HUMAN NATURE: 20th Century Philosophy in a new Key

This essay is a précis (for which I take full responsibility) of Chapters One and Two of Leslie Dewart’s seminal book consisting of Nine Chapters. The perspective he presented here, to my mind, sets a fresh intellectual trajectory for philosophical contemplation. Written towards the end of the 20th century the book is not an easy read, but since it introduces an alternative and refreshing philosophical interpretation, I offer this précis in the hope that it may inspire readers to read the entire book in the context of the 21st Century experience. His “single mosaic” is not the unified intellectual fruit of classical Western philosophy, but rather is an insightful statement of the alternatives (described in the epilogue of the book) consciously available to the human species of the future

Susan Langer and the woeful world of facts

Susanne Langer is mainly known as the American philosopher who, starting from her famous Philosophy in a New Key (1942), worked in aesthetics and famously saw art as the product of the human mind’s most important, distinctive and remarkable ability, i.e., the ability to symbolise. But Langer’s later consideration of the connection between art and symbol is propagated by an early interest in the logic of symbols themselves. This rather neglected early part of Langer’s thought and her early interests and lines of reasoning, which she somehow abandoned later on to dedicate herself exclusively to the study of art, are the topic of this paper

Core Aspects of Dance: Condillac and Mead on Gesture

This essay—part of a larger project of constructing a new, historically informed philosophy of dance, built on four phenomenological constructs that I call “Moves”—concerns the second Move, “gesture,” the etymology of which reveals its close connection to the Greek word “metaphor.” More specifically, I examine the treatments of gesture by the philosophers George Herbert Mead and Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, both of whom view it as the foundation of language. I conclude by showing how gesture can be used in analyzing various types of dance, which in turn suggests transformational potential for philosophy, dance, and society as a whole

Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Between Reason and Relativism; a Critical Appraisal

This paper pursues the double task of (a) presenting Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms as a systematic critique of culture and (b) assessing this systematic approach with regards to the question of reason vs. relativism. First, it reconstructs the development of his theory to its mature presentation in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Cassirer here presents a critique of culture as fulfilling Kant’s critical work by insisting on the plurality of reason as spirit, manifesting itself in symbolic forms. In the second part, the consequences of this approach will be drawn by considering the systematics Cassirer intended with this theory. As can be reconstructed from his metaphilosophical reflections, the strength of Cassirer’s philosophy is that it accounts for the plurality of rational-spiritual activity while at the same time not succumbing to a relativism. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms steers a middle course between a rational fundamentalism and a postmodern relativism