Diversity Reading List

Publisher's Note: What is the difference between a performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and the symphony itself? What does it mean for musicians to be faithful to the works they perform? To answer this question, Goehr combines philosophical and historical methods of enquiry. She describes how the concept of a musical work emerged as late as 1800, and how it subsequently defined the norms, expectations, and behavior characteristic of classical musical practice. Out of the historical thesis, Goehr draws philosophical conclusions about the normative functions of concepts and ideals. She also addresses current debates amongst conductors, early-music performers, and avant-gardists.

Summary: Goldberg provides a richly illustrated historical account of the intimate connection between identity and performance art. Starting from the feminist art of the 1960's, the recognition and assertion of identity was a fundamental bid for social visibility. The next frontier was social recognition, which concerned ethnic and sexual minorities as much as it did women. The final frontier - political equality - is one that is still out of reach. Still, according to Goldberg, performance art continues to chart new territories of identification. In fact, while at the outset performance art used early feminist writing as inspiration, Goldberg recognizes a gradual reversal - today's feminists are as likely to chart new philosophical directions as they are to follow the exploratory charge of their performance art counterparts.

Summary: Goldberg sees the human body in performance art as a transmitter of erotics, gender tensions, cultural norms and political deviations. While two of the notable early works of performance art featured fully clothed male artists using naked female bodies (Yves Klein's Anthropometries of the Blue Period from 1960 and Piero Manzoni's Living Scupture from 1961), the work of female artists like Shigeko Kubota and Yoko Ono addressed the gender imbalance soon after. Goldberg sees the recognition of the body as "prime, raw material" as one of the central accomplishments of performance art. Through numerous examples she demonstrates how this notion enabled a spectrum of physical signification - from regarding the human body as a mere lump of undifferentiated flesh to capitalizing on its biological intricacies. Because of the irreducible intimacy of shared bodily experience, all creative choices along this spectrum - from the disquietingly erotic, to the anachronistically ritualistic, to the viscerally sacrificial - have affected the way we see art and the world around us.

Summary: In this brief historical note, Goldberg outlines the artistic response to the political upheavals of the 1960's. The general spirit of civic disillusionment offered the best conditions for the re-evaluation of art and its supporting social institutions. Not surprisingly, a new animosity emerged towards the objects of art and their claim to aesthetic pleasure. The farthest possible opposite, which many artists readily embraced, was found in conceptual art, which prioritized ideas, relations and experiences over traditional aesthetic categories. Goldberg sees performance art as a potent embodied application of these new artistic concerns, and thus as a rightful heir to conceptual art. Furthermore, each sub-genre of performance art - from body art to live sculpture to discussions and performative scripts - retains a conceptual core that finds its roots in that decade of strife and controversy.

Publisher's Note: Imagine that Plato came to life in the twenty-first century and embarked on a multi-city speaking tour. How would he mediate a debate between a Freudian psychoanalyst and a 'tiger mum' on how to raise the perfect child? How would he handle the host of a right-wing news program who denies there can be morality without religion? What would Plato make of Google, and of the idea that knowledge can be crowdsourced rather than reasoned out by experts? Plato at the Googleplex is acclaimed thinker Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's dazzling investigation of these conundra. With a philosopher's depth and erudition and a novelist's imagination and wit, Goldstein probes the deepest issues confronting us by allowing us to eavesdrop on Plato as he takes on the modern world; it is a stunningly original plunge into the drama of philosophy, revealing its hidden role in today's debates on religion, morality, politics and science.

Abstract: In this article, Gonzalez-Arnal challenges Susan James' embodied conception of personal identity by analysing transexual narratives. According to Gonzalez-Arnal, James' account cannot fully capture the experience of transexual persons since they describe the continuity of their personal (but also gender) identity despite significant changes in their bodies. Gonzalez-Arnal examines how other two theories of personal identity, a reductionist and a dualist one, might provide a better picture of the transexual narratives. After concluding that none the reductionist nor the dualist account does much better than an embodied view of personal identity, Gonzalez-Arnal proposes an improvement to James' view that accommodates transexual experiences, namely, acknowledging the integration of the "inner" self and other's perception of one's body in shaping one's "outer self".

Abstract:

The paper discusses two problems with Graham Priest's version of dialetheism: the thesis that one cannot be rationally obliged to both accept and reject something, and the use of a Contraction-less conditional in dealing with Curry paradoxes. Some solutions are suggested.

Abstract: This paper argues that there are powerful similarities between cognitive development in children and scientific theory change. These similarities are best explained by postulating an underlying abstract set of rules and representations that underwrite both types of cognitive abilities. In fact, science may be successful largely because it exploits powerful and flexible cognitive devices that were designed by evolution to facilitate learning in young children. Both science and cognitive development involve abstract, coherent systems of entities and rules, theories. In both cases, theories provide predictions, explanations, and interpretations. In both, theories change in characteristic ways in response to counterevidence. These ideas are illustrated by an account of children's developing understanding of the mind.

Introduction: The concept of artistic freedom, like that of academic freedom, is as potent as it is slippery. Its indeterminacy may in fact lend the concept some power, since it can be uncritically applied to many different kinds of situations involving artists and their creations. Philosopher Paul Crowther has observed that the prevailing conception of artistic freedom is essentially negative in character: it is based 'purely on the absence of ideological or conceptual restraint.' There is a widespread art-world intuition that the creative freedom of the artist should be given virtually absolute precedence in decisions about the creation, exhibition, and treatment of artworks. As a recent controversy involving Swiss artist Christoph Buchel and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) shows, the dominant conception of artistic freedom also entails freedom from financial and logistical constraints such as museum budgets and exhibition deadlines. In this particular case, the artist and his supporters argued that the museum violated his artistic freedom by attempting to display his unfinished and abandoned artwork against his wishes. As with the Tilted Arc controversy in the 1980s, this case raises provocative questions about the nature of artistic freedom as 'artistic' as it comes into conflict with the needs and interests of the institutions that pay for, exhibit, and, in Mass MoCA's case, construct the work.

Content: Govier distinguishes four kinds of slippery slope arguments - conceptual, precedential, causal and mixed - and argues that only the last kind are likely to ever be sound.