ABSTRACT Philosophical hermeneutics is underrepresented in the literature on music performance. Given the shift from Cartesian subjectivism to anti-subjectivism in the contemporary literature on improvised musical performance, it is somewhat surprising that hermeneutics does not figure more prominently. Since hermeneutics is characterized by a dialectical to-and-fro—the hermeneutical conversation—between

ABSTRACT In an increasingly globalizing world, the aesthetics of Dubai have become potentially available even for impoverished, peripheral cities such as Belgrade. With the explicit rhetoric of finally achieving a “global profile” for the city, the Serbian government has hired an Emirati company to build a “world city” in a centrally located district of Belgrade. The rationale for the development is

ABSTRACT The focus of this essay is the art of Vincent van Gogh and the way in which van Gogh’s understanding of nature informs his landscape painting. Van Gogh’s descriptions of the relationship between nature and his art betray certain humanist views that invest nature with anthropomorphic elements. Van Gogh seeks to subdue nature in order to uncover its essence and divulge its inner truth. I do

ABSTRACT This article questions how contemplative contemporary cinema “sexualize” the landscapes. Through the filmography of four directors, Abbas Kiarostami, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lars von Trier and Bruno Dumont, the relationships between nature and human body are highlighted. Furthermore, based on the “eroticism” notion developed by Georges Bataille, our study tries to emphasize how these relationships

(2020). Review: John Sallis’ Songs of Nature, on Paintings. Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology: Vol. 7, Philosophy and Landscape East and West, pp. 173-175.

(2020). Review: Francois Jullien’s Living off Landscape, or the Unthought of in Reason. Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology: Vol. 7, Philosophy and Landscape East and West, pp. 176-182.

(2020). Automating Art: Gilbert Simondon and the Possibility of Independently Creative Machines. Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology: Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 17-32.

ABSTRACT This contribution to phenomenological aesthetics takes inspiration from Martin Heidegger’s idea that poetry arises out of the experience of thinking and thinking out of the experience of poetry. The mutual nourishment of philosophy and poetry is put into practice here through a presentation of three poems and the reflections they provoke. The poems are the work of a contemporary Lithuanian-American

ABSTRACT In his late essay “To Have Done With Judgment” Gilles Deleuze puts forward an alternative aesthetics to those based within the doctrine of judgment. He argues that to do justice to the work of art, one must recognise the creation of the new modes of existence in the work to come. This essay aims to deepen the understanding of Deleuze’s concept of the “work to come” by going against the grain

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to draw important parallels between the way in which configured pictorial practices of early Cubism interpreted the idea of tactile space and the phenomenological concept of existential spatiality. It is argued that in dispensing with the “illusion of perspectival space” and deconstructing geometrical perspective, several Cubist artists developed a position of multi-perspectival

(2020). Aesthetics. Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology: Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 85-87.

(2020). Intimate Strangeness: Gadamer on Celan, Dialogue, and the Other. Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology: Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 1-15.

ABSTRACT Rudolf Eisler’s Dictionary of Philosophical Concepts (2nd edition, 1904) and James Mark Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (new edition, 1920) show that, until the first two decades of the 20th century, The Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869) by Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906) defined the meaning of the expression “the unconscious.” This special volume will explore how the

ABSTRACT The notion of the unconscious resulted in a reversal of optics concerning the evidence of consciousness, and the split which Freud created in the analysis of mental activities elicited many reactions. Some French writers attempted to develop concepts with the ambition of competing with the unconscious. We are interested here in the notion of implex that Valéry elaborated in L’Idée fixe (1932)

ABSTRACT This paper aims at investigating how the cross-cultural chasm can be meaningfully connected with the discussion on creativity and imagination. In order to examine cross-cultural creativity and imagination, several basic assumptions in the Western tradition must be reexamined and put into question. To begin with, the translatability and equivalence of the notions of “creation” and “imagination”

ABSTRACT The foundations of psychoanalysis in the German idealist concepts of the reflexive human self have been the subject of detailed investigations devoted to the intertwined processes of introspection, consciousness, and the unconscious. Much less consideration has been given to the contemporary French spiritualist philosopher Maine de Biran (1766–1824), whose physiologically-oriented philosophical

ABSTRACT This paper questions the apparent silenc of Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms on the unconscious, in its double sense of the psychic structure and of the description of the imperceptible. Although Cassirer is engaged in a very fine phenomenological analysis of our experience of the world, under the prism of a critic of culture, and although he does not believe in the evidence of the

(2019). The Leibnizian breakthrough: on Rosemary Sponner Sand’s The Unconscious Without Freud, Plymouth, UK: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014, 188 pp., $100. ISBN: 978-1442231733. Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology: Vol. 6, The Unconscious, pp. 195-202.

