Monthly Archive for June, 2010

From Jeremy Adler at The Sunday Times…

Few writers did more to propagate the idea of a singular genius than the young Goethe, yet few can have done more than he to cultivate their relationships to others. As the studies by Rüdiger Safranski and Gustav Seibt remind us, Goethe’s interest in other people often entailed a highly conscious, indeed sometimes stylized, pose that helped him both to place himself in the world and to perfect his art. Whether dealing with writers, scholars, scientists or men of affairs, Goethe knew how to achieve the maximum mutual benefit. That he was so often able to form a productive rapport with the leading figures of his day, notably with Schiller, his only competitor as a writer, and even with the Emperor Napoleon, says much about Goethe’s culture – a self-culture or Bildung which he promulgated in his writing. Intriguingly, both Schiller and Napoleon sought Goethe out, flattered him, and won him over by literary-critical discourse. Anyone who today doubts the value of criticism could do worse than examine these instances. Goethe himself did much to foreground them. He consolidated the public image of the friendship with Schiller by publishing the Goethe–Schiller correspondence, and recorded the meeting with Napoleon in a brief sketch, as in some suggestive references to the man he liked to call “my emperor”. More…

From Eurozine…

Analytic philosophy has a complex history of more than one hundred years and this movement is so variegated that it can hardly be characterized by a single feature. Most of those who have tried to do so either were not aware of its diversity or considered only some part of its history. For example, it is sometimes believed that analytic philosophy is committed to a thoroughly anti-metaphysical stance. Such a belief may be rooted in some of the famous pronouncements of the logical empiricists, in the philosophical method put forward by Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, or in the fact that some of the works of early analytic philosophy due to Russell and Moore – two of the founding fathers of the movement – have usually been interpreted as reactions against Bradley’s metaphysics and other versions of the British idealism of the time. Other facts, however, which support a completely different view, should not be overlooked. For one thing, Russell’s theory of the proposition and his logical atomism, as well as his philosophy of logic, clearly had metaphysical implications. For another, the logical empiricists’ anti-metaphysical crusade, which had been forceful in the twenties and the thirties, began to run out of steam in the sixties. At that time, other prominent figures of analytic philosophy were much less prone to reject any form of metaphysics as fundamentally unclear or unscientific: Quine’s famous criterion of ontological commitment had already been formulated in a paper which appeared in the Review of Metaphysics, Strawson had published his Individuals. An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, and Kripke’s semantics for modal logic would soon arouse a wave of metaphysical thinking about the existence of possible worlds. Today, metaphysics is a well established and respected important part of analytic philosophy – indeed, one of its main divisions – although the style of the authors who take part in it is, to be sure, not really akin to the one Hegel or Bergson used in their writings. More…

From Montclair State University…

Artists and those who love the arts have tried to gain more meaning and insight by taking a critical look at what they have viewed or heard. Oftentimes, we challenge how we are affected emotionally and psychologically through the performances or artwork we experienced, seeking to process any messages that playwrights, visual artists, musicians or choreographers may be sending.

In the world of theatre, dramaturgy can be described as the art of dramatic composition and the representation of the main elements of drama on stage. Applied in a sociological perspective, the idea of dramaturgy (coined in modern times by Erving Goffman in homage to G.E. Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy of 1767) contends that human actions are dependent upon time, place, and audience. As Shakespeare put it so eloquently, the world is indeed a stage.

In theatre, dramaturgy is a significant component in the construction and deconstruction of dramatic work while taking a critical look at how everything fits together. There has been no formal equivalent in the world of dance, however — until now. More…

(Image: Lois Greenfield)