Monday, November 7, 2016

Technology Invites a Deep Dive Into Art

Technology Invites a Deep Dive Into Art

For many years, patrons were asked to turn off their cellphones when they entered a museum. Now, they’re encouraged to use them with technologies like augmented and virtual reality, touch-screen tables and customized audio tours. The goal is to enhance the visitor’s experience while keeping the artwork front and center. Here are some examples.

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A virtual reality experience of Dalí’s 1935 painting “Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet’s ‘Angelus.’” CreditGoodby Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco/Salvador Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, Fla.

Dreams of Dalí

This virtual reality experience drops the viewer into Dalí’s 1935 painting “Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet’s ‘Angelus,’” where he or she moves through a vast desert full of dreamlike oddities, like enormous elephants on stick legs, or a ringing telephone. The technology, including headsets from Oculus Rift, allows users to control where they want to go within the painting. A 360-degree video gives a taste of the experience.
Created by the digital ad agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners for “Disney and Dalí: Architects of the Imagination,” the exhibition ran from January to June at the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., in a collaboration with the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco.

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Google’s Art Camera, which produces images with more than one billion pixels. CreditGoogle

A Global Platform

Museums all over the world are digitizing their art collections using Google’s Art Camera, which produces images with more than one billion pixels.
By building the Google Arts & Culture platform for the web and as an app, Google has enabled museums to upload that content so that it can be shared widely. One way museums can do that is by using Google’s Art Camera, which produces images with more than one billion pixels. It has been available at no cost to museums and cultural institutions for about a year.

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The Minneapolis Institute of Art’s Overheard app. CreditMinneapolis Institute of Art

Simulated Chatter at Your Elbow

Last winter, 3M, based in a Twin Cities suburb, inaugurated the 3M Art and Technology Award Competition to help the Minneapolis Institute of Art reach new audiences. The winning project was Overheard, an audio narrative for museum visitors created by the design studio Luxloop.
Visitors download the app, which sets off audio content when they stand near a piece of art. They may hear fictional characters talking with one another about the artwork or perhaps about something unrelated. The idea is to mimic what patrons experience when overhearing the conversations of strangers.

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The actors Kumail Nanjiani, left, and Martin Starr. CreditGeoff Captain Studios

An Unusual Perspective

With a tap by the viewer, an app from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art tells a story about a piece of art from an unusual perspective. “It’s sort of like traveling somewhere new with a smart, opinionated friend telling you all these great stories about what you’re seeing,” said Keir Winesmith, head of web and digital platforms at the museum.
In an audio tour of “German to Me,” for example, an exhibition of postwar German art, patrons hear a young German-American interviewing her mother and grandmother about their experiences growing up after World War II.
Other guided tours include one with the actors Kumail Nanjiani and Martin Starr from the HBO comedy “Silicon Valley,” who are unabashedly confused by much of the art.
“They ask the curator: ‘What is this? What’s going on?” Mr. Winesmith said.

Sight-Impaired See Art Afresh

In a move coinciding with the 25th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act (1990), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago implemented Coyote, which brings works on the museum’s website to life for the visually impaired with descriptions that are read aloud using a screen reader.
Other museums can use and modify the software. Ultimately, the system will be able to store a large trove of descriptions of different lengths in various languages, sending the message that everyone can be part of the world of art.
“It’s a way for us to say, ‘Come on in, you don’t need a degree in art history, you don’t even need to be able to see,’” said Susan Chun, the museum’s chief content officer.

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A cardboard headset that can be used with Bosch VR. CreditBDH

Delights and Damnation

With Bosch VR, a virtual reality app created by the British digital agency Burrell Durrant Hifle, viewers travel through “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” a triptych by the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. The journey begins through the Garden of Eden on the back of a fish, and proceeds through Earthly Delights, where viewers see spectacular birds, orchards and festive naked people.
Then, said John Durrant, the owner of Burrell Durrant Hifle, “we descend into hell” — viewing a pair of dagger-wielding, disembodied ears; a man being crucified across a harp; a pig reading the last rites. “Collections are static and still and flat,” he said. “So the idea of moving an artwork around and feeling it as a living thing in space is irresistible.”
The painting is included in a retrospective that’s part of“Bosch Year 2016,” a series of events that honor the 500th anniversary of painter’s death, and it’s being held in his hometown, ’s-Hertogenbosch.
The app can be downloaded at no cost from Google Play or the iTunes App Store and used with a custom-designed Google cardboard headset that holds the user’s smartphone. The headset can be purchased from the National Gallery in London or from Amazon.

