The challenge seems to be: to find the proper formulation of some set of alternatives so that it becomes clear that a dilemma is at stake. Von Hagens’ plastinates Urvashi didn’t perceive a dilemma in the case of Von Hagens’ plastinates (the plastified corpses), and this is interesting in itself.If there is a dilemma here,…

Perhaps the gaze, too, is distinguished from empathy, its cognitive brother, as a success term. The gaze is the receiving counterpart of expression, empathy the receiving counterpart of emotion.

Unlike ’emotion’, ‘expression’ is a success term. Emotions presuppose a history of psychological events, a disposition (Wollheim would say). They also involve beliefs about the world–present-day views of emotions take them to be cognitive. Lastly, emotions are acquired events. We learn the norms of appropriateness from our peers and parents in a long process of…

Exline and Fehr argue that there is no researching the gaze. Not that it is not an important subject for research, it is. They argue that it is impossible not to interfere with the gaze and other people’s responses to it, as a researcher. Either the observer, or the camera, or the one-way mirror all…

It is one thing to identify the meaning of the locution ‘is sentimental’ (i.e. to provide a definition of the term), but quite another to establish whether in some particular case someone or something is or is not sentimental.We all seem to agree that ‘is sentimental’ involves disapproval of some kind.The disapproval has something to…

One of the moral values of art appreciation (according to Eaton) is that it teaches us about narrative coherence, but: Is a human life coherent? When would one say of a human life that it is incoherent? In short: how exactly is artistic (narrative) coherence going to teach us a lesson about our lives? In…

Where there is human practice there is bound to exist normativity, i.e. ideas about what is better or worse than its alternative. But not all normativity is moral in nature. Although it may be for the best to pursue knowledge and truth in science and elsewhere, truth in itself involves a normativity to be explicated…

In the past, I have dubbed the type of representation through modal ellipsis, that we saw in the coffee cup scene from Robert Bresson’s L’argent, ‘intimation’. The point about intimation is that it makes events intimate by representing them incompletely, i.e. not in all the sense modalities that an audience expects. There was visual representing…

Common sense intuitions, gut feelings form our tacit theories. They are based on generations of thinking and float about in a culture. To be provoked to explicitly state your tacit assumptions, is a ‘Hegelian’ approach to philosophical analysis.

Digital remastering What if the digital remastering of music brings us more complete sound as recorded, with more details, including those details which the original musician did not hear and which did not, at the time, instruct him aesthetically? The musicians chose a version of their music which is now no longer held to be…