Kant, in his so-called Copernican move, filled in the details of this picture in wistful manner. He installed our scientific methods. Hastily. Herder installed our language, instead of the Kantian categories of understanding and the forms of intuition, space and time. And Schopenhauer reduced them to space, time and causality. These were efforts to correct…

We can distinguish between terms which apply only after success and terms which refer to the activity leading to such success. Some terms are ambiguous in this respect, e.g. the Anglosaxon “aesthetic appreciation”: one would think the term denotes a perceptive activity, but in the literature it is used as well to refer to the…

One element in addictions is the farmed out clues, spread in the world the addict tramples in. These clues carry our memories for us, irrespective of the narrative we live through whilst encountering the clues. It is the clues which feed back onto our narratives, instead of the narratives determining how we interpret the clues….

You know how cats can’t concentrate on a task; how, whenever something moves in their direct vicinity, that something is their project … immediately? We seem to head in that direction. Whenever we sit behind the computer whatever distracts our attention makes us move towards it, inducing us to forget what we were doing in…

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,…

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…

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…

Recently, I defended the art-status of certain fairground attractions. I couldn’t begin to explain the likes of the Dutch’ De Efteling’s Villa Volta. I won’t. I also argued abundantly that perception is a bodily event, not a mere brain-event. I was thinking of J.J. Gibson’s ecological approach. And I argued that works of art seem…