This dissertation adds to the many arguments already made for the value of art (cultural artifact) in teaching and learning. The special approach developed here concludes with the articulation of Salience Strategy. The argument firstly questions the value of seeing intelligence as a problem-solving faculty. It continues by examining consciousness, memory and the imagination as both the ground and substance of intellection. It argues that, amongst other things, interconnectedness, reiterative pathways and networks are central to the operation of consciousness and therefore, are central to its epiphenomenal attributes like intelligence. As education should strive for greater intellectual functioning so it should, therefore, strive to harness the paradigms of interconnectedness, reiterative pathways and networks. The art object, (device, gesture, statement), it is proposed, is valuable when deployed as hubs in networks of ideas allowing learners to form patterns of unexpected and creative linkages enhancing both memory, curiosity and a capacity for imaginative and associative thinking. Learning becomes movement through a landscape of complex objects and outgrowths. Two salience itineraries are explored in this dissertation. The first in relation to concepts overheard during learner conversations over the duration of a school week, and a second, exploiting my own work as an artist, selected work by the British artist Richard Long, and some of the issues raised in the theoretical discussion of consciousness and networks.

Thesis advisor: Lisa Cahill / This dissertation investigates the relationship between religious aesthetics and justice in the pursuit of the societal common good. The orienting problem of the work is the tensive relationship between maintaining political stability and meaningful engagement with religious particularity in order to foster robust democratic participation, especially among communities that have been historically marginalized in American public life. This project interrogates the relationship between religion in public life through the specific locus of religious aesthetics: what role ought religious symbols—including images, narratives, music, liturgical practices—play in cultivating justice, or the minimum level of solidarity required for promoting basic human dignity in society? Each chapter illuminates the significance of a particular discourse in support this project. Chapter one exposes the relevance of Guadalupe as a religious symbol in public life. Chapter two forges a dialogue with John Rawls’s political philosophy, reiterating the necessity of an adequate framework for religion in public life that prohibits the ascent of particular comprehensive doctrines to inordinate influence over society’s basic structure while critiquing his framework for religion in public life as lacking adequate viability in a public context where limitation on religion in democratic speech about the most salient societal issues hinders participation of ethno-racially marginalized groups. Chapter three engages Martha Nussbaum’s response to these issues, highlighting her arguments pertaining to political emotions and aesthetics as crucial contributions to this framework. Nussbaum argues persuasively for a central relationship between emotions and cognition and, further, makes a convincing statement of the significance of aesthetics—primarily literature—in the cultivation of political emotion. Yet, Nussbaum’s work makes an unnecessary demand on religion in public life: that it be viewed as “civic poetry.” While this framework is less restrictive than Rawls’s framework, it does not yet articulate a robust appreciation of the positive meanings of religious pluralism, especially among individuals and communities for whom religious and public arguments are intertwined. Chapter four offers Alejandro García-Rivera’s theological aesthetics as a crucial component to an adequate framework for forming community across difference. García-Rivera offers the basis for a more inclusive framework for religion in public life, however, his lack of substantive engagement with ethical issues pertaining to justice demands attention. With these pieces in place, the fifth chapter knits together this set of insights toward a more adequate framework for engaging religious pluralism in liberal context: aesthetic solidarity. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Thesis advisor: John Sallis / This dissertation investigates the importance of the imagination in the thought of F.W. J. Schelling and Martin Heidegger, and argues that Heidegger's later philosophy cannot be understood properly without appreciating Schelling's central importance for him. It is increasingly recognized today that Schelling, who had long been overlooked, is an important figure in post-Kantian German Idealism. However, his significance for Heidegger's concentration on the creative character of thought remains undervalued. I argue that, by tracing the theme of imagination in these thinkers, the milieu of Schelling's absolute idealism and that of Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenlogy may be understood as distinct discourses that nevertheless share in a profound impulse to overcome sensible-intelligible and subject-object dualisms and retrieve and refine the productive and projective character of reason. This impulse is first evident in both thinkers' attention to the role of imagination in Kant's critical project (for Schelling, cir. 1800; for Heidegger, cir. 1929). It then proves inseparable from Schelling's treatments of intuition, identity, ground, and freedom; and it becomes still more evident in Heidegger's 1936 lecture course on Schelling and his affiliated inquiries into the essence of art and poetry. Even as Heidegger labors to deconstruct the alleged visual and subjectivist bias of metaphysics, he remains preoccupied with Schelling's ontological treatment of the law of identity and intent on translating Schelling's aesthetic emphasis into a poetic paradigm for philosophical inquiry. By focusing on how, alongside his engagement with Schelling, Heidegger endeavors to recover the imagination as a poetic (as opposed to reductive and willful) basis for reason, we attain a decisive rubric for understanding his later thought / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

anekdota is an exploration of the form of short short fiction. The exploration contains original works of fiction as short as five words and as long as twelve-hundred words. The exploration seeks new forms for fiction by frustrating and manipulating our traditional sense of story structure. At times, the exploration also investigates a form of conceptual art known as "found language" whereby original material is created by transforming, reframing, and collaging previously published material. anekdota translates from the Greek as "unpublished things." / by Scott Wood. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011.

