Korsgaard, Christine M.. Facing the Animal You See in the Mirror
2009, The Harvard Review of Philosophy 16(1): 4-9.
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Added by: Rochelle DuFordIntroduction: What does it mean to be an animal? About 600 million years ago, certain organic life forms on this planet began to wake up, and to become aware of their surroundings. They found themselves to be hungry, and to be the target of unwelcome interest on the part of others who were hungry. And for both of these reasons, they had to work to take care of themselves. To prod them to do that, nature made many of them capable of pain, and of terror. But some of them were also capable of the opposite feelings of pleasure and security. And out of these various feelings grew feelings of interest and boredom, of grief and joy, of family attachment and hostility to outsiders. These life forms are constructed in such a way that they cannot help but struggle to stay alive, and perhaps even to care about their lives. And a few of them know themselves to be, in spite of that, ephemeral beings. The organic life forms sharing this strange evolutionary adventure are the animals, and you and I are among them. This gives rise to a moral question: How should we interact with the others?Comment: A useful introduction to the idea of human exceptionalism and logocentrism. Korsgaard presents a clear and accessible argument by analogy for respecting/caring for non-human animals based on degrees of self-consciousness. This would make a good introductory text in any class that covers the relationship of humans to non-human animals.Korsgaard, Christine M.. Creating the Kingdom of Ends1996, Cambridge University Press
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Jojanneke VanderveenPublisher's Note: Christine Korsgaard has become one of the leading interpreters of Kant's moral philosophy. She is identified with a small group of philosophers who are intent on producing a version of Kant's moral philosophy that is at once sensitive to its historical roots while revealing its particular relevance to contemporary problems. She rejects the traditional picture of Kant's ethics as a cold vision of the moral life which emphasises duty at the expense of love and value. Rather, Kant's work is seen as providing a resource for addressing not only the metaphysics of morals, but also for tackling practical questions about personal relations, politics, and everyday human interaction. This collection contains some of the finest current work on Kant's ethics and will command the attention of all those involved in teaching and studying moral theory.Comment: Very important contemporary defense of Kantian ethics. In an ethics/deontology class, Korsgaard should not be missed.Korsmeyer, Carolyn. The Magnetism of Disgust2010, In: Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics. New York: Oxford University Press. 113-136.
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Added by: Rossen VentzislavovSummary: Korsmeyer's account of disgust and the role it plays in art appreciation starts with a treatment of what she calls the "paradox of aversion" - the apparent incompatibility between humans' disposition to seek pleasure and their frequent voluntary exposure to unpleasant and even painful art-related experiences. Korsmeyer's provisional solution to the paradox is based on the realization that pleasure is not an emotion but rather "an intense absorption in an object that induces us to continue rather than halt an experience." This opens the possibility that the pleasure we take from a work of art retains a cognitive element such that we gain unique insight from what would, outside of the art context, have given us pain. Korsmeyer speaks of an "aesthetic conversion" whereby disgust and fear are transfigured into vehicles of absorption, and thus become aesthetically pleasurable. Since disgust and its magnetic force are of material interest to performance artists and their critics, Korsmeyer's treatment of the paradox of aversion helps re-contextualize an important art historical issue.Comment: Interesting to teach following classes on the paradox of horror, and perhaps even alongside (some of) Noel Carroll's writings on horror.Korsmeyer, Carolyn. Real Old Things2016, Journal of Aesthetics 56(3): 219-31.
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Added by: Erich Hatala MatthesSummary: Korsmeyer argues that although genuineness (or authenticity) is not a perceptual property, it is still an aesthetically relevant property for cultural artifacts, an argument that she locates in the relationship between age and the sense of touch. She thus offers a potential explanation for a common ntuition about the nature and value of authenticity in the Western tradition.Comment: This is the most recent in a series of articles by Korsmeyer on the aesthetics of age and genuineness. It builds on the previous work and focuses on cultural artifacts in particular, but instructors interested in, for instance, the moral significance of authentic artifacts associated with historical injusitces might prefer some of the earlier articles in this series (such as her "Staying in Touch"). Her account also raises questions about how attributions of authenticity might affect aesthetic experience, with potential implications for discussion of authenticity in appropriation debates, though these are not explicitly explored in the article.Korsmeyer, Carolyn. Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction2004, London: Psychology Press.
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Added by: Simon FoktPublisher's note: Feminist approaches to art are extremely influential and widely studied across a variety of disciplines, including art theory, cultural and visual studies, and philosophy. Gender and Aesthetics is an introduction to the major theories and thinkers within art and aesthetics from a philosophical perspective, carefully introducing and examining the role that gender plays in forming ideas about art. It is ideal for anyone coming to the topic for the first time. Organized thematically, the book introduces in clear language the most important topics within feminist aesthetics:
- Why were there so few women painters?
- Art, pleasure and beauty
- Music, literature and painting
- The role of gender in taste and food
- What is art and who is an artist?
- Disgust and the sublime.
