Building on yesterday’s theme, Barbara Gail Montero (CUNY) has much to add to the debate over concepts and their role in action and perception. Interestingly, Montero’s new book, Thought in Action, has the same title as one of the papers I quoted yesterday; however, it’s a different work entirely, though it deals with similar themes. The other paper, by Komarine Romdenh-Romluc, appears in the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology. The below passages are excerpted from Montero’s recent interview at 3:AM Magazine. Continue reading
Author: AE Robbert
Thought in Action
Aesthetic Perception
“The artistic process shares with the creative process of nature the characteristic of rendering things visible, causing them to appear. Merleau-Ponty laid great stress on this idea: ‘Art no longer imitates things; it makes things visible. It is the blueprint of the genesis of things. Paintings show how things become things and how the world becomes a world . . . how mountains become, in our view, mountains.’ Painting makes us feel the presence of things: the fact that ‘things are here.’ ‘When Cézanne strives after depth,’ continues Merleau-Ponty, ‘what he’s really seeking is the combustion of being.'”
“The experience of modern art thus allows us to glimpse—in a way that is, in the last analysis, philosophical—the miracle of perception itself, which opens up the world to us. Yet we can only perceive this miracle by reflecting on perception, and converting our attention. In this way, we can change our relationship to the world, and when we do so, we are astonished by it. We break off ‘our familiarity with the world, and this break can teach us nothing other than the unmotivated surging forth of the world.’ At such moments, it is as if we were seeing the world appear before our eyes for the first time.” – Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 256
Spaces of Freedom
It’s been just over a year since I posted anything new here, but that’s not for lack of study or engagement on my part. Work—both intellectual and vocational—continues apace. Readers may be interested to know that I’ve started pursuit of a PhD here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Below I’m sharing a short description of my plans for the dissertation. Things may change a bit here and there as I complete various sections of the dissertation, but I expect to follow pretty closely the below summary. I’m not sure what will become of Knowledge Ecology at this point. I may start afresh with a new blog. I may continue blogging here. I might abandon the Internet all together. Who knows.
The thing about blogging—both positive and negative—is that it puts on offer a continuous stream of output, an ongoing account of one’s thinking and development. This has the double effect of providing greater context for one’s writing but also makes it difficult, at least psychologically for me, to separate oneself from earlier work in the way that writing books or articles naturally provides. The Internet tends toward a pathological amount of continuity and interconnectivity that I think many of us writing in this medium would be wise to rail against. In any case, enjoy the PhD ruminations.
Whitehead Talks and Locations for Today
For those interested, I’m posting the location of my talks below along with the PDFs for the papers I’ll be working from. It’s been a great conference so far, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it in the coming days.
Title: Concept and Capacity: The Ecology of Knowledge (paper HERE and slideshow HERE)
Location and time: Lebus Hall, Room 201, 11:00 a.m.
Title: Appearance in Time: Whitehead and von Uexküll on Aisthēsis in Evolutionary Process (paper HERE)
Location and time: Edmunds Hall, Room 101, 4:00 p.m.
Knowledge Ecology 