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A WoofbertVR view of Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.” CreditWoofbert

Wander a World of Museums

Woofbert, creator of the app WoofbertVR, says it lies at the intersection of virtual reality and arts education. Once downloaded, the app works with an Oculus Rift or Samsung Gear VR headset, enabling the wearer to wander virtually through museums and galleries all over the globe. It is intended to work with additional VR headsets as they enter the market.
Woofbert has relationships with about 30 cultural institutions worldwide, including the Courtauld Gallery in London, where visitors using WoofbertVR can delve into the Manet painting “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” to get an intimate look at vintage Parisian night life while they savor the barmaid’s offerings of imported alcohol and mandarin oranges.
Woofbert’s vision is to build an expansive platform that allows a user to choose from a wide array of works.

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An exhibit in the Baltimore Museum of Art’s “Imagining Home” show. CreditMitro Hood

Connecting Viewer With Artist, and Oracles

The Baltimore Museum of Art did not want downloading an app to be a barrier for its visitors, so it developed Go Mobile, a mobile website. Visitors spot the Go Mobile logo on object labels; plug the name of the artist, museum gallery or the work itself into the site’s search box on their smartphones; and then listen to interviews or commentary. For example, patrons wanting to learn more about an Ifa bowl from the Yoruba region of Nigeria can hear a Yoruba diviner’s explanation of the divination ritual.
In another technological innovation, soundscapes accompany six objects in “Imagining Home,” an exhibition exploring notions of home, place and identity. When you walk toward an embroidered Afghan prayer mat, for example, you might hear Afghan women singing traditional songs while they make the mats.

Lost in the Museum? Not Anymore

The British Museum brought augmented reality, virtual reality, coding and more when it opened the Samsung Digital Discovery Center in 2009. Exhibits are geared toward children and families, with activities such as a digital coding workshop in which participants use a BBC micro:bit and a mobile phone to code cultural symbols, from ancient hieroglyphs to modern-day emojis.
More recently, with the support of Korean Air, the museum reinvented its audio guide as a mobile app after soliciting feedback from visitors. It now offers 11 languages, including British Sign Language, enabling visitors to go on self-guided tours and hear commentary from curators and experts about recent research on important objects.
An interactive map tracks museumgoers’ locations to help those who get lost find their way out of the galleries. “It’s about a culture of understanding audience needs,” said Chris Michaels, the museum’s head of digital initiatives and publishing.

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With the Smartify app, information about a piece of art pops up on a phone’s screen, with an option to become part of the user’s collection of favorites.

Instant Interaction With Art

A platform developed by Smartify, a London-based company founded in May, enables instant digital interaction with works of art. Upon scanning a work, the visitor gets its history, the artist, the creative process and other salient information.
“Most of us, if we visit an art gallery or museum and see a work of art we really like, we’ll take a photo of it or its label and save it for later to look up,” said Thanos Kokkiniotis, the company’s co-founder and chief executive. With Smartify, the user can save a work to a personal favorites collection.
In June, Smartify teamed up with “Sculpture in the City 2016,” London’s annual public exhibition of contemporary artwork around the financial district. Smartify’s first United States partner was the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, Calif., and the app came to New York this month for the three-day art exhibition “Exchange Rates,” in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Warhol: Out Loud

The Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh comprise four distinct entities, one of which is the Andy Warhol Museum, dedicated to that artist’s work. About a year ago, the museums founded the Innovation Studio, a research, design and development laboratory headed by Jeffrey Inscho.
The studio’s first offering is The Warhol: Out Loud, an app for people with poor vision. The app determines where a person is within the Warhol Museum and integrates Apple VoiceOver technology to communicate what he or she is seeing through a smart audio player.
“It learns, based on your preferences, what kind of audio content you most enjoy — whether that’s a visual description of the object or painting, curator descriptions or stories about Andy Warhol creating the piece of work and what inspired it,” Mr. Inscho said. The code used to build the Warhol app is open-source, so any museum can download it and create its own app.

