Persistent Autonomy and Romanticism

Autonomy in the arts is generally considered an outdated concept, an atavism that is only relevant to outsiders and to people who have a mere traditional, if not completely obsolete understanding of the artistic and aesthetic field. Autonomy in this view has little to do with contemporary discussions about art and artistic practices. The very first sentence of a recent study about autonomy in literature, Andrew Goldstone’s Fictions of Autonomy (2013) for example reads: ‘In literary studies, we regard aesthetic autonomy as an idea whose time has passed.’Instead of repeating the historicity and irrelevance of the autonomy concept it may be interesting to ask why it has been criticised so often while continuing to reappear again and again. If we keep in mind Peter Bürger’s analysis in his classic Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984), that the Avant-Garde failed to abolish autonomy in the arts and that this appeared to be impossible in what he calls ‘late capitalist society’, it may still be worthwhile to ask ourselves, how to understand the tenacious belief in autonomy, a belief that has so often been abolished yet and is still present everywhere. In doing so we’d better go back to the emergence of the belief in autonomy in the art history of the last few centuries rather than adding still another explanation about the irrelevancy of the concept

Art in Progress

In this challenging and erudite philosophical essay, the author argues that in art, belief in progress is still relevant, if not essential. The radical freedoms of postmodernism have had a crippling effect on art - more than ever before, art is in danger of becoming meaningless. Art can only acquire meaning through context, and the concept of progress is ideal as the primary criterion for establishing that context. History of art can be seen as a process of constant accumulation. Works of art comment on each other, enriching each other's meanings. These complex interrelationships lead to progress in both the sensibility of the observer and the significance of the works of art.Alles in de kunst is in beweging. Tegelijkertijd lijkt met het eind van de avantgarde de grote stilstand te zijn ingetreden. Het veelbesproken einde van de kunst en het postmodernisme roepen veel twijfels op. In dit helder geschreven betoog onderzoekt de auteur een begrip dat door de tot cliche geworden afschaffing van de Grote Verhalen onzichtbaar is geworden: het vooruitgangsidee. Hij laat zien hoe dat idee in de achttiende eeuw opkomt, allesbepalend is tijdens de avantgarde en met het eind van de avantgarde ten onder gaat. Maarten Doorman pleit voor een kritische herwaardering van vooruitgangsbegrippen om de als zorgeloosheid vermomde vrijblijvendheid van het postmodernisme het hoofd te bieden. Arthur Danto: The end of art does not entail that there has not been genuine progress in the philosophy of art. Maarten Doorman's challenging and valuable study contributes to that progress, whether or not progress in art itself remains, as he argues, a tenable idea

How does a missing part become important for primary school students in understanding fractions?

Understanding of fractions is difficult for Indonesian students. This often leads to misinterpretation in solving fractional problems. In this study, a task aiming at identifying students’ struggles in understanding the basic concept of part-whole relationships in fractions was developed and tested with six 4th-grade students. The task uses Indonesian sweet food, martabak, that has a rounded pizza-like shape as a context in which one slice was missing. Realistic Mathematics Education underlies the context designed, that was also inspired by the Dutch textbook Alles telt Q Basiswerkschrift. The study used a qualitative methodology through an interview, observation, and written test. The result of this study indicated that the students’ struggles can be identified as follows: making references to the whole, making references to the complete partition, and making sense of the incomplete partition. The study showed that the designed tasks have potentials to provoke students' reasoning in learning fractions. The findings indicate that when students learn fractions, their understanding of the meaning of fractions should be well addressed with problems that challenge this part-whole relationship. Challenging this relationship can be supported with problems that have some ambiguity about what is the ‘whole’ using the missing part context

Niccolò Machiavelli. Een Florentijn verscheurd tussen eerzucht en eenzaamheid.

Review of: K. Mittelmaier, Niccolò Machiavelli. Denker en cynicus; Anthony J. Parel, The Machiavellian Cosmo

Onverholen sarcasme van miskend genie

Review of: A. Schopenhauer, Bespiegelingen over levenswijshei