Metal music today is bathed in a glow of serenity relative to its function as designated by Soviet authorities only thirty years ago. Mikhail Gorbachev permitted a Monsters of Rock concert to be st...

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 3, Page 412-413, June 2012.

Shakespeare 's A Midsummer Night's Dream shows ethical conflicts to be resolved relationally. Quarreling lovers divide Duke Theseus's Athenian court in advance of his own nuptial celebration, forcing the Duke to decide moral questions based on their ethical consequences. King Oberon's conflicted fairy world meddles in human affairs, adding to the ethical confusion. Athenian workmen vie for roles in a court performance that becomes both a theatrical travesty and a triumph of relational ethics owing to Bottom, the character most within (...) relation itself. Paradoxically, the “dream” elevates relating per se to self-consciousness. Hegel's dialectical, Jean-Luc Nancy's transfiguring, and Martin Buber's relational perspectives take up Shakespeare 's premise of treating ontology and ethics as facets of the same movement. Just as the play enacts Hegel's assertion that all alienation must be overcome, so it also shows Nancy's and Buber's symbolic consecration of ethical being as mutuality. (shrink)

Volume 25, Issue 4, June 2020, Page 484-486.

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 4, Page 545-546, July 2012.

This article discusses Leibniz’s unique blend of aesthetics and diplomacy. While his art extended diplomacy beyond the bounds of political realism, his diplomacy gave occasion to his art. His identity of indiscernibles inspired philosopher Arthur Danto to define contemporary art in terms of a qualitative perceptual division between the world and the Artworld. Although Leibniz would have disputed Danto’s bifurcated artistic perspective, Danto vindicates Leibniz’s major contribution to contemporary aesthetic philosophy by defending his belief in the moral foundation of art. (...) Leibniz was not only one of the pre-eminent men of German letters of his time, he also excelled in diplomacy on behalf of the Hanoverian court. His international relations theory of peace through grand global alliances is only just beginning to be understood, though his aesthetics and correct diplomacy continue to validate individual creativity, liberal freedoms, and universal enlightenment up to this very day. (shrink)

Volume 25, Issue 7-8, November - December 2020, Page 870-872.

Richard Rorty sacrifices high art on the altar of freedom, tolerance, and equality, although novelists like Dickens awaken his hope for the greatest possible improvement in our cultural well-being. Essentialist artists and philosophers of misery strike him as loathing ordinary humans and their foibles. His populist aesthetics owes to his belief in pragmatism as redemptive “knowledge about how things really are.” Still, he rejects some progressive works as artistic failures while embracing other art forms that ignore culture altogether. Rorty’s advocacy (...) of art for the common good situates him in an ethical aesthetic tradition imbued with many of the ironies presented by Plato, although in the final analysis his progressive neo-pragmatism safeguards all forms of art. (shrink)

Ai Weiwei is an installation artist who enjoyed great acclaim in the West after having absented himself from China, his homeland. He owes his global recognition to his dual identity as an artist/di...

Albert Camus’s journals of his travels to North America (1946) and South America (1949) offer his astute perspectives on literature, the arts, and Western politics in the aftermath of World War II....

Divining a theory adequate to account for the collapse of the Soviet Union requires the production of evidence depreciated by theorists of international relations realism. Scholars have pursue...

The guitar as such achieved aesthetic prominence starting in the mid-1950s. Formerly employed as a rhythm instrument in big bands, or as a battered tool to accompany the vocals of itinerant troubad...