Philosophy

Review of Michael Hauskeller, Better Humans? Understanding the Enhancement Project Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. August 1, 2013. Web Version Acumen Publishing, 2013, Paperback. 212pp. As its title suggests, Michael Hauskeller's book takes a skeptical look at our ability to use biomedical technology to improve our lives by altering our mental and physical capacities. Hauskeller is not a religious conservative who worries about taunting the gods by taking evolution into our own hands. Instead, he criticizes "the enhancement project" from a broadly secular humanist perspective. Indeed, the main virtue of Better Humans is Hauskeller's attempt to understand and explain what often look like religious arguments against enhancement in terms that are more tangible and less spiritual. Unfortunately, the arguments are almost entirely negative and by the end of the book the reader is left with the vague sense that we really ought to just accept what nature has given us, no matter how paltry or unfair, and stop dreaming of better things to come. In the first two chapters, Hauskeller makes two broad claims: first, there is no such thing as better people, only people that are better at performing certain tasks, or who have greater capacities to do so; second, enhancing some widely valued capacities may decrease rather than increase our subjective wellbeing. Hauskeller thinks the first claim follows from the fact that different people value different personality traits, and because enhancing one capacity may diminish another. For example, using pharmaceuticals or genetic engineering to enhance my baseline level of compassion may make me a less cheerful person, since I'll be more prone to see and sympathize with suffering (p. 9). To the extent that cheerful optimism and profound sympathy are both valuable character traits, if there is a trade-off between them, we may not be able to enhance both simultaneously. In support of the view that enhancements may not increase our subjective well-being, Hauskeller notes that increasing general cognitive abilities like memory or impulse control may make us less happy if it also makes us less capable of being moved by emotions that are, to some extent, valuable because they are beyond our control (p. 10-12). So far so good. But the rhetorical questions Hauskeller asks – Is control always good? and Who would want to remember every detail of their lives? – are exactly the kinds of questions that thoughtful proponents of enhancement already ask. The fact that increasing our motivation or memory may produce some unwanted side-effects, like anxiety or painful recollections of failed relationships (p. 28), does not imply that it is worse for us all things considered. Having more motivation or a greater ability to understand and control the world would clearly benefit some people, while others would probably be better off with a greater ability to relax and take satisfaction in past accomplishments. But this suggests the fairly uncontroversial view that using biomedical technology to enhance ourselves will – like other kinds of medicine – force us to weigh risks and rewards, including trade-offs between traits that we value, and to think about the package of products we would most prefer to have,1 subject to some of the constraints Hauskeller emphasizes. The third chapter is devoted to a hot topic in bioethics: moral enhancement. Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson have recently argued that we face an increasing number of large scale collective action problems that human psychology is ill-equipped to deal with.2 Although people evolved under conditions requiring strong reciprocity,3 or within-group altruism, it may be difficult to extend these dispositions so that we care about distant people, including those not yet born. Thus, Savulescu and Persson think, collective action problems ranging from climate change mitigation to the preservation of biodiversity may go unsolved unless we increase our capacity to identify with others, and to make personal sacrifices to help them. Hauskeller is not convinced, for at least two reasons. First, he argues that manipulating certain hormones and neurotransmitters can increase our sense of fairness, but it may adversely affect other parts of our behavior, or lead to collectively undesirable consequences unless everyone is similarly enhanced. For example, spraying a room with oxytocin before volunteers play the ultimatum game leads proposers to make more generous offers, and responders to accept lower offers.4 Hauskeller mentions a study suggesting that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, may have similar effects (p. 45-46). Assuming this is true, moral enhancement is a double edged sword, since, if only part of the population increases its generosity, cooperation can unravel as stingy people exploit more generous "suckers."5 Hauskeller's second argument is that attempts to engineer morally better people would undermine free choice: "the very fact that we would be engineered to feel and think a certain way would deprive us of our humanity and turn us into mere puppets hanging from strings that are being moved by those who have decided not only that we are in need of enhancement, but also what enhancement we are subjected to. We would lack freedom not so much because we were incapable of evil, but rather because others...would have decided for us what is evil and what is not and would then have programmed us accordingly" (p. 51). This is a more provocative but less plausible critique of moral enhancement. The problem is that Hauskeller is describing the condition we already find ourselves in: we are "engineered" by our biochemical nature to have certain moral dispositions, and to act accordingly. It seems strange to think that deliberately manipulating what evolution has bequeathed us with would somehow remove rather than increase our ability to act according to our wishes, and I suspect this is yet another call for caution rather than a decisive argument against moral enhancement. Most of the middle chapters of Better Humans