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The moral weight of art in SchopenhauerIn David Bather Woods & Timothy Stoll (eds.), The Schopenhauerian mind, Routledge. 2023.
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34This book articulates and defends an interpretation of Schopenhauer's ethics as an original and credible contribution to the history of ethics. It presents Schopenhauer's ethics of compassion in direct tension with his resignationism and aims to show surprising continuities with Kant's ethics.
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43Was Schopenhauer a Kantian Ethicist?International Journal of Philosophical Studies 28 (2): 168-187. 2020.ABSTRACTCommentators have generally seen the compassionate person as a second-rate character vis-à-vis the ascetic ‘saint’ who denies the will-to-life and resigns from willing altogether in Schopen...
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Hedwig Dohm (1831-1919)In Kristin Gjesdal (ed.), The Oxford handbook of nineteenth-century women philosophers in the German tradition, Oxford University Press. 2023.
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8Vija Celmins: Nature at Art's EndIn Lydia Goehr & Jonathan Gilmore (eds.), A Companion to Arthur C. Danto, Wiley. 2021.Danto's end of art thesis as well as his partial definition of art as “embodied meaning” have sparked much controversy, but I shall not quarrel with either here. Rather, my aim is to suggest that there was another distinct chapter in the grand narrative described by Danto, one taking place right under his nose. This was an environmental chapter, crystallized most forcefully in my view by the work of Latvian‐American artist Vija Celmins (1938‐ ), especially by her work To Fix the Image in Memory …Read more
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12Poetic Intuition and the Bounds of Sense: Metaphor and Metonymy in Schopenhauer's PhilosophyIn Robert Stern, Alex Neill & Christopher Janaway (eds.), Better Consciousness, Wiley‐blackwell. 2010-02-19.This chapter contains sections titled: The Kantian Symbol The Schopenhauerian Metaphor? The Schopenhauerian Metonymy Gracián's Poetics and Schopenhauer as Poetic Metaphysician Conclusion References.
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10Why Life Rather than Death?In Tom Sparrow & Jacob Graham (eds.), True Detective and Philosophy, Wiley. 2017.Rustin Cohle, the protagonist of the first season of True Detective, declares that he is "in philosophical terms, a pessimist". The doctrine of "pessimism" espoused by Rust is remarkably similar to the view adumbrated by Arthur Schopenhauer, who holds that conscious life (both human and nonhuman animal) involves a tremendous amount of suffering that is essentially built into the structure of the world and there is no Creator (providential or otherwise) to redeem all of this suffering, by, say, p…Read more
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17Kehinde Wiley at the National Gallery: The PreludeBritish Journal of Aesthetics 63 (4): 601-605. 2023.Kehinde Wiley became a household name and widely recognized as one of the most important living American artists with the 2018 unveiling of his official Smithso.
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Poetic intuition and the bounds of sense: metaphor and metonymy in Schopenhauer's philosophyIn Alex Neill & Christopher Janaway (eds.), Better Consciousness: Schopenhauer's Philosophy of Value, Wiley-blackwell. 2009.
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27Aesthetics: a comprehensive anthology (edited book)Wiley. 2020.The study of aesthetics concerns the arts broadly conceived, as well as the nature of aesthetic experience, which includes our responses to beauty, sublimity, ugliness, and other such qualities found in works of art, nature, the built-environment and in the course of everyday life. Although the term "aesthetics" to denote this area of study goes back only to the eighteenth century with the work of Alexander Baumgarten, the field has had a long and distinguished history dating back to classical a…Read more
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16The Environmental Presence of Ruins: On Zoltán Somhegyi’s Reviewing the Past: The Presence of Ruins (review)Philosophia 50 (4): 1537-1551. 2022.Zoltán Somhegyi’s Reviewing the Past: The Presence of Ruins takes the reader on a captivating journey through the phenomenon of ruins. It is a remarkable achievement that, I believe, only someone like Somhegyi--a philosophical aesthetician as well as an art historian, and one who has studied ruins on a global scale--could pull off so brilliantly.What I focus on in this essay, however, is on the side of ruins that I believe gets shorter shrift in this book, namely, the environmental side. First, …Read more
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38Introduction to “The Good, the Beautiful, the Green: Environmentalism and Aesthetics”Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 76 (4): 391-397. 2018.In most circles today, it is taken to be an uncontroversial fact that human beings are having an impact on Earth's climate, and one that is exceedingly worrisom.
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17Kant, Celmins and Art after the End of ArtCon-Textos Kantianos 1 (12): 209-225. 2020.One typically thinks of the relevance of Kant’s aesthetic theory to Western art in terms of Modernism, thanks in large part to the work of eminent critic and art historian Clement Greenberg. Yet, thinking of Kant’s legacy for contemporary art as inhering exclusively in “Kantian formalism” obscures a great deal of Kant’s aesthetic theory. In his last book, Arthur Danto suggested just this point, urging us to enlarge our appreciation of Kant’s aesthetic theory and its relevance to contemporary art…Read more
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17Advantages and Disadvantages of Pop-Cultural Artifacts for Exploring Bioethical IssuesIn Arno Görgen, German Alfonso Nunez & Heiner Fangerau (eds.), Handbook of Popular Culture and Biomedicine: Knowledge in the Life Sciences as Cultural Artefact, Springer Verlag. pp. 57-70. 2018.For the past several decades, popular culture, especially feature films and television, has been utilized with increasing frequency in bioethics teaching and reflection. This seems quite fitting, for, in the words of cultural historian and film critic Leo Braudy, even more than standard newspaper articles and other analytical texts, popular culture constitutes a “sounding board or lightning rod for deep-rooted audience concerns” Refiguring American film genres. University of California Press, Be…Read more
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25Call for Papers The Good, the Beautiful, the Green: Environmentalism and AestheticsJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 75 (2): 113-113. 2017.
