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Added by: Rossen Ventzislavov
Summary: Sigman studies outrage and offense in the art context. The first important observation she makes is that, often enough, the public's recoiling from a piece of art comes with the assumption that the object of offense is interpretatively transparent. This is because in the absence of art-historical or theoretical wherewithal, we default to pre-conceptual reactions - fear of otherness, loss of our ethical bearings, low self-esteem etc. Since most historical offense-based arguments against art have made a claim that the particular work is demeaning to the public, Sigman carefully lays out the features of demeaning treatment - a mostly intentional act that treats persons as less than persons, usually in an abusive manner. On this description, very few artworks could be considered demeaning. Furthermore, as Sigman shows in her art-historical contextualization of artist Stelarc's performance work Street Suspension, public outrage could be tempered and/or extinguished through attentive engagement with problematic artworks.Silvers, Anita. From the Crooked Timber of Humanity, Beautiful Things Can Be Made2000, in: Brand, Peg Zeglin (ed.), Beauty Matters, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 197-221.-
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Added by: Hans Maes
Summary: Starting from our appreciation of cubist portraits, asks why it to commonplace for us to contemplate distorted depictions of faces with eagerness and enjoyment but to be repelled by real people whose physiognomies resemble the depicted ones. Argues that the aesthetic process that permits our attraction to portrayed human anomalies can be expanded so as to offset the devalued social positioning of real people whose physiognomic features are anomalous. Presenting an anomaly as originality rather than deviance is crucial.Comment: Useful in discussing portraiture and depiction, beauty, as well as the links between aesthetics and ethics.
Artworks to use with this text:
Pablo Picasso, Maya with a Doll (1938)
Cubist portrait of a child. Silvers interestingly compares this to a photo of a child with osteogenesis imperfecta. Useful in discussing portraiture and depiction, beauty, as well as the links between aesthetics and ethics.
Artworks to use with this text:
Pablo Picasso, Maya with a Doll (1938)
Cubist portrait of a child. Silvers interestingly compares this to a photo of a child with osteogenesis imperfecta.
Silvers, Anita. From the Crooked Timber of Humanity, Beautiful Things Should Be Made!2011, APA Newsletter, 10(2): 1-5.-
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Added by: Hans Maes, Contributed by: Christy Mag Uidhir
Summary: Follow-up essay on her 'From the Crooked Timber of Humanity, Beautiful Things Can Be Made' (note the one-word difference in the title). Adds the idea that medical professionals have at least a mild duty to cultivate aesthetic judgment of individuals with biological differences. Also makes the case that beauty is not the same thing as attractiveness or normalcy.Comment: Useful in discussing portraiture and depiction, beauty, as well as the links between aesthetics and ethics.
Artworks to use with this text:
Riva Lehrer, Susan Nussbaum (1998)
This portrait of disability activist Nussbaum invokes Picasso's famous portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906). It is discussed in Garland-Thomson. Useful in discussing portraiture and depiction, beauty, as well as the links between aesthetics and ethics.
Artworks to use with this text:
Riva Lehrer, Susan Nussbaum (1998)
This portrait of disability activist Nussbaum invokes Picasso's famous portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906). It is discussed in Garland-Thomson.
Silvers, Anita. Has her(oine’s) time now come?1990, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48 (4):365-379.-
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Christy Mag Uidhir
Abstract: Following suggestions drawn from both analytic and postmodernist sources, I shall advise revisionist artwriters to follow Fou- cault's caution against conceiving of the artists whose stories are related in arts scholarship as historical persons who originated (that is, were the origins of) their art, and who, consequently, are prior to and separate from it. From this perspective, it is problematic how references to properties external to works of art-properties like gender-function in the kind of artwriting crucial to canonical reform.Comment:
Sinclair, Rebekah. Exploding Individuals: Engaging Indigenous Logic and Decolonizing Science2020, Hypatia, 35, pp. 58–74-
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Added by: Franci MangravitiAbstract:
Despite emerging attention to Indigenous philosophies both within and outside of feminism, Indigenous logics remain relatively underexplored and underappreciated. By amplifying the voices of recent Indigenous philosophies and literatures, I seek to demonstrate that Indigenous logic is a crucial aspect of Indigenous resurgence as well as political and ethical resistance. Indigenous philosophies provide alternatives to the colonial, masculinist tendencies of classical logic in the form of paraconsistent—many-valued—logics. Specifically, when Indigenous logics embrace the possibility of true contradictions, they highlight aspects of the world rejected and ignored by classical logic and inspire a relational, decolonial imaginary. To demonstrate this, I look to biology, from which Indigenous logics are often explicitly excluded, and consider one problem that would benefit from an Indigenous, paraconsistent analysis: that of the biological individual. This article is an effort to expand the arenas in which allied feminists can responsibly take up and deploy these decolonial logics.
Comment:
available in this Blueprint
Skabelund, Aaron. A Dog’s Life: The Challenges and Possibilities of Animal2018, In Animal Biography: Re-framing Animal Lives. André Krebber and Mieke Roscher (eds.). Palgrave Macmillan-
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Added by: Björn FreterAbstract:
If one were to write a biography of a nonhuman animal, a likely candidate is Hachikō, an Akita dog who became popular in 1932 when a newspaper claimed he had been awaiting the return of his master at a Tokyo train station since his owner’s death seven years earlier. That fame led to the production of an enormous variety of source material that a historian could use to reconstruct his life’s story. This chapter uses Hachikō to explore the methodological and theoretical challenges of animal biography. It argues that two new(er) kinds of primary sources—taxidermy and photography—allow Hachikō (and some other animals) to “speak” and play a collaborative role in telling their own stories.Comment (from this Blueprint): Using Hachikō as example (an Akita dog who became popular in 1932 when it was claimed it waited for his owner at a train station for seven years) this article explores the methodological and theoretical challenges of animal biography.
