Preview: /Review: Brian S. Dixon, Dewey and Design: A Pragmatist Perspective for Design Research (Cham: Springer, 2020), 200 pages./ Brian S. Dixon’s book Dewey and Design provides, as the book’s subtitle declaims, a pragmatist perspective for design research. Design research is an academic field that specifically deals with the design process. Its domain-specific…
Preview: /Review: Poul Andersen, The Paradox of Being: Truth, Identity, and Images in Daoism (Leiden, The Netherlands: Harvard University Asia Center, 2019), 362 pages./ Philosophy tends to approach Daoism in degrees. One may be introduced to the Dao de Jing of Laozi and appreciate the poetic structure and appreciate the virtues of non-coercive action. When one…
Preview: Shusterman, as a philosopher who draws from the work of John Dewey, has pragmatic expectations for art. For Dewey, communing with art was an intensification of experience, that is to say being in the world. For art is full of meaning, and it is in human nature to rush to search for meanings. Experience is only…
Abstract: This article explores the relation between cinema and philosophy through the lens of interest shown by some filmmakers in the lives and works of philosophers. It begins by delving into contemporary perspectives on the relationship between philosophy and cinema. In order to assess how the constitutive dissimilarity of the two terms and the ways in which…
Abstract: Michel Foucault defined parrhesia as “the free courage by which one binds oneself in the act of telling the truth.” Could telling objective untruth also be a parrhesiastic act, insofar as it requires courage and initiates subjectivation? Climate deniers, anti-vaccinationists and other groups that delegitimize the authority of science present themselves as courageously standing up against…
Abstract: Humility is enjoying an upsurge of interest among contemporary virtue theorists. Unfortunately, many of these discussions have cast humility as inconsistent with social activism. Humility is assumed to consist of quiet and unobtrusive traits which seem inconsistent with the assertiveness and outspokenness required for social activism. Paul Bloomfield argues that this…
Abstract: The paper is an attempt at a systematic review and a tentative synthesis of the philosophically most relevant theories of voice that are to be found within the psychoanalytic tradition. Beginning with some reflections borrowed from Thomas Ogden, the author proceeds to examine two lines of thinking about voice: the ‘paternal’ line which discusses voice…
Abstract: Music, as sung and listened to, has been described in many a tale as powerful and transformative. Yet, the important question is not so much if that claim is true or whether it may be verified, but what kind of power and transformation are alluded to in those mythical and literary sources? Taking these symbolic claims and…
Abstract: Jacques Derrida’s critique of Edmund Husserl in Voice and Phenomenon targets several ways in which Husserl’s theory of signs is said to remain dependent on a model of presence, and therefore to be a form of onto-theology. In a sense this simply extends Martin Heidegger’s own critique of Husserl as failing to account for what remains obscure behind any presentation to the mind….
Preview: Ernst Cassirer rightly observed that culture, in all its manifold forms, requires expression and, accordingly, is always mediated by some means of communication. These means are extremely diverse – from simple gestures and face expressions or drawings on the stone walls to sounds combined in sophisticated ways into musical compositions, subtle languages of literature, carefully…