Evaluations and Revaluations

Evaluations and Revaluations
Author: John O'Loughlin
Publisher: Centretruths Digital Media
Total Pages: 83
Release: 2022-03-24
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1446663116

EVALUATIONS AND REVALUATIONS, which is divided into two parts, each of which reflects one aspect of the overall title, is a compilation of aphoristic writings with strongly metaphysical and subatomic overtones such that take the ideological philosophy of Social Transcendentalism to a new level of analytical sophistication and synthetic penetration.

Pollock and After

Pollock and After
Author: Francis Frascina
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2000
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780415228671

This revised edition features ten new articles and is fully updated to take account of new critical approaches to post-war American art.

The Atrocity Paradigm

The Atrocity Paradigm
Author: Claudia Card
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2002-09-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0198033141

What distinguishes evils from ordinary wrongs? Is hatred a necessarily evil? Are some evils unforgivable? Are there evils we should tolerate? What can make evils hard to recognize? Are evils inevitable? How can we best respond to and live with evils? Claudia Card offers a secular theory of evil that responds to these questions and more. Evils, according to her theory, have two fundamental components. One component is reasonably foreseeable intolerable harm -- harm that makes a life indecent and impossible or that makes a death indecent. The other component is culpable wrongdoing. Atrocities, such as genocides, slavery, war rape, torture, and severe child abuse, are Card's paradigms because in them these key elements are writ large. Atrocities deserve more attention than secular philosophers have so far paid them. They are distinguished from ordinary wrongs not by the psychological states of evildoers but by the seriousness of the harm that is done. Evildoers need not be sadistic:they may simply be negligent or unscrupulous in pursuing their goals. Card's theory represents a compromise between classic utilitarian and stoic alternatives (including Kant's theory of radical evil). Utilitarians tend to reduce evils to their harms; Stoics tend to reduce evils to the wickedness of perpetrators: Card accepts neither reduction. She also responds to Nietzsche's challenges about the worth of the concept of evil, and she uses her theory to argue that evils are more important than merely unjust inequalities. She applies the theory in explorations of war rape and violence against intimates. She also takes up what Primo Levi called "the gray zone", where victims become complicit in perpetrating on others evils that threaten to engulf themselves. While most past accounts of evil have focused on perpetrators, Card begins instead from the position of the victims, but then considers more generally how to respond to -- and live with -- evils, as victims, as perpetrators, and as those who have become both.

Contingencies of Value

Contingencies of Value
Author: Barbara Herrnstein Smith
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 1988
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780674167858

Charges of abandoned standards issue from government offices; laments for the loss of the best that has been thought and said resound through university corridors. While revisionists are perplexed by questions of value, critical theory--haunted by the heresy of relativism--remains captive to classical formulas. Barbara Herrnstein Smith's book confronts the conceptual problems and sociopolitical conflicts at the heart of these issues and raises their discussion to a new level of sophistication. Polemical without being rancorous, Contingencies of Value mounts a powerful critique of traditional conceptions of value, taste, judgment, and justification. Through incisive discussions of works by, among others, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Northrop Frye, Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, and Jürgen Habermas, Smith develops an illuminating alternative framework for the explanation of these topics. All value, she argues, is radically contingent. Neither an objective property of things nor merely a subjective response to them, it is the variable effect of numerous interacting economies that is, systems of apportionment and circulation of "goods." Aesthetic value, moral value, and the truth-value of judgments are no exceptions, though traditional critical theory, ethics, and philosophy of language have always tried to prove otherwise. Smith deals in an original way with a wide variety of contemporary issues--from the relation between popular and high culture to the conflicting conception of human motives and actions in economic theory and classical humanism. In an important final chapter, she addresses directly the crucial problem of relativism and explains why a denial of the objectivity of value does not--as commonly feared and charged--produce either a fatuous egalitarianism or moral and political paralysis.

A T.S.Eliot Companion

A T.S.Eliot Companion
Author: F B Pinion
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 330
Release: 1986-08-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1349074497

The Social Life of Art

The Social Life of Art
Author: Peter Stupples
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2014-11-10
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1443870927

This study examines not only the objects and processes that make up the artworlds of human history, but also the social and cultural circumstances, the historicised contexts that bring about their making, frame their functioning, inform their properties and influence their effects, both at the time of their creation and throughout their subsequent biographies. In the short span that “art” has played a part in human life, one may conceive of time as a social river, with a strong current towards the capricious mainstream, and eddies and quiet pools near the banks. The current will flow faster in spate and slower in drought. But it will be forever in motion. It will be unpredictable. Nothing will stop its inexorable force. Art runs in that social river, subject to the flow and chance of time.

Twentieth Century Theories of Art

Twentieth Century Theories of Art
Author: James Matheson Thompson
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 572
Release: 1990
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780886291112

Includes selections from major writers on various approaches to art theory, for example Freud, Jung, Marx, Heidegger.

Self-Knowledge and the Self

Self-Knowledge and the Self
Author: David A Jopling
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2002-09-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1135958394

In this clear and reasoned discussion of self- knowledge and the self, the author asks whether it is really possible to know ourselves as we really are. He illuminates issues about the nature of self-identity which are of fundamental importance in moral psychology, epistemology and literary criticism. Jopling focuses on the accounts of Stuart Hampshire, Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Rorty, and dialogical philosophical psychology and illustrates his argument with examples from literature, drama and psychology.

The Philosophy of Art History (Routledge Revivals)

The Philosophy of Art History (Routledge Revivals)
Author: Arnold Hauser
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2018-12-07
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1134889860

First published in 1959, this book is concerned with the methodology of art history, and so with questions about historical thinking; it enquires what scientific history of art can accomplish, what are its mean and limitations? It contains philosophical reflections on history and begins with chapters on the scope and limitations of a sociology of art, and the concept of ideology in the history of art. The chapter on the concept of "art history without names" occupies the central position in the book — thoroughly discussing the basic philosophical outlook for the whole work. There are also further chapters on psychoanalysis, folk art and popular art. The chapter on the role of convention in the history of art points the way for further study.