Abstract Gregory Currie’s claim that art manifests artists’ skilful activity is given sympathetic examination. The scope of the claim is considered, as well as the sense in which it invokes a personal connection to the artist. Currie’s information-focused account of the value of manifestation profiles is extended to encompass engagement with art that may not share information bearing accepted value. The significance of sheer connection to the object worked on by the artist is explored, with reference to Benjaminian aura and pressing Currie’s comparison of humanly and mechanically made copies.
Abstract Is there anything the individual ought to do in light of the climate catastrophe and insufficient political leadership in addressing it? I argue that we can find in Kant a collectivist conception of individual obligation that provides an answer: each of us, as an individual, has climate obligations, but the nature of these obligations is made determinate only with reference to the collective of which the individual is a part. I suggest that Kant’s collectivism sheds light on the relations between the individual and the collective and the ethical and political in the climate crisis.
Abstract Pictures manifest the skills of their makers. Offering only a partial characterization of that idea, I show how it bears on the differences between originals and copies and between paintings and photographs, how it connects the visible appearances of pictures with their histories, what it suggests about the origin of our aesthetic sense, and about the role of agency in art criticism.
Contemporary philosophical orthodoxy treats names as universally accessible, arbitrary tags that track referents across space, time and possibility. I argue that paradigmatic nicknames, like ‘Shrimpy’, ‘Crooked Hillary’ and ‘Bubblegum’, do track referents, but are marked by contrast with proper names by enforcing restrictions on who they can be used by and with, and when they can be used; and by framing their referents under affectively valenced social identities. While proper names can also carry social information, it is part of nicknames’ characteristic function to manage face, in ways that an adequate overall theory of meaning needs to explain.
This paper presents a new phenomenology of love, with a fresh analysis of its intentional and temporal structures and a clarification of its affective, axiological and conative bases. The paper begins by questioning the habitual manner of classifying emotions into oppositional pairs of positive and negative ones. The second part focuses on the intentional and temporal structures of love. It demonstrates that love is a personal emotion in the specific sense that it draws from the very core of the intentional subject and is conatively anchored in this core. On the basis of this analysis, the paper argues that the obligation to care for the loved one is transitive: love demands that the lover cares not just for her beloved but also for the loves of her beloved. Utilizing these results, the third part proceeds to study the role of love in ethics. In this interest it develops a novel interpretation of the ‘commandment of love’.