cover aesthetic enhancement, and survey the philosophical terrain without attempting to stake out new ground. The exception is chapter six, where Hauskeller criticizes the quest for immortality, or radical life extension. He begins by usefully distinguishing the question of whether death is an evil from whether extending life is desirable. On the first question, Hauskeller agrees with Epicurus that if death is simply the absence of consciousness, it is neither good nor bad. But on the second question, Hauskeller challenges the argument that extending our lives would be a good thing on net. His first argument against life extension is not especially compelling. Hauskeller invokes Kant's Formula of Universal Law and says that a Kantian should conclude that life extension is immoral if we cannot – under conditions of resource scarcity and a growing population – universalize the maxim "if we can abolish death, we will do so" (p. 96). However, this is a misapplication of Kant's categorical imperative. In order to test whether a maxim can be universalized we need to formulate the purpose of our action (a "maxim" is a principle of action, not just an action description), and stipulate the relevant empirical conditions. For example, we can easily universalize the following maxim: "I will use biomedical technology to extend my life, provided resources are sufficiently abundant." If everyone followed this principle, life extension would be permissible in conditions of resource abundance, and impermissible in conditions of extreme scarcity. But the maxim itself is universalizable, given the proviso about resource scarcity. A more interesting argument against life extension is the argument from boredom. Suppose we could live both longer and better lives. Over time, Hauskeller thinks the number and quality of new experiences will likely decline since "we cannot endlessly continue looking upon the world with fresh eyes" (p. 105). This is a deep problem, and it remains an open question whether we could also engineer ourselves to be able to take enough delight in new experiences and activities to continue wanting to go on living forever. Still, many of us would like the opportunity to try, and, as Hauskeller concedes, suicide is always an option. Near the end of the book, Hauskeller tries to interpret and-to some extent- defend Sandel's view that we should accept life as a gift and resist the temptation to enhance ourselves. While Hauskeller does a nice job of dissecting Sandel's view and clarifying the many ways in which we might understand what it means to accept something as a gift, his task in this chapter is hopeless since Sandel's view cannot be defended without appealing to dubious religious assumptions. As other commentators have pointed out, it is difficult to describe nature as giving us "gifts" without anthropomorphizing it, or ascribing intentions to the pointless process that is evolution by natural selection. Richard Dawkins reminds us that nature, or natural selection, does not "give" organisms anything; it is simply a process by which combinations of genes that are relatively bad at replicating themselves in particular environments are sifted out6 (the fact that words like "selection" and "sifted" are used to describe the process shows how deeply teleological our language is, but what we really mean is simply that some combinations of genes will leave more copies of themselves in certain environments than alternative combinations of genes). The fact that any of us exist at all seems improbable, given the enormous number of different combinations of molecules that might have occurred since the Big Bang. And this can create a powerful feeling of awe; but gratitude toward the universe is misplaced unless the universe (or God) intentionally created us, and did so in order to benefit us. Hauskeller denies this, and wants to expand "gratitude" to cover something like an emotion of gladness about the fact that we exist, that we are healthy (if we are), and so on. He insists that even in a secular context "our gratitude for being alive is not merely a derivative or metaphorical kind of gratitude" (175). I do not want to quibble with words, since we can stipulate any meaning we like. But Sandel's argument loses all force when we interpret it to mean that we should be glad about the fact that we're alive. Gladness at being alive says nothing at all about whether we should use our powers to improve our lives, either indirectly through education, exercise, and nutrition, or directly by manipulating our biochemistry and our genes. In the end, the same objections that apply to Sandel also apply to Hauskeller. But defenders of enhancement will welcome the many critical questions Hauskeller asks about our ability to use biomedical technology to improve our lives. Jonny Anomaly, Duke University 1 Buchanan, Allen, Beyond Humanity? The Ethics of Biomedical Enhancement, Oxford University Press, 2011. 2 Persson, Ingmar and Savulescu, Julian. Unfit for the Future: The Urgent Need for Moral Enhancement, Oxford University Press, 2013. 3 Gintis, Herbert and Bowles, Samuel. "The Evolutionary Basis of Collective Action," In The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy. Oxford University Press, 2008. 4 Zak, Paul. "The Neurobiology of Trust," Scientific American, May 19, 2008. 5 Axelrod, Robert. The Evolution of Cooperation, revised edition. Basic Books, 2006. 6 Dawkins, Richard, The Selfish Gene, 30th anniversary edition, Oxford University Press, 2006.


Philosophy

Stability of character is important for personal identity. Without stability, Kelvin's two colleagues suggest that Hari can be destroyed as an object. The correctness of Kelvin's intuition is also demonstrated by the famous inductive reasoning test of the duck. Unlike the dwarf of Sartorius who fails to pass the duck test of humanity. And as in the case of Snaut. Thed reductionism is part of a movement in the philosophy of mind that contradicts Cartesian dualism. RenÃ© Descartes claims that human beings possess a soul (or mind in modern terms) quite separate and qualitatively different from the body.
          DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.12384.43524

Solaris (Andrei Tarovski): The duck test Nicolae Sfetcu April 29, 2019 Sfetcu, Nicolae, "Solaris (Andrei Tarovski): The duck test", SetThings (April 29, 2019), MultiMedia Publishing (ed.), URL = https://www.telework.ro/en/solaris-andrei-tarovski-theduck-test/ Email: firstname.lastname@example.com This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/. A partial translation of: Sfetcu, Nicolae, "Filmul Solaris, regia Andrei Tarkovsky – Aspectepsihologiceșifilosofice", SetThings (2 iunie 2018), MultiMedia Publishing (ed.), DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.24928.17922, URL = https://www.telework.ro/ro/e-books/filmul-solaris-regia-andrei-tarkovsky-aspectepsihologice-si-filosofice/ Solaris (Andrei Tarovski): The duck test John Locke imagined what would happen if a prince's mind had been transported into a shoemaker's body by replacing the shoemaker's mind. On the outside it would look like a shoemaker, but the inner feeling would be the prince, "For should the soul of a prince, carrying with it the consciousness of the prince's past life, enter and inform the body of a cobbler, as soon as deserted by his own soul, every one sees he would be the same person with the prince, accountable only for the prince's actions." (Locke and Winkler 1996, 142)For Locke, the shoemaker would be the prince only on condition that all the experiences of the past, that is, his autobiographical memory, be preserved during the transfer of mind. Thus, Locke sees autobiographical memory as the most important aspect of personality, which is very relevant for assessing Hari's status in Solaris. At first, Hari does not seem to have an autobiographical memory ("You know, I have the feeling as if I've forgotten something."), So he fails the personality test of Locke's. Kelvin concludes that she can not be a human person and eliminates her. His action is representative of a culture of personal repression, and according to Berton's warning at the beginning of the film, that Kelvin is shown more than willing to destroy what he does not understand.(Tumanov 2016) But Kelvin has the chance to re-evaluate Hari at its second iteration. The new Hari begins to accumulate the autobiographical memory imposed by Locke, merging in a way with Kelvin because it is an emanation of his mind. This paradigm of "memory outsourcing" can be developed based on Derek Parfit's attempt to expand the Lockean personification concept: " There are several ways to extend the experience-memory criterion so as to cover such cases. I shall appeal to the concept of an overlapping chain of experience-memories. Let us say that, between X today and Y twenty years ago, there are direct memory connections if X can now remember having some of the experiences that Y had twenty years ago. On Locke's view, only this makes X and Y one and the same person. But even if there are no such direct memory connections, there may be continuity of memory between X now and Y twenty years ago. This would be so if between X now and Y at that time there has been an overlapping chain of direct memories. In the case of most adults, there would be such a chain. In each day within the last twenty years, most of these people remembered some of their experiences on the previous day. On the revised version of Locke's view, some present person X is the same as some past person Y if there is between them continuity of memory." (Parfit 1984, 205) Tumanov states that in Solaris we have such a chain of memory that overlaps with Hari, because he remembers Kelvin. Hari even managed to recall a conflict with Kelvin's mother, a fragment taken from Kelvin's memory: "II remember how we were having tea, and then she threw me out. I got up and left. And then what happened?" The last question indicates that the borrowed autobiographical memory is still incomplete, but it exists. In a study by Nina Strohminger and Shaun Nichols, they concluded that modifying a person's moral base rather memory loss is the most important feature of losing identity. (Strohminger and Nichols 2014, 161)The authors call this "moral self hypothesis" and propose it as a model of how people perceive the nucleus of autonomy in others. In Hari's case, Tumanov argue that his "moral self", identical to that of Kelvin's ex-wife, is very clearly defined. Parfit synthesizes personal identity as a complex phenomenon: "personal identity over time just consists [...] in various kinds of psychological continuity, of memory, character, intention, and the like." (Parfit 1984, 227)Thus, Kelvin discovers that Hari is an empty reply, but a person with moral and emotional qualities like any human being. Over time, Hari's reply becomes a totally new person: "I am not Hari. That Hari is dead." But the psychological continuity of the new Hari captivates him and convinces Kelvin of her personality when she tries to commit suicide with liquid oxygen and then comes back to life with horrible pain, Kelvin says, "You used to resemble Hari. But now you-and not her-are the real Hari." The episode of oxygen suicide illustrates the prime role of suffering in the process of determining Hari's personality. For Sartorius, however, Hari's non-biological non-human structure disqualifies her. He expresses the ethical view that he is free to experiment with the "guests" of the station in search of knowledge. the justification of these actions comes from the belief that he does not experience real people or animals, but the appearance of the child's figure trying to escape from the lab evokes Berton's claim to value or morality in search of knowledge. (Duffy 2003)Kelvin's warning, "you'd better leave, you're too impressionable" suggests that such considerations are not being met at this station. Tarkovsky noted that "Man's unending quest for knowledge, given him gratuitously, is a source of great tension, for it brings with it constant anxiety, hardship, grief and disappointment"" (Andrey Tarkovsky 1996, 198)Snaut adds that the neutrino systems of which his body is composed are unstable, an affirmation of symbolic significance, equivalent to denying Hari's personality. Stability of character is important for personal identity. Without stability, Kelvin's two colleagues suggest that Hari can be destroyed as an object. The correctness of Kelvin's intuition is also demonstrated by the famous inductive reasoning test of the duck1: "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck." Unlike the dwarf of Sartorius who fails to pass the duck test of humanity. And as in the case of Snaut. Thed reductionism is part of a movement in the philosophy of mind that contradicts Cartesian dualism. René Descartes claims that human beings possess a soul (or mind in modern terms) quite separate and qualitatively different from the body: "From the very fact that we conceive vividly and clearly the natures of the body and the soul as different, we know that in reality they are different, and consequently that the soul can think without the body." (Descartes 1984, 99) Unlike Cartesian