Pleasure and its Bystanders: A Ludibrium (original) (raw)
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Special issue on sense of place in the history of English
English Language and Linguistics, 2015
This special issue is concerned with how the multidisciplinary concept ‘sense of place’ can be applied to further our understanding of ‘place’ in the history of English. In particular, the articles collected here all relate in some way to complicated processes through which individuals and the communities they are embedded within are defined in relation to others and to their socio-cultural and spatial environments (Converyet al.2012). We have brought together eight articles focusing on specific aspects of this theme using different theoretical models that offer new insights into the history of the English language from the Old English (OE) period to the twenty-first century. The findings will also be of interest to researchers in the fields of corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, English dialectology, lexicography, pragmatics, prototype theory, sociolinguistics and syntactic theory.
Nous, 2019
The aim of the paper is to reassess the prospects of a widely neglected affective conception of the aesthetic evaluation and appreciation of art. On the proposed picture, the aesthetic evaluation and appreciation of art are non-contingently constituted by a particular kind of pleasure. Artworks that are valuable qua artworks merit, deserve, and call for a certain pleasure, the same pleasure that reveals (or at least purports to reveal) them to be valuable in the way that they are, and constitutes their aesthetic evaluation and appreciation. This is why and how art is non-contingently related to pleasure. Call this, the Affective View. While I don’t advance conclusive arguments for the Affective View in this paper, I aim to reassess its prospects by (1) undermining central objections against it, (2) dissociating it from hedonism about the value of artworks (the view that this value is grounded in, and explained by, its possessors’ power to please), and (3) introducing some observations on the practice of art in support of it. Given that the objections I discuss miss their target, and given the observations in support of it, I conclude that the Affective View is worth serious reconsideration.
2019
The aim of the paper is to reassess the prospects of a widely neglected affective conception of the aesthetic evaluation and appreciation of art. On the proposed picture, the aesthetic evaluation and appreciation of art are non-contingently constituted by a particular kind of pleasure. Artworks that are valuable qua artworks merit, deserve, and call for a certain pleasure, the same pleasure that reveals (or at least purports to reveal) them to be valuable in the way that they are, and constitutes their aesthetic evaluation and appreciation. This is why and how art is non-contingently related to pleasure. Call this, the Affective View. While I don’t advance conclusive arguments for the affective view in this paper, I aim to reassess its prospects by (1) undermining central objections against it, (2) dissociating it from hedonism about the value of artworks (the view that this value is grounded in, and explained by, its possessors’ power to please), and (3) introducing some observatio...
The Nature and Artifice of Pleasure
Part introspection, part evolutionary biology: an essay on the origin of feelings, intelligence and meaning in life, and a passionate statement for biotechnology and gratitude.
Fun and Comfort As States of Mind and as Driving Motives of History
There are two basic types of pleasure, not commensurable but closely inter-related: There is Comfort-pleasure based on the parasympathetic, 'rest-and-digest' nervous system and there is Fun-pleasure based on the sympathetic 'fight-or-flight' adrenaline system for arousal and intense activity. Between them, they motivate much or all of human activities, and can be seen as drivers of culture and history - in particular, their power relationships of dominance and submission.
This is a Course Description for a new course being developed by Professor Smirniotopoulos in the School of Business at George Mason University outside Washington, D.C. This course is intended as a foundation course for a concentration in Real Estate Development and Finance (REDFin) Professor Smirniotopoulos is also developing at GMUSB. Comments to and other feedback on the attached Course Description are welcome. The Meaning of Place is based on Professor Smirniotopoulos’ Spring 2001 essay of the same title, published in Urban Land magazine ﴾Vol. 60, No. 3, March 2001﴿. This essay received the Urban Land Institute’s inaugural Apgar Urban Land Award in 2002 (then simply named “the Apgar Award”). The Apgar Urban Land Award recognizes “the industry practice articles that clearly communicate ideas, knowledge, research, and expertise for the benefit of the entire real estate community “each year in Urban Land magazine. The essay is premised on the juxtaposition of authentic places that have evolved organically over long periods of time—think Greenwich Village in New York City; Old Town (or the colloquial “Olde Towne”) in the City of Alexandria, Virginia; Georgetown in Washington, D.C.; Haight Ashbury in San Francisco; and Lincoln Road Mall in South Beach, Miami—with newly minted venues like the Mosaic District in Fairfax County, Virginia; Horton Plaza in San Diego; and Easton Town Center in Columbus, Ohio. This latter category of “New Town Centers” are designed by a cadre of planners, designers, and architects, carefully orchestrated and managed by a new breed of property managers Yaromir Steiner of Steiner & Associates, co-developer of Easton Town Center, calls “animators,” and Professor Christopher Leinberger at The George Washington University Center for Real Estate and Urban Analysis calls “place managers.” These “new places” are intended to emulate or mimic the authenticity of their antecedents. The course is structured around ten (10) books Professor Smirniotopoulos considers to be “essential works on the meaning of place,” authored by a diverse group of thinkers on the subject including urbanists, architects, urban planners, demographers, cartographers, and social scientists. The following ten books comprise the Required Reading list for the course. However, the listing below is not necessarily reflective of the order in which each book will be assigned and discussed in class throughout the semester: • Camillo Sitte's classic, The Art of Building Cities (Italian, 1889; English translation 1945) • Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space (French, 1958; English translation, 1964) • Jane Jacobs' classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) • Edward T. Hall’s The Hidden Dimension (1966) • Mildred Reed Hall and Edward T. Hall’s The Fourth Dimension in Architecture (1975) • William H. "Holly" White's The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980) • Tony Hiss' The Experience of Place (1990) • Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class Revisited (2014) • Colin Ellard's Places of the Heart (2015) • Jonathan F. P. Rose’s The Well-Tempered City (SEP 2016)