Abstract: This essay discusses the mounted image of St. George slaying an emperor within the broader context of how and why early Christian images were transformed and adapted to the early Byzantine religious style. The representational framework of Arthur Danto’s philosophical system is used to tie together the threads of this research….
Abstract: The literary work of Stanisław I. Witkiewicz (Witkacy), whose world career began in the fifties of the last century, is considered today in many aspects as precursory to postmodernism. In his dramas and novels, this is manifested in the creation of characters who are internally broken up, who act like deregulated human machines and who…
Abstract: Over the last few decades, philosopher of art Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985) has gained growing attention for her wide-ranging and innovative philosophy of mind and culture. A central element in this philosophy is her distinction between sign and symbol. In order to understand the way in which Langer draws this distinction it is essential…
Abstract: In this essay I want to focus on Jean-François Lyotard’s interpretation of Marcel Duchamp’s “The Large Glass” which I confront with Duchamp’s idea of pictorial nominalism. I invoke the main thesis from Lyotard’s important essay “Freud selon Cézanne,” to draw a line between Lyotard’s analysis of artistic experience of space in Cézanne’s work and the topological conceptuality traced…
Abstract: This study is based on the assumption that literary interpretations are explicitly or implicitly influenced by some philosophical system as a general system of thought. In this way, different literary interpretations often hide more general philosophical ideas. Nevertheless, this study tries to show that the interpretation of the given work of art need not be conceived only…
Abstract: Metaphor, as is known, has been considered an expression of the creative approach of a subject to language and thinking. Metaphor enables the subject of cognition and action to establish meaning – the subject exercises semiosis not only by referring to the former convention and the situational context, but also by transforming it due to the distinct…
Abstract: In this essay, the author considers intertextuality in contemporary musical work, conceptualizing it not only as a critical category and as an artistic convention, but also as an aesthetic strategy. Listening for texts, as it were, opens the work for influences and gives it new purposes. The multiple texts, which are mutually interdependent, alter each other’s…
Abstract: This paper explores the role of music as a communicative tool between the human and the posthuman. It utilizes the theories of embodiment and performativity of Karen Barad and Deniz Peters, as well as the perspectives of Continental Realism and contemporary phenomenology (Serres, Merleau-Ponty, Harman, and Morton). The examples are drawn from a range…
Abstract: In 1870, Wilhelm Richard Wagner (1813-1883) wrote an essay to celebrate the centennial of Beethoven’s birth. In this essay Wagner made the case that music is, unlike any other object we create or are attentive to in experience, in an immediate analogical relationship with the activity of the Schopenhauerian “will” and is always enlivened. By drawing on this idea,…
Abstract: The essay presents an attempt at characterizing contemporary music’s culture by identifying a dialectical tension between “modern” and “postmodern” currents in it. After initial considerations on the manifold usages of the term “postmodernism,” five composers’ approaches will be analyzed: John Cage, Philip Glass (and other minimalists), Bernhard Lang, Mauricio Kagel and Johannes Kreidler. However different…