The Virtual Splendor of Paris’s Glass House

Art & Design | Art Review

The Virtual Splendor of Paris’s Glass House

Facade of the groundbreaking Maison de Verre, designed by Chareau. Credit Mark Lyon
Discovering the existence of the Maison de Verre in Paris can be a major aesthetic epiphany. When you see a photograph of this translucent structure in glass, steel and expanses of glass brick — completed in 1932 — the impression is of startling modernity, something very much of its time yet strikingly ahead of it, too, like Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” or Duchamp’s “The Large Glass.
Tucked into a courtyard on the Left Bank and invisible from the street, the Maison de Verre is among the first large homes made entirely of industrial materials whose structure is starkly exposed. Steel I-beams — parts of which are painted red in different ways — cut through its flexible spaces. It has numerous mechanical and moving parts, including sliding walls and a horizontal dumbwaiter, some of which seem excessive, but it also involves a great deal of handcrafting, like perforated metal screens that, at least from photographs, contribute a medieval aspect. There is nothing quite like it in the world.
But if the Maison de Verre (House of Glass) becomes fixed on your list of landmarks, the man who designed it is virtually unknown in the United States. He was Pierre Chareau (1883-1950), an energetic and ambitious French designer of custom furniture and interiors who never trained in architecture, his first love. He would collaborate on most of his projects, Maison de Verre included, with a self-effacing Dutch architect named Bernard Bijvoet.
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The Pierre Chareau exhibition at the Jewish Museum. Credit Pablo Enriquez for The New York Times
“Pierre Chareau: Modern Architecture and Design,” a delightful, virtual-reality-enhanced examination of the designer’s work at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, should greatly diminish his obscurity, even as it reveals a great talent that was not without flaws. The exhibition is at once a portrait, an archive and a collection of intriguing objects, most notably around 180 pieces of furniture designed by Chareau, but also a trove of art he collected with his wife, Dollie, whose role in his career emerges with a new clarity here.
Continue reading the main story
The show has been organized by Esther da Costa Meyer, a professor of the history of modern architecture at Princeton University, who has overseen an exceptionally informative, readable catalog. The architects Diller Scofidio & Renfro designed the presentation, whose changing display methods almost seem to set it in motion. It comes with a virtual-reality gallery that places us in four Chareau interiors, including the double-height grand salon of the Maison de Verre. In addition, a mesmerizing digital slide show creates the illusion of moving from the street outside into and back out of the house layer by layer as it is being drawn, built and furnished. On the analog side, the design’s most inspired element is a single enormous vitrine that extends into three galleries through horizontal slots in the walls. It creates a welcome sense of openness along the show’s sometimes twisty path.
Chareau was born in Bordeaux, where his father was a wine merchant, and his mother was descended from Sephardic Jews. In 1899 he went to work at the Paris branch of Waring & Gillow, British furniture manufacturers. After World War I he set out on his own, and during the 1920s and early ’30s he had a flourishing career, mostly designing furniture and interiors for wealthy clients. This ground to a halt when the Depression hit France in 1932. The second blow was the German invasion of France in 1940; Chareau fled to New York, where he lived for a decade, dying penniless and overlooked.
He loved working with rich or unexpected materials — rare woods or alabaster. He also liked to work with skilled artisans, especially Louis Dalbet, a virtuoso ironsmith who would collaborate on the Maison de Verre. Chareau’s most fervent supporters were a small coterie of cultivated, upper-middle-class professionals, many of whom were related, notably the Bernheims, the Flegs and the Dalsaces.
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A digital reconstruction of the Maison de Verre (House of Glass) allows visitors to experience different views of the house as though they’re moving through it. Credit Pablo Enriquez for The New York Times
Jean Dalsace, a gynecologist, and his wife, Annie Bernheim Dalsace, commissioned the Maison de Verre around 1925 and would live on the two upper floors with Jean’s medical practice on the ground floor. The house remained in the family until 2005, when it was purchased and painstakingly restored by Robert M. Rubin, a Wall Street financier turned architecture patron and cultural historian.
The show begins with a witty fantasy: six short filmed vignettes quickly conjure a luxurious interwar dwelling like those enjoyed by Chareau’s clients. Projected onto blazing white paper, these silent shadow plays show Chareau furniture being used by actors — all in silhouette. It is a bit slick, but it quickly sets the period mood and makes the furniture mysterious. In the dining room, a maid polishes silver. In the living room, a man on a sofa smokes a cigar. A butler who moves among the screens brings him a drink. Elsewhere, a frustrated young writer at a desk rises and paces past a daybed on an adjacent screen.
When you walk around the screens, the shadowy furniture emerges in three dimensions with a kind of ta-da. You begin to see how Chareau’s designs oscillate between lightening and refining familiar styles, like Art Deco, with subtle angles and pinches and works of rougher, more forceful originality. His more innovative side is visible, for example, in a semicircular bookcase harboring a round table that can swing out on a mechanical arm.
The bulbs of his La Religieuse (The Nun) floor and table lamps are shaded by shards of alabaster that are both Cubistic and wimplelike, held together by bits of welded iron, courtesy of Dalbet. The dining room furniture stands out for its eccentricity, especially a cabinet that resembles a solid block of walnut burl and is outfitted with two wide bands of patinated iron (Dalbet again) that provide legs, wall attachments and a big exposed hinge. It looks like something the Minimalist sculptor Carl Andre might have concocted as a lark.
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Works by Chareau, from left, bicolor table designed for Julia Ullmann (1929), wall cabinet (1928) and La Religieuse (The Nun) floor lamp (1923). Credit Pablo Enriquez for The New York Times
A narrow gallery displays some of the Chareaus’ art collection, which they sold piece by piece to survive in New York. A rather clunky pair of early collages by Picasso with elements cut from a single piece of paper covered with sawdust fits the blunter side of Chareau’s sensibilities. A magical Max Ernst painting of five glass vases containing flowers speaks to his use of transparency.
Photographs of a Long Island house in East Hampton that Chareau designed attest to his ingenuity on a shoestring budget; it is cobbled together from a Quonset hut and a wall of windows from a greenhouse. Designed as a summer house for the Abstract Expressionist painter Robert Motherwell, it was a rare commission during Chareau’s American exile. The house, tragically, was demolished in 1985.
The virtual-reality treat comes toward the end. Against black walls, four spare displays capture Chareau’s ecumenical love of tradition and experimentation. Each display has a swivel stool to sit on and V.R. goggles for viewing. Suddenly you see each ensemble in its original interior, based on vintage photographs but rendered in bracing living color. Turning in the seat, you can enjoy a 360-degree view and glimpse adjacent rooms. The Maison de Verre’s double-story grand salon makes the most memorable impression — while also revealing that the Dalsace family had a protomodern Biedermeier dining room set.
The Maison de Verre hovers over this show like a sheltering presence, visible in photographs and architectural drawings, and is most present in the digitalized slide show. The slides pause at certain points and films flanking the screen show a man and a woman in that particular part of the house, including the bathroom. At one point the woman opens a curved metal closet door with some effort; elsewhere, she lowers a metal cover to reveal a mirror and demonstrates how a bidet swivels out from the wall. These last two especially are more gratuitous flourishes than conveniences.
An unwelcome thought flashed across my mind: too many moving parts, too much metal. But so what? Maybe most masterworks that change history are imperfect. The riotous “Demoiselles” and unfinished “Large Glass” certainly are. Like the Maison de Verre, their imperfections indicate unexplored possibilities, taken up by others.
Continue reading the main story

