Showing papers in "The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism in 1990"

Opera, or the Undoing of Women

Abstract: Prima donnas, or the circus of women dead women family affairs, or the \"parents terribles\" the girls who leap into space furies and gods, or wanings of the moon madmen, negroes, jesters, or the heroes of deception the tetralogic of the ring, or the daughter done for in praise of paganism.

Memes and the exploitation of imagination

Abstract: The general issue to be addressed in a Mandel Lecture is how (or whether) art promotes human evolution or development. I shall understand the term "art" in its broadest connotations--perhaps broader than the American Society for Aesthetics would normally recognize: I shall understand art to include all artifice, all human invention. What I shall say will a fortiori include art in the narrower sense, but I don't intend to draw particular attention to the way my thesis applies to it.

Human Agency: Language, Duty, and Value : Philosophical Essays in Honor of J.O. Urmson

Abstract: Introduction J. M. E. Moravcsik Prichard and knowledge J. O. Urmson Part I. Theories of language Use: 1. Things done with words Jennifer Hornsby 2. Context-fixing semantics for the language of action Patrick Suppes and Colleen Crangle 3. Mood and the analysis of non-declarative sentences Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber Part II. Duty and the Moral Life: 4. Aristotle on moral luck Anthony Kenny 5. Urmson on Aristotle on pleasure C. C. W. Taylor 6. The perils of friendship and conceptions of the self J. M. E. Moravcsik 7. Moral subjects, freedom, and idiosyncrasy David Heyd 8. Supererogation and moral realism Jonathan Dancy 9. What does intuituinism imply? Bernard Williams Part III. Aesthetic Values and Valuations: 10. Aesthetic satisfaction Bruce Vermazen 11. Live performances and dead composers: on the ethics of musical interpretation Peter Kivy 12. The presentation and portrayal of sound patterns Kendall L. Walton 13. Sports and art: beginning questions Philosophical writings of J. O. Urmson Notes Index of names.

Oppressive Texts, Resisting Readers and the Gendered Spectator: The New Aesthetics

Abstract: At the heart of recent feminist theorizing about art is the claim that various forms of representation-painting, photography, film-assume a "male gaze." The notion of the gaze has both a literal and a figurative component. Narrowly construed, it refers to actual looking. Broadly, or more metaphorically, it refers to a way of thinking about, and acting in, the world. In literal terms, the gaze is male when men do the looking. Men look both as spectators and as characters within works. In figurative terms, to say that the gaze is male refers to a way of seeing which takes women as its object. In this broad sense, the gaze is male whenever it directs itself at, and takes pleasure in, women, where women function as erotic objects. The feminist claim is that most art, most of the time, places women in this position. In Laura Mulvey's words, man is the bearer of the gaze, woman its object. ' Feminist theory, like many other theories, takes as one of its basic tenets that no vision, not even artistic vision, is neutral vision. All vision is colored by the "spectacles" through which we see the world. The notion that all seeing is "a way of seeing" contrasts sharply with the traditional realist assumption that observation can be cleanly separated from interpretation, at least under certain ideally specified conditions. In part, feminism can be understood as reiterating a familiar, but still important, objection to the naive notion of the innocent eye. As E.H. Gombrich convincingly argues, observation is never innocent. In his words, "whenever we receive a visual impression, we react by docketing it, filing it, grouping it in one way or another, even if the impression is only that of an inkblot or a fingerprint. ... [T]he postulate of an unbiased eye demands the impossible. "2 Observation is always conditioned by perspective and expectation. Yet, the feminist claim that our representations inscribe a male gaze involves more than a denial of the eye's innocence. It involves asserting the central role that gender plays in formulating those expectations. Feminism insists, moreover, that these expectations are disproportionately affected by male needs, beliefs and desires. Both men and women have learned to see the world through male eyes. So, for example, women throughout their lives expend enormous amounts of time and energy and money making themselves "beautiful." In undertaking this costly process, women judge themselves according to internalized standards of what is pleasing to men. As Sandra Bartly observes, adolescent girls "learn to appraise themselves as they are shortly to be appraised." In this sense, the eyes are female, but the gaze is male.3 Feminism objects to seeing the world "through male eyes." It equates the male gaze with patriarchy. Patriarchy defines a social system "marked by the supremacy of the father and the legal dependence of wives and children. "4 Under such a system, women depend not only for status and privilege, but for their very identity, upon men. The assumption is that this arrangement oppresses women. It also, as both feminist and non-feminists have argued, oppresses men, although not necessarily in the same way as it oppresses women. This oppression occurs at the symbolic as well as the material level. Women, as the first editorial of the film journal, Camera Obscura, announced, "are oppressed not only economically and politically, but also in the very forms of reasoning, signifying and symbolical exchange of our culture. "5 Thus, to take a familiar but powerful example, in English "he" functions as the unmarked term, "she" as the marked term.