Skorburg, Joshua August. Jane Addams as Experimental Philosopher2017, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26 (5): 918-938-
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Added by: Tomasz Zyglewicz, Shannon Brick, Michael GreerAbstract:
This paper argues that the activist, feminist and pragmatist Jane Addams (1860–1935) was an experimental philosopher. To defend this claim, I argue for capacious notions of both philosophical pragmatism and experimental philosophy. I begin in Section 2 with a new defence of Rose and Danks’ [‘In Defense of a Broad Conception of Experimental Philosophy’. Metaphilosophy 44, no. 4 (2013): 512–32] argument in favour of a broad conception of experimental philosophy. Koopman [‘Pragmatist Resources for Experimental Philosophy: Inquiry in Place of Intuition’. Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 1 (2012): 1–24] argues that many twentieth-century American pragmatists (e.g. Peirce, James, Dewey) can make important contributions to contemporary experimental philosophy. In Section 3, I argue that while this may be true, it is also true that under the broad conception, many of the pragmatists just were experimental philosophers. In Section 4, I argue that as a pragmatist philosopher in her own right, Jane Addams also fits the bill of an experimental philosopher, broadly construed. My central argument is that working at Hull House rather than the University of Chicago is no reason to think Addams’ methods any less rigorous or empirical, nor the problems she addressed any less philosophical. I conclude by responding to potential objections to my even broader conception of experimental philosophy, and I briefly consider how my arguments might inform contemporary feminist criticisms of experimental philosophy.Comment (from this Blueprint): In this article, Skorburg argues that Jane Addams – the 20th Century activist who worked for poor and immigrant communities in Chicago – can be appropriately understood as an early experimental philosopher. In making the argument, Skorburg distinguishes between narrow and broad senses of what it means to do x-phi, as well as a narrow and broad sense of what it means to be a pragmatist. If we accept broad sense of both x-phi, and pragmatism, Jane Addams counts as both a pragmatist, and an experimental philosopher.
Slingerland, Edward. Body and Mind in Early China: An Integrated Humanities-Science Approach2013, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 81(1): 6–55-
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Added by: Xintong WeiAbstract:
This article argues against the strong “holist” position that the early Chinese lacked any concept of mind–body dualism, and more broadly against a “neo-Orientalist” trend that portrays Chinese thought as radically different from Western thought. In the first half, it makes the case against strong mind–body holism by drawing upon traditional archeological and textual evidence. In the second, it turns to resources from the sciences, arguing that large-scale quantitative–qualitative analyses of early Chinese texts suggest that they embrace a quite vigorous form of mind–body dualism, and further that a huge body of evidence coming out of the cognitive sciences suggests that this is not at all surprising. In this section, the role that deep humanistic knowledge can, and should, play in scientific approaches to culture is also explored. The article concludes by suggesting that a mutually informed, humanities–scientific approach to religious studies is the best way for our field to move forwardComment (from this Blueprint): While many have argued that early Chinese thinkers endorsed a holistic view about the mind-body relationship, there is also evidence that they distinguish the mental from the body. One important notion in Confucian ethics is the idea of the extension of one’s mind. To cultivate one’s mind is to extend and deepen it so that it ‘can embrace the ten thousand things and the whole universe’ (Mengzi 7A4). To make sense of this idea, Chen (2017) suggests that we should interpret Confucians as endorsing substance dualism: the mental and the body as two distinct substances. He traces the idea of extension the mind in classic Confucian texts and neo-confucian writings such as that of Wang Yangming.
Sliwa, Paulina. In defense of moral testimony2012, Philosophical Studies 158 (2): 175-195.-
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Added by: Nick Novelli
Introduction: Moral testimony has been getting a bad name in the recent literature. It has been argued that while testimony is a perfectly fine source for nonmoral belief, there's something wrong with basing one's moral beliefs on it. This paper argues that the bad name is undeserved: Moral testimony isn't any more problematic than nonmoral testimony.Comment: This is a very good, easy to understand article on moral epistemology. The examples used are clear and well-presented, and it would be suitable even for students with no previous experience with moral epistemology. As the issue addressed, moral testimony, is a central one, this article would be recommended for an introductory course in moral epistemology.
Slowther, Anne. Truth-telling in health care2009, Clinical Ethics 4 (4):173-175.-
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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Simon Fokt
Abstract: This article is about the description of all the situations in which clinician find difficult to tell the truth to patients regarding their condition. Moral importance of telling the truth is recognized in both moral theory and in the practical reality of everyday living. However, empirical studies continue to show that health- care professional identify the question of truth-telling and disclosure as a source of moral and psychological discomfort in many situations. Other situation creating difficulties for clinicians are not related directly to the patient's wants or needs regarding their illness but to wider issues such as disclosure of medical error and identifying poor performance in colleagues.Comment:
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Sigman, Jill. Self-Mutilation, Interpretation and Controversial Art
2003, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 27(1): 88–114.
Comment: This is a thought-provoking text which can provide good background for a debate on controversial art. It is quite easy to read and features examples which make it accessible for beginners classes on aesthetics, art interpretation, the value of art, and modern art in general.