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131Cellular, or mobile phones are great: they allow people to communicate over long distances whenever and wherever they are, and instantaneously at that when the one called is wearing one too. Having said that, though, it must immediately be added that they, also, have a complex disadvantage, and it is one we are hard pushed to understand. In fact, due to its complexity people simply tend to neglect it, even though everyone in his right mind has had experience with it. Now Walter Benjamin defined a…Read more
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118Inertie hoort bij Kunst als de Dood bij het LevenIn Kabinet: Inertie & Kunst (even pages Russian translation), . pp. 238-263. 2008.In this article I propose to understand inertia in art as a “disposition to meaning”. I compare inertia in art with that of a face of a person recently deceased. To acquaintances, i.e. to family and friends, it holds a promise of memories (of the deceased); to all the others the corpse offers the possibility of a projection of meanings. Art is made of plain, or extra-ordinary stuff, which is turned into artistic material. The artist is to bring the inert potency of stuff to artistic life, and to tu…Read more
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116Wachten op beeld - De tragische retorica van Iconische foto’sAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 105 (1): 40-54. 2013.Iconic photographs are visual arguments depicting an, often dramatic, particular situation showing victims of disasters. Spectators watching the photo of the particular situation, empathise with it, and project the feelings evoked onto the events that form the context for the scene in the picture. This mobilises them into political action. In the process, however, the depicted personal misery is perused to exemplify the larger events. The tragedy of iconic photographs is analysed not as the mise…Read more
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101Filosofie en subjectiviteitAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 108 (4): 545-549. 2016.Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.
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86Esthiek: Kunst en morele afstemmingAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 115 (4): 409-422. 2023.Aesthics: Art and moral attuning. Art can help us understand everyday moral deliberation. Better perhaps than ethics. People don’t just act randomly in moral situations nor do they argue internally about which ethical principle to follow before deciding what to do. We built our moral sensitivity whilst living our lives, adhering to aesthetic norms of interaction. Regular engagement with works of art educates our moral sensitivity.
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85De toekomst van kunstAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 105 (3): 135-147. 2013.A philosophical analysis of the future of art must explicate art’s nature, as well as discuss the historical nature of art practice. Only so can one explain those contemporary developments in art which have led many people to doubt whether art even has a future. Arguably, art practice as we know it started with the installing of the modern system of the fine arts. I explain the pragmatics of art so understood, and suggest that we can define art, internally. We need not resort to a nominalist app…Read more
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81Mathematical Beauty and Perceptual PresencePhilosophical Investigations 34 (3): 249-267. 2011.This paper discusses the viability of claims of mathematical beauty, asking whether mathematical beauty, if indeed there is such a thing, should be conceived of as a sub-variety of the more commonplace kinds of beauty: natural, artistic and human beauty; or, rather, as a substantive variety in its own right. If the latter, then, per the argument, it does not show itself in perceptual awareness – because perceptual presence is what characterises the commonplace kinds of beauty, and mathematical b…Read more
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79Ethical Autonomism. The Work of Art as a Moral AgentContemporary Aesthetics 2. 2004.Much contemporary art seems morally out of control. Yet, philosophers seem to have trouble finding the right way to morally evaluate works of art. The debate between autonomists and moralists, I argue, has turned into a stalemate due to two mistaken assumptions. Against these assumptions, I argue that the moral nature of a work's contents does not transfer to the work and that, if we are to morally evaluate works we should try to conceive of them as moral agents. Ethical autonomism holds that ar…Read more
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72Kant’s Regulative Principle of Aesthetic Excellence: The Ideal Aesthetic ExperienceKant Studien 86 (3): 331-345. 1995.It is rather intriguing that we will often try to persuade people of what we find beautiful, even though we do not believe that they may subsequently base their judgement of taste on our testimony. Typically, we think that the experience of beauty is such that we cannot leave it to others to be had. Moreover, we are often aware of the contingency of our own judgements’ foundation in our own experience. Nevertheless, we do think that certain aesthetic, evaluative conceptions do relate to specific…Read more
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64Kuipers over comparatief realismeAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 100 (3): 203-205. 2008.
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51My pleasure in being here, at the Studiecentrum Soeterbeeck, to discuss the book Roger Scruton wrote on beauty, is twofold. It so happens that I am finishing a book on facial expression and facial beauty, and the chapter I sent to Roger to request his comments, resurfaced unopened in my own mail box, last week. Apparently something went wrong in the mail. Today I might get some of those comments. Secondly, reading Roger’s book, an impression of a kindred spirit has stuck with me throughout.1) Som…Read more
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47Hearing Musicians Making Music: A Critique of Roger Scruton on Acousmatic ExperienceJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70 (2): 223-230. 2012.
