Introduction to Moscaism

"God creates out of nothing, man out of ruins. We must break ourselves to pieces before we know what we are, what we can be and do! Horrible Fate!"  - Christian Dietrich Grabbe The popular task of Art in the Middle Ages was to create a unified and shared world via the spread of religious ideals. …

Environmentalism: The Distant Phenomenology of the Apocalypse

In the wake of Greta Thunberg, the vapidity of environmentalism and the associated cringing from, if you're anything like me, any pathetic attempts to adapt it to a romantic narrative (i.e the polar bears as martyrs dying for the sins of modernity) has confused me. I know full well as do you that the state …

The incomplete Heideggerian World

I would argue that Heidegger’s account of art unconcealing a world is still relevant to contemporary art and would use the example of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica to elaborate this point. Like Heidegger’s own example of the Ancient Greek Temple which “first gives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves”, Picasso’s Guernica …

Modernism & the Human Mosaic

The incursion of modernity upon civilisation brought along with its many benefits a crisis of identity for the human being. This crisis of identity, generally speaking, can be divided in its fragmentation of the human’s ability to perceive one’s self through introspection and extrospection. That is to say, how one harmonises oneself within the chaos …

Can Aquinas’ Second Way be improved?

Rebecca Goldstein presents the following cosmological argument, as an alteration of St. Thomas Aquinas' Second Way: Everything that exists must have a cause (Premise) (Therefore) The universe must have a cause (From 1) Nothing can be the cause of itself. (Premise) (Therefore) The universe cannot be the cause of itself. (From 3) (Therefore) Something outside …

The Problem of John Leslie Mackie’s Problem of Evil

John Leslie Mackie, as part of his overarching problem of evil argument, discusses the possible rebuttal that the universe containing some evil is better than it could be if it had none. Mackie dismisses this claim through assigning general goods and evils to an ordered system, the conclusion of that system which Mackie argues displays …

Art within Time: Lyotard, Newman & Tarkovsky

Jean-François Lyotard’s analysis of Barnett Newman’s paintings is that their genius is found in their disintegration of the triadic system of art being an event between the sender, the recipient, and the referent (1998, p. 81). In other words “the message is the messenger; it says: ‘Here I am’ ” (1998, p. 81). Lyotard argues …