Students working on the issue of art’s autonomy and recent works crossing the borderline with morality, may be interested in the following case. Both Steve Kurtz and Robert Farrell are facing charges of wire fraud brought in connection with absurdly-alleged ‘bioterrorism.’ Their “Critical Art Ensemble” used bacteria to experiment on genetically modified food. The CAE…

I have been getting so many questions about things I have said inTrouw, that it seems appropriate to me to explain my point of view in my own words. For that I have to rely on what others have reported to me about the article in Trouw in which I have been quoted, because I…

In academia a war is going on between autist people with savant capacities and people with empathetic capacities. Reductionist science versus life-world analysis. Those in the first faction will, of their autist nature, never recognise the war. This gives them the upper hand. The human species is intriguing. Kant’s Critique of Judgement is about this…

The ideal of beauty is a sensuous presentation of beauty. This cannot be found in nature because its purposivity is projected by us humans. Natural beauty is a gift. We experience nature’s own logic.

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” Søren Kierkegaard

In class, we discussed Gadamer’s view that a work of art is also symbolic: it is not finished until its meaning has come about. This meaning though, he argued, is in the work itself. It is also “once only”: it belongs to the one work one is confronted with. This also explains Gadamer’s view that…

Their Peculiar Contribution What if we’d introduce a distinction between the epistemology of the narrative and the sincerity of testimonials of experiential memories that anchor the narrative—liberating the moral witness from having to answer epistemological challenges. the truth of a witnesses testimony is allowed to be idiosyncratic, because what it arguably does is contribute an…

1. Indeed. He knows his musicians best, and has written his piece with their powers in mind. In this “proper” (not: original) performance he can “correct” the orchestra, and, perhaps apply newly acquired insights to his score. As long as such proper performance is a viable possibility the claim in the title is of aesthetic…

Polymodality, the synchronous perception of the world through several of our senses, is of the essence of many things. Perception is by an embodied agent, and what is perceived is a reality an embodied agent can move in (Gibson, McDowell). Through it the reality of the perceived is proven (Locke and Hacking). The principle of…

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…