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91A review article on Leszek Kołakowski’s, ‘ Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing ?’ centering on Leibniz’s famous Question.
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73What is the good/ good of the form of the good?Sophia 48 (4): 413-417. 2009.‘Good’ is nothing specific but is transcendentally or generally applied over specific, and specified, ‘categories’. These ‘categories’ may be seen—at least for the purposes of this note—as under Platonic Forms. The rule that instances under a category or form need a Form to be under is valid. It may be tautological: but this is OK for rules. Not being specific, however, ‘good’ neither needs nor can have a specifying Form. So, on these grounds, the Form of the Good is otious. Any rule of the kind…Read more
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60Peter Hurd's fences and the boundaries of surrealismBritish Journal of Aesthetics 9 (1): 39-59. 1969.
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45‘The Origin of the Work of Art’: HeideggerSophia 51 (4): 465-478. 2012.Professor Max Charlesworth and I worked, at Deakin University, on a course, 'Understanding Art'. Max was interested in the Social History of Art and in art as: 'giving form to mere matter'. Here 'form' might be read as 'lucid', 'exemplary', 'beautiful' etcetera. I am an Aristotle Poetics 4 man '… imitating something with the utmost veracity in a picture', and an Aristotle and John Cage man: 'Art is the imitation of nature in the manner of operation. Or a net'. (Cage) (See Aristotle Meteorologica…Read more
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38Keywords Voltaire - Jesuit - Religious poems.
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36Antonello da Messina: l’ opera completa (review)Sophia 48 (1): 59-76. 2009.Antonello da Messina’s Annunciation with the Blessèd Virgin sola breaks with iconic convention, so inviting new interpretations of the theme. The Rome exhibition of 2006 allowed one to compare Antonello with van Eyck: Antonello seemed pre-modern. This review discusses three important essays on the Annunciation (see the last three keywords). All three perceptive essays raise theological and phenomenological issues directly related to the almost unique iconic representation which Antonello gives u…Read more
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36The shield of pallas: The virtual contemplation of the human soul: The aesthetic of fr. Arthur little S.j. (1887–1949)Sophia 44 (1): 105-124. 2005.This paper explores the extreme but well-argued-for thesis that the indirect object of an aesthetic experience of serious art is the human soul of the person having the experience. The author of the thesis was Fr. Arthur Little S.J. a mid twentieth-century Irishman, professional philosopher and philosophical popularizer. The paper treats Little’s thesis seriously: comparisons are drawn with Kant, which may be of interest even to those hostile to Little’s central assertion. Little makes a brillia…Read more
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36Book reviews (review)Sophia 42 (1): 125-126. 2003.Book Review. . ???aop.label???. doi: 10.1080/00048402.2014.929720
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34Hans Küng, Can We Save the Catholic Church!? London, William Collins, 2013, 345 pp. An Open Letter to Pope Francis? or ‘Sleepers Awake!’ (review)Sophia 53 (3): 401-410. 2014.Hans Küng is a well-known, and harsh, critic of doctrine of papal infallibility declared at Vatican I, 1870–1871. It leads—he argues—not to transparent certainty, but away from it. A propos ‘infallibility’ and the still-running scandals of child sexual abuse by members of the Catholic clergy, he writes:…While Rome no longer dares to proclaim formally infallible doctrines, it still envelopes all of its doctrinal pronouncements with an aura of infallibility, as though the Pope’s words were a direc…Read more
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32Review of Kirk varnedoe, pictures of nothing: Abstract art since Pollock (review)Sophia 46 (3): 313-314. 2007.
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31The paper concludes the argument that certain aesthetic objects conduce to a feeling of radical contingency, and to an openness to St Thomas's Third Way proof for the existence of God. Much is conceded to the late Mr Gershon Weiler's criticism of an earlier discussion. The upshot is (a) that Necessary Being as converse of radical contingency may be an Aesthetic Idea/Sublime of Kant's kind, and (b) that without the ‘I AM that I am’, it is empty. The ‘inference’ from radical contingency to Necessa…Read more
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31A Note on ‘Heidegger’s Temple: How Truth Happens when Nothing is Portrayed’, by Shane Mackinlay, in Sophia 49, No.4 : 499–507 (review)Sophia 53 (1): 145-150. 2014.He’s a terrible fellow, but at least he’s got substance.—Erich Auerbach on HeideggerMy esteemed colleague Purushottama Bilimoria drew my attention to Shane Mackinlay’s ‘Heidegger’s Temple: How Truth Happens when Nothing is Portrayed’. My friend wondered whether my piece on ‘The Origin of the Work of Art: Heidegger’ in Sophia 51, no.4 (2012): 465–478 was a reply to Mackinlay. It was not.I had not in fact read Shane Mackinlay’s elegant essay. Having read it now, I do not entirely agree with it: No…Read more
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27Listening to picturesSophia 46 (2): 193-198. 2007.A review of Peter Steele’s: The Whispering Gallery: Art into Poetry, in which Steele writes poems on and to paintings and the sculpture Black Sun (By Inge King) in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. Each work on which there is a poem is reproduced. In this book Steele writes more to the ‘contour’ of the topic-work than he did in Plenty. His poems – as ever sidenoted – are tensed between the topicality of the work of art in question, and Kant’s aesthetic which involves ‘the f…Read more
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26A review article on Leszek Kołakowski’s, ‘Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?’ centering on Leibniz’s famous Question.
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25Sophie's world: a Novel about the history of philosophySophia 34 (2): 120-121. 1995.Phoenix House, London, 1995.
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24Speaking to picturesSophia 46 (1): 79-89. 2007.A review of Peter Steele’s Plenty, a book in which each poem is faced by a colour plate of the painting or object which sparked it off. Hollander’s ecphrasis and Krieger’s ekphrasis are held in – possibly unresolvable – dialectic by Steele’s poems. The only resolution which one can find is one of wit rather than of philosophy.