Related Coverage

Going Head to Head With Pierre Chareau

Citations sur l’art


Citations sur l’art


[Téléchargez l'application La-Philosophie sur Google Play]


L’art est un sujet brûlant de philosophie : il déchire les philosophes depuis Platon jusqu’à Heidegger. De discipline mineure à l’Antiquité, l’art est devenue une thématique propre (la philosophie esthétique) tardivement.
Kant, dans la Critique de la faculté de juger, fait de l’art et du sentiment esthétique le troisième pilier de la raison. Certains, comme Nietzsche ou Kierkegaard, feront de l’esthétique un mode de vie, une catégorie existentielle (authentique chez Nietzsche, inauthentique chez Kierkegaard). Plus tard, l’Ecole de Francfort et la théorie critique feront de l’art une forme de résistance à la déshumanisation du monde moderne.
Les grandes questions relatives à l’art sont les suivantes :
– L’art est-il une technique ?
– Qu’est-ce que le génie ?
– Le beau est-il universel ?
– Qu’est-ce qu’une oeuvre d’art ?
– Quel est le rôle de l’artiste ?
Pour aller plus loin, voyez notre article sur la définition de l’art

Phrases célèbres sur l’art

Platon : L’art est l’illusion d’une illusion

Aristote : C’est par l’expérience que la science et l’art font leur progrès chez les hommes


Baumgarten : Science de la connaissance sensible ou gnoséologie inférieure

Kant : Le jugement de goût, c’est-à-dire un jugement qui repose sur des fondements subjectifs et dont le motif déterminant ne peut être un concept, ni par suite le concept d’une fin déterminée (Critique du Jugement)

Arthur Schopenhauer : L’art est contemplation des choses, indépendante du principe de raison

Friedrich Nietzsche : Chez l’homme l’art s’amuse comme la perfection (Nietzsche et l’art)

Oscar Wilde : La Vie imite l’Art bien plus que l’Art n’imite la Vie (citations Oscar Wilde)

Alain : Tous les arts sont comme des miroirs où l’homme connaît et reconnaît quelque chose de lui-même

Martin Heidegger : L’essence de l’art, c’est la vérité se mettant elle-même en œuvre

Herbert Marcuse : L’art brise la réification et la pétrification sociales. Il crée une dimension inaccessible à toute autre expérience – une dimension dans laquelle les êtres humains, la nature et les choses ne se tiennent plus sous la loi du principe de la réalité établie. Il ouvre à l’histoire un autre horizon (L’homme Unidimensionnel)

Bibliographie sur l’Art :

Nietzsche : La Naissance de la Tragédie
Kant : Critique de la