Imaginari: the absent present in the Baroque
Waldir BARRETO; Thais CAREZZATO
Original title: Imaginari: a presença ausente no Barroco
Published in Games from Antiquity to Baroque
Keywords: Absence, Baroque, Imagination, Presence.
This essay presents an introductory and speculative approach to the paradigmatic change that occurred between the 16th and 17th centuries in the artistic treatment of the idea of “presence in absence”. Based on some comparative categories by Heinrich Wölfflin and semiotics by Charles Peirce, taken as merely functional tools and not directive concepts, it proposes the Baroque as the starting point of a historical process of relativization, opening and expansion of the space constituting a work of art.
Imagining Otherness: The Pleasure of Curiosity in the Middle Ages
Anna KOŁOS
Published in Pleasure in the Middle Ages
Keywords: Augustine of Hippo, Curiosity, Imagination, Order of things, Otherness, Pleasure.
The main aim of this paper is to take a closer look at both the philosophical and religious presumptions upon which the medieval concept of curiosity was premised. Such an enterprise needs to go back to Aristotle in order to fully comprehend the limitations for curiosity introduced by St. Augustine in his City of God and developed by such medieval thinkers as Isidore of Seville and Thomas of Aquinas. These conceptions will be analysed in reference to Foucauldian archeology of knowledge. Much attention should be paid to the ideas of curiositas, admiratio and studiositas.
The sublime: from word to silence
Waldir BARRETO
Original title: Lo sublime, de la palabra al silencio
Published in Pleasure in the Middle Ages
Keywords: Beautiful, Imagination, Reason, Sublime, Understanding, Unrepresentable.
This essay presents a didactic and expositive approach the historical-philosophical deployment of the sublime’s concept since the retrieval of the term, according to its translation of the Greek into French, until the reinstatement of meaning, according to its shift from rhetoric to philosophy, through Anglo-Saxon valuation of the imagination, the birth of Aesthetics, philosophical premise, Burke’s key of terror and his distinction between pleasure and delight, the game of faculties in Kant, and the characterization of the radical informality of the sublime.
