Form and Feeling in Photography

In his recent essays on art, philosophy, and the concept of intention in criticism, Walter Benn Michaels suggests that the opacity of a photograph with regard to the photographer’s intention, and photography’s taking up intention and chance as central animating problems, account for the medium’s increasing art-historical importance over the last several decades. In what specific and concrete sense, Michaels asks, is the taking of a photograph an intentional act? This essay responds to Michaels’ essays on art and the philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe and shows how, for Michaels, artists in the postwar and contemporary periods overwhelmingly are better and more incisive thinkers on aesthetic questions than philosophers and literary theorists

Kant with Michael Fried: Feeling, Absorption, and Interiority in the Critique of Judgment

While the greater part of criticism and reflection on Kant takes the question of aesthetics in the Critique of Judgment to center on the subject’s relation to art, art is not actually Kant’s model of aesthetic experience in the text. This essay argues that the The Critique of Judgment, in other words, cannot simply be understood as Kant’s engagement with the realm of what we understand by aesthetics. Rather, an aesthetic object for Kant constitutes itself as aesthetic object only in relation to a particular kind of subject or unique experience of the subject. Aesthetic experience for Kant is an economy between subject and object rather than an encounter with what we understand by beauty. Aesthetics, then, rather than being the division of Kant’s philosophy concerned with art or the beautiful becomes, instead, a mode or a displaced way of his posing questions about subjectivity more generally. This essay shows that this economy between subject and object bears a striking resemblance to the shift between artwork and beholder that Michael Fried claims transpires at about the same period in the history of art and aesthetics

Corporate Counsel, Legal Loopholes, and the Ethics of Interpretation

This Article examines ethical issues posed by imperfections in legal texts. More particularly, it addresses legal loopholes, carefully defining the term and then exploring whether there is anything wrong with exploiting loopholes for private gain. Focusing on corporate settings, the analysis considers both the obligation of a business leader to support reasonably just social institutions and the professional obligation of corporate counsel advising on such issues. Although the notion of a legal loophole enjoys widespread colloquial use, the term is typically used quite loosely and without critical reflection. Perhaps in an adversarial system, one becomes accustomed to taking full advantage of any and all effective legal recourse, including but not limited to the exploitation of loopholes. Loopholes often generate arguments over interpretation. This Article addresses the ethics of legal interpretation head on. It examines the scope of the social obligation to abide by a good faith interpretation of a legal text, rather than to exploit inevitable imperfections in those texts to advance private interests. The analysis proceeds in three parts followed by a conclusion. Part II portrays a loophole as a style of argument that pits a literal inter- pretation of a text against a more purposeful one. Because literal interpretations sometimes prevail, loopholes have economic value. Part III examines the ethics of a corporate legal strategy to construct strained interpretations of the law as guides to corporate conduct. The discussion embraces both the libertarian insights of Milton Friedman and the democratic liberalism of John Rawls, drawing useful ideas from each. Part IV considers the role of corporate counsel, concluding that in an adversarial setting, corporate counsel must argue for the legal interpretation that best suits the corporation\u27s needs. In a transactional setting, by contrast, where advising rather than advocacy is the norm, ethics require a more balanced interpretation. The Article concludes with a brief summary