ABSTRACT In this article I argue that, with the liberation of the hand from the tasks of locomotion in human evolution, unconscious use of the hands begins to create cultural forms. The first feature of the hands is its openness to the world. The second feature is its mediation between things and the body of which it is a part. The third feature is its self-referentiality. By touching, by giving form

ABSTRACT Aesthetic experience is an emotional response to the spontaneous interpretation of an object/situation as symbolic of either the fulfilment of an impossible but inalienable desire (positive aesthetic experience) or the inescapability of that to which we are ineluctably averse (negative aesthetic experience). In both cases it is an emotional response to situations for which there is no appropriate

ABSTRACT Concepts are traditionally pictured as discrete containers that bring together objects or qualities based on the possession of shared, uniform properties. This paper focuses on a contrasting notion of the concept which holds that concepts are defined by their capacity to reach out and connect with other concepts. Two theories in recent continental philosophy maintain this view: one from Ricoeur

Jorella Andrews’ Showing Off! A Philosophy of Image is a lively, idiosyncratic account of the experiential power images can have in revealing truths. It possesses that rare quality in books on this subject—accessibility—for it is readable and gives a strong sense that the author is energetically committed to her chosen sources and to art practitioners. Those sources range across a broad territory of

ABSTRACT Can we gain knowledge by reading literature? This essay defends an account of reading, developed by Stanley Cavell and Hans-Georg Gadamer, that phenomenologically describes the experience of acquiring self-knowledge by reading literary texts. Two possible criticisms of this account will be considered: first, that reading can provide other kinds of knowledge than self-knowledge; and, second

ABSTRACT Many critics have pointed to the failures of modernist urban design, which include its obliteration of thriving neighborhoods, isolation of functions and production of alienating spaces hostile to the human form. Less focus has been placed on defining the source of the modernists’ errors. This essay argues that these errors were in part due to neglect of the nature of fully embodied experience

ABSTRACT Most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portrait paintings have eyes staring outward at the beholder. A minority of these eyes have slightly elevated pupils in comparison to the iris. These off-centre pupils are not the norm, but they occur regularly in works by skilful European portrait painters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This article takes a closer look at selected portrait

ABSTRACT This paper argues that the Husserlian notion of “passive synthesis” can make a substantial contribution to the understanding of aesthetic experience. The argument is based on two empirical cases of qualitative interview material obtained from museum visitors and a world-renowned string quartet, which show that aesthetic experience contains an irreducible dimension of passive undergoing and

ABSTRACT This article examines works by the American-born, Paris-based artist Sheila Hicks and her sense of the universal communicability of thread. Hicks bridges cultures and resists simple identification with any single nationality, media, or art historical paradigm. For these reasons and others, it is timely to examine her work and its relevance for pluralistic, feminist thought. The article situates

ABSTRACT That beauty [beauté] pertains to phenomenality, this may have long seemed self-evident. For however conveyed and crafted in sensible experience, beauty is to be seen, heard, touched; in short it makes itself manifest. Not only does beauty make itself manifest by taking shape, but it makes itself manifests par excellence, to a greater extent than what appears in the course of everyday life

ABSTRACT Translated into English in 2004, Vladimir Jankelevitch’s book Music and the Ineffable has made a significant impact in anglophone musicology. I argue that the figure of the feminine is central to his understanding of music and musical ineffability, and use feminist philosophers’ interpretations and critiques of the figure of the feminine in his close friend and colleague Emmanuel Levinas’s

ABSTRACT This article draws on Daniel Maximin’s extended essay on Caribbean identity, Les fruits du cyclone, to open up the potential in Luce Irigaray’s work for a decolonizing, elemental sublime. In so doing, it hopes to produce the kind of generative crossing that Maximin invokes via the figure of métissage: a term that recalls the forced breeding of the transatlantic slave trade, even as Maximin

