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Contemporary definitions are of two main sorts. One distinctively modern, conventionalist, sort of definition focuses on art's institutional features, emphasizing the way art changes over time, modern works that appear to break radically with all traditional art, and the relational properties of artworks that depend on works' relations to art history, art genres, etc. The less conventionalist sort of contemporary definition makes use of a broader, more traditional concept of aesthetic properties that includes more than art-relational ones, and focuses on art's pan-cultural and trans-historical characteristics.
in list: Philosophy Notes
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Traditional definitions, at least as commonly portrayed in contemporary discussions of the definition of art, take artworks to be characterized by a single type of property. The standard candidates are representational properties, expressive properties, and formal properties.
A number of different reports by people who have been unhappy with the politics of Wikipedia editing, especially the notability standards.
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By the end of 2005, we had lived through Seigenthaler. This incident especially threw a lot of scrutiny on Wikipedians, who previously had been just happy geeking out and amusing themselves. Seigenthaler was the mainstream media and traditional authorities (academics) demanding to know what the hell Wikipedia thought it was doing and how dare they and just exactly how were they planning to meet the standards of those traditional fonts of knowledge anyway?
I think it panicked the community,
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he notability guideline is the most blatant example of the Wikipedia community retreating into traditional acceptability because we were spooked. Maybe also because we wanted to be respected, respectable? We wanted to be gatekeepers too, and enjoy that decisive feeling of “keeping order” amongst the rabble of the world?
Considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein played a central, if controversial, role in 20th-century analytic philosophy. He continues to influence current philosophical thought in topics as diverse as logic and language, perception and intention, ethics and religion, aesthetics and culture. There are two commonly recognized stages of Wittgenstein's thought — the early and the later — both of which are taken to be pivotal in their respective periods. The early Wittgenstein is epitomized in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. By showing the application of modern logic to metaphysics, via language, he provided new insights into the relations between world, thought and language and thereby into the nature of philosophy. It is the later Wittgenstein, mostly recognized in the Philosophical Investigations, who took the more revolutionary step in critiquing all of traditional philosophy including its climax in his own early work. The nature of his new philosophy is heralded as anti-systematic through and through, yet still conducive to genuine philosophical understanding of traditional problems.
in list: Philosophy Notes
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"For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language" (PI 43). This basic statement is what underlies the change of perspective most typical of the later phase of Wittgenstein's thought: a change from a conception of meaning as representation to a view which looks to use as the hinge of the investigation. Traditional theories of meaning in the history of philosophy were intent on pointing to something exterior to the proposition which endows it with sense. This "something" could generally be located either in an objective space, or inside the mind as mental representation
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In order to address the countless multiplicity of uses, their un- fixedness, and their being "part of an activity", Wittgenstein introduces the key concept of ‘language-game’. He never explicitly defines it since, as opposed to the earlier ‘picture’, for instance, this new concept is made to do work for a more fluid, more diversified, and more activity-oriented perspective on language.
Throughout the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein returns, again and again, to the concept of language-games to make clear his lines of thought concerning language. Primitive language-games are scrutinized for the insights they afford on this or that characteristic of language. Thus, the builders' language-game (PI 2), in which a builder and his assistant use exactly four terms (block, pillar, slab, beam), is utilized to illustrate that part of the Augustinian picture of language which might be correct but which is, nevertheless, strictly limited. "Regular" language-games, such as the astonishing list provided in PI 23 (which includes, e.g., reporting an event, speculating about an event, forming and testing a hypothesis, making up a story, reading it, play- acting, singing catches, guessing riddles, making a joke, translating, asking, thanking, and so on), bring out the openness of our possibilities in using language and in describing it.
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The sorites paradox is the name given to a class of paradoxical arguments, also known as little-by-little arguments, which arise as a result of the indeterminacy surrounding limits of application of the predicates involved. For example, the concept of a heap appears to lack sharp boundaries and, as a consequence of the subsequent indeterminacy surrounding the extension of the predicate ‘is a heap’, no one grain of wheat can be identified as making the difference between being a heap and not being a heap. Given then that one grain of wheat does not make a heap, it would seem to follow that two do not, thus three do not, and so on. In the end it would appear that no amount of wheat can make a heap. We are faced with paradox since from apparently true premises by seemingly uncontroversial reasoning we arrive at an apparently false conclusion.
in list: Philosophy Notes
Until about the middle of the previous century induction was treated as a quite specific method of inference: inference of a universal affirmative proposition (All swans are white) from its instances (a is a white swan, b is a white swan, etc.) The method had also a probabilistic form, in which the conclusion stated a probabilistic connection between the properties in question. It is no longer possible to think of induction in such a restricted way; much synthetic or contingent inference is now taken to be inductive; some authorities go so far as to count all contingent inference as inductive. One powerful force driving this lexical shift was certainly the erosion of the intimate classical relation between logical truth and logical form; propositions had classically been categorized as universal or particular, negative or affirmative; and modern logic renders those distinctions unimportant. (The paradox of the ravens makes this evident.) The distinction between logic and mathematics also waned in the twentieth century, and this, along with the simple axiomatization of probability by Kolmogorov in 1933 (Kolmogorov, FTP) blended probabilistic and inductive methods, blending in the process structural differences among inferences.
As induction expanded and became more amorphous, the problem of induction was transformed too. The classical problem if apparently insoluble was simply stated, but the contemporary problem of induction has no such crisp formulation. The approach taken here is to provide brief expositions of several distinctive accounts of induction. This is not comprehensive, there are other ways to look at the problem, but the untutored reader may gain at least a map of the terrain.
in list: Philosophy Notes
Reasoning is defeasible when the corresponding argument is rationally compelling but not deductively valid. The truth of the premises of a good defeasible argument provide support for the conclusion, even though it is possible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. In other words, the relationship of support between premises and conclusion is a tentative one, potentially defeated by additional information.
in list: Philosophy Notes
Beauty is an important part of our lives. Ugliness too. It is no surprise then that philosophers since antiquity have been interested in our experiences of and judgments about beauty and ugliness. They have tried to understand the nature of these experiences and judgments, and they have also wanted to know whether these experiences and judgments were legitimate.
in list: Philosophy Notes
Human excellence can be conceived in ways that do not include the moral virtues. For instance, someone thought of as excellent for benefiting friends and harming enemies can be cruel, arbitrary, rapacious, and ravenous of appetite. Most ancient philosophers, however, argue that human excellence must include the moral virtues and that the excellent human will be, above all, courageous, moderate, and just. This argument depends on making a link between the moral virtues and happiness.
in list: Philosophy Notes
Perfectionism has acquired a number of meanings in contemporary moral and political philosophy. The term is used to refer to an account of the good human life, an account of human well-being, a moral theory, and an approach to politics. Historically, perfectionism is associated with ethical theories that characterize the human good in terms of the development of human nature.
in list: Philosophy Notes
online encyclopedia of western designs and ideograms. Symbols.com contains more than 1,600 articles about 2,500 Western signs, arranged into 54 groups according to their graphic characteristics.
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