Ontology Books - Page 14

Ontological Arguments and Belief in God

Graham Oppy

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Editorial Review:

This book is a unique contribution to the philosophy of religion. It offers a comprehensive discussion of one of the most famous arguments for the existence of God: the ontological argument. The author provides and analyzes a critical taxonomy of those versions of the argument that have been advanced in recent philosophical literature, as well as of those historically important versions found in the work of St. Anselm, Descartes, Leibniz, Hegel and others.

The logic of perfection,: And other essays in neoclassical metaphysics

Charles Hartshorne

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Described as one of the pathbreaking works in 20th-century philosophical theology. this work presents Hartshorne's rehabilitation of Anselm's "Ontological Argument", recast in neoclassical form as "the Modal Proof", along with applications of Hartshorne's method to a variety of issues in contemporary metaphysical and religious thinking.

Of God Who Comes to Mind (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

Emmanuel Levinas

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Editorial Review:

The thirteen essays collected in this volume investigate the possibility that the word “God” can be understood now, at the end of the twentieth century, in a meaningful way. Nine of the essays appear in English translation for the first time.

Among Levinas’s writings, this volume distinguishes itself, both for students of his thought and for a wider audience, by the range of issues it addresses. Levinas not only rehearses the ethical themes that have led him to be regarded as one of the most original thinkers working out of the phenomenological tradition, but he also takes up philosophical questions concerning politics, language, and religion. The volume situates his thought in a broader intellectual context than have his previous works. In these essays, alongside the detailed investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, Rosenzweig, and Buber that characterize all his writings, Levinas also addresses the thought of Kierkegaard, Marx, Bloch, and Derrida.

Some essays provide lucid expositions not available elsewhere to key areas of Levinas’s thought. “God and Philosophy” is perhaps the single most important text for understanding Levinas and is in many respects the best introduction to his works. “From Consciousness to Wakefulness” illuminates Levinas’s relation to Husserl and thus to phenomenology, which is always his starting point, even if he never abides by the limits it imposes. In “The Thinking of Being and the Question of the Other,” Levinas not only addresses Derrida’s Speech and Phenomenon but also develops an answer to the later Heidegger’s account of the history of Being by suggesting another way of reading that history.

Among the other topics examined in the essays are the Marxist concept of ideology, death, hermeneutics, the concept of evil, the philosophy of dialogue, the relation of language to the Other, and the acts of communication and mutual understanding.

The Radical Aesthetic

Isobel Armstrong

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Think about art, but feel that thought 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 10 people found this review helpful.

Even though I do not agree with everything Armstrong says, this is one of the most important and succesful attempts to reflect philosophically about emotions in art (my own research field) from a contemporary theory perpective (critical theory, poststructuralism, feminism).

She may not be the first one to make the oppositions between emotions and cognition as well as subject and object collapse, but because she is so conscious of the dialectical implications, this is a pure pleasure to read. She is a brilliant writer, personal and objective at the same time, rethorically following the theoretical idea.

Her ultimate goal is to save the field of the aesthetics in a historical situation where the anti-aesthetic (the reduction of art to something else) is the dominating paradigm. She does that by advancing theory rather than by restoring an old view on art, and I love her for it!

Editorial Review:

This ground-breaking new work offers a spirited and severe critique of the turn to an anti-aesthetic in theoretical writing and asserts that it has now become an intellectual necessity to rethink the aesthetic and remake aesthetic discourse.

The Art of Living: Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Traditions

Crispin Sartwell

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Lots of good ideas... 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

It is unfortunate that Sartwell's book has received so little attention since he really did an excellent job of demonstrating what modernism has done to aesthetics and life in general. And really, what doesn't come down to aesthetics for meaning?

Sartwell develops the concept of art in many contexts including Zen, Taoism, Hinduism, Native American, African and African-American traditions. He then moves into reintegrating aesthetics into its true position in life - the core - as opposed to the scrap heap where modernism would like to have it stay.

Sartwell's chapter, "The Art of Knowing", is, I believe, the pinnacle of the book. He carefully demonstrates what has been done to "knowing" and how modernism (and scientific realism) have attempted to slide a number of incoherent positions into our general framework and proclaim them to be some sort of truth.
Highly recommended along with Bogdan's "Minding Minds", Faber's "Human Objectivity and Perception" and Flemons' "Completing Distinctions".

I'm surprised it has never been reviewed before now...

Editorial Review:

This is a multicultural philosophy of art applied to common American and European experience and discussed in relation to Taoist, Buddhist, Hindu, Native American, and African traditions.

The Art of Living: Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Traditions is the first truly multi-cultural philosophy of art. It develops a new theory of what art is, and discusses it in relation to Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism, as well as Native American, African, and African-American traditions.

The realm of essence: Book first of Realms of being,

George Santayana

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Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine

Naomi Schor

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Who cares about details? As Naomi Schor explains in her highly influential book, we do-but it has not always been so. The interest in detail--in art, in literature, and as an aesthetic category--is the product of the decline of classicism and the rise of realism.

But the story of the detail is as political as it is aesthetic. Secularization, the disciplining of society, the rise of consumerism, the invention of the quotidian, have all brought detail to the fore. In this classic work of aesthetic and feminist theory, now available in a new paperback edition, Schor provides ways of thinking about details and ornament in literature, art, and architecture, and uncovering the unspoken but powerful ideologies that attached gender to details.

