You wouldn’t know as you slogged through his impenetrable prose, but Husserl’s turn to phenomenology was, Jonathan Ree argues, a “belated return to plain healthy common sense” (I See A Voice, 343).All knowledge comes initially through the senses, the scholastics had said, and . . . . Continue Reading »
One of the most amusing contributions to the early modern debate on the origins of language came from Francis Mercury van Helmont. Like many others, he insisted that Noah spoke Hebrew, but his way of defending and explication that was uniquely his own.In his 1667 Very Short delination of the Natural . . . . Continue Reading »
Historically, “aesthetics” has had an accidental relationship to art. Aesthetics, from aesthesis, referred to perception through senses. In this sense, an “aesthetic” theory of art is a theory with a particular focus on the sensory experience of art.If we put aside the . . . . Continue Reading »
Voice has often been seen as expression, as the coming into public space of something within. Given its reliance on breath, it was easy to conclude that voice is the expression of the soul.According to Ree (I See A Voice), it was Herder who broke through this illusion bt arguing that voice . . . . Continue Reading »
We don’t hear sounds, Heidegger said. That’s an abstraction. What we hear are things making sounds - “the creaking wagon, or the motor cycle . . . the column on the mark, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire crackling” (quoted in Jonathan Ree, I See A Voice, . . . . Continue Reading »
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