Still Moving

Here is something puzzling. Still Lifes can be expressive. Expression involves movement. Hence, (some) Still Lifes move. This seems odd. I consider a novel explanation to this ‘static-dynamic’ puzzle from Mitchell Green (2007). Green defends an analysis of artistic expressivity that is heavily indebted to work on intermodal perception. He says visual stimuli, like colours and shapes, can elicit experienced resemblances to sounds, smells and feelings. This enables viewers to know how an emotion feels by looking at the picture. The hypothesis is intriguing, but I show that his suggestion that we empathize with the pictorial content is implausible and that this exposes a flaw in the way his argument moves from experiential mappings to experiential-affective mappings. Consequently, I register some reservations about the way Green supposes we detect these cross-modal qualities

The Implied Painter

In this paper, I discuss Jenefer Robinson’s personalist account of pictorial expression. [1] According to personalism, a picture possesses the expressive properties we attribute to it because we take it that someone expresses E in the work. Robinson’s particular strategy exploits the concept of an implied persona who ‘unifies’ and ‘specifies’ what is expressed. [2] Dominic Lopes challenges this view by attacking what he takes to be a flawed assumption motivating the personalist account: the priority of figure expression. [3] Once we acknowledge this flaw, he argues, there is no good reason to prefer personalism to an impersonalist theory. I will argue that Robinson qua personalist can pre-empt this strike by clarifying the relation between (a) what a picture expresses and (b) what is depicted as expressing in the picture. Rather than leading with the idea that personalism unifies or determines the meaning, I argue that impersonalism diminishes it and that, should it be accepted, we would be left with an impoverished view of what specific art pieces can mean

The Village of Billionaires: Fair Taxation and Redistribution Amid Relative and Absolute Poverty

Tax justice and principles underpinning the international tax regime are in vogue. The idea that companies and individuals need to pay their fair share , not just in the domestic sense but also the international sense, is now a mainstream position. This paper explores the problems relating to what might constitute a fair share by setting out what is meant when this expression is used. A reasonable assumption is to consider taxation as the means by which the state funds public services and in some jurisdictions, contributes to greater equality within society. Those goals, however, give rise to competing claims. This is especially the case when considering international tax challenges, for example those faced by the OECD\u27s 2019 work plan.This paper, in examining competing claims for tax revenues, considers the specific categories of relative as opposed to absolute poverty. If one accepts that taxation is to fund public services, the question arises, at least in international tax, which jurisdiction\u27s public services? If the motivation for raising tax is to tackle inequality, what has the greater claim, international inequality or national inequality? It is in answering these questions that we need to address the issue of which is more pressing, relative as opposed to absolute poverty?The contention in this paper is that there is a far stronger moral claim for tax to be redistributed on an international basis rather than on a nation basis. Further, this paper contends that purported moral claims which seek to address inequality within national borders are merely political demands made to further the economic interests of particular groups who themselves are among the most economically privileged, when viewed on an international spectrum

Body mass estimates of an exceptionally complete Stegosaurus (Ornithischia: Thyreophora): comparing volumetric and linear bivariate mass estimation methods

© 2015 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. The file attached is the published version of the article