Category

Art

Try to conceive of beauty and you will become a “bumbling” fool: good art, bad art and ontological vagueness

I went to a great talk last night which featured Dr. Aaron Meskin, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leeds. His aesthetic research is really interesting. It addresses such topics as the effects of exposure to bad art and the nature of aesthetic adjectives such as ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’. Basically, what I took…

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Patriarchy and the Alphabet: Goddess Worship, Marshall McLuhan, and The Conflict Between Word and Image

“The Old Testament was the first alphabetic written work to influence future ages. Attesting to its gravitas, multitudes still read it three thousand years later. The words on its pages anchor three powerful religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Each is an exemplar of patriarchy. Each monotheistic religion features an imageless Father deity whose authority shines…

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We are from the start outside ourselves // Carol Bigwood on Intersubjectivity

…We exist simultaneously in cultural and natural ways that are inextricably tangled. We are always already situated in an intersubjective (and thereby already cultural), spatiotemporal, fleshy (and thereby already natural) world before we creatively adopt a personal position in it. Moreover, nothing determines us from the outside or inside, precisely because we are from the…

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Our poetry is our haunting and adventure / More Dean Young

Poetry is a manifestation of the spirit as it triangulates itself through the desires and limitations of meat; meditative inklings of immortality, and the play in the manipulation of aestheticized materials. It forgets about itself as code making, has the supreme confidence of handling elemental fuels. The word then is not only fit referent but…

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Dialectics: The Art of Refutation and the Quintessential Method for Ascertaining Knowledge

The notion of process, activity, or change has an inextricable relation to the nature and meaning of dialectic. In ancient philosophy, dialectic (dialektik‘), derived from the Greek dialegein, meaning to ‘converse,’ ‘argue,’ or ‘discourse,’ involved a conversational method of argumentative exchange. By Plato’s time, the term acquired a technical sense in the form of question…

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Vice Rag – A.A. Bondy | Art by Alberto del Pozo

Sweet, sweet cocaine Won’t you be all mine Heart’ll pound, my hands will shake I’m doin’ mighty fine Sweet, sweet heroin Won’t you be all mine I don’t wanna feel a thing Want nothin’ on my mind Sweet, sweet whiskey Won’t you be all mine If you were to fill the ocean I would drink…

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What is an event?

“What is an event?” is, of course, a quintessentially Deleuzian question. And Whitehead marks an important turning-point in the history of philosophy because he affirms that, in fact, everything is an event. The world, he says, is made of events, and nothing but events: happenings rather than things, verbs rather than nouns, processes rather than…

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