Throughout history magic has been an art that has instilled awe and wonder in its spectators. The magician used to be held in high esteem, as teacher, as scientist, as priest and even as philosopher. This being the case, throughout the history of philosophy, philosophers have deemed magic to be deception, to be a mode of misleading people into believing what is not true. Through the modern philosophical era, philosophers have been seeking a purely scientific method for questioning reality. It seems that, today, even the magician views his or her art as mere entertainment. The purpose of my thesis is to dispel the belief that magic is purely a hobby with no artistic value and that, like other artworks, magic too can cause one to question existence. / by Mark J. Gobeo. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2008. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, FL : 2008 Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Thesis advisor: Judith Wilt / Though contemporary evangelical Protestants have shown an increased interest in the fine arts, scholars have often seen the aesthetic history of Anglo-American evangelicalism as one marked by hostility and indifference. In contrast to this view, this study argues that the history of evangelicalism's intellectual engagement with the fine arts has been complex and varied. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, evangelicals writing in a variety of denominational periodicals carried on a robust inquiry into aesthetics. This study traces the rise of this discourse among Anglo-American evangelicals and maps some of the main features of the evangelical theoretical landscape between 1830 and 1900&mdash;a high point of evangelical critical activity. <italic>Christians, Critics, and Romantics</italic> describes how evangelicalism's contact with Enlightenment thought initiated a break with the Puritan aesthetic tradition that contributed to the growth of a modern aesthetic consciousness among some eighteenth-century evangelicals. By the 1830s, evangelical aesthetic discourse had come under the influence of romanticism. Not only did many evangelical writers define art according to the expressivist principles adduced by major romantic critics but some went even further in asserting, after Coleridge and the German idealists, that art is an embodiment of a higher reality and the imagination an organ of transcendental perception. Evangelical critics, moreover, valued art for its contribution to the stability and progress of &ldquo;Christian nations&rdquo; such as England and the United States. By refining the moral feelings of individuals, fine art helped to safeguard the socio-moral cohesion of Protestant &ldquo;civilization.&rdquo; For a time, evangelical critics attempted to celebrate art in romantic terms while insisting on art's subordination to traditional Christianity, but such an arrangement ultimately proved unsustainable. By the end of the nineteenth century, a rift had opened up within Anglo-American evangelicalism between conservatives and liberals. This rift, caused in part by the spread of romantic thought and by various other secularizing trends, had important implications for evangelical aesthetic thought. While liberals continued to advance high claims for the spiritual and educational potential of art, conservatives largely abandoned the philosophical exploration of art in order to turn their attention to the threats of Darwinian evolution and biblical criticism. Nevertheless, both liberals and conservative fundamentalists retained in their respective ways many of the aesthetic assumptions of the romantic tradition. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Thesis advisor: John Sallis / Maurice Merleau-Ponty's last essay about art, Eye and Mind, refers to many painters, to painting, and even to sculpture. Yet there is hardly any use of the traditional categories used in art criticism to categorize artistic movements or to evaluate painters' contributions to their period. Instead, he uses terms such as `body' and `flesh' that are alien to that tradition, thereby indicating that he clearly intends to go beyond commenting on and assessing the artistic value of the works he mentions. Instead, the essay is a reevaluation of meaning of painting as a whole. Merleau-Ponty says that all painting from Lascaux to our day has been a celebration of `the visible.' However, to understand what he means by `the visible' involves considerable complexity. The standard by which Merleau-Ponty evaluates painting emerges from his phenomenological and ontological research into perception. I argue that in fact Eye and Mind answers a question that arose in his first major book concerning the relationship between consciousness and nature. Because the evolution of the ideas underlying the Eye and Mind's answer is so vast, the goal of this dissertation is to trace the thread leading from his earlier work in order to provide a unifying viewpoint that will ground an adequate understanding of the essay's various arguments. The dissertation argues that Merleau-Ponty's notion of the Gestalt or structure is the framework for understanding the origin and depth of the aperçus developed in Eye and Mind. Ironically perhaps, this notion is not mentioned in Eye and Mind. As if it had lost its original meaning, it is only referred to indirectly and vaguely in terms of transcendence. Nevertheless, the main issue settled in The Structure of Behavior dominated his understanding of the body in The Phenomenology of Perception, and underwent a transformation when Merleau-Ponty discovered language as a diacritical structure. This made possible the radical use he made of it in Eye and Mind without expressly mentioning it. Once the interpretation of Gestalt in relation to Paul Klee and