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This essay examines and analyzes the debate between David Chalmers and Daniel Dennett about the nature of consciousness and how to proceed to explain its existence. They are two of the biggest names of philosophy of mind today and have been on opposite sides of the debate since the nineties. Chalmers has long advocated a modern dualistic view of consciousness while Dennett's theories move in a more physicalist and functionalist direction. Today, Chalmers calls himself a realist as a clear opposite to Dennett's illusionism. The essay begins with a short summary of the history of modern philosophy of mind and a presentation of Chalmers and Dennett. Then it goes into some of their most noted older theories and arguments and move on to two of the most famous thought experiments of philosophy of mind before going into their most recent theories and work. It concludes with summary of their development and with an analysis of the sustainability and significance of their theories for the development of the debate today together with some personal reflections.

This study investigates the subject of illusionism in contemporary American fiction. A recurrent yet under-examined theme, the history of stage magic in the U.S. suggests how an earlier age domesticated the seeming sorcery of market capitalism, credit, limitless self-(re)making, and ethnic vanishing. Such conditions provide antecedents and analogues for the writing of fiction in a world of digitalized knowledge, work, identity, and financialization. Self-reflexively illusionist fiction today represents itself ambivalently as magical entertainment. Is its function to mesmerize audiences or alert them to ideological sleight-of-hand? If the enchantments of literary art screen the machinations of power, how do novelists preserve fiction's capacity to inspire wonder, affective experience, and ethical commitment? Chapter One argues that Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian presents illusionism as integral to imperialism and commodification, as well as to its own artistry. McCarthy indicates the instrumentalization of aesthetics under late capitalism yet seeks through moments of enchantment to transcend it. Chapter Two shows that in Mr. Vertigo by Paul Auster and In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien, fiction’s "magic" lies in transcending social differences and inspiring empathy, but that the historical residue of racism in American illusionism obstructs the effort to imagine otherness. Both novels reframe the worth of fiction as therapeutic. Chapter Three argues that the figure of Harry Houdini embodies literature's status as primarily entertainment, inspiring wonder rather than critique. Michael Chabon's Kavalier & Clay celebrates escapistry, but seeks through Houdini to restore a utopian dimension to entertainment. / 2017-11-04T00:00:00Z

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In this PhD thesis I offer an examination of the work of Jesuit Andrea Pozzo (1642-1709), an artist known primarily for his works of perspectival fresco painting. Pozzo's development, his career and his multifaceted practice––which included painting, scenography, architecture, and a two-volume treatise on perspective–– together serve as a prime case study for understanding the relationship of the religious art and architecture of the seventeenth century to the period's culture of ritual and performance. Pozzo's work, I argue, is religious theatre, and the key to reading both his ephemeral scenographies and the permanent works of painting and architecture lies in religious performance. Each of the works, I contend, functions as a work of religious theatre: architectural space, images, narrative, illusion and light are used to communicate messages, to engage the senses and the intellect, to activate the memory and the imagination, and to directly involve the spectator both internally and externally as a performer. In my first two chapters I present an analysis of the environment in which Pozzo emerged, beginning with the religious, intellectual and visual culture of the Jesuits, before turning to the religious theatre of Northern Italy. Here I concentrate on the Counter-Reform culture of religious spectacle, before arriving at Pozzo’s first recorded scenographies. In addition to their ritual function, I demonstrate how these works establish many of the recurring visual themes and techniques we see across Pozzo's work. In the third chapter I study Pozzo's earliest surviving major painting commission: the church of San Francesco Saverio at Mondovì. I present the church as a teatro sacro—a permanent ritual scenography of architecture and painting which evokes the elaborate ritual processions of the time. My fourth chapter focuses on the ephemeral scenographic works of Pozzo’s Roman period. Pozzo’s innovations in scenography and perspectival illusionism in Rome quickly establish his reputation and lead to the major commissions in the church of Sant'Ignazio, which I discuss with several major Roman works in my final chapter. The examination of the Roman projects returns us to the central theme of my thesis: art and architecture as theatre; both a setting for religious ritual and a means of persuasion through intellectual and spiritual engagement of the observer in a ritual performance. In order to pursue this line of argument I have consulted a wide array of sources and secondary literature across a number of fields. Important primary sources studied include Pozzo's two-volume treatise, Perspectiva Pictorum et Architectorum (1693,1700), Jesuit documents and archived correspondence, eighteenth-century biographies of Pozzo, prints and commemorative publications of festivals, works of classical authors, and theological writings of major figures in the seventeenth century. This project embraces a wide range of topics including painting, perspective, architecture, illusion, theatre and scenography, ritual and spectacle, theology, philosophy, early modern science, Counter-Reform religious culture, and Jesuit history.