In Derrida’s “White Mythology” the figure of the heliotrope, both flower and gemstone, illustrates the multifaceted nature of French aesthetics. At once a natural beauty and, as bouquet or gemstone, a product of techne, the heliotrope as a figure for metaphor is itself a metaphor, performing the simultaneous presence and absence that Derrida traces. It turns toward the “sun” but its attaining is always

ABSTRACT This piece explores the dialogic form as a way to engage in rigorously focused philosophical analysis and the generation of problems. We take up Jacques Rancière’s understanding of the relation of aesthetics and politics, and his critique of Gilles Deleuze’s aesthetic thought in its purported inability to generate political community. To develop the stakes of this problem, we introduce Simone

Abstract Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) is a gigantic figure in musical aesthetics, and many still consider his views relevant, not only for analyzing the modernist music he was inspired by and that he inspired himself, but also for more contemporary developments in classical music. John Adams (b. 1947) is arguably the foremost contemporary composer who has tried to break away from the modernist musical

Abstract This paper develops a concept of fictioning when this names, in part, the deliberate imbrication of an apparent reality with other narratives. It focuses on a particular audio-visual example of this kind of art practice, known as the film-essay or what Stewart Home has called called the “docufiction.” The latter operates on a porous border between fact and fiction, but also between fiction

Abstract In recent years several scholars have wrestled with the term “poetic thought,” suggesting in various ways there is something distinctive about the nature of meaning as it occurs/unfolds through poetry. In this paper I suggest, in part following the lead of Simon Jarvis, that one of the most fruitful lines of inquiry for exploring this idea lies in a consideration of poetic works through the

Abstract Contemporary phenomenological discussions on relationship between painting and nothingness have mainly employed Sartrean and Heideggerian notions of nothingness. In this paper, I propose another perspective by discussing the possibility of pictorially depicting Levinas’s notion of the nothingness of being, which he develops in his early works in terms of the il y a (“there is”). For Levinas

Abstract In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant defines the architectonic as the “art of constructing systems.” For him, architectonics is the systematic unity of knowledge according to a principle he identifies as the ends of reason. In the discipline of architecture, the concept of the architectonic has varied understandings: the unity of form of the appearance of the building that is given; or the

Abstract In this paper, I explain why I have chosen the expression “metaphysical anti-Semitism” to characterize Heidegger’s position in the Black Notebooks. In this context, the strong connection between the question of being and the “Jewish question” is important. My thesis is that Heidegger ties Judaism to metaphysics with a Gordian knot. His ontological, theological, and political accusations against

Abstract What and how is the work of art? This paper considers Heidegger’s venerable question by way of a related one: what exactly is the essence of the painting? En route to critiquing the Heideggerian conception of the work of art as that which discloses a world, I present Michel Henry’s competing aesthetic theory. According to Henry, the artwork’s task is not to disclose the exteriority of the

In 2016, when we first began planning this special issue, eighty years had passed since Heidegger’s 1935–36 lectures on “The Origin of the Work of Art” momentously turned the philosophical attention from the beauty of art to its truth—to the process of truth “setting itself to work” in the work of art, now understood as the exposition of the conflictual interaction or “strife” between the meaningful

Abstract This paper is motivated by Heidegger’s invitation to think the essence of technics through a dialogue between technics and art. This dialogue is approached with the help of several artworks belonging to what can be called the “technological turn” in art. First, I draw a schematic picture of notions of instrumentality, rationality, totality, and teleology inherited from classical philosophy

Abstract In this paper we discuss Heidegger’s conception of philosophy in the Black Notebooks. In particular, we set out a reading of the Notebooks from the 1930s and early 1940s as exhibiting an extremist view of philosophy, and its concern with being, which accords it an absolute and exclusive priority above and beyond everything else. We argue that such overcompensation for philosophy’s declining

Abstract One of the most prominent notions in Heidegger’s thinking about art is that of the earth (die Erde). This paper probes the phenomenological potential of Heidegger’s concept by turning to the work of contemporary British artist Andy Goldsworthy. Drawing from Heidegger’s theoretical writings as well as his analysis of a poem by C.F. Meyer in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and his 1936–37 seminar

Abstract The aim of this paper is to begin to respond to the question of how to engage the presence of catastrophic climate change as a locus of philosophical thought. What has to be thought is the end of the world. Central to that project is Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art,” and in particular, Heidegger’s thinking of the earth/world relation, both in itself and in terms of the limits it

Abstract This paper is an argument for drawing creative practice to the center of philosophical aesthetics. Such an approach would engage philosophical problems that originate from artistic practices. It would also give aesthetics a role in the cultivation of creative practices, both inside and outside of traditional artistic fields. As such aesthetics would begin to engage questions that are pertinent

Argument Il s’agira, en s’appuyant sur les analyses de Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty et Gadamer, et sur des exemples empruntés aussi bien à l’architecture et à la peinture qu’à la littérature, à la poésie et à la musique, de montrer que l’œuvre d’art, loin d’être intemporelle, possède une temporalité spécifique, qui est celle de la présence actuelle et de la contemporanéité.

