Many Enlightenment philosophers, such as G.W. Leibniz (1646-1716) and Christian Wolff (1679-1754), had argued aesthetic experience was potentially intellectual. They argued that the sole difference between sensation and thought is that thought is distinct and sensation is confused. In order… Read more ›
The Danish proto-existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) put forth an intriguing account of the demonic in chapter 4 of his eccentric work The Concept of Anxiety (see the Princeton edition translated by the Hongs). Kierkegaard claims the demonic person has “anxiety about the… Read more ›
The surrealists (go here for a helpful overview) were very influenced by Freud’s naturalistic approach to the mind as well as occult phenomenon. But they tried to distance themselves from both influences by, on the one hand, trying to probe the… Read more ›
In the last post I defined the uncanny as follows: The uncanny is an unsettling, even terrifying, experience of the familiar suddenly becoming unfamiliar at the same time (or the unfamiliar suddenly becoming familiar at the same time). The experience… Read more ›
The aesthetic category of the uncanny became popular in late romanticism (late 1800s), Gothic fiction, and a variety of art movements including surrealism, dadaism, and symbolism. This category is just as illuminating as the beautiful and the sublime, but it is… Read more ›
Romanticism was a philosophical, literary, and artistic movement that began in the late 1700s and ended at the end of the 1800s.[1] The movement was essentially a reaction to the Enlightenment movement and was therefore essentially a reaction to (1)… Read more ›
What does it mean to ask someone for forgiveness? Jesus said: “Father forgive them for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). This request, by yoking together forgiveness and ignorance, seems to contradict a necessary condition for forgiveness, namely,… Read more ›
The late Professor Michael Bobkoff passionately taught Honors Holocaust Studies at Westchester Community College in New York for many years. During his last semester (Spring 2012) he gave a talk about the challenges he faced over the years in teaching… Read more ›
Humans are able to think and speak about the world around them. What are the limits of this relationship between our reason (logos) and the things that reason encounters (being)? Nicholas Denyer, in his book Language, Thought, and Falsehood in… Read more ›
In Japanese aesthetics yūgen refers to those moments when we feel as if we have had a partial glimpse into a hidden reality. Such a glimpse is felt to be profoundly mysterious. It is also experienced as beautiful. According to… Read more ›
In his dialogue On Free Choice of the Will (Macmillan, 1964), St. Augustine (354-430 C.E.) argues that our minds can know truths that are eternal. For Augustine, something is eternal if it exists in a timeless, unchanging state. So eternal truths are unchanging… Read more ›
A note of caution: Plato wrote dialogues not treatises. These dialogues show the life of the philosophical mind at work: questioning, arguing, speculating, imagining, wondering, struggling, and understanding. They do not show finished results that we can confidently attribute to… Read more ›
In his book On the Soul, Aristotle gave the following definition of soul: “The soul is the first actuality of a natural body that is potentially alive” (412a27). This first actuality of the body is the immaterial form of the… Read more ›
Sophists were professional teachers in fifth century Athens, Greece. They offered practical guidance to anyone who was trying to be successful. This guidance was particularly important given the political and cultural climate of Athens at the time: the older aristocracy… Read more ›
Plato’s pupil Aristotle claimed that the “chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree”. For many, THE chief form of beauty is the golden ratio. Two quantities are in the… Read more ›