Here you will find the world’s first sublimist Manifesto, a handbook to a way of creating Art that is, at once, entirely ancient and entirely new; a perfect marriage between the finite and the finite; and the most effective way to disclose the sublime Truth of life through Art.
In this essay I articulate, for the first time, the general profile of ‘Sublimism’, an art movement that is, at once, entirely new and ancient. In it, I put forth the idea that, in order to be great, an artwork must be technically proficient and metaphysically rich in equal measure, and that it must wilfully seek to convey the higher truth of life, or the ‘Sublime’.
The following is an excerpt from my work, “Art as Sublime”, in which I attempt to reconceptualize an ancient idea. Its bold thesis is that, far from an aesthetic incident, the Sublime is art’s very ‘telos'. “Art as Sublime” was published in 2023 in the short volume, “Sublimism: An introduction”.
In this vignette, I attempt to profile the Sublime, a topic I delve into more extensively in my essay, “Art as Sublime”, published here.
In the following vignette, I attempt to distinguish aesthetic knowledge, that is, the knowledge of sublime Truth, from conceptual knowledge.
In the following vignette, I explore the interesting idea that any artwork is a living paradox, one in which an attempt is made to use finite means to convey infinite ends, that is, to express the inexpressible.
In this brief vignette, I attempt to philosophically distinguish two great modes of human knowing from one another, Art and Science - a distinction I delve into more deeply in my essay, “Art as Sublime”, published in “Sublimism: An Introduction.”
In this paper, I contrast – but also compare – Husserl’s philosophy of the Self, first, to Kant’s and, second, to Descartes, with particular focus on its transcendental iteration, and its relationship both to the empirical and to objective reality.
Hegel’s conception of selfhood is amorphous, and gleaning it from the pages of his dense and complex tome, The Phenomenology of Spirit, is no mean feat. However, the picture of Hegelian self which reveals itself to the reader patient enough to tease it out from the idealist Titan’s pages, is as intriguing and it is nuanced and complex.
Descartes’ ‘epistemological turn’ would influence generations of philosophers who, in an attempt to understand the structure of the self, took him – either directly or indirectly – as the starting point of their own reflections. Among the most prominent of these undoubtedly is David Hume.
It can with little exaggeration be said that, with the works of Descartes, the modern philosophy of the self was born. Where for the Medievals, the self had first and foremost been a metaphysically conceived entity, Descartes would invert this primacy, outlining instead a self whose basic structure is epistemic in nature.
With his total privileging of the concept of Being, Heidegger radically changed the way we conceptualise selfhood. The self went from being an epistemic entity, as it had been for centuries under Descartes and Kant, to a largely ontological one. This paper attempts to shed light of aspects of this paradigmatic shift in the philosophy of the self.
What is the self? Is it a unity or a chimera? Can there be said to be a ‘self’ at all? Of all Enlightenment philosophers, it is perhaps Immanuel Kant who gave, to these questions, the most startlingly original answers.
Socrates was used as a literary mouthpiece by many of the so-called 'Socratics', followers of the infamous 'Gadfly' who themselves went on to have illustrious careers as writers and thinkers. Several of these - chiefly Plato, Xenophon and Aeschines - depicted their master as a philosopher and fine connoisseur of that greatest of human pleasures and agonies: love.
For Kierkegaard, the self was a synthesis of the ‘finite’ and the ‘infinite’. The finite is the limiting factor, all that which we cannot change, and the infinite is the expanding factor, all that which could just as well be some other way.
In this paper, I attempt to explore he idea that Kant ‘killed’ god – and I will do so chiefly by applying Kant’s refutations of the ontological proof to some of its most prominent instantiations through history, those of Anselm, Descartes and Spinoza.
Literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin once claimed that, in Dostoevsky's novels, characters are so fully developed, that they can be claimed to be independent even from their author, and his works are thus "polyphonic." But how true is this really? This paper explores this very question.
The picture that emerges, in Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men, of man’s original psychology is one highly idealised, you might even say romanticised: one in which our darker innate impulses are either minimised or discarded altogether.
Drawing to a certain extent upon Kant, but mostly upon observations from the introduction to Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art, this paper sets out to explore fine art’s infinite purposiveness, firstly by contrasting it to form, then to fine art’s finite counterpart, and finally by integrating it with Hegel’s notion of ‘Spirit’ (Geist).
In this short commentary, I set out to explore the idea of epistemological diremption - which, for Hegel, lies at the kernel of the origin of philosophy itself - particularly as discussed in the introduction of the Phenomenology of Spirit.