The present dissertation is intended to be the first systematic investigation of the illusionistic pergola considered within the framework of the intellectual culture and the garden culture of early modern Rome. The subject is the fresco or mosaic decoration featuring a pergola – a depicted trelliswork covered with plants and peopled with birds – in the loggias, porticoes, and garden pavilions of villas and palaces in Rome and its environs. These pictorial fictions have survived in sufficient numbers to constitute a decorative trend, and moreover, appear in clusters at specific periods, which can be partly explained by means of the cultural factors predominant at the time. The dissertation discusses these pergolas in relation to antiquarian culture, the collecting of plants and birds, the study of natural history, garden furnishings and the art of treillage, thereby contextualizing them within the culture of early modern Rome. The dissertation assembles the first corpus of illusionistic pergolas in the period 1500-1620, updating a much earlier general corpus of 1967 by Börsch-Supan, and distinguishes three distinct periods of the proliferation of these pictorial fictions in Rome and its environs: the first period (1517-1520), the second period (1550-1580), and the third period (1600-1620). Important cultural issues relevant to each period are identified,and proposed as the frameworks for study. These include the reference to the antique and to the vernacular, mediation between indoors and outdoors, the tension between art and craft and the ambiguity of the pseudo-architectural, semantic and aesthetic cross reference between architecture and garden, and the reflection of the intellectual culture. On examination, the illusionistic pergolas are revealed to be a nexus of interrelationships between built structure, ornamented surface, garden and landscape, as well as multivalent embodiments of emerging ideas and sensibilities concerning the experience of architectural space and nature. By taking into account the middle ground of architecture and garden, the study explores the multivalence of ephemeral garden furnishings and their fictive counterparts, opening up a new perspective on the sites examined, and attempts to see a resonance of the tradition in modern times. / text

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My dissertation contributes to the material and sensorial interest in the humanities by focusing on the beholder’s phenomenological experience of multi-panel paintings by Gerrit Dou (1613-1675), Rembrandt’s first and most financially successful pupil. Dou has long been hailed as the founder of the Leiden fijnschilders (fine painters), who brought mimesis to the height of artistic achievement around mid-century. Archival documents reveal that at least eight of Dou’s paintings were once fitted within cases that featured highly illusionistic still life paintings on the outer surfaces of their hinged doors or sliding lids. While only two of the recorded covers survive, they feature both common and luxury objects with varied surface textures and lighting effects that exhibit a level of artifice true to the goal of painting professed by Philips Angel: schijn zonder sijn (“semblance without being”). Projecting out of the darkness of false shallow niches, the objects addressed the viewer in a trompe l’oeil mode and with a startling mimetic force that invited closer scrutiny. Yet, Dou’s still life works are rarely the subject of critical analysis and remain on the periphery of seventeenth-century Dutch art historical scholarship, overshadowed by his novel achievements in genre painting. Scholars most often interpret Dou’s still lifes as protective mechanisms for and allegorical glosses on the paintings they concealed. Instead, I argue that these approaches have limited our understanding of their significance. The disassembly and loss of most of these painted covers has further obscured their functions and meanings. My phenomenological approach underscores the ways in which these painted still life covers fostered an embodied relationship with the beholder in the context of the art collections for which they were destined. In Chapter 1, I gather evidence of Dou’s extant and lost still life covers and quantify this practice and consider these paintings together as an understudied corpus in concert with the paintings they covered. In Chapter 2 and 3, I provide historical and theoretical contexts for Dou’s nested paintings to ground them in pictorial and material traditions of concealment and revelation that permeated early modern culture (Netherlandish, German, and Italian) from the fourteenth- to the late seventeenth century. I consider them modern adaptations of the illusionistic images on the exterior of devotional diptychs and triptychs, insisting on their presence in the liminal space that connects the painted and real world. In Chapter 4, I analyze Dou’s painted still life covers as “meta-paintings,” characterizing them as theoretical objects charged with their own agency and the ability to invite the beholder to “think” with both their mind and body. Ultimately, I explore the ways in which Dou’s still life covers and René Descartes’s natural philosophy exhibit a shared and contemporaneous distrust of the senses through an epistemology of doubt and deceit, a premise that expanded the horizons of their respective fields in the seventeenth century. / 2025-09-21T00:00:00Z

