What is a problem? What’s asked in that question, and how does one even begin to take its measure? How else could one begin, except as one does with any other problem—by way of its impulsion. Of Learned Ignorance is about philosophy because philosophy is about problems: philosophy, in a word, is where problems become a problem. Of Learned Ign…[Read more]

What is philosophy? That’s a good question—not because there’s no answer, but because what’s involved in posing it points up something essential to philosophy. In the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, Spinoza sets out what’s required by a definition. A circle, a typical definition might run, is a figure in which all lines drawn fro…[Read more]

In a 1917 letter to Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin writes, “Theory is like a surging sea.” This small book takes more than its title from that line—it takes that line as a point of departure in Erich Auerbach’s sense, an *Ansatzpunkt,* as a compositional principle so that what follows can be read in its entirety as a gloss on the remaind…[Read more]

Review of Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence by Carl Brandon Strehlke

A brief essay about the work Past Won’t Pass (Catalog #52) by artist Noritaka Minami.

Thomas Hobbes has been hailed as the philosopher of power par excellence; however, I demonstrate that Hobbes’s conceptualization of political power is not stable across his texts. Once the distinction is made between the authorized and the effective power of the sovereign, it is no longer sufficient simply to defend a doctrine of the authorized p…[Read more]

The concept of imperium is central to Spinoza’s political philosophy. Imperium denotes authority to rule, or sovereignty. By extension, it also denotes the political order structured by that sovereignty, or in other words, the state. Spinoza argues that reason recommends that we live in a state, and indeed, humans are hardly ever outside a state.…[Read more]

Hobbes’s science of politics rests on a dual analysis of human beings: humans as complex material bodies in a network of mechanical forces, prone to passions and irrationality; and humans as subjects of right and obligation, morally exhortable by appeal to the standards of reason. The science of politics proposes an absolutist model of politics. I…[Read more]

Negri celebrates a conception of democracy in which the concrete powers of individual humans are not alienated away, but rather are added together: this is a democracy of the multitude. But how can the multitude act without alienating anyone’s power? To answer this difficulty, Negri explicitly appeals to Spinoza. Nonetheless, in this paper, I a…[Read more]

Emphasizing the peculiar, the perverse, the clandestine and the scandalous, this volume opens up a critical discourse on sexuality and visual culture in early modern Italy. Contributors consider not just painted (conventional) representations of sexual activities and eroticized bodies, but also images from print media, drawings, sculpted objects…[Read more]

Questo volume propone un discorso critico sulla sessualità e sulla cultura visiva dell’Italia rinascimentale. I saggi raccolti tentano di fare luce su una serie di zone d’ombra, dando spazio a tutte quelle pratiche o preferenze considerate in genere come alternative o anomalie, e a un’ampia varietà di scenari “scandalosi”. Particolare attenzione…[Read more]

This paper offers an explanation of how phenomenology can be used to provide a solution to the so-called paradox of fiction. The paradox of fiction asks: how is it that we have a real emotional response to fictional characters or situations when we do not believe that these characters or situations actually exist? This paper will attempt an answer…[Read more]

This paper is part of a workshop with Donald A. Landes on his book Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression. It summarises the ideas of Merleau-Ponty, and Landes’ take on these, before offering some critical comments on Landes’ chapter on ‘The Structure of Behaviour’.

The rush of activity among London’s auction houses in the first few weeks of summer has long been a familiar occurrence that persists even today. However, this intense seasonal concentration of sales was not always so. This paper draws on quantitative methods to explore the gradual emergence of a tightly scheduled auction season in London at the t…[Read more]

winter/spring 2017 issue of ENVIRONMENTAL & ARCHITECTURAL PHENOMENOLOGY, edited and published by David Seamon

Sharon Street (2009) argues that realism about epistemic normativity is false. Realists believe there are truths about epistemic reasons that hold independently of the agent’s (or anyone else’s) attitudes. Street argues by dilemma. Either the realist accepts a certain account of the nature of belief, or she does not. If she does, then she cannot…[Read more]

Discussions of hope can be found throughout the history of philosophy and across all Western philosophical traditions, even though philosophy has traditionally not paid the same attention to hope as it has to attitudes like belief and desire. However, even though hope has historically only rarely been discussed systematically—with important e…[Read more]