de un criterio [standard] capaz de zanjar discusiones de gusto. Ese criterio se basa en la existencia de ciertas formas y cualidades que complacen naturalmente a todo ser humano. Hume asevera que tal criterio corresponde a la opinión del crítico: un hombre que ha desplegado particularmente sus facultades cognoscitivas, lo cual le permite percibir esas finas (...) cualidades que suscitan naturalmente el placer de lo bello en el ser humano. Con respecto a en qué consisten esas formas y cualidades universalmente placenteras, Hume guarda silencio. Pretendo mostrar cómo la teoría de la emoción en la música desarrollada por Leonard Meyer en su texto Emoción y significado en la música (Emotion and Meaning in Music) puede aportar inmensidades en ese aspecto. (shrink)

Christian Metz can rightfully be considered the founder of the semiology of cinema. This essay traces the supporting structures, and the problems connected to them, of this theoretical effort, starting first of all from the context that nourished it. The difficulties associated with both the construction of a general semiology and the use of its categories in cinema and artistic languages emerge.

The article focuses on Leibniz’s theory of dual access to the innate practical truths developed in the _New Essays_, on the background of the reconciliation between egoism and altruism he pursues – since his early writings on natural law – through the categories of disinterested love and charity, and the onto-aesthetic implication between harmony and pleasure as well. After reconstructing the meaning and the functions of the argument on the community of brigands that Leibniz addresses against Locke’s conventionalism, the article (...) dwells on the structure of social instincts in human and non-human animals and emphasises the role of the “prick of conscience”, conceived of as a first, affective and pre-rational step in the construction of otherness. (shrink)

O texto investiga a dimensão “labiríntica” sociedade contemporânea do ponto de vista de sua autocompreensão conceitual, e a dimensão do “esquecimento” do real concreto, que caracteriza esta sociedade do ponto de vista de suas relações humano-ecológicas; a “emergência” do eticamente “excepcional” no real “estado de exceção em que vivemos”, em um cruzamento de categorias levinasianas e benjaminianas, é apresentada como uma possibilidade de escapar a algumas das dificuldades categoriais da filosofia política contemporânea. PALAVRAS-CHAVE – Alteridade. “Estado de exceção”. Labirinto conceitual. (...) Esquecimento. ABSTRACT The text discusses the contemporary society as a society marked by a “labyrinth of abstract concepts”, of its self-understanding, and by the strong incapacity to remember the real concrete, from the standpoint of its human, ecological relations. The emergency of the ethically “exceptional” in the actual “state of exception where we live”, in the intersection of Levinasian and Bejaminian categories, is presented as a possibility to escape some categorical difficulties of contemporary political philosophy. KEY WORDS – Alterity. “State of exception”. Conceptual labyrinth. Forgiveness. (shrink)

1. Natura e storia.--2. Arte, critica e filosofia.

Taking as a fundamental axis The case Wagner, this article will develop from the relationship between word and music on musical aesthetics late Nietzsche. The use of the Opera Carmen by George Bizet, as possibility of antithesis to the Total work of art program, the composer Richard Wagner, allows one to reflect on the aesthetics-Nietzschean musical of a privileged point of view. Why Nietzsche would have served as a work which he himself considered minor when compared to the Wagnerian musical (...) drama? The answer to that question requires that you understand the deep value is not always clear from the word in musical compositions taken over by Nietzsche at various times of his work. After all, his musical aesthetics favored the word significant or considered mere apparatus of absolute music? (shrink)

Artistic function within the global society is not more to produce “beauty” instead to acting inside communication. At Baudelaire’s time beauty was the ephemeral and bizarre. Masterpiece, work of art now is rather an open device. At the beginning of the modern era, cinema creates a new kind of spectator as an absent-minded expert, as W. Benjamin said. The new technological condition produces itself a sort of technical aura (so is for radio, cinema, records etc.) But as K. Marx said (...) «production produce consume». So a new condition of aura in communication era lies in the ephemeral artist’s act. Art is now in the era of “gas”, to live the aura is just to breath an atmosphere as Y. Michaud says. Artistic function is to produce relations and public relations. Curators they work as cool hunters or disc jockey and museums are a new kind of mass media for an absent-minded public enjoying in the supermarket of aura. (shrink)

The article contributes to the debate on Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) in Italy, focusing on Graham Harman’s aesthetics. It develops three main points: OOO’s idea of objects, theory of beauty, and figure-ground relation. OOO’s positions are compared with the phenomenological perspective, highlighting discrepancies and points of contact. Harman’s theory of the quadruple object raises ontological and relational issues; the same can be said about OOO’s idea of part-whole relationships. However, Harman’s view of beauty as metaphor and the central role of the (...) human beholder in aesthetic experience offer intriguing reflections and challenges for phenomenology. (shrink)

Resumo O propósito deste texto é mostrar que os problemas enfrentados por Merleau-Ponty, ao longo de seu percurso de pensamento, decorrem dos pressupostos dicotômicos dos quais ele parte. Assim, procuramos trazer à tona outras consequências de se assumir tal pressuposto, o do primado de uma experiência perceptiva muda como solo natal de todas as outras modalidades da experiência. Para tanto, tomam-se em consideração tanto a primeira como a segunda fase do pensamento de Merleau-Ponty.Our purpose is to show that the problems (...) faced by Merleau-Ponty throughout his path of thought arise from the dichotomous assumptions from which he begins. Thus, we seek to shed light on the other consequences of assuming a presumption such as the primacy of a mute perceptual experience as the native soil of all other experience’s modes. Therefore, the first as well as the second phases of Merleau-Ponty’s thought are taken into account. (shrink)