Looking at some of the iconic images that we recognize as such (we don’t seem to have a definition of iconic images) one might want to think that for a person to be in a particular iconic image is for her or him to be a moral witness (following Margalit’s definition thereof). But is that…

Kant’s Copernican Revolution is a point well taken: “the” world is a human world: we get from it what we recognise. Yet, his analysis of this, in terms of two forms of intuition and 12 categories of understanding, is a capitulation to logic—reminding one of Plato’s. Plato, among other things, messed up a beautiful myth…

The central claim Yesterday, I explained an argument to my class, and one of the students stared at me in disbelieve. Then, after taking my explanation into consideration, he smiled—some sort of smile of defeat. Eliminative Materialism claims that that smile is all and only physiology—muscle contractions and neurophysiology. In a sense, that is indisputably…

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…

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…

Computer games allow their audiences to interfere in the world that they “represent”. This is sometimes said to ask for a qualification of the account of art in terms of the artistic attitude that it, art, requires of its ever audience, which account is proffered by myself in different places. In my view, the artistic…

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…

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…