Mémoire (M.A.)-- Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 1988. / Ce travail de recherche a été réalisé à l'Université du Québec à Chicoutimi dans le cadre du programme de maîtrise en arts plastiques extentionné de l'Université du Québec à Montréal à l'Université du Québec à Chicoutimi. CaQCU Document électronique également accessible en format PDF. CaQCU

Si Platon a souvent été très critique à l’égard du théâtre et de la littérature en général, reprochant aux poètes d’introduire « un mauvais génie dans l’âme de chacun », le genre dramatique va revêtir, au XIXe siècle, une dimension philosophique nouvelle. À l’heure de la comédie de boulevard et de la « pièce bien faite », un théâtre d’idées commence à émerger et Villiers de l’Isle-Adam fait figure de précurseur de ce nouveau théâtre. Sa pièce Axël s’est rapidement imposée comme l’œuvre matricielle du drame symboliste. Dans ce mémoire, il s’agit d’étudier le caractère philosophique d’Axël, pièce publiée à titre posthume en 1891, et les procédés dramaturgiques employés par l’auteur pour revitaliser un genre littéraire qu’il jugeait lui-même en décrépitude. Dans ce travail, nous repérons les fragments des théories idéalistes de Hegel et Schopenhauer que Villiers réutilise dans sa pièce pour consacrer sa philosophie personnelle : l’illusionnisme. Nous nous intéressons aussi à la manière dont Villiers parvient, en renouvelant les canons de la dramaturgie classique, à insuffler le soupçon de vie nécessaire pour « faire d’une abstraction philosophique une réalité dramatique ». Finalement notre mémoire tend à vérifier l’hypothèse de Camille Dumoulié, exposée dans son essai Littérature et Philosophie, qui fait de la littérature l’Idée de la philosophie. / If Plato often criticized theater and literature, faulting poets of “implanting an evil constitution in the soul of man”, theater dons, nonetheless, a new philosophical dimension in the 19th century. At a time of boulevard comedy and of “well-made play”, a theater of ideas begins to emerge. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam is a precursor of this new theater thanks to his play Axël, who quickly became the template of symbolist theater. In this thesis, we will study the philosophical features of this play, published posthumously in 1891, and the dramaturgical methods employed by the author to give a new life to this literary genre, which he himself considered as dying. In this work, we will find fragments and references to the idealist theories by Hegel and Schopenhauer, which Villiers used in his play to illustrate his personal philosophy: Illusionism. We will study the ways in which Villiers, by renewing the classical techniques of play writing, brings in the dialogues the new life necessary to “make of an abstract philosophy a tangible play”. Finally, this thesis, has a propensity to verify the hypothesis of Camille Dumoulié, exposed in his essay Littérature et Philosophie, which argues that literature is the idea of philosophy.