dualism, which claims that human beings have a separate and qualitative soul (or mind) different from the body, reductionism is based on the hypothesis that the soul/mind can be reduced to the body, that is, the brain produces the mind, so the soul cannot " think without body ". (Tumanov 2016)Functionalists including Hilary Putnam are trying to save the elements of Cartesian dualism in the context of modern materialism,(Putnam 1975, 436)attempting to maintain the materialistic basis of reductionism without accepting the latter's 1The test of the duck implies that a person can identify an unknown subject by observing the usual features of the subject. It is sometimes used to counter brutal or even valid arguments that something is not what it seems to be. claim to a correlation between physical and mental, challenging the pain problem with the idea that mental states can be reduced to the states of the brain From this point of view, Sartorius is a reductionist, considering only Hari's neutrinos structure. Putnam's position, however, known as multiple realizability the notion that no matter how pain is done, regardless of the physical structures or processes in which the person suffers, the experience of pain shows the existence of a mental constitution. (Putnam 1975, 436)Practically, in the confrontation between Kelvin and Sartorius about Hari's pain, we have a dramatic debate between reductionism and functionalism with ethical foundations. Descartes considered animals lacking souls and, therefore, the ability to truly experience pain or suffering. He saw them as automatic machines and even made vivisecations of the type Sartorius suggests to Kelvin to interpret Hari: "I do not explain the feeling of pain without reference to the soul. For in my view pain exists only in the understanding. What I do explain is all the external movements which accompany this feeling in us; in animals it is these movements which occur, and not pain in the strict sense." (Descartes 1984, 148)Descartes was a dualist only in terms of people. For animals, he was a full reductionist. In the library scene, after witnessing the tension and hostility of the three men in the library, and heard Sartorius accusing Kelvin of neglecting science for her, Hari offers the central discourse of the film: " Hari: I think that Kris Kelvin is more consistent than both of you. In inhuman conditions, he has behaved humanely. And you act as if none of this concerns you, and consider your guests it seems that's what you call us something external, a hindrance. But it's a part of you. It's your conscience. And Kris loves me. Maybe it's not me he loves, but he's simply protecting himself. He wants me alive. That's not the point. It doesn't matter why man loves. It's different for everyone. It's not Kris. It's you. I hate you all. " Sartorius: I would ask you... " Hari: Please don't interrupt me. I'm a woman, after all. " Sartorius: You're not a woman and you're not a human being. Understand that, if you're capable of understanding anything. There is no Hari. She's dead. You're just a reproduction, a mechanical reproduction. A copy. A matrix. " Hari: Yes. Maybe. But I... I am becoming a human being. I can feel just as deeply as you. Believe me. I can already get by without him. I... love him. I am a human being. You... you're very cruel." (Andrei Tarkovsky 1972, 2: 02: 02,489-02: 04: 35,893) Hari passes the duck test in the library, convincing the spectators. Here, Sartorius seems to be a Cartesian machine. Snoot oscillates between Hari's scientific rejection and emotional acceptance, demonstrating the dilemma inherent in the human condition, between the pure emotion and the theories we build. Snaut's monologue is the culmination of the final stage of the library: " We have no interest in conquering any cosmos. We want to extend the Earth to the borders of the cosmos. We don't know what to do with other worIds. We don't need other worIds. We need a mirror. We struggle for contact, but we'll never find it. We're in the foolish human predicament of striving for a goal that he fears, that he has no need for. Man needs man." (Andrei Tarkovsky 1972, 01: 59: 22,329-02: 00: 00,701) The notion of a mirror is the significant element in the use of Tarkovski's heterotopic model. As part of the station, the library not only allows Tarkovsky to present the audience with a framework that avoids exotics, but also states the use of the heterotopic model in the film. The library is the alternative to the discourse of the reductive scientific reasoning that governs the rest of the discourse. (Duffy 2003)As a site that opens the discourse realm of imagination and alternative models of "reality," the library is at the same time the focal point of the contest between the "truth" representations. As many critics have highlighted, the scene of the film library is largely Tarkovsky's creation. (Vida and Graham 1994) Lefanu states that "Tarkovsky, of course, is intent on showing us the mirror like the interdependence of earth and space in the last resort one and the same location, filtered through the human imagination." (Fanu 1987, 61)As states Duffy, the possibility of being in the heterotopic space gives us the ability to look back from the distance, the true inversion of panoptic vision. Green says the planetary ocean is the one that gives us the device that will allow us to look directly at our own beliefs in humanity. The mandate of the heterotopic device is to provide this "glass" or "mirror", which allows us to see what is often hidden from our eyes by our inability to recognize the obvious. (Duffy 2003) Bibliography Descartes, René. 1984. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Volume 3, The Correspondence. Cambridge University Press. Duffy, Richard Nathan. 2003. Sculpted in Time: Heterotopic Space in Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris. UMI. Fanu, Mark Le. 1987. The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky. BFI. Locke, John, and Kenneth Winkler. 1996. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Hackett Publishing Company. Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and Persons. OUP Oxford. Putnam, Hilary. 1975. Mind, Language, and Reality. Cambridge University Press. Strohminger, Nina, and Shaun Nichols. 2014. "The Essential Moral Self." Cognition 131 (1): 159–171. Tarkovsky, Andrei. 1972. Solaris. Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069293/. Tarkovsky, Andrey. 1996. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. University of Texas Press. Tumanov, Vladimir. 2016. "Philosophy of Mind and Body in Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris." FilmPhilosophy 20 (2–3): 357–75. https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2016.0020. Vida, Johnson, and Petrie Graham. 1994. "The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky." Indiana University Press. 1994. http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/isbn/9780253208873.


WHAT IS ART (classificatory disputes, aesthetic judgements, contemporary art

Philosophy

WHAT is art? Classificatory disputes..
