Realism

About: Realism is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 10799 publications have been published within this topic receiving 175785 citations.

Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews

Abstract: Michael Fried. Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. The Michael Fried of Art and Objecthood is a marvel of certitude, and in James Joyce's Stephen Hero he has found a nearly perfect epigraph for this collection of his art criticism: "[H]e was persuaded that no-one served the generation into which he had been born so well as he who offered it, whether in his art or in his life, the gift of certitude." Fried's writings on art divide between two distinct periods. Art and Objecthood collects his art criticism from 1962 to 1977. In the early 1970s, Fried ceased to make criticism his main endeavor and instead rededicated himself to art history. The result has been Absorption and Theatricality, Courbet's Realism, and Manet's Modernism, an epic, three-volume study of the origins of modernist painting cast in terms of the relationship between painting and beholder in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If the later, art-historical period finds Fried, in his own words, "resolutely nonjudgmental," then the earlier, art-critical period finds Fried packing a career's-or a lifetime's?-worth of strongly argued evaluation into the span of a decade and a half. As a critic, Fried is synonymous with the demand that art compel conviction. Art and Objecthood is proof that nowhere in art criticism of the period in question will you find conviction to match Fried's. The frontispiece to Art and Objecthood is Frank Stella's Portrait of Michael Fried Standing on His Head Far above Cayuga 's Waters, and the will to stand on one's head and the remarkable will to judgment in these essays strikes the reader as poetically commensurate. I smiled. Fried's criticism has itself compelled conviction in the manner of a lightning rod-heated, angry conviction-and it is no exaggeration to say that his 1967 essay "Art and Objecthood" has provoked more debate than any other piece of art criticism in the last three decades. Fried's critics may find strength in numbers, but that isn't to say it hasn't been a fair fight. "Art and Objecthood" is Fried's critique of minimalism, particularly the work of Robert Morris and Donald Judd, on the basis of what he terms its "theatricality"-the work's appeal to the viewer by means of staging a particular presence, a mode Fried judges "surefire" and "inartistic." There have been several occasions since the publication of "Art and Objecthood" in which Fried has responded to his critics; one has the impression in reading the lengthy, fascinating introduction to this volume that he hopes these will be his final words on that essay. What is the gist of Fried's revisitation of "Art and Objecthood" three decades down the line? There isn't much that he would change. …

The Deleuze Connections

Abstract: The first book to present Gilles Deleuze's philosophy in language the nonphilosopher can understand. This book is a map of the work of Gilles Deleuze-the man Michel Foucault would call the "only real philosophical intelligence in France." It is not only for professional philosophers, but for those engaged in what Deleuze called the "nonphilosophical understanding of philosophy" in other domains, such as the arts, architecture, design, urbanism, new technologies, and politics. For Deleuze's philosophy is meant to go off in many directions at once, opening up zones of unforeseen connections between disciplines. Rajchman isolates the logic at the heart of Deleuze's philosophy and the "image of thought" that it supposes. He then works out its implications for social and cultural thought, as well as for art and design-for how to do critical theory today. In this way he clarifies the aims and assumptions of a philosophy that looks constantly to invent new ways to affirm the "free differences" and the "complex repetitions" in the histories and spaces in which we find ourselves. He looks at the particular realism and empiricism that this affirmation implies and how they might be used to diagnose new forces confronting us today. In the process, he explores the many connections that Deleuze himself constructs in working out his philosophy, with the arts, political movements, even the neurosciences and artificial intelligence.

Truth and progress

Abstract: Introduction Part I. Truth and Some Philosophers: 1. Is truth a goal of inquiry?: Donald Davidson vs. Crispin Wright 2. Hilary Putnam and the relativist menace 3. John Searle on realism and relativism 4. Charles Taylor on truth 5. Daniel Dennett on intrinsicality 6. Robert Brandom on social practices and representations 7. The very idea of human answerability to the world: John McDowell's Version of Empiricism 8. Anti-sceptical weapons: Michael Williams vs. Donald Davidson Part II. Moral Progress: Towards more Inclusive Communities: 9. Human rights, rationality, and sentimentality 10. Rationality and cultural difference 11. Feminism and pragmatism 12. The end of Leninism, Havel and social hope Part III. The Role of Philosophy in Human Progress: 13. The historiography of philosophy: four genres 14. The contingency of philosophical problems: Michael Ayers on Locke 15. Dewey between Hegel and Darwin 16. Habermas, Derrida and the functions of philosophy 17. Derrida and the philosophical tradition.

Realism and the End of the Cold War

Abstract: iNlodern realism began as a reaction to the breakdown of the post-World War I international order in the 1930s The collapse of great-power cooperation after World War II helped establish it as the dominant approach to the theory and practice of international politics in the United States During the Cold War, efforts to displace realism from its dominant position were repeatedly thwarted by the continued salience of the US-Soviet antagonism: although indirect, the connection between events and theory was undeniable Now, the US-Soviet antagonism is history Suddenly, unexpectedly, and with hardly a shot fired in anger, Russian power has been withdrawn from the Elbe to the Eurasian steppe A central question faces students and practitioners of international politics Do the rapid decline and comparatively peaceful collapse of the Soviet state, and with it the entire postwar international order, discredit the realist approach? Scholars have answered this question in two ways Most argue that the events of the late 1980s and early 1990s utterly confound realism's expectations, and call into question its relevance for understanding the post-Cold War world' Others-realist and non-realist alike-disagree, maintaining that the