Erotic Ascension And Stylistic Hoverance : The Symposium Body

The body has been cut, burned, exploited, sexualized, glorified, abused and stretched out to its limits, as a form of curiosity in art. The body has been a central theme throughout art history and in the contemporary world today. It is recognized as a symbol of identity, social politics, culture and belonging. Art cannot be made without the presence of the body and its interaction with the material world. Artists have continually tried to redefine the meaning behind the encounters of the body and the body as the medium. From early works in Western paintings and sculpture, the body served as an idealized figure, only made to represent the mythical, biblical, the rich and historical figures. The representations of the body seem to only serve

In this essay it will be argued that the soul is mortal and does not survive the death of the body. As support, the following arguments from Lucretius will be examined: the “proof from the atomic structure of the soul,” the “proof from parallelism of mind and body,” the “proof from the sympatheia of mind and body,” and the “proof from the structural connection between mind and body.” The following arguments from Plato will be used as counterarguments against Lucretius: the “cyclical argument,” the “affinity argument,” the “argument from the form of life,” and the “recollection argument.” It will be shown that Plato’s premises lack validity and that Lucretius’

Weathered and fragmented, she stood there, in the corner, seeking no attention yet attracting the gaze of all, she was to be my muse for this assignment. Inspired by the Greek sculptor Praxiteles’ Statue of the Aphrodite of Knidos in the mid-4th century BC, this Roman version of the statue is just as striking. Currently residing at the Art Institute of Chicago's Ancient Greek / Roman art exhibit, this sculpture struck me while I was drifting around one Saturday evening, and I felt obliged to stop, analyze, and admire. For a “lady” whom lacks a head, she packs quite an astonishing impression on a man. The refined silence of her body is what seized my attention. Upon facing her, you connect in her silence. There's a gravity there you're incompetent to sound,

“She had a very strong, feminine body” (15), The body beneath it strong and reliable” (71)

The Female Nude in Critical Perspectives on Art History by Kenneth Clark clears up how the style of nude art in any society reflects the visual skills and propensities that develop from ancient Greece. He depicts the evolution of the nude from the sculptures of the gods to the emotions that the nude represents emotions such as pathos, energy, and ecstasy. The focus is on the specific types of female nudes and the courses in which they were depicted through the ages. Clark's nearly contended and insightful volume on the development of the nude naked follows both a focal strand of art criticism and presents a perspective of life.

“Whether the body is clothed or naked, transgressive or traumatised, grotesque, abject or celebratory, its staged significance resides in its capacity to focus on minds of the matter of what is being seen and heard” .

Through this ungendered voice, the narrator attempts to subversively reclaim the language of love in celebration of their beloved partner Louise, whom wishes the narrator to embody a genuine love, to “come to [her] without a past” (Winterson 54) . Although the narrator is hyperaware of the ideological undertones attached to language and its “cliché[d]” nature, I am reluctant to say s/he is able to escape the historical grasp patriarchy has on language (10). By poetically combining the binaries of scientific and aesthetic discourse, Winterson “reclaims the [female] body from scientific [and male dominated] discourses” (Rubinsond 228). However, this does not overthrow the fact that much of the novel is “based on a discourse of colonization”, leaving the body of Louise “a mere colonized land with no specific identity” (Maioli 144, 154). This paper will examine these interlocking systems of language in relation to the effect an imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy has on a subversive language of

Representation plays a crucial role in how we understand our own and other’s bodies; for example ideals of what is normal, beautiful or physically accepted in society. Ted Lawson contemporary sculptures Eve, beautiful decay, 2013 (Fig.2) are physical representations of modern psychological concerns. Beautiful decay sculptures confront issue of the female form and the fragile relationship between the body and the mind. Lawson’s Eve touches on the ramifications of gluttony, vanity, abuse, anorexia, self harm etc. As though stemming from her first sinful act by indulging in one of the forbidden fruit, Eve has a choice of different paths she might choose to go down, each leading to a different version of herself.