Comment: Chapter 5 is particularly useful in teaching on art theories. It offers an interesting review of art theories from a feminist perspective, noting the gendered character of existing definitions. It may be good to teach it alongside Brand's ‘Glaring Omissions in Traditional Theories of Art’ to best bring out these issues. Secondly, it inspires the question: given the problematic exclusionary character of art history and theory, would it not be better if we did not have a definition of art which we can use to exclude? The value of the feminist art discussed in the chapter lies largely in its ability to expose the biases present in the artworld and expressed in theories of art. Thus the fact that artists tend to create works which challenge existing theories might be in fact desirable.Korsmeyer, Carolyn. Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy1999, Cornell University Press.-
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Christy Mag UidhirPublisher's Note: Taste, perhaps the most intimate of the five senses, has traditionally been considered beneath the concern of philosophy, too bound to the body, too personal and idiosyncratic. Yet, in addition to providing physical pleasure, eating and drinking bear symbolic and aesthetic value in human experience, and they continually inspire writers and artists.In Making Sense of Taste, Carolyn Korsmeyer explains how taste came to occupy so low a place in the hierarchy of senses and why it is deserving of greater philosophical respect and attention. Korsmeyer begins with the Greek thinkers who classified taste as an inferior, bodily sense; she then traces the parallels between notions of aesthetic and gustatory taste that were explored in the formation of modern aesthetic theories. She presents scientific views of how taste actually works and identifies multiple components of taste experiences. Turning to taste's objects?food and drink?she looks at the different meanings they convey in art and literature as well as in ordinary human life and proposes an approach to the aesthetic value of taste that recognizes the representational and expressive roles of food. Korsmeyer's consideration of art encompasses works that employ food in contexts sacred and profane, that seek to whet the appetite and to keep it at bay; her selection of literary vignettes ranges from narratives of macabre devouring to stories of communities forged by shared eating.Comment:Korsmeyer, Carolyn. Pleasure: Reflections on aesthetics and feminism1993, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (2):199-206.
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Christy Mag UidhirIntroduction: For some time my own interests in aesthetics and in feminism appeared to run parallel yet mutually exclusive courses, but it seems to me now that philosophical aesthetics and feminist views of culture have begun to dovetail and to share certain concerns and orientations. Philo sophical aesthetics is not by and large taking note of this, however, and in the first section of this essay I argue that feminist perspectives pro vide a vantage from which the appearance of breakdown in unified theorizing can be seen to have an underlying order and pattern.2 Thus at first I shall emphasize a potential harmony be tween feminist critiques and recent directions in aesthetics. Then in the second section I shall focus on one of the subjects that has all but dropped from view in the reshuffling of the oretic concerns: aesthetic appreciation or plea sure. I argue that this concept is urgently in need of reexamination, a need that is especially evi dent when we consider feminist alternatives to the traditional idea of aesthetic pleasure.Comment:Korsmeyer, Carolyn. Taste as Sense and as Sensibility1997, Philosophical Topics 25 (1):201-230.
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Christy Mag UidhirIntroduction: Philosophers occasionally take note of the degree to which their theories make use of metaphoric language. Plato may have been the first to call attention to the heuristic use of sensory images to illuminate the world of abstractions, but twentieth-century thinkers have been particulalry reflective on the subject. Metaphors, remarks Iris Murdoch, are "fundamental forms of our awareness of our condition: metaphors of space, metaphors of movement, metaphors of vision." Philosophical systems, she believes, can often be understood as explorations of centrally important images. Indeed, it seems to her "impossible to discuss certain kinds of concepts without resort to metaphor, since the concepts are themselves deeply metaphorical, and cannot be analyzed into non-metaphorical components without a loss of substance." Mark Johnson agrees and obeserves that recent discoveries in cognitive science provide empirical evidence for claims about metaphor that previously were largely intuitive, namely, that "metaphor is not merely a linguistic phenomenon, but more fundamentallly, a conceptual and experiential process that structures our world.Comment:Kouri Kissel, Teresa, Stewart Shapiro. Classical Logic2018, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
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Added by: Berta GrimauSummary: This article provides the basics of a typical logic, sometimes called 'classical elementary logic' or 'classical first-order logic', in a rigorous yet accessible manner. Section 2 develops a formal language, with a syntax and grammar. Section 3 sets up a deductive system for the language, in the spirit of natural deduction. Section 4 provides a model-theoretic semantics. Section 5 turns to the relationships between the deductive system and the semantics, and in particular, the relationship between derivability and validity. The authors show that an argument is derivable only if it is valid (soundness). Then they establish a converse: that an argument is valid only if it is derivable (completeness). They also briefly indicate other features of the logic, some of which are corollaries to soundness and completeness. The final section, Section 6, is devoted to a brief examination of the philosophical position that classical logic is 'the one right logic'.Comment: This article introduces all the necessary tools in order to understand both the proof-theoretic and the model-theoretic aspects of first-order classical logical consequence. As such it can be used as a main reading in an introductory logic course covering classical first-order logic (assuming the students will have already looked at classical propositional logic). Moreover, the article covers some metatheoretic results (soundness, completeness, compactness, upward and downward Löwenheim-Skolem), which makes it suitable as a reading for a slightly more advanced course in logic. Finally, the article includes a brief incursion into the topic of logical pluralism. This makes it suitable to be used in a course on non-classical logics with an introduction module on classical logic.Kouri Kissel, Teresa. Logical Pluralism from a Pragmatic Perspective2018, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (3):578-591
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Added by: Franci MangravitiAbstract:
This paper presents a new view of logical pluralism. This pluralism takes into account how the logical connectives shift, depending on the context in which they occur. Using the Question-Under-Discussion Framework as formulated by Craige Roberts, I identify the contextual factor that is responsible for this shift. I then provide an account of the meanings of the logical connectives which can accommodate this factor. Finally, I suggest that this new pluralism has a certain Carnapian flavour. Questions about the meanings of the connectives or the best logic outside of a specified context are not legitimate questions.
Comment: Can serve as an example of logical pluralism in any philosophy of logic course. Familiarity with the pluralisms of Shapiro and Carnap is helpful for comparison, but is not technically required.Can’t find it?Contribute the texts you think should be here and we’ll add them soon!
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