          Classificatory disputes about what is art
          Art historians and philosophers of art have long had classificatory disputes about art regarding
          whether a particular cultural form or piece of work should be classified as art. Disputes about
          what does and does not count as art continue to occur today

          Defining art is difficult if not impossible. Aestheticians and art philosophers often engage in
          disputes about how to define art. By its original and broadest definition, art (from the Latin ars,
          meaning âskillâ or âcraftâ) is the product or process of the effective application of a body of
          knowledge, most often using a set of skills; this meaning is preserved in such phrases as
          âliberal artsâ and âmartial artsâ. However, in the modern use of the word, which rose to
          prominence after 1750, âartâ is commonly understood to be skill used to produce an
          aesthetic result (Hatcher, 1999).

WHAT IS ART ULRICH DE BALBIAN META-PHILOSOPHY RESEARCH CENTER WHAT is art? Classificatory disputes.. Classificatory disputes about what is art SEE this link for the images embeded in the text!! https://ulrichdebalbian.wordpress.com/2015/05/09/classificatory-disputes-about-what-is-art/ Art historians and philosophers of art have long had classificatory disputes about art regarding whether a particular cultural form or piece of work should be classified as art. Disputes about what does and does not count as art continue to occur today Defining art is difficult if not impossible. Aestheticians and art philosophers often engage in disputes about how to define art. By its original and broadest definition, art (from the Latin ars, meaning "skill" or "craft") is the product or process of the effective application of a body of knowledge, most often using a set of skills; this meaning is preserved in such phrases as "liberal arts" and "martial arts". However, in the modern use of the word, which rose to prominence after 1750, "art" is commonly understood to be skill used to produce an aesthetic result (Hatcher, 1999). Britannica Online defines it as "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others". But how best to define the term "art" today is a subject of much contention; many books and journal articles have been published arguing over even the basics of what we mean by the term "art" (Davies, 1991 and Carroll, 2000). Theodor Adorno claimed in 1969 "It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident any more." It is not clear who has the right to define art. Artists, philosophers, anthropologists, and psychologists all use the notion of art in their respective fields, and give it operational definitions that are not very similar to each other's. The second, more narrow, more recent sense of the word "art" is roughly as an abbreviation for creative art or "fine art."Here we mean that skill is being used to express the artist's creativity, or to engage the audience's aesthetic sensibilities. Often, if the skill is being used to create objects with a practical use, rather than paintings or sculpture with no practical function other than as an artwork, it will be considered it as falling under classifications such as the decorative arts, applied art and craft rather than fine art. Likewise, if the skill is being used in a commercial or industrial way, it will be considered design instead of art. Some thinkers have argued that the difference between fine art and applied art has more to do with value judgments made about the art than any clear definitional difference (Novitz, 1992). The modern distinction does not work well for older periods, such as medieval art, where the most highly regarded art media at the time were often metalwork, engraved gems, textiles and other "applied arts", and the perceived value of artworks often reflected the cost of the materials and sheer amount of time spent creating the work at least as much as the creative input of the artist or artisan. The traditional Western classifications since the Renaissance have been variants of the hierarchy of genres based on the degree to which the work displays the imaginative input of the artist, using artistic theory that goes back to the ancient world. Such thinking received something of a boost with the aesthetics of Romanticism. A similar theoretical framework applied in traditional Chinese art; for example in both the Western and Far Eastern traditions of landscape painting (see literati painting), imaginary landscapes were accorded a higher status than realistic depictions of an actual landscape view – in the West relegated to "topographical views". Many have argued that it is a mistake to even try to define art or beauty, that they have no essence, and so can have no definition. Often, it is said that art is a cluster of related concepts rather than a single concept. Examples of this approach include Morris Weitz and Berys Gaut. Andy Warhol exhibited wooden sculptures of Brillo Boxes as art. Another approach is to say that "art" is basically a sociological category, that whatever art schools and museums, and artists get away with is considered art regardless of formal definitions. This institutional theory of art has been championed by George Dickie. Most people did not consider a store-bought urinal or a sculptural depiction of a Brillo Box to be art until Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol (respectively) placed them in the context of art (i.e., the art gallery), which then provided the association of these objects with the values that define art. For example when you bake bread in your kitchen it is not considered as art, but do it in a gallery then it 'becomes art.' Undress or get dressed at home it is not viewed as art, but do it in a gallery or as a 'performance' then it mighgt be viewed as art. Cut up your clothes on your own it might not be interpreted as art, but when Yoko Ono had others cut off pieces of her clothes in public it suddenly is viewed as art, etc, etc. Proceduralists often suggest that it is the process by which a work of art is created or viewed that makes it, art, not any inherent feature of an object, or how wel l received it is by the institutions of the art world after its introduction to society at large. For John Dewey, for instance, if the writer intended a piece to be a poem, it is one whether other poets acknowledge it or not. Whereas if exactly the same set of words was written by a journalist, intending them as shorthand notes to help him write a longer article later, these would not be a poem. Leo Tolstoy, on the other hand, claims that what makes something art or not is how it is experienced by its audience, not by the intention of its creator.Functionalists, like Monroe Beardsley argue that whether a piece counts as art depends on what function it plays in a particular context. For instance, the same Greek vase may play a non-artistic function in one context (carrying wine), and an artistic