I have always understood Lacan to be arguing that children at a certain age move from the imaginary to the symbolic, and that this transition takes place with their introduction to language. I may have misunderstood Lacan, but that is not what this entry is about. It is about processing an idea. If there is…

… is the experience of having cognitions that conflict amongst each other. Some stalemate of agency might result from this, and, above all, an effort to produce new thoughts that may take away the inner tensions.One has to live on though, and to diminish the internal turmoil resulting from the dissonance one may adopt further…

Desires celebrate their own state. They do not require satisfaction in any near future—at best one, in a future accepted to be unattainable. Basically, that is why it is so much fun to live on desires.

1. Experimentation Though a core method for the natural sciences, most experimentation is prohibited for social sciences, for moral reasons (we are not allowed to manipulate people). This prohibition seems not to go against experimentation in the Humanities, since, here, the subject matter is the “products of human agency” (and not human agency directly, as…

The knock-down on putting the distinction between 1 and 2, instead of between 2 and 3 (as Radford would want it), with regard to 1. a real situation before you, 2. a documentary representation of a real situation, and 3. a fictional representation situation, seems to me to be the following consideration. First, there are…

A natural sense of melancholia overcomes one easily when watching historical documentary footage. The people one watches are all but dead and gone. Their lives, however miserable or joyful, held some kind of inner coherence, much like one’s own live does—which too will become a thing of the past in the not so far future….

The difference between photography and representation is brought by zooming in on another peculiarity of the vistas through windows and in mirrors. Photos, mirrors, and windows all prove that what is seen in or through them is real, really existant. And they prove this either by the polymodality of their perception (mirrors and windows), or…

In recent philosophical discussion, two paradoxes are distinguished. However, distinguishing them points to flaws in the prevalent analysis of the experience of fictional works of art, which I have termed an ontological fallacy.

1. What kind of property is ‘timeless’ (or its counterpart “outdated”)? It is not a normal, objective property, like ‘loud’, or ‘in D minor’. These latter properties have clear rules of application. Instead “timeless” is a value; ‘is outdated’ is its negative counterpart, also a value. 2. How should we understand this value? Either nominally,…

We are so much Hegelians with regard to art. I can bring this out by arguing that our interest in art is little more than a category mistake. Sure, people sometimes make interesting, or beautiful pictures. So what? Why put them in a museum? We could rightly ask this rhetorical question with regard to old…