In the opening scene of Plato?s Phaedrus, the Socratic interlocutor of the same name swears on a sacred plane tree in order to compel an unwilling Socrates to speak on the subject of Eros.  Socrates subsequently both recants this speech…

This paper presents a concise exposition of the aesthetic theory of the early Soviet literary critic Aleksandr Voronsky, the editor of Red Virgin Soil who was executed in Josef Stalin?s Great Purge.  Despite an anthology of Voronsky?s writings, published for…

This paper makes the claim that in ?The Origin of the Work of Art,? Heidegger treats art as a primary phenomenon through which truth as unhiddenness is revealed at the locus of the work of art. Essays by Heidegger commentators…

Aesthetic definitions of art face difficulties in dealing with art that is nonaesthetic.  This has led some to suggest that if aesthetic theories of art are to apply to all art, then they must be disjunctive.  In such a case,…

The paper examines the importance of painting for Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Painting, as the celebration of visibility, is an important supplement to that project. It is a way of exploring the possibilities of embodied perception that does not rely on linguistic…

 More than any other artist of the modern era, Georges Seurat has been subjected to an analysis in which the genius of his works is reduced to the theoretical framework?pointillism?out of which they supposedly emerged. This paper considers three major…

By applying a few of the concepts and transformative tools presenting in many of Deleuze?s texts, Barnett Newman?s paintings receive a much-needed re-interpretation. In many of Newman?s paintings, the fields of colors and the pulsating zips that sear through these…

Upon introducing aesthetic judgment in his Critique of Judgment, Kant proceeds to focus almost exclusively on elucidating positive aesthetic judgment.  In the face of the conspicuous absence of negative judgment, scholars debate whether it is possible at all in Kant?s…

Word Count: 3,624  In ?The Ideology of Modernism,? Georg Lukács proposes the following antithesis in order to critique the aesthetic condition of modern subjectivity: ?Abstract potentiality belongs wholly to the realm of subjectivity; whereas concrete potentiality is concerned with the dialectic…

Can digital pictures qualify as photographs? The commonsensical answer is that they can. We are happy to call a picture of a scene made with a digital camera a photograph. According to William Mitchell, however, we are wrong to do…