function in another context (helping us to appreciate the beauty of the human figure). Philosopher David Novitz has argued that disagreements about the definition of art are rarely the heart of the problem, rather that "the passionate concerns and interests that humans vest in their social life" are "so much a part of all classificatory disputes about art" (Novitz, 1996). According to Novitz, classificatory disputes are more often disputes about our values and where we are trying to go with our society than they are about theory proper. For example, when the Daily Mail criticized Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin's work by arguing "For 1,000 years art has been one of our great civilising forces. Today, pickled sheep and soiled beds threaten to make barbarians of us all" they are not advancing a definition or theory about art, but questioning the value of Hirst's and Emin's work. On the other hand, Thierry de Duve argues that disputes about the definition of art are a necessary consequence of Marcel Duchamp's presentation of a readymade as a work of art. In his 1996 book Kant After Duchamp he reinterprets Kant's Critique of Judgement exchanging the phrase "this is beautiful" with "this is art", using Kantian aesthetics to address post-Duchampian art. The work of the French artist Marcel Duchamp from the 1910s and 1920s paved the way for the conceptualists, providing them with examples of prototypically conceptua l works (the readymades, for instance) that defied previous categorisations. Conceptua l art emerged as a movement during the 1960s. The first wave of the "conceptual art" movement extended from approximately 1967 to 1978. Early "concept" artists like Henry Flynt, Robert Morris and Ray Johnson influenced the later, widely accepted movement of conceptual artists like Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, and Douglas Huebler. More recently, the "Young British Artists" (YBAs), led by Damien Hirst, came to prominence in the 1990s and their work is seen as conceptual, even though it relies very heavily on the art object to make its impact. The term is used in relation to them on the basis that the object is not the artwork, or is often a found object, which has not needed artistic skill in its production. Tracey Emin is seen as a leading YBA and a conceptual artist, even though she has denied that she is and has emphasised personal emotional expression. Recent examples of disputed conceptual art 1991: Charles Saatchi funds Damien Hirst and the next year in the Saatchi Gallery exhibits his The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a shark in formaldehyde in a vitrine. 1993: Vanessa Beecroft holds her first performance in Milan, Italy, using young girls to act as a second audience to the display of her diary of food. 1999: Tracey Emin is nominated for the Turner Prize. Part of her exhibit is My Bed, her dishevelled bed, surrounded by detritus such as condoms, blood-stained knickers, bottles and her bedroom slippers. 2001: Martin Creed wins the Turner Prize for The Lights Going On and Off, an empty room where the lights go on and off. 2002: Miltos Manetas confronts the Whitney Biennial with his Whitneybiennial.com. 2005: Simon Starling wins the Turner Prize for Shedboatshed, a wooden shed which he had turned into a boat, floated down the Rhine and turned back into a shed again. The Stuckist group of artists, founded in 1999, proclaimed themselves "pro -contemporary figurative painting with ideas and anti-conceptual art, mainly because of its lack of concepts." They also called it pretentious, "unremarkable and boring" and on July 25, 2002, in a demonstration, deposited a coffin outside the White Cube gallery, marked "The Death of Conceptual Art".In 2003, the Stuckism International Gallery exhibited a preserved shark under the title A Dead Shark Isn't Art, clearly referencing the Damien Hirst work (see disputes above). In 2002, Ivan Massow, the Chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts branded conceptual art "pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless tat" and in "danger of disappearing up its own arse ... led by cultural tsars such as the Tate's Sir Nicholas Serota". Massow was consequently forced to resign. At the end of the year, the Culture Minister, Kim Howells, an art school graduate, denounced the Turner Prize as "cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit". In October 2004, the Saatchi Gallery told the media that "painting continues to be the most relevant and vital way that artists choose to communicate." Following this, Charles Saatchi began to sell prominent works from his YBA (Young British Artists) collection. Computer games date back as far as 1947, although they did not reach much of an audience until the 1970s. It would be difficult and odd to deny that computer and video games include many kinds of art (bearing in mind, of course, that the concept "art" itself is, as indicated, open to a variety of definitions). The graphics of a video game constitute digital art, graphic art, and probably video art; the original soundtrack of a video game clearly constitutes music. However it is a point of debate whether the video game as a whole should be considered a piece of art of some kind, perhaps a form of interactive art. Film critic Roger Ebert, for example, has gone on record claiming that video games are not art, and for structural reasons will always be inferior to cinema, but then, he admits his lack of knowledge in the area when he affirmed that he "will never play a game when there is a good book to be read or a good movie to be watched." Video game designer Hideo Kojima has argued that playing a videogame is not art, but games do have artistic style and incorporate art.Video game designer Chris Crawford argues that video games are art.[17] Esquire columnist Chuck Klosterman also argues that video games are art.Tadhg Kelly argues that play itself is not art and that fun is a constant required for all games so the art in games is the art of location and place rather than interaction.ah288 ah208 ag101abc https://ulrichdebalbian.wordpress.com/2015/05/09/classificatory-disputes-about-what-is-art/ Related Aesthetic Judgement https://ulrichdebalbian.wordpress.com/2015/12/03/aesthetic-judgement/ What (and HOW is Fine and Applied) Art (and craft)? https://ulrichdebalbian.wordpress.com/2015/05/07/whatr-and-how-is-fine-and-applied-artand-craft/ Contemporary Art https://ulrichdebalbian.wordpress.com/2015/05/08/contemporary-art/ https://ulrichdebalbian.wordpress.com/2015/05/06/aesthetic-judgment-taste-and-beauty-dopeople-like-your-work-from-taste-or-as-beauty/ https://ulrichdebalbian.wordpress.com/2015/07/31/art-journeys-golden-ration-aesthetic-myth/


Philosophy

Tarkovskiâs film is a drama of pain and partial recovery centered on the psychology of the Solaris station crew. Tarkovski wanted to address this way the deeply emotional and intellectual science-fantastic genre, considered by him to be superficial.