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77What Is the Monumental?Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 79 (2): 145-160. 2021.The aesthetic category of the sublime has been theorized (especially in the Kantian tradition) as integrally intertwined with the moral. Paradigmatic experiences of the sublime, such as gazing up at the starry night sky, or out at a storm-whipped sea, lead in a moral or religious direction depending on the cognitive stock brought to the experience, since they typically involve a feeling of awe and reflection on the peculiar situation of the human being in nature. The monumental is a similar aest…Read more
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137A Two-Tiered Theory of the SublimeBritish Journal of Aesthetics 61 (2): 123-143. 2021.By the start of the twenty-first century, the notion of ‘the sublime’ had come to seem incoherent. In the last ten years or so considerable light has been shed by empirical psychologists on a related notion of ‘awe’, and a fruitful dialogue between aestheticians and empirical psychologists has ensued. It is the aim of this paper to synthesize these advances and to offer what I call a ‘two-tiered’ theory of the sublime that shows it to be a coherent aesthetic category. On this theory, sublime exp…Read more
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24Compassió o renúncia? «Aquesta» és la qüestió de l’ètica de SchopenhauerEnrahonar: Quaderns de Filosofía 55 51-69. 2015.https://revistes.uab.cat/enrahonar/article/view/v55-shapshay-ferrell.
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9Subtle Scripture for an Invisible ChurchThe Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 1 158-165. 1998.I argue for an interpretation of Kant's aesthetics whereby the experience of the beautiful plays the same functional role in the invisible church of natural religion as Scripture does for the visible churches of ecclesiastical religions. Thus, I contend, the links that Kant himself implies between the aesthetic and the moral are much stronger than generally portrayed by commentators. Indeed, for Kant, experience of the beautiful may be necessary in order to found what Kant views as the final end…Read more
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16Danto as EducatorPhilosophy Today 61 (2): 339-349. 2017.This essay offers a discussion of how Arthur Danto educated me philosophically both through his personal example and through his work. Along the way, I detail what I take to be his most important lesson: to engage deeply and seriously with the subject of one’s philosophy, in his case predominantly art, and thus always to retain contact with the world outside of philosophy. Danto modeled a truly engaged philosopher of art, attending to history, actual practices and contemporary currents, without …Read more
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10Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook (edited book)Palgrave Macmillan. 2017.This comprehensive Handbook offers a leading-edge yet accessible guide to the most important facets of Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophical system, the last true system of German philosophy. Written by a diverse, international and interdisciplinary group of eminent and up-and-coming scholars, each of the 28 chapters in this Handbook includes an authoritative exposition of different viewpoints as well as arguing for a particular thesis. Authors also put Schopenhauer's ideas into historical context…Read more
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29Danto as EducatorPhilosophy Today 61 (2). 2017.This essay offers a discussion of how Arthur Danto educated me philosophically both through his personal example and through his work. Along the way, I detail what I take to be his most important lesson: to engage deeply and seriously with the subject of one’s philosophy, in his case predominantly art, and thus always to retain contact with the world outside of philosophy. Danto modeled a truly engaged philosopher of art, attending to history, actual practices and contemporary currents, without …Read more
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Aesthetic and Moral Deliberation: A Kantian-Schopenhauerian Approach to an Understanding of the Relations Between Art and MoralityDissertation, Columbia University. 2001.When we engage seriously with a work of art, we "walk around it," metaphorically and often quite literally. Analogously, when we seek to act responsibly in relation to other persons, we imagine the impact our action might have on them, and try to see things from their points of view. Metaphorically speaking, this process is "walking around an action." ;In this dissertation, I investigate the complex process of serious interaction with a work of art, and the conditions necessary for this process …Read more
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41The Human Being in the Age of Mechanical ReproductionJournal of Philosophical Research 30 (9999): 119-133. 2005.
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68Poetic intuition and the Bounds of sense: Metaphor and metonymy in Schopenhauer's philosophyEuropean Journal of Philosophy 16 (2): 211-229. 2008.No Abstract
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29Children's rights and children's healthJournal of Social Philosophy 39 (4): 583-605. 2008.No Abstract
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35Contemplating art: Essays in aesthetics - by Jerrold LevinsonPhilosophical Books 49 (1): 89-93. 2008.
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13" He Just Got OldIn Sandra Shapshay (ed.), Bioethics at the movies, Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 205. 2009.
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34Lifting the Genetic Veil of IgnoranceIn Bioethics at the movies, Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 87. 2009.
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75Bioethics at the movies (edited book)Johns Hopkins University Press. 2009.Bioethics at the Movies explores the ways in which popular films engage basic bioethical concepts and concerns. Twenty philosophically grounded essays use cinematic tools such as character and plot development, scene-setting, and narrative-framing to demonstrate a range of principles and topics in contemporary medical ethics. The first section plumbs popular and bioethical thought on birth, abortion, genetic selection, and personhood through several films, including The Cider House Rules, Citize…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Value Theory |
History of Western Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Aesthetics |
19th Century Philosophy |
Value Theory |
History of Western Philosophy |