Comparative Efficiency in International Sales Law

The article employs the method of the economic analysis of law (EAL) in a comparative context. In particular, it assesses the efficiency of select provisions of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG). The CISG is the law of the United States and over 70 other countries. It reflects a culmination of a century-old process of failed attempts to achieve an international sales law. The drafting process involved intense negotiation and compromise between representatives of the common and civil law legal traditions. As a result, the CISG provides in an interesting amalgam of civil and common law rules. This article analyzes whether the more efficient rules were chosen from the civil and common law alternatives. The article begins by surveying the policy choices incumbent in drafting the CISG and by reviewing the basic tenets of EAL. These tenets are then used as a metric for measuring the efficiency of specific CISG rules. The article examines both the efficiency of rules taken in isolation and the global efficiency of the CISG as an international sales law generally. The rules selected for analysis come from two categories (1) instances where the common and civil laws conflicted and one of the conflicting rules was adopted and (2) instances where the drafters created a new rule unique to the CISG. Specific rules analyzed include writing and evidentiary rules, contract formation rules, contract interpretation rules, and the law of liquidated damages. The article concludes by offering a practical scheme limiting the role of contract interpretation, as well as assessing the value of Comparative EAL. In the area of contract ambiguity and interpretation, the article articulates a theory of particularized consent to narrow the gap between subjective and objective consent. The article also illustrates that Comparative EAL in relation to the CISG can be used at three levels of analysis—two descriptive and one normative. The first level of analysis asks given the choices that the drafters were presented did they adopt the efficient options? The second level of analysis asks whether jurisprudential developments in the application of CISG rules have made the rules more or less efficient. The normative analysis involves taking the findings of the comparative efficiency analysis to ask what changes should be considered to make international sales law more efficient

Thinking with Austen: Literature, Philosophy, and Anne Elliot's Inner World

This essay discusses pedagogical approaches to teaching Austen’s Persuasion as a novel situated at the intersection of literature and philosophy. It focuses on how Persuasion takes up, talks back to, and helps illuminate classic philosophical questions about personhood, sociality, ethics, consciousness, and the space of inner life. It discusses classroom strategies, assignments, and exercises that connect Austen’s ideas about “knowledge” or “subjectivity” to more than fictions: What kinds of rhetorical and stylistic decisions does Austen make? How can we connect those decisions with her sense of what is important, knowable, and significant in the world? No character in Austen’s novels is as silently intelligent and quietly reflective as Anne Elliot, and the emphasis in my approach pivots on the class’s patiently staying with her character. I show how students come to see that staging Anne’s slow emergence out of the quiet discontent of her own inner world is Persuasion’s central concern. As Anne comes to find forms of expression (linguistic, social, emotional, bodily) that capture the impulses of her rich inner life, she also takes on the dimensions of a heroine. Our classroom inquiry centers on what Austen wants to suggest about personhood, subjectivity, acknowledgment, and love through this unveiling of a character

Keats's Voice

Keats’s poetic thoughts on the topic of human identity remain some of Romanticism's most incisive reflections on the constitution of selfhood. This essay is about the ways Keats's verse thinks through questions about human subjectivity and its horizons with an imaginative range. Keats famously asserts that the poetical character has "no identity" and allows his characters and speakers to dissolve into or be absorbed by other beings. From the early experiments to the Spring Odes, Keats's poems are populated by selves that are empty and have been hollowed out by the chameleon poet, but his poetic persona can also come forward as vital, energetic, effusive, and abundant. Readers of Keats have claimed that his verse is constitutively bound to a logic of the self's internalization and—with equal conviction—they have argued that Keats offers a critique of the self's autonomy and independence in the world. This essay attends to the very breadth of literary thinking that constitutes Keats's active struggles with questions of human subjectivity

Wordsworth, Wittgenstein, and the Reconstruction of the Everyday

The connection between philosophy and real or everyday language belongs to Wordsworth’s early poetic vision. My interest in Wordsworth’s dialogue with philosophical thinking leads me to turn neither to studies tracing the varied philosophic influences on his poetics nor to those examining the influence of his collaborator Coleridge on his early poetic theory and practice. Instead, this essay turns to Wittgenstein, a philosopher who, very much like Wordsworth, gives almost exclusive and even obsessive attention to everyday language. This essay explores the deep and rarely noted conceptual affinity between Wordsworth’s conviction in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads that poetry should be written in “language really used by men” and Wittgenstein’s overarching desire in Philosophical Investigations to “bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.” What occupies me in this essay is the epistemological priority both Wordsworth and Wittgenstein in this way assign to everyday language; I wonder throughout how it turns out in both Lyrical Ballads and Philosophical Investigations that the everyday is the philosophical, and how the singular attention to everyday language in both the case of the poet and the philosopher culminates in what one could call a novel epistemology