Rudolf Arnheim had been worked out, this dissertation could use this notion--usually undervalued in Merleau-Ponty scholarship--to make sense of Eye and Mind's main contention in light of the interpretive reconstruction of the notions of expression, reversibility, body, and flesh Merleau-Ponty elaborated on the way to that essay. Part I of the dissertation deals with the phenomenology of the Gestalt structure prior to Merleau-Ponty's ontological turn, which in turn frames and underpins many of the insights achieved in this pre-ontological period, especially those about the body. The first two chapters introduce the notion of structure as it emerges in its application to behavior, and explain Merleau-Ponty's own contribution to the notion through the overcoming of earlier psychologists' static reduction of the notion to the physical level. The third and last chapter of Part I discusses the structural dimension of the body. There are two extraordinary things in Eye and Mind: the first is Paul Valery's statement that the painter "takes his body with him"; and the second is the analogy between the problems of the body and the problems of painting, by which Merleau-Ponty proposes that understanding one is indispensable for understanding the other. To clarify his proposal we have to return to The Phenomenology of Perception's analysis of the body according to embodied intentionality or motor intentionality, in which the body operates according to an "I can" that must replace the mechanical reaction to a stimulus. Here Merleau-Ponty was helped by Kurt Goldstein's insight into the body as a Gestalt. The dissertation illustrates what this could mean for the structure of a painting by using examples. What was formerly Part II profiles Merleau-Ponty's embodied notion of the Gestalt form against Arnheim's aprioristic account, which explains the relationship between consciousness and nature through an isomorphism that is even more ambitiously totalizing than the ones envisioned by the original Gestalt psychologists. Because of the detailed nature of our account this part is in two appendices. What is now Part II focuses on the problem of painting more directly. Using both the Notes de Cours (where Merleau-Ponty's most extensive comments on Paul Klee occur) and Paul Klee's own celebrated Notes, Chapter Four on Paul Klee reconsiders the relationship between consciousness and nature as the one between the painter and the world. Klee interpreted abstraction in terms of Gestalt as a form of transcendence involving the visible and the invisible, in contrast to Sartre's idea of transcendence, which also employs the figure/ground formation of the Gestalt. In Eye and Mind the expression of painting is interpreted as "a `visible' to the second power, a carnal essence or icon of the first." So Chapters Five and Six discuss the notion of structure from the viewpoint of expression. The doubling of expression in painting is seen first as analogous to philosophy as a hyper-reflection, and then in the linguistic distinction between le langage parlé et le langage parlant, which allowed Merleau-Ponty to interpret and generalize the model of expressive language via the diacritical structure of language and not restrict expressive language to bodily gestures. Rather than a return to the original (as The Phenomenology may have suggested), the point of this doubling aspect of expression is the recognition of the qualities of reversibility and difference that constitute `depth.' With the clarification of terms such as `perceptual faith' and `style,' Chapter Seven introduces the notion of reversibility before exploring its meaning, specifically in the second chapter of Eye and Mind. In Chapter Eight the earlier focus on the beginning of the definition of a painting as "a `visible' to the second power, a carnal essence or icon of the first," shifts to the meaning of the term "icon." This rounds off the meaning of `depth' and completes the exploration of the theme of the Gestalt structure. Now it becomes clear that the meaning of `depth' is articulated as the depth between the visible and the invisible, because the model used to understand depth is the by now very familiar basic articulation of the perceptual Gestalt: the articulation of a figure over a ground. Like a stain on a rug--in painting, in history, in philosophy, in language, or in perceptual faith--the crystallization of what appears always disguises an invisible dimension, whose invisibility is what makes the visibility of the visible possible. Chapter Nine then concludes the dissertation. It first considers Jean-Luc Marion's use of the icon in painting, in which, as in our interpretation of Merleau-Ponty on depth, uses his own idea of the depth between the visible and the invisible; and second, it responds to observations on Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of art by Veronique Fotí and criticisms of it by Michel Haar. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

Thesis advisor: Eileen Sweeney / This paper combines principles from aesthetic cognitivism with phenomenological embodiment as explained by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in order to construct both an argument for video games as a form of art as well as a method for appreciating them. I argue that the unique status of video games as interactive fictions warrants an adjusted set of aesthetic criteria. My proposed method of examination involves the concept of "fictional embodiment" in which an appreciator imaginatively undergoes the experiences of the video game character. After establishing this framework the paper applies it to narrative and emotion in video games before moving on to extended examples. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: College Honors Program. / Discipline: Philosophy.

