Nicolas C. Gonzalez

While surrealist art is often thought of as some rejection of classical conceptions of beauty, we can use such approaches to analyze certain surrealist art works. By using a realist metaphysical idea of beauty and art, particularly in the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, a deeper meaning can be drawn from surrealist paintings. Far from casting away realist metaphysics, surrealist art calls us to contemplate this realism in a new way. This new paradigm is exemplified in considering the contemplative aspects of several works by Salvador Dalí; and while not comprehensive, the analysis provides an insight for scholars into how they can use this aesthetic framework in their own analyses. If this realist method, specifically designed in light of traditional and classical art, can provide a fruitful way of approaching new, innovative, and non-traditional art, it deserves a broader consideration as a window into both aesthetic and metaphysical theory.

Given recent developments in Church-State relations, it is important to discuss the relationship between liberty and morality in law. We must reconcile the classical understanding of politics as a way to make citizens virtuous with a more modern understanding of law as institutional safeguards to liberty. Legal pronouncements can lead citizens to virtue or condemn their wrongdoing without engaging in forceful punishment. The law in this way can be used as an instrument of moral education. Congressional resolutions and moral curricula serve as current examples of this. Political theorists and lawyers should reaffirm not only the just structures that constitute political offices but also the virtue required to uphold them. Without this proper moral education, citizens abandon their commitment to liberty. This solution allows us to recognize that liberty and virtue must coexist because the moral order is inextricably tied with the free order of society.

The idea that appearances provide justifications for beliefs—the principle of phenomenal conservatism—is self-evidently true. In the case of cognitive penetration, however, it seems that certain irrational etiologies of a belief may influence the epistemic quality of that belief. Susanna Siegel argues that these etiologies lead to ‘epistemic downgrade.’ Instead of providing us with a decisive objection, cognitive penetration calls for us to clarify our epistemic framework by understanding the formative parts of appearances. In doing so, the two different but inseparable ideas of sensation and intellection provide us with a basis of our appearances. These appearances, in turn, provide us with the objective evidence needed to test our judgements. Thus, the extra-sensory concepts of intellectual identification and the appearances they help form become an epistemic groundwork.