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- Cederberg, Carl, 1973-
(författare)
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Resaying the Human : Levinas Beyond Humanism and Antihumanism
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this reading a notion of the human is developed through an engagement with the work of French philosopher Emanuel Levinas. The argument is that, with the help of Levinas, it is possible for the idea of the human to be understood anew, for the notion to be ‘resaid’. This resaying of the human is performed in a critical appropriation of the philosophical tradition: Levinas’s work is shown not to be a new variation of the complacent ideology of humanism; the idea of the human is instead interpreted to be the bearer of the very movement of critique. This movement is articulated in terms of a transcendence of a discursive ‘economy of violence’. Critique does not establish a permanent position outside of violence, but is a movement that must constantly be renewed.Here Levinas is offered as a modern thinker of particular relevance for contemporary discussions surrounding the nature both of the political and of Human Rights. In addition one finds a systematic analysis of the major works of Levinas, unraveling how a notion of the human develops from within his philosophy.Levinas’s thought is placed alongside philosophical figures of his time, such as Heidegger, Sartre, Bataille, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault and Derrida, as well as more recent political thinkers, for example, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Rancière.
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| 2. |
- Foultier, Anna Petronella, 1966-
(författare)
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Recasting Objective Thought : The Venture of Expression in Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis is about meaning, expression and language in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, and their role in the phenomenological project as a whole. For Merleau-Ponty, expression is the taking up of a meaning given either in perception or in already acquired forms of expression, thereby repeating, transforming or congealing meaning into gestures, utterances, artworks, ideas or theories. Contrary to the predominant view in the literature, the relation of expression to meaning, and in particular the problem of expressing new meanings, was of fundamental importance to Merleau-Ponty from the very beginning, in that it was intrinsically related to the overcoming of what he termed “objective thought”. Admittedly, there is an evolution of his philosophy in this respect: from the early stance where the recasting of certain basic categories is taken as pivotal for the development of a new form of thinking, with arguments drawn also from various empirical and social sciences, to what appears to be an effort at an all-pervading reformulation of philosophical language during his last years. But the remoulding of categories was never for Merleau-Ponty a matter simply of finding a few, better adapted concepts, but from the outset an endeavour to think philosophical arguments through to a point where they reveal their inherent inconsistencies. Recasting philosophical expression is thus a risky enterprise, and this is a point I explore further in Essay 1, that focuses especially upon creative expression in painting and to some extent in literature. In Essay 2 I discuss the notion of Gestalt and how it serves this general project, whereas Essay 3 deals with verbal language, on the basis of Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Saussure’s linguistics. Essay 4 examines bodily expression from the point of view of feminist phenomenology and in particular Judith Butler’s early reading of Merleau-Ponty, and finally Essay 5 discusses expression in the art of dance.
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| 3. |
- Pettersson, Mikael, 1976-
(författare)
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Seeing What Is Not There : Essays on Pictures and Photographs
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Pictures—paintings, etchings, photographs, CGI—let us see what is not there. Or, rather, since what pictures depict is not really there, we do not really see the pictorial contents. But we seem to see the depicted things: we “see” them “in” the pictures. One kind of picture—photographs— would seem to have a special capacity to yield this experience of “seeming-to-see.” Over the last couple of decades, the question of what it is to see something in a picture—photographic or otherwise—has been lively discussed. The papers in this thesis are all attempts at contributing to this discussion.Essay I treats the special subjective experience one undergoes in looking at photographs (as opposed to “handmade” images). I argue that this experience is (in part) due to our taking photographs as a certain kind of trace. Along the way, it is also argued that Kendall Walton’s “transparency thesis”—the thought that one literally, actually, sees photographed objects when one sees photographs of them—cannot explain the phenomenology of photography. Behind Walton’s transparency thesis lies a view of photography as an essentially causal medium; it is the merely causal process of photography that, on Walton’s view, makes photographs transparent. In Essay II, I offer an account of the role of causality in photography, and discuss its implications for the possible contents of photographs. Essays III and IV discuss pictorial perception in general. Essay III treats Richard Wollheim’s notion of non-localisation, and (what I call) pictorial perceptual presence, how things, which are strictly speaking not seen in an image, are still part of our apprehension of the picture. Essay IV gives an account of the seeing of states of affairs in pictures, and points to the significance of such seeing.
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| 4. |
- Wallenstein, Sven-Olov, 1960-
(författare)
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Nihilism, Art, and Technology
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The thesis investigates the role of technology in the formation of the artistic avant-garde, along with various forms of philosophical reflection on this development, with a particular emphasis on Heidegger. Setting out from an analysis of three paradigmatic cases in the interplay between art and technology—the invention of photography, the shift from Futurism to Constructivism, and the interpretation of technology in debates on architectural theory in the 1920s and ’30s—it proceeds to a discussion of three philosophical responses to this development, those found in Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, and Ernst Jünger, all of which share a certain avant-garde sensibility and a notion of art as a response to nihilism. In Heidegger’s postwar writings we see a retreat from the positions of the mid 1930s, and in his reflections on technology a different answer emerges to the question of whether “great art” is still possible: great art is an art that exists precisely by making the founding of a world into something problematic. The fourth part confronts Heidegger’s analysis of technology with the work of an individual artist, the architect Mies van der Rohe, and asks how the “silence”—the withdrawal of language, sense, aesthetic perception, etc.—that is often understood as a precondition for the critical potential of his work should in fact be understood. By examining interpretations that draw on Heidegger via comparisons with other types of critical theory, a different understanding emerges of the relation among nihilism, art, and technology. They form a field of constant modulation, which implies that the concepts that have been the foundation of critical theory, nature, subjectivity, experience, even “being” in Heidegger’s sense, must be subjected to a historical analysis that acknowledges them as ongoing processes of construction, and that also accounts for the capacity of technologies and artistic practices to intervene in the formation of philosophical concepts.
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| 5. |
- Weigelt, Karl, 1971-
(författare)
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The Signified World : The Problem of Occasionality in Husserl's Phenomenology of Meaning
- 2008
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study offers the first comprehensive account of the problem of situation-dependence and facticity in Husserl's phenomenology of meaning. On the basis of a reconsideration of the central ideas of Husserl's phenomenological approach to meaning and intentionality, it presents a reconstruction and assessment of Husserl's revised conception of empirical meaning. Taking its lead from Husserl's self-critical remark on the analysis of "occasional expressions" in the Logical Investigations, the study uncovers the underlying problem with Husserl's initial conception of the relation between subjectivity and objectivity. It is shown that the problem of occasionality does not relate to indexicality in a standard sense, but to the essential facticity and subject-relativity of the intentional individuation of real being in general and to the contingency and inexhaustible transcendence of the world. The reconstruction of Husserl's solution is carefully related to an interpretation of central ideas of Husserl's developed philosophy. Critically reviewing influential interpretations of Husserl, the study elaborates on the question of internalism and externalism, the question of representationalism, the question of ideal contents, the notion of noema and the issues of direct reference and de re meaning. It is shown how Husserl's revised conception of empirical meaning is related to the analysis of horizon-intentionality, to the constitution of the transcendent real world and to the constitution of the lived body as a centre of situated orientation. It is argued that Husserl succeeds in maintaining phenomenological internalism with regard to intentionality in concreto, while accepting a form of externalism with regard to meaning, according to which the possibility of true identity of meaning is bound to the presumptive existence of the experienced world.
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