Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Wisdom', 'Causality and Determinism' and 'Art and Its Objects'

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23 ideas

1. Philosophy / A. Wisdom / 3. Wisdom Deflated
The devil was wise as an angel, and lost no knowledge when he rebelled [Whitcomb]
     Full Idea: The devil is evil but nonetheless wise; he was a wise angel, and through no loss of knowledge, but, rather, through some sort of affective restructuring tried and failed to take over the throne.
     From: Dennis Whitcomb (Wisdom [2011], 'Argument')
     A reaction: ['affective restructuring' indeed! philosophers- don't you love 'em?] To fail at something you try to do suggests a flaw in the wisdom. And the new regime the devil wished to introduce doesn't look like a wise regime. Not convinced.
8. Modes of Existence / E. Nominalism / 5. Class Nominalism
Classes rarely share properties with their members - unlike universals and types [Wollheim]
     Full Idea: Classes can share properties with their members (e.g. the class of big things is big), but this is very rare. ....In the case of both universals and types, there will be shared properties. Red things can be exhilarating, and so can redness.
     From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 92)
     A reaction: 'Exhilarating' is an extrinsic property, so not the best illustration. This is interesting, but would need checking with a wide range of examples. (Too busy for that right now)
15. Nature of Minds / C. Capacities of Minds / 4. Objectification
We often treat a type as if it were a sort of token [Wollheim]
     Full Idea: Much of the time we think and talk of a type as though it were itself a kind of token.
     From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 35)
     A reaction: A helpful way of connecting what I call 'objectification' to the more conventional modern philosophical vocabulary. Thus I might claim that beauty is superior to truth, as if they were two tokens.
16. Persons / F. Free Will / 3. Constraints on the will
Freedom involves acting according to an idea [Anscombe]
     Full Idea: Freedom at least involves the power of acting according to an idea.
     From: G.E.M. Anscombe (Causality and Determinism [1971], §2)
     A reaction: Since 'you' presumably have to sit above the idea and pass a judgement on it, then the same principle should apply to acting on a desire, which presumably 'you' could reject because it just wasn't attractive enough.
16. Persons / F. Free Will / 6. Determinism / a. Determinism
To believe in determinism, one must believe in a system which determines events [Anscombe]
     Full Idea: 'The ball's path is determined' must mean 'there is only one possible path for the ball (assuming no air currents)', but what ground could one have for believing this, if one does not believe in some system for which it is a consequence?
     From: G.E.M. Anscombe (Causality and Determinism [1971], §2)
     A reaction: This seems right, but it doesn't follow that one has to know the full details of the system. The system might just be the best explanation, or even a matter of vague faith. It might, though, be just that you can't imagine any other outcome.
21. Aesthetics / A. Aesthetic Experience / 2. Aesthetic Attitude
Interpretation is performance for some arts, and critical for all arts [Wollheim]
     Full Idea: Performative interpretation occurs only with certain arts, but critical intepretation pertains to all.
     From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 38)
     A reaction: Fairly obvious, but this is the first point to make about the concept of 'interpretation'. Does the word in fact have two meanings? Or do I perform a painting when I look carefully at it?
A love of nature must precede a love of art [Wollheim]
     Full Idea: We could not have a feeling for the beauties of art unless we had been correspondingly moved in front of nature.
     From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 43)
     A reaction: Wollheim offers this in defence of Kant's view, without necessarily agreeing. Similarly one could hardly care for fictional characters, but not for real people. So the aesthetic attitude may arise from life, rather than from art. Is art hence unimportant?
21. Aesthetics / B. Nature of Art / 1. Defining Art
A criterion of identity for works of art would be easier than a definition [Wollheim]
     Full Idea: Maybe, rather than defining art, it would be more fruitful, and more realistic, to seek a general method of identifying works of art.
     From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 60)
     A reaction: The whole enterprise is ruined by Marcel Duchamp! I'm more interested in identifying or defining good art.
21. Aesthetics / B. Nature of Art / 2. Art as Form
If beauty needs organisation, then totally simple things can't be beautiful [Wollheim]
     Full Idea: It is said that beauty cannot consist in organisation because, if it did, we would not be able to predicate beauty of totally simple objects.
     From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 59)
     A reaction: [He says this idea originates in Plotinus] I'm struggling to think of an example of something which is 'totally' simple and beautiful. Maybe a patch of colour like the breast of a bullfinch?
21. Aesthetics / B. Nature of Art / 4. Art as Expression
Some say art must have verbalisable expression, and others say the opposite! [Wollheim]
     Full Idea: The view that a work of art expresses nothing if it can't be put into other words ...is reduced by the view that a work of art has no value if what it expresses or says can be put into (other) words.
     From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 49)
     A reaction: I prefer the second view. Poetry is what is lost in translation. Good art actually seems to evoke emotions which one virtually never feels in ordinary life. But how could that be possible? What are those emotions doing there?
It is claimed that the expressive properties of artworks are non-physical [Wollheim]
     Full Idea: The argument that works of art have properties that physical objects could not have characteristically concentrates on the expressive properties of works of art.
     From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 10)
     A reaction: Since the idea of an object having non-physical properties strikes me as ridiculous, this gets off to a bad start. If artworks are abstract objects, then all of their properties are non-physical.
21. Aesthetics / B. Nature of Art / 6. Art as Institution
Style can't be seen directly within a work, but appreciation needs a grasp of style [Wollheim]
     Full Idea: 'Style' would seem to be a concept that cannot be applied to a work solely on the basis of what is represented and yet it is also essential to a proper understanding or appreciation of a work.