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41Expression as Success. The Psychological Reality of Musical PerformanceEstetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 45 (1): 24-40. 2008.Roger Scruton’s ontology of sound is found wanting on two counts. Scruton removes from music the importance of the performer’s manipulating of his instrument. This misconceives the phenomenology of hearing and, as a consequence, impoverishes our understanding of music. I argue that the musician’s manipulations can be heard in the music; and, in a discussion of notions developed by Richard Wollheim and Jerrold Levinson, that these manipulations have psychological reality, and that it is this psyc…Read more
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17Artistic Truth: Aesthetics, Discourse, and Imaginative DisclosureBritish Journal of Aesthetics 46 (2): 217-219. 2006.
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16Een politieke rol voor kunst?Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 110 (2): 197-202. 2018.Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.
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15Hearing Musicians Making Music: A Critique of Roger Scruton on Acousmatic ExperienceJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70 (2): 223-230. 2012.
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14Germs: A Memoir of ChildhoodBritish Journal of Aesthetics 62 (4): 699-702. 2022.I.What are the genre characteristics of an autobiography? Is it journalism about anecdotes from the writer’s life? Or is it a personal fiction based on truthful memories that conveys the nature and logic of the writer’s youth? Biographies certainly differ from philosophical texts with their argumentative strategies. How was I to read Germs? If I just read on, like one reads a novel, I might overlook details relevant to the life recounted. Reading intently, in contrast—like you would a philosophy…Read more
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14Art and Human InteractionAesthetic Investigations 5 (1). 2021.In this Editor’s column I discuss certain fruits and limits of applying the notion of ‘performance’ to works of art. Art works can be viewed as perfor- mances, the public furnishing of works’ final form. Concerts can be viewed as performances of a work scored by someone else, the composer, but not all arts are double in this sense. Moreover, art can be viewed as mirroring the psychological, phenomenological and rhetorical aspects of human interaction, which exemplify the way people scrutinise mo…Read more
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13Grounding Ethics in AestheticsAesthetic Investigations 4 (2). 2021.In this Editor’s column I suggest a more modern aesthetics, in order to fill in some of the promise the current Special Issue on The Birth of the Discipline has in store for us. I base my suggestion more on Kant and Aristotle, though.
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12On Exemplary Art as the Symbol of Morality. Making Sense of Kant's Ideal of BeautyIn Ralph Schumacher, Rolf-Peter Horstmann & Volker Gerhardt (eds.), Kant Und Die Berliner Aufklärung: Akten des Ix. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses. Bd. I: Hauptvorträge. Bd. Ii: Sektionen I-V. Bd. Iii: Sektionen Vi-X: Bd. Iv: Sektionen Xi-Xiv. Bd. V: Sektionen Xv-Xviii, De Gruyter. pp. 553-561. 2001.
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8Hegel's Dialectics Was Geared To Art: HE HAD NO BUSINESS >ENDING< ITHegel-Jahrbuch 2 (1): 68-74. 2000.
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7Richard Wollheim on the Art of Painting: Art as Representation and Expression (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2001.A collection of essays on Wollheim's philosophy of art; includes a response from Wollheim himself.
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5Richard Wollheim on the Art of Painting: Art as Representation and Expression (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2001.Richard Wollheim is one of the dominant figures in the philosophy of art, whose work has shown not only how paintings create their effects but why they remain important to us. His influential writings have focused on two core, interrelated questions: how do paintings depict? And how do they express feelings? In this collection of essays a distinguished group of thinkers in the fields of art history and philosophical aesthetics offers a critical assessment of Wollheim's theory of art. Among the t…Read more
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3Stephen Mulhall, On Being in the World. Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 11 (5): 339-342. 1991.
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3What They See is What We Get in Film: Reality Tells the FictionAesthetic Investigations 3. 2020.Robert Bresson's cinematography allows him to show the affordances that things and situations have for characters in a film. By intimating these affordances, Bresson authentically presents the affordances as well as the characters. The fact that Bresson views and conceives of his `actors' as models, rather than as malleable actors, illustrates, again, an effort to authentically film real persons in real situations. Recognising people authentically is done in real-life through a reciprocal gaze, …Read more
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2Research as Scrutiny. Our most demanding issues are aesthetic issuesAesthetic Investigations 3. 2020.Certain art theorists think of what artists do as artistic research. But research is fact- and theory-driven, whereas when a film is being made what directors do is scrutinise what they see happening before their eyes. This scrutiny is guided by aesthetic judgement, individual style, and subjective intuition. It makes good sense to investigate the research that went on before a work was made, and to look at the theoretical implications of that work. But the most important work to be done is our …Read more
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1De ontologische drogreden in de analytische estheticaAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 94 (2): 109-123. 2002.
Areas of Specialization
Aesthetics |
Perception |
History of Aesthetics |
Philosophy of Film |
Areas of Interest
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Aesthetics |
Philosophy of Film |
Philosophy of Mind |
Human Beings |
History of Aesthetics |
Persons |
Realism and Anti-Realism |
Epistemology |