Wide-ranging and richly argued, Reading in Detail presents ideas about reading (and viewing) that will enhance the study of literature and the arts.

Plato's Parmenides (The Joan Palevsky Imprint in Classical Literature)

Samuel Scolnicov

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Of all Plato's dialogues, the Parmenides is notoriously the most difficult to interpret. Scholars of all periods have disagreed about its aims and subject matter. The interpretations have ranged from reading the dialogue as an introduction to the whole of Platonic metaphysics to seeing it as a collection of sophisticated tricks, or even as an elaborate joke. This work presents an illuminating new translation of the dialogue together with an extensive introduction and running commentary, giving a unified explanation of the Parmenides and integrating it firmly within the context of Plato's metaphysics and methodology.

Scolnicov shows that in the Parmenides Plato addresses the most serious challenge to his own philosophy: the monism of Parmenides and the Eleatics. In addition to providing a serious rebuttal to Parmenides, Plato here re-formulates his own theory of forms and participation, arguments that are central to the whole of Platonic thought, and provides these concepts with a rigorous logical and philosophical foundation. In Scolnicov's analysis, the Parmenides emerges as an extension of ideas from Plato's middle dialogues and as an opening to the later dialogues.

Scolnicov's analysis is crisp and lucid, offering a persuasive approach to a complicated dialogue. This translation follows the Greek closely, and the commentary affords the Greekless reader a clear understanding of how Scolnicov's interpretation emerges from the text. This volume will provide a valuable introduction and framework for understanding a dialogue that continues to generate lively discussion today.

Art and Essence (Studies in Art, Culture, and Communities)

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The Essence of Art Explored 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This is an excellent overview of state-of-the-art issues having to do with philosophical exploration of the essence of art and other related topics. The editors have nicely divided chapters into four parts: theoretical perspectives, historical perspectives, cross-cultural perspectives, and contemporary perspectives. The quality of the essays is surprisingly good, and in general better than that of typical collections of this sort. I found myself often coming away from an essay with some key thought that kept nagging me for days. Stephen Davies, who is widely known for an earlier work on the definition of art, gives a nice overview of the articles in the introduction, and then follows this up with a survey of the field in the first chapter. Graham McFee in a very subtle essay argues that the implications of Wittgenstein's views on essences have been misunderstood in aesthetics circles. Stephanie Ross looks at gardens as an interesting intersection between natural aesthetics and the aesthetics of art. Liberato Santo-Brienza reinterprets the concept of mimesis within a survey of ancient and medieval views on art and beauty. Dabney Townsend provides a thought-provoking analysis of why neither Hume nor Kant were really much interested in the essence of art. Robert Wicks shows intriguing similarities and dissimilarities between Hegel and Nietzsche on art and the theatrical. One of the nicest features of this anthology is that it includes cross-cultural perspectives. To that end, Ananta Sukla describes the aesthetic views of Abhinavagupta, the great Indian aesthetician of the 11th century. Yuriko Saito, in a finely nuanced essay, shows how representing the essence of the object is central to Japanese aesthetics, and then relates this to the Western fascination with disinterestedness. Larry Shiner looks into the notion of authenticity in small-scale traditional societies and how it contrasts with western notions of the same concept. In Part IV, Kathleen Stock opens with a criticism of the various historical definitions of art offered in the last part of the 20th century. Robert Stecker, a widely read philosopher, moves away a bit from the question of the essence or definition of art to that of the ontology and interpretation of art, arguing as he often does against constructivist views of interpretation. Monique Roelofs weighs in from a feminist perspective arguing for something she calls aesthetification, which tries to feminize art and make feminist subjectivity artful. Finally, Dennis Dutton argues for an aesthetic universalism in which the term "art" can be applied cross-culturally based on evolutionary commonality amongst humans. Drawing ultimately from Darwin he sees art as mainly a form of sexual advertisement. It is a shame that this book is not yet out in paperback, as it is a must-read for anyone interested in the topic.

Editorial Review:

This exceptional new collection comprises 13 new essays on the nature and definability of art. Presenting a wide offering of contemporary philosophical perspectives--including theoretical, historical, cross-cultural, and evolutionary--Art and Essence offers thorough critical discussion on the extensive contemporary philosophical literature on the subject.

In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture

Victor Burgin

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Editorial Review:

Recent discussions about the culture of images have focused on issues of identity--sexual, racial, national--and the boundaries that define subjectivity. In this context Victor Burgin adopts an original critical strategy. He understands images less in traditional terms of the specific institutions that produce them, such as cinema, photography, advertising, and television, and more as hybrid mental constructs composed of fragments derived from the heterogeneous sources that together constitute the "media." Through deft analyses of a photograph by Helmut Newton, Parisian cityscapes, the space of the department store, a film by Ousmane Sembéne, and the writings of Henri Lefebvre, Andrè Breton, and Roland Barthes, Burgin develops an incisive theory of our culture of images and spectacle.
In/Different Spaces explores the construction of identities in the psychical space between perception and consciousness, drawing upon psychoanalytic theories to describe the constitution and maintenance of "self" and "us"--in imaginary spatial and temporal relations to "other" and "them"--through the all-important relay of images. For Burgin, the image is never a transparent representation of the world but rather a principal player on the stage of history.