     From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 32)
     A reaction: Sounds right. One long held musical note creates an expectation which depends on the presumed style of the piece of music. A single bar from a piece may well not exhibit its characteristic style.
The traditional view is that knowledge of its genre to essential to appreciating literature [Wollheim]
     Full Idea: From Aristotle onwards it has been a tenet of the traditional rhetoric that the proper understanding of a literary work involves the location of it in the correct genre, that is, as drama, epic or lyric.
     From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 32)
     A reaction: Walton argues this persuasively. I've seen the climax of a Jacobean tragedy ruined by laughter from the audience. Genre dictates appropriate responses, so it is a communal concept.
21. Aesthetics / B. Nature of Art / 7. Ontology of Art
If artworks are not physical objects, they are either ideal entities, or collections of phenomena [Wollheim]
     Full Idea: In denying that works of art are physical objects, one theory (the 'ideal') withdraws them altogether from experience, and a second theory ('phenomenal') pins them too it inescapably and at all points.
     From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 21)
     A reaction: I incline towards them being transient ideals, created by human minds. As with so much, we idealise and objectify them as 'works', and abstract their image from the instance(s) we encounter.
The ideal theory says art is an intuition, shaped by a particular process, and presented in public [Wollheim]
     Full Idea: The ideal theory of Croce and Collingwood says art is first an inner intuition or expression of the artist, resulting from a particular process of organisation and unification, which can be externalised in public form.
     From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 22)
     A reaction: [compressed] As stated this doesn't sound very controversial or 'ideal'. I take it the theory is intended to be more platonist than this expression of it suggests. I think the idea that it is an 'expression' of the artist is wrong.
The ideal theory of art neglects both the audience and the medium employed [Wollheim]
     Full Idea: Because the ideal theory makes a work of art inner or mental, the link between the artist and the audience has been severed .....and it also totally ignores the significance of the medium.
     From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 23)
     A reaction: Emily Dickinson had virtually no audience for her poetry. The medium used to perform Bach's 'Art of Fugue' seems unimportant. For paintings of painterly painters paint matters. For some visual art many different media will suffice.
A musical performance has virtually the same features as the piece of music [Wollheim]
     Full Idea: With the usual reservations, there is nothing that can be predicated of a performance of a piece of music that could not also be predicated of that piece of music itself.
     From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 37)
     A reaction: He offers this as evidence that it fits the performance being a token, and music (and all other art) being a type. There are quite a few 'reservations'. Music too difficult to perform. Great music always badly performed.
21. Aesthetics / B. Nature of Art / 8. The Arts / a. Music
An interpretation adds further properties to the generic piece of music [Wollheim]
     Full Idea: Interpretation may be regarded as the production of a token that has properties in excess of those of the type.
     From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 37)
     A reaction: I suppose so. If you play accurately everything that is written in the score, then anything else has to be an addition. If you play less than the score, you aren't quite playing that piece of music.
21. Aesthetics / C. Artistic Issues / 3. Artistic Representation
A drawing only represents Napoleon if the artist intended it to [Wollheim]
     Full Idea: It is necessary, if a drawing is to represent Napoleon, that the draughtsman should intend it to be Napoleon.
     From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 13)
     A reaction: Does a perfect and intended representation of a person also count as a representation of the person's identical twin? The families of both might well order copies.
26. Natural Theory / C. Causation / 5. Direction of causation
With diseases we easily trace a cause from an effect, but we cannot predict effects [Anscombe]
     Full Idea: It is much easier to trace effects back to causes with certainty than to predict effects from causes. If I have one contact with someone with a disease and I get it, we suppose I got it from him, but a doctor cannot predict a disease from one contact.
     From: G.E.M. Anscombe (Causality and Determinism [1971], §1)
     A reaction: An interesting, and obviously correct, observation. Her point is that we get more certainty of causes from observing a singular effect than we get certainty of effects from regularities or laws.
26. Natural Theory / C. Causation / 6. Causation as primitive
The word 'cause' is an abstraction from a group of causal terms in a language (scrape, push..) [Anscombe]
     Full Idea: The word "cause" can be added to a language in which are already represented many causal concepts; a small selection: scrape, push, wet, carry, eat, burn, knock over, keep off, squash, make, hurt.
     From: G.E.M. Anscombe (Causality and Determinism [1971], p.93)
     A reaction: An interesting point, perhaps reinforcing the Humean idea of causation as a 'natural belief', or the Kantian view of it as a category of thought. Or maybe causation is built into language because it is a feature of reality…
26. Natural Theory / C. Causation / 8. Particular Causation / b. Causal relata
Causation is relative to how we describe the primary relata [Anscombe, by Schaffer,J]
     Full Idea: Anscombe has inspired the view that causation is an intensional relation, and takes it to be relative to the descriptions of the primary relata.
     From: report of G.E.M. Anscombe (Causality and Determinism [1971], 1) by Jonathan Schaffer - The Metaphysics of Causation 1
     A reaction: It seems too linguistic to say that there is nothing more to it. It seems relevant in human examples, but if a landslide crushes a tree, what difference does the description make? 'It was just a few rocks and some miserable little tree'. No excuse!
26. Natural Theory / C. Causation / 8. Particular Causation / c. Conditions of causation
Since Mill causation has usually been explained by necessary and sufficient conditions [Anscombe]
     Full Idea: Since Mill it has been fairly common to explain causation one way or another in terms of 'necessary' and 'sufficient' conditions.
     From: G.E.M. Anscombe (Causality and Determinism [1971], §1)
     A reaction: Interesting to see what Hume implies about these criteria. Anscombe is going to propose that causal events are fairly self-evident and self-explanatory, and don't need analyses of conditions. Another approach is regularities and laws.