          The film approaches a central phenomenon of Klaus Holzkampâs critical-psychological analysis of human perception: the perceptions of the human world are significant to human beings. In perception, human beings are oriented towards an objective sense, which objects possess it in connection with the vital activity of the people. By virtue of this quality, the localization of meanings in objects is exclusively a characteristic of the human world.
          DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.13456.05129

Psychology of the film Solaris directed by AndreiTarkovsky Nicolae Sfetcu March 13, 2019 Sfetcu, Nicolae, "Psychology of the film Solaris directed by Andrei Tarkovsky", SetThings (March 13, 2019), MultiMedia Publishing (ed.), URL = https://www.telework.ro/en/psychologyof-the-film-solaris-directed-by-andrei-tarkovsky/ Email: email@example.com This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/. A partialtranslation of: Sfetcu, Nicolae, "Filmul Solaris, regia Andrei Tarkovsky – Aspecte psihologice și filosofice", SetThings (2 iunie 2018), MultiMedia Publishing (ed.), DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.24928.17922, URL = https://www.telework.ro/ro/e-books/filmul-solaris-regia-andrei-tarkovsky-aspectepsihologice-si-filosofice/ Psychology of the film Solaris directed by Andrei Tarkovsky Tarkovski's film is a drama of pain and partial recovery centered on the psychology of the Solaris station crew. Tarkovski wanted to address this way the deeply emotional and intellectual science-fantastic genre, considered by him to be superficial. The film approaches a central phenomenon of Klaus Holzkamp's critical-psychological analysis of human perception: the perceptions of the human world are significant to human beings.(Geier 1992) In perception, human beings are oriented towards an objective sense, which objects possess it in connection with the vital activity of the people. By virtue of this quality, the localization of meanings in objects is exclusively a characteristic of the human world. (Holzkamp 1989, 119)The human world is significant in that it is an objectification of the evaluation of utility and hence of human power. Under these circumstances, Solaris can have no meaning, disorienting the human society. Solaris is a noetic complex species a species with the property of thought, (Griffin 1998)that evolved under conditions completely different from ours. In our metaphysical system, although two species reach a noetic integrative level, their particular sub-levels may be different and will never be able to tell whether the gap between them lies outside the contact window of the other. (Weissert 1992) The film focuses on the issue of communication, in a human society of the future considered by Tarkovsky as rigid. This society refuses to accept diversity, both a dogmatic refusal to check Berton's astronaut's testimonies and an intention to destroy what he fails to understand.(Salvestroni 1987) The spectator deduces the characteristics of this future society, but which is very similar to Tarkovsky's Soviet reality, only indirectly, from the way Berton investigates the metaphor of the mechanical world induced by the impersonal and apparently chaotic character of cars on the motorway, Sartorius's statements, etc. Tarkovsky is obsessed with the house. The dream images of the house are present in Solaris, just like in Mirror and Nostalghia. A "home" built as a place for both memory and desire. Kelvin's subconscious is made up of memories of the house. The idealization of the house in memory allows it to escape mentally from the conflictual reality. Many memories have unrealistic features (raining inside, levitation, space discontinuity) affecting any idea that the ontology of the past is simple and objective. (McFadden 2012) For the scene of Kris father's house, a symmetry at the beginning and end of the film, in contradiction with technological developments, the director resorts to a series of metaphorical images: lively lake, rain, horse reminding of the final frames of Andrei Rublev. The critic Mark Le Fanu believes that home memories in the film combine "to demonstrate that memory need not be extinction; and that on the contrary we live in significance to the extent that we are prepared to embrace the shadows of our loss." (Fanu 1987) The film critic Sean Martin observes the parallelism between the psychic and the home "as if reflecting dream logic.. .the interiors of these dachas are always ambiguously arranged, with rooms seemingly moving around in relation to one another." (Martin 2011)The instability of the house structure reflects the disharmony between conscious and subconscious in movies. The structure of the house is mutable and confusing, because the characters themselves are confused and do not have complete self-knowledge. When characters face their weird self, the illusion of self-knowledge is shaken and forced into a state of anxiety. (McFadden 2012) Kelvin is presented in the beginning as profoundly incapable of correctly understanding the essence of the society in which he lives. The director notes that it is important to recognize that Kelvin "is an ordinary city dweller, a philistine; he looks just so, ordinarily. For me it was important that he would be just like that. He should be a man of a rather limited spiritual range, average just in order to be able to experience this spiritual battle, fear, not like an animal which is in pain and does not comprehend what is happening to it. What was important to me was precisely that human being unconsciously forces himself to be human, unconsciously and as far as his spiritual abilities would allow, he opposes the brutality, he opposes all that is inhuman while he remains human. And it turns out that despite him being so it would seem a thoroughly average guy, he stands at a high level spiritually. lt's as if he convicted himself, he went right inside this problem and he saw himself in a mirror". (Jerzy and Neuger 1985, 22) Solaris deeply disturbs this society because it invalidates the laws and fixed rules the society is used to. The ocean has a noetic behavior allowing dreams to create, from its own biological material, temporary geometric structures on its surface, as well as some disproportionately independent versions of the human form