Sexuality and Subordination : Interdisciplinary studies of gender in the nineteenth century

Abstract: Sexuality and Subordination uses the insights of a range of disciplines to examine the construction of gender in nineteenth-century Britain and France. With contributions from history, literature, sociology and philosophy, its interdisciplinary approach demonstrates the extent to which a common focus can illuminate problems inaccessible to any single discipline. 'Victorianism' is generally understood to mean sexual double standards, hypocrisy and prudery among the middle classes. But, as this collection shows, the representation of sexuality in the nineteenth century was more diverse and complex than is sometimes realized. Both art and literature point to the deployment of sexual metaphors and imagery, and the language of educated public opinion was shaped by the dichotomy between mind and matter, between rationality and sexuality. The contributors to this volume explore how women, in questioning their subordination, had to challenge a construction of femininity which imposed sexual ignorance.

Ontology of the work of art : the musical work, the picture, the architectural work, the film

Abstract: In these studies Roman Ingarden investigates the nature and mode of being of four kinds of art works: the musical work, the picture, the architectural work, and the film. He establishes that the work of art is a purely intentional object but considers also its connections to the real world. By analyzing a work of art in its \u201cconstitutive heterogeneous strata,\u201d Ingarden demonstrates that a work of art will reveal, when examined in the appropriate way, its own inherent structure. Further, he shows that in consequence of the art work's structure, we must distinguish between the work itself and the concretizations of it by the listener or viewer. Ingarden elaborates upon the conception of concretization which he present in The Literary Work of Art and applies it to music and visual art. He also employs the concept of aspect to clarify the ontic structure of these art works and the distinction between the concretization of the work and the work itself. The distinction between the work's concretization - effectuated in the mental experiences of the listener or viewer - and the work itself serves to help Ingarden confirm and account for the work's intersubjective identity. The problem of aesthetic value, Ingarden maintains, can be fruitfully treated only after the ontic structure of art work has been clarified. His primary concern in Ontology of the Work of Art is to ascertain and describe that structure and the mode of existence of works of art. In addition, he offers several discussions of aesthetic value, showing in the m the connections between questions of aesthetic value and the structure of the work of art.

Feeling and freedom: Kant on aesthetics and morality

Abstract: In the final section of the introduction to the Critique of Judgment, Kant speaks of the "great gulf' (grosse Kluft) that separates the "realm of the concept of nature" from that of "the concept of freedom." "The concept of freedom," he states, "determines nothing in regard to the theoretical cognition of nature; the concept of nature likewise [determines] nothing in regard to the practical laws of freedom." It does not seem possible to throw a bridge across this gulf; he continues, but in fact "the faculty of judgment yields the mediating concept between the concept of nature and the concept of freedom, which makes possible the transition from the purely theoretical to the purely practical, from the lawfulness of the former to the final purpose of the latter, in the concept of a purposiveness of nature." Such a mediating concept apparently must show that even though "the determining grounds of causality according to the concept of freedom (and the practical laws which it contains) are not founded in nature," "nevertheless their effect, in accord with these formal laws, should take place in the world" (CJ, Introduction IX, pp. 195-196).' Many writers have offered accounts of how the concept of the purposiveness of nature, or more broadly the formal purposiveness of both aesthetic and teleological judgment, is supposed to bridge the gulf between the causality of nature according to theoretical laws and the causality of freedom according to practical laws. But few pause to ask the question, what gulf? What problem about the relationship between the legislations of nature and freedom remains to be solved in the Critique of Judgment that was not already solved by the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason? Had not the proof of the actuality of freedom in the second Critique, building upon the proof of its logical and epistemological possibility in the third antinomy of the first Critique, already solved the problem of the relation between the causality of nature and the causality of freedom? Kant's conception of morality as well as the model of the relations between theoretical and practical reason which he had evolved by the time of the completion of the Critique of Practical Reason, which we might have conveniently called his metaphysics of morals if he had not preempted that title for his detailed description of our actual duties of justice and virtue in his last great work, comprised several key claims. Above all was Kant's conception of virtue or moral worth as a quality attaching to agents on account of their attempts to perform actions intended to comply with the moral law solely on the ground that such actions are required by the moral law, that is, from the motive of duty alone: "it is not enough to do what is right, but it must also be performed solely on the ground that it is right" (CJ, ?53, p. 327). Next, there was a claim about our knowledge of the moral law: pure practical reason alone can discover the moral law without assistance from any other faculty of cognition. Third, there was a claim about our knowledge of the actuality of freedom: although acknowledgment of the difference between phenomena and noumena, appearances and things in themselves, and recognition that the deduction of the universal applicability of the law of natural causation holds only for objects of empirical knowledge or appearances had been argued, in the solution to the third antinomy in the first Critique, to suffice for the proof of the possibility of a causality according to laws of freedom as well as laws of nature, only in the second Critique was it argued that