Art is the final product of the system and the ground can gain a complete intuition of itself through works of art. Art therefore becomes the final destination of the system. Schelling thinks that only the works of art can completely unify thinking and reality, the infinite and the finite, the universal and the particular, the subjective and the objective, give equal respect to each opposing pole, completely reflect the original identity and fulfill the primordial demand. What Schelling in his philosophy of art reveals is that philosophizing or reflection is not sufficient to solve the ultimate questions asked by itself. Thinking or rationality is not the foundation of world and reality. In fact, thinking and reality are equally the products of the ground. Hence, it is unreasonable and one-sided to make any one product the dominant factor and even the first principle of the unification and the whole system. / Before Schelling, Kant has already placed aesthetics in a system of philosophy, but he is not genuinely concerned about the question of art. Schelling is the first philosopher who places art within a system of philosophy and endows art a paramount role in the system. For Schelling, at least in his early thinking, art is not only a necessary question in philosophy, but is also its very origin and final destination. This position is quite extraordinary to for philosopher. Why does Schelling, as a philosopher, make such claim? How can art become the origin and destination of philosophy and sciences? What is the true essence and significance of art? These are the major questions of this dissertation. Schelling's discourse on art in his System of Transcendental Idealism and Philosophy of Art will be explicated. In order to make Schelling's contention more apparent, the discussions on art in Hegel and the early German romantic such as Friedrich Schlegel, Holderlin and Novalis will be included as well. / From the discourse on art, we see that Schelling, who is known as a German idealist, pays much attention to the question of existence and gives much respect to reality as such. Hence, Schelling's intellectual identity is quite ambivalent and should be re-examined. The second major task of this dissertation is to deliberate whether Schelling is an early German romantic or a German idealist, and whether there is a transition from romanticism to idealism in Schelling's philosophy. In order to answer these questions, the general positions of early German romanticism and German idealism should be first articulated. Then, the consistency of Schelling's thought will be verified. This dissertation argues for consistency of Schelling's system throughout his life and for Schelling's reconciliation of romanticism and idealism. Instead of being a preparation to Hegel's system, this dissertation will show that Schelling's fundamental concern and position are incompatible with that of Hegel. Despite his affinity with the romantic thought, the position of the demand of the ground and the final anticipation of future development are different in Schelling and the romantics. / The ground is for Schelling nothing else but the original One and the primordial demand. In order to explain and attain the unity of everything, the ground is posited as original identity; in order to explain the origin of existence and thinking, the ground is posited as a primordial demand. This demand is the demand for intuiting or knowing itself. Since the first principle is a demand, the system therefore becomes a dynamic and dialectical one. The whole system of Schelling is thus constructed according to two basic activities originated from the primordial demand: separation and unification. / Unlike contemporary aesthetic discussions, Schelling's discourse on art is never detached from the context of philosophy or metaphysics. For Schelling, what philosophy or metaphysics ultimately questions about are the unity and the ground of existence and thinking. Following Kant, Schelling, like his romantic and idealistic contemporaries, recognizes that the problem of unity is the fundamental question of philosophy. But diverging from Kant, Schelling thinks that there is no way to attain and explain the unity unless the ground is first investigated. / Wong, Wing Yuen. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 71-01, Section: A, page: 0210. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 309-322). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese.

This thesis will examine the practice of relational aesthetics as it involves the viewer, as well as the way in which it plays out within and outside of the institutional setting of the museum. I will focus primarily on two unique projects: that of The Machine Project Field Guide at Los Angeles County Museum of Art on November 15, 2008, produced by Machine Project, a social project operated out of a storefront gallery in Echo Park; and David Michalek's Slow Dancing at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York City, July 12-29 2007.

This submission comes in two parts; the written dissertation, Contemporary art: the key issues, and the exhibition Melbourne - Moderne. When taken together they present a discourse on the conditions facing contemporary art practice and one artist’s response to these conditions in the context of Melbourne 2003-2007. (For complete abstract open document)