of people who have approached it, from the footprints of scientists' memories. (Weissert 1992)The ocean is thus endowed with a "symmetrical" logic that helps it overcome formal communication barriers. According to Godel's theorem1, there is a need for a meta-level approach to language. But astronauts are not prepared for this awareness of the unconscious. Their dialogue with the unknown becomes difficult and tense, and instinctively and dogmatically rejects this way of communication. Kris is the only person in the movie capable of evolution. In Solaris, "the key to interpretation is the same principle of "symmetry" that governs the Unconscious, including dreams and emotions. With that idea in view, we can observe that Harey, Kris, and Solaris are autonomous beings, distinct from one another, and at the same time elements in which the part is identical to the whole." (Salvestroni 1987)Hari is initially just a message materialized in the communication between Kelvin and Solaris. It brings together the human traits derived from Kris's memory of the woman she loved, but also an alterity she shares with Solaris in the way it was created and evolving. Thus, one of Solaris's most important moments, where the potentials and ductility of image language come to a halt, is when Hari, in turn, develops an interactive process using images he perceives visually. After Hari sees in a record the warm and red flames of a fire around which Kris's family is gathered in a snow-covered winter landscape, she looks at the reproduction of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Hunters in the Snow with intense concentration. Hari, an extraterrestrial person who possesses the natural language and cognitive abilities of an adult but lacking worldly experiences, falls into Ludwig Wittgenstein's comments on visual perceptions: "I contemplate a 1Gödel's incompleteness theorem is a fundamental theorem in mathematical logic, which establishes a correspondence between the semantic truth and the syntactic probability in the first-order logic. face and suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience 'noticing an aspect'" (Wittgenstein 1953, 193)Hari notes the element that painting has in common with the sequence he has been watching snow and this triggers an associative process that allows her to see painting in a different way. She isolates certain properties, associates them with other images and at the same time synthesizes their common details in order to clarify and illuminate each other. Hunters in the Snow (1565), by Pieter Bruegel the Elder At the same time, Bruegel, with his gray and green tones and his white of ice, conveys a sense of cold, loneliness, lack of communication. The lousy and dark hunters, supposedly unnecessarily killing, seem to be linked to Hari's imminent closure of dissolution in Sartorius's annihilator as a victim of a cold ferocity she feels but does not understand. Painting gives Hari a way of approaching an unknown world, and at the same time to connect the message of painting with her situation as a victim and prey. (Salvestroni 1987) Hari is the message that the planet sends to Kelvin, making him aware of the obtuse and mechanical cruelty dominating the world he comes from: "and consider your guests it seems that's what you call us something external, a hindrance. But it's a part of you. It's your conscience." (Tarkovsky 1972, 02: 02: 13,333-02: 02: 29,808) This second and again imperfect model that the planet sends and which Kris can immediately decipher brings the spectator back to the original scene of the film. As we look at what appears to be the lake water of the opening frames (which present the same concentric motion), the camera slowly pulls away so that we can see that what we see now is an aquatic island, wrapped in turn by the Solaris waters and the island, the old Kelvin's house in and out. The subsequent embrace of two generations is an event that takes place far from Earth on the space station as a materialization of Kris's mental image; and this signals the acceptance of a less fantastic alterity than Hari or the planet, though one that Kris would have misunderstood before his extraordinary double experience. (Salvestroni 1987) When Kris becomes ill and falls into a dreamlike state of fever, there is a last sequence of memory. The figures of Hari and his mother are almost undetected, the photographs hiding their faces, and both wear the same clothing. The wife and mother combine into a single figure, a recurring theme at Tarkovsky, which suggests an oedipal desire in Kris, updated by Kris's final gesture to his father in the final stage. (McFadden 2012) Bibliography Fanu, Mark Le. 1987. The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky. BFI. Geier, Manfred. 1992. "Manfred GeierStanislaw Lem's Fantastic Ocean: Toward a Semantic Interpretation of Solaris." 1992. https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/57/geier57art.htm. Griffin, David Ray. 1998. "Pantemporalism and Panexperientialism." In The Textures of Time, edited by P. Harris. University of Michigan Press. Holzkamp, Klaus. 1989. SinnlicheErkenntnis. HistorischerUrsprung und gesellschaftlicheFunktion der Wahrnehmung. Königstein/Ts: Athenaeum Vlg., Bodenheim. Jerzy, Illg, and Leonard Neuger. 1985. "'Tm Interested in the Problem of Inner Freedom..." Interview w/Andrei Tarkovsky." 1985. https://people.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/interview.html. Martin, Sean. 2011. Andrei Tarkovsky. Oldcastle Books. McFadden, Daniel. 2012. "Memory and Being: The Uncanny in the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky." Verges: Germanic & Slavic Studies in Review 1 (1). https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/verges/article/view/10846. Salvestroni, Simonetta. 1987. "The Science-Fiction Films of Andrei Tarkovsky (Les Films de Science-Fiction d'AndreiTarkovsky)." Science Fiction Studies 14 (3). Tarkovsky, Andrei. 1972. Solaris. Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069293/. Weissert, Thomas P. 1992. "Stanislaw Lem and a Topology of Mind (Stanislaw Lem et Une Topologie de l'esprit)." Science Fiction Studies 19 (2): 161–66. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4240148. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. 4 edition. Cambridge, Mass: WileyBlackwell.