Este trabalho, composto por uma dissertação e um livro de artista, apresenta uma investigação conceitual e um exercício de expressão acerca da sensibilização do espaço da casa pelo seu morador. O processo de pesquisa, deflagrado por uma experiência pessoal importante decorrente da desaparição de uma casa da família, coletou conhecimentos teóricos, históricos e filosóficos para fundamentar uma dissertação que trata dos mecanismos de construção, conexão e identificação daquilo que faz da casa espaço artificial do mundo um exemplo de interioridade humana, reflexo de vivências do seu morador. Para a concepção da obra de arte que completa a dissertação, foi necessário desenvolver estratégias experimentais que estimulassem, colhessem, registrassem e comunicassem informações sensíveis características de vivências domésticas. Como resultado, obtiveram-se fotografias, testemunhos verbais e registros de áudio que, ao final do processo criativo, puderam encontrar na configuração de um livro de artista o meio mais satisfatório para servir de contentor, organizador e potencializador do seu conteúdo. Esse livro - intitulado o sentimento morador - procura reavivar valores da casa capazes de estimular a imaginação do fruidor a guiá-lo em devaneio até sua casa onírica lugar do mundo interior que é a fusão de todas as casas vivenciadas, lembradas e sonhadas, espaço onde se pode reviver intensamente os próprios valores e experiências de morador. Essa obra, assim como uma arquitetura possível, também deve contar com um morador - manuseador/leitor/observador/ouvinte - ativo para prospectar seu interior, desvelar algum significado e vivenciá-lo plenamente. / This work, comprising a dissertation and an artist book, presents a conceptual investigation and an exercise of expression concerning the sensitization of the house space by its inhabitant. The research process, arisen out of an important personal experience derived from the disappearance of a familys house, gathered theoretical, historical and philosophical knowledge in order to set up a dissertation that deals with the mechanisms of constructing, connecting and identifying what makes the house artificial space of the world an example of human interiority, a mirror of the way its inhabitant lives. For the conception of the art piece that completes the dissertation, it was necessary to develop experimental strategies that stimulated, gathered, recorded and communicated sensitive information, specific to domestic life. As a result, there were photographs, verbal statements and audio recordings that, at the end of the creative process, could find out in the configuration of an artist book the most satisfactory mean to suit as a container, an organizer and a way to raise all the potentialities of its content. This book entitled the inhabitant feeling is intended to revivify house-related values that could stimulate the imagination of whom usufructs the book, to conduct him/her in a reverie up to his/her own oneiric house a place of the inner world that is a fusion of all lived, remembered and dreamed houses, a space where one can strongly revive his/her own inhabitant-related experiences and values. This work, like a possible architecture, also needs an active inhabitant - book-handler/reader/observer/listener - to prospect its interior, to unveil some meaning and experience it intensely.

This thesis explores colour as a philosophical means of transit between literature and the visual arts. I explore a new way of thinking about the self and about thought, developmg the significance of colour alongside, and internal to, modes of representation in the modernist movement. The interaction of art and literature is crucial to much debate on modernist aesthetics. DevelopIng the debate into the history of colour phenomena, I argue that colour aHows a philosophical inflection to certain clich6s (such as stream-of-consciousness) that are attached to modernist writing. In the work of Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Dorothy Richardson and TS Eliot, I argue that the modernist preoccupation with the seeming unpasse between thought and representation can be seen to be 'made visible' through the theme of colour. Colour is a vehicle through which to explore the relation between thought and perception, subject and object, and offers a new way of engagement with recent research into theoretical comparisons between thinking, writing and visual arts.