Abstract This paper looks at the phenomenon of theopoetic art. The word theopoetic dates back to the Patristic authors—referring to the making divine of the human and the making human of the divine—and has been radically revived as part of the recent religious turn in continental phenomenology and hermeneutics (Keller, Caputo, Nancy, Kearney). Looking at an example of religious art, Andrei Rublev’s

Abstract Paul Celan was undoubtedly the greatest post-World War II German-writing poet, and Anselm Kiefer one of the greatest living German artists. These two giants can be seen to meet through a series of artworks that Kiefer dedicates to the depiction of Celan’s Todesfugue (Fugue of Death). Bringing together the verbal and the visual, the color of gold symbolizes life, while ashes symbolize exile

Abstract The question of the value of painting—why paintings should matter to us—has been addressed by a number of Phenomenological philosophers. In this paper, I critically review recent discussions of this topic by Simon Crowell and Paul Crowther—while also looking back to work by Merleau-Ponty and Michel Henry. All the views I discuss claim that painting is important (at least in part) because it

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to defend a deflationary account of the ethical value of narrative representation. In sections 1 and 2 I demonstrate that there is a necessary relation between narrative representation and ethical value, but not between narrative representation and moral value. Ethical is conceived in terms of moral as opposed to amoral and moral in terms of moral as opposed to

This book on its 50th anniversary is like a little gem. Similar to the characteristics of a fine gem, it is unique, brilliant, and timeless; it is hard and has potential. The brilliance of the book...

What is phenomenology? Or, to be more precise, what can rightly assume the name “phenomenology”? These two questions frequently spring to mind while reading Peer F. Bundgaard’s and Frederik Stjernf...

Abstract Although cities have been philosophically important since ancient times, the development of phenomenology and, to a lesser degree environmental and everyday aesthetics, made possible the aesthetic consideration of urban life. Unlike much of Western philosophy, phenomenology takes seriously that human beings inhabit a lifeworld, in which they live as embodied beings together with others. These

Abstract This article offers a philosophical account of a range of urban phenomena that are integral to the visual fabric of the modern city and, at the same time, external to the visual order administered by the city’s rulers. Explaining why the common terms of “graffiti” and “street art” are too narrow for discussing the plurality of the illicit visual forms that populate the city’s space, I coin

Abstract Evidence affirms that aesthetic engagement patterns our movements, often with us barely aware. This invites an examination of pre-reflective engagement within cities and also aesthetic experience as a form of the pre-reflective. The invitation is amplified because design has political implications. For instance, it can draw people in or exclude them by establishing implicitly recognized public-private

Abstract This article explores the relationship between the bodily presence of other humans in the lived urban world and the experience of everyday architecture. We suggest, from the perspectives of phenomenology and architecture, that being in the company of others changes the way the built environment appears to subjects, and that this enables us to perform simple daily tasks while still attending

Abstract The relationship between architecture and urban centers and concepts such as community and identity is undeniably complex and has been described, by both philosophers and architectural theorists, in radically different ways. In this essay, I will focus on the contrast between the role of architecture and cities as providers of a sense of identity while also emphasizing the risks associated

Abstract In discussions of the conservation of culturally significant architecture, awareness about issues of temporality and its theoretical import has been approached from varied, partial, perspectives. These perspectives have usually focused on accounts of temporality that focus on the past and the present—and more rarely the future—without considering either the complete spectrum of human temporality

Abstract One of the more ambitious and yet fruitful attempts in recent years to untangle general questions about the nature of aesthetic phenomena and their socially constituted nature rests in Lambert Zuidervaart’s critical hermeneutical theory of artistic truth. In this paper, I explore one part of Zuidervaart’s project, namely his conception of “aesthetic validity as a horizon of imaginative cogency