This research addresses the effect of pedagogical ways-of-knowing in higher education design programmes such as Graphic Design, Interior Design, Fashion, and Industrial Design. One problematic aspect of design studio pedagogy is communication between teachers and students about the aesthetic visual meaning of the students’ designed objects. This problematic issue involves ambiguous and divergent ways-of-knowing the design meaning of these objects. The research focus is on the design teacher role in design studio interactions, and regards pedagogical ways-of-knowing as the ways in which teachers expect students to know visual design meaning. This pedagogical issue is complicated by the fact that there is no agreed-upon corpus of domain knowledge in design, so visual meaning depends greatly on the social knowledge retained by students and teachers. The thesis pursues an explanation of pedagogical ways-of-knowing that is approached through the philosophy of critical realism. How it is that particular events and experiences come to occur in a particular way is the general focus of critical realist philosophy. A critical realist approach to explanation is the use of abductive inference, or inference as to how it is that puzzling empirical circumstances emerge. An abductive strategy aims to explain how such circumstances emerge by considering them in a new light. This is done in this study by applying Luhmann’s theory of the emergence of cognition in communication to teacher ways-of-knowing in the design studio. Through the substantive use of Luhmann’s theory, an abductive conjecture of pedagogical ways-of-knowing is mounted. This conjecture is brought to bear on an examination of research data, in order to explain how pedagogical ways of-knowing constrain or enable the emergence of shared visual design meaning in the design studio. The abductive analysis explains three design pedagogical ways-of-knowing: design inquiry, design representation and design intent. These operate as macro relational mechanisms that either enable or constrain the emergence of shared visual design meaning in the design studio. The mechanism of relation is between design inquiry, design representation and design intent as historical knowing structures, and ways-of-knowing in respect of each of these knowing structures. For example, design inquiry as an historical knowing structure has over time moved from ways-of-knowing such as rationalistic problem solving to direct social observation and later to interpretive cultural analysis. The antecedence of these ways-of-knowing is important because communication about visual meaning depends upon prior knowledge, and teachers may then reproduce past ways-of-knowing. The many ways-of-knowing that respectively relate to design inquiry, design representation and design intent are shown to be communicatively formed and recursive over time. From a Luhmannian perspective, these ways-of-knowing operate as variational distinctions that indicate or relate to the knowing structures of design inquiry, design representation and design intent. This is the micro-level operation of pedagogical ways-of-knowing as relational mechanisms in design studio communication. Design teachers’ own ways-of-knowing may then embrace implicit way-of-knowing distinctions that indicate the knowledge structures of design inquiry, design representation and design intent. This implicit indication by distinction is the relational mechanism that may bring design teachers’ expectation that this and not that visual design meaning should apply in communication about any student’s designed object. Such an expectation influences communication between teachers and students about the potential future meaning of students’ designs. Consequently, shared visual design meaning may or may not emerge. The research explanation brings the opportunity for design teachers to make explicit the often implicit way-of-knowing distinctions they use, and to relate these distinctions to the knowing structures thus indicated. The study then offers a new perspective on the old design pedagogical problem of design studio conflict over the meaning of students’ designs. Options for applying this research explanation in design studio interactions between students and teachers are therefore suggested.

As an alternative to existing research which states that the phenomenon of displacement resists theorisation because of its complex nature, this study conducts a Phenomenological examination of the nature of displacement in which the interlinked losses in the key concepts of the consciousness of the displaced, namely Memory, Land and home and Identity, are navigated. It is shown that the current consciousness of society mimics these losses with the effect of displacement being experienced as a state of mind by contemporary society. By comparing selected artworks of artists Rachel Whiteread and Cornelia Parker, it is established that although manifested in diverse ways, contemporary artworks reflect displacement according to a set of broadly defined visual signifiers. The visual documentation of a site of displacement in the North West Province of South Africa and subsequently produced artworks underline these findings and highlight the elusive attributes of loss inherent in the displacement phenomenon. / Art History, Visual Arts & Musicology / M.A. (Visual Arts)

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis places Chaucer within the tradition of philosophical poetry that begins in Plato and extends through classical and medieval Latin culture. In this Platonic tradition, poetry is a self-reflexive epistemological practice that interrogates the conditions of art in general. As such, poetry as metapoetics takes itself as its own object of inquiry in order to reinforce and generate its own definitions without regard to extrinsic considerations. It attempts to create a poetic-knowledge proper instead of one that is dependant on other modes for meaning. The particular manner in which this is expressed is according to the idea of the loss of the Golden Age. In the Augustinian context of Chaucer’s poetry, language, in its literal and historical signifying functions is an effect of the noetic fall and a deformation of an earlier symbolism. The Chaucerian poems this thesis considers concern themselves with the solution to a historical literary lament for language’s fall, a solution that suggests that the instability in language can be overcome with reference to what has been lost in language. The chapters are organized to reflect the medieval Neoplatonic ascensus. The first chapter concerns the Pardoner’s Old Man and his relationship to the literary history of Tithonus in which the renewing of youth is ironically promoted in order to perpetually delay eternity and make the current world co-eternal to the coming world. In the Miller’s Tale, more aggressive narrative strategies deploy the machinery of atheism in order to make a god-less universe the sufficient grounds for the transformation of a fallen and contingent world into the only world whatsoever. The Manciple’s Tale’s opposite strategy leaves the world intact in its current state and instead makes divine beings human. Phoebus expatriates to earth and attempts to co-mingle it with heaven in order to unify art and history into a single monistic experience. Finally, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale acts as ars poetica for the entire Chaucerian Performance and undercuts the naturalistic strategies of the first three poems by a long experiment in the philosophical conflict between art and history. By imagining art and history as epistemologically antagonistic it attempts to subdue in a definitive manner poetic strategies that would imagine human history as the necessary knowledge-condition for poetic language.

No description available.

No description available.