Adorno is nominalistisch voor zover hij stelt dat de kunstenaar niet mag proberen iets transparant af te beelden (dat zou ideologisch zijn: ieder positieve representatie suggereert grip die er niet is). Dus moet de kunstenaar experimenteren met zijn materiaal—iets anders staat hem niet open. Maar Adorno is ook een realist in de zin dat hij…

Wittgenstein, in TLP 3.332, says something about sentences which sounds awkward, but is perfectly clear when applied to pictures. So the insight in the lemma may well depend on his picture theory of language. 3.332 No proposition can make a statement about itself, because a propositional sign cannot be contained in itself (that is the…

What is the isomorphy between a sentence and the world it describes? Looking at the photograph, and assuming the world was similar to what we see in it—let us say we hold the photograph up to the scene it depicts—it makes clear sense to claim that the fork is to the left of the plate…

…What is the logical formof a cup of tea half-filled with lemon juice?… A picture can depict only that which form it has. Sculptures depict the spatial aspect of things, paintings their colouring aspect. (2.171) What seems presupposed as a necessary condition is the sharing of the logical form between the picture and the depicted….

So I hear Douwe Draaisma say—in an interview on television—that we have many kinds of memory, at least one per sense organ and then a lot more of them. (I like that model). And he defines memory as anything we retain from the past to deal with the present. (I like that definition). And he…

…Phenomenology is martial art for philosophers… Imagine this: you are the only person in the world who moves in slow motion. You have no clue about this (of course you don’t), but everyone else can see it happening. So imagine a world where people see one person moving in slow motion, and that one person…

Net zoals voor Schopenhauer onttrekt zich ook voor Adorno iets aan onze kennis-claims, maar voor Schopenhauer is dat de Wil, een ongevormd Ding an Sich—terwijl dat voor Adorno nog ideologischer en “nominalistisch onvermogender” zal zijn dan de standaard waarheidsclaims van de wetenschappen. De Wil gaat immers de particulariteit van individuele dingen en gebeurtenissen verre te…

Een sterke intuïtie stelt dat we het over waarnemingen uiteindelijk eens moeten kunnen worden (zwak gezegd); eigenlijk geloven we dat waarnemingen aan waarheidswaarden gehoorzamen. Maar ook geloven we dat schoonheid waargenomen moet worden (je behoort over schoonheid “uit eerste hand” te oordelen) én dat er over schoonheid niet te twisten valt. Hier is dus sprake…

Recently, I developed this “argument from reunions”: People, when visiting reunions, say, of a High School class, notice how they fall back in their old roles. That is how we express the experience. But why does this happen? According to my view on how we farm out our perceptions to the things and events perceived…

The first sentence of Kant’s Critique of Judgement (of section 1), in my reading, presents us with the flawed view of human beauty–without mentioning human beings there, and apparently Kant didn’t mean to either–that is threaded through contemporary culture: the view that requires one to treat the object of the gaze as if represented. Gerwen,…