The body has been a key focus in the design world across all history according to Ellen Lupton as people like to build and make things that look like them. It’s also prevalent as objects made come into contact with the skin and at times, act as extensions for the body allowing it to do things it cannot. In her essay Second Skin: new design organics (2006), Lupton discusses the surfaces of objects; from lights, to chairs, and to building materials, acting like skin which allow for a fluctuating understanding of the objects meaning and function. Representing the body in architecture has been a common practice for almost all of architectural history dating back to Vitruvius however Anthony Vidler believes that the practice of architecture is distancing itself further from the body. Sigmund Freud describes this a tradition of body projection which leads to the creation of object-surrogates where one thing represents the other. For example, the telescope as an eye, electrical circuits as a nervous system and a dwelling as the womb . This section of the paper will show how Vidler’s statement is untrue through an analysis of work from the likes of Le Corbusier and Filaret, then, see how it can be extended to FOA’s design of the terminal

In his book Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes talks about the nature of the human mind, and how the mind relates to the human body. With his famous declaration, I am, I exist, Descartes claims that “I” am “a thinking thing”, and therefore “I” exist (17-18). He also argues that the mind is better known than the body. In the Sixth Meditation, he further argues that there must be a clear distinction between mind and body. However, there is surely some connection between these two. In The Treatise on Human Nature, Aquinas argues that the soul is united to the body as its form (18). Plato, however, believes that “the intellect is united to the body as its mover” (21). In this paper, I am trying to argue that in Descartes’ view, the soul is more probably united to the body as its mover, rather than as its form.

The philosophical conventions at play are a string of universalizing contentions about the ways of Man, Truth, and the World. What is striking in the appropriation of so many minutes of screen-time into rational argument is the theoretical inevitability into which they stumble as if for the first time and in a serendipitous glee. Is (discussion of) the film finally to be a moment of truth?

The plenary discussions on corporeality always reconstruct the perception of the body and aim to see the beyond of the body besides it is an entity as a concrete being with flesh and bones. The studies and works based on the notion that is what the body – which analyze the psychological and philosophical (and also anthropological and sociological) approaches to the concept of the body over hand-painted portraits to mug shots, personal care methods to collective protection theories, the sexuality as a study of psychology not through morality - are all creating a various worldview and also attempt an alternative definition on the perception of the body.

In Platonism, few philosophical theories are as essential as the theory of Forms. This is besides the fact that it is generally overlooked in many of Plato’s writings even though it lays the foundations to many other theories of his. The Republic is where the theory is first mentioned, followed by discussion in Phaedo and criticized in Parmenides and Timaeus thereafter. (These works will be further discussed later throughout the essay.) Plato’s theory of Forms, (sometimes referred to as the theory of Ideas) states basically: that which is made of matter and can be physically perceived by a human through one of his five senses does not represent true reality. The realm of ideas and abstract thought is in fact the ideal representation of reality. (When used in this manner, the first letter of form is usually capitalized). The aim of this essay is to identify “What is a Form?” and “What are the critiques of Plato’s theory of Forms?”

Ovid’s Metamorphoses tells the story of Diana and Actaeon, the goddess of the hunt and a man who unwittingly stumbles upon the sacred grotto of Gargaphia while Diana is bathing with her nymphs. The outraged goddess transforms Actaeon into a stag, and ironically, his own hunting dogs kill him. Rembrandt’s painting of Diana, Actaeon, and Callisto is an artistic interpretation of Book III – and a bit of Book II- of the Metamorphoses, providing a visual insight of the scene that casts Actaeon’s unfortunate fate. Rembrandt’s still life expresses many Ovidian themes of censorship, chastity, and punishment by the divine hand. Despite superficial differences between the painting and the book, the scene remains true to the myth of Actaeon & Diana both visually and thematically. Rembrandt successfully enhances certain Ovidian motifs by adapting imagery, characters, and themes from the writing onto the canvas.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a story “of shapes transformde to bodies straunge” (Ovid 3), has surged in popularity in the twentieth and twenty-first century, with numerous reinterpretations, reprintings and new translations coming forth from writers such as Ted Hughes (Tales from Ovid), Ali Smith (Girl Meets Boy) and Charles Martin’s lively contemporary translation. Citing Marina Warner’s view, according to which the idea of metamorphosis is “thriving more than ever in literature and art” (2), Kaye Mitchell suggests this new wave of popularity was due in part to Ovid’s affinity with postmodern ideas which turned away from the seriousness of realism and towards a more playful, absurd view of literature and art. Not least among these affinities was the postmodern preoccupation with identity, especially identity seen as a problem, with twentieth century writers rebelling against the idea of a “unified self” (Warner 203).