Emma Fieser

Descartes said very little about miracles in his published writings, and the subject is all but absent in scholarly literature. I address this oversight by analyzing around 30 discussions of miracles that appear in Adam and Tannery's Oeuvres de Descartes, mostly from his letters. I argue that these discussions are of four types: non-literal hyperbolic uses of the term “miracle”, scientific counterfactual uses of the term, attempts to debunk miracle claims, and discussions of genuine miracles within traditional Christianity. The theme behind all of these discussions is that we should minimize claims about miraculous events as much as possible, and accept that events occur within the ordinary course of nature, which we can understand mechanically through modern scientific inquiry. For the private Descartes, it is possible that he believed that all events with no exception follow the ordinary course of nature. But the public Descartes held that we must acknowledge that some events disrupt it, namely, miraculous events of traditional Christianity which would be unwise to dispute. In this way, Descartes’ public approach to miracles resembles that of Hobbes, Pascal and Malebranche who also deferred to the natural order of things except in rare cases.

In this paper I investigate Dewey's view of how institutions might use fine art to contribute to democracy. I first show that Dewey’s pragmatic conception of democracy is a collaborative problem-solving effort to enhance human experience. I then establish two Deweyan criteria of what I call an “institution of democratic art”. The first involves the curation of artworks with a democratic message, and the second involves the democratic process by which the institution selects those works. I then explain Dewey’s pragmatic conception of aesthetics, where art emerges as a solution to social needs and problems, and, contrary to what traditional museums do, how art should not be isolated from its original social context. I then analyze the success of two examples Dewey gives of institutions of democratic art: the Barnes Foundation and The Section of Fine Arts. I argue that they both succeeded with their art’s democratic content, although their art selection process could have been more democratic. Finally, I show how a Deweyan notion of an institution of democratic art is relevant to recent discussions of controversial public art.