Boydstun

Proton pump operations at organelle walls.

OSIRIS-REx grabs asteroid dirt.

Over the last several years workers for the North American Kant Society “have managed to categorize ALL of the Kant items in the Philpapers.org database. The Kant section (https://philpapers.org/browse/immanuel-kant) now contains almost 30,000 entries. That’s far more than any other individual philosopher (Aristotle and Hume, for instance, are each languishing around the 11,000 mark). It’s more even than entire sub-categories of contemporary philosophy (Philosophy of Law, for instance, has around 20,000 entries). That was in a report in the latest issue of the NAKS newsletter. I wanted t

What is this? Something man-made and of wood. Not something whose form and strength are determined for some utilitarian purpose so far as I know. It is something pleasing to me, and I’d like to see it in real space and walk around it to get its different views. I’d like to touch it. Any principles of geometry it exhibits would be of a secondary interest. Any neurological findings of why it is pleasing (or not) to us would be of secondary interest. Any imagination-feats along the lines of “It’s like a (fill-in-the-blank)” or “I could use it as a (fill-in-the-blank)” would be of still lower inte

Thorncrown Chapel (1980) Located in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Designed by E. Fay Jones, who had apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright. This is a work that strikes me as needing no ornamentation, no external sculpture. Rather, the building is its own sculpture.

Schopenhauer II Let us see how Schopenhauer’s esthetics plays out for architecture. Kant had rightly thought of architecture as having its esthetic ideas confined by the use to be made of the building. Unlike sculpture, architecture is not only an esthetic expression, an object made only to be looked at and liked on its own account (Kant 1790 §51, 322). A building’s beauty is adherent to, and encumbered by, the concept of the building’s purpose (§16, 230). Unlike Rand 1943, and many of her century (see Parsons and Carlson 2008 [PB], 43–44), Kant does not locate distinctively esthetic sat

Schopenhauer I Mary Ann Sures took up Rand’s essays on the nature of art and applied them more particularly to sculpture (1969). Sures attributed the differences of human form between Winged Victory and a medieval work such as Eve at St. Lazare in Autun to differences in what Rand had conceived as metaphysical value-judgements. Schopenhauer too had thought that sculpture and other arts have underpinnings in metaphysics. He saw in sculpture opposition of the fundamental conception of man in classical Greece (Phidias, Praxiteles, Scopas) to the conception of man within Christian culture, b

Young John the Baptist – Donatello

Eve breaking bad – 12th c. St. Lazare in Autun

Winged Victory

Of the two voices, lower pitch and higher one, which of you is which? Slavery was brought to the Spanish colony of Florida in 1526. There is much New England hegemony in telling the history of this country. When in grade school, we were taught that the Pilgrims were about religious freedom. (Ha!) Nothing about the fact that it was a commercial enterprise. Nothing about the fact that it was through the charter for the Carolinas enterprise that the assertion and rationale for religious freedom (put in there by John Locke) entered the colonial scene. Slaves were imported through Charleston o

Rand on Sculpture Ayn Rand took sculpture, as an art form, to be confined to human figures (1971, 1012). In defining art, Rand aimed for what has been called a “‘wrapper definition’ that attempts to cover the entire extension of a concept,” rather than only “an evaluative characterization of what the best forms of art aspire to be like” (Stroud 2011, 5). Rand defined art as “a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments” (1965a, 16) Rand specified a function of art beyond its beckon of experience and contemplation for its own sake. Art has i

David - Bernini

Hebe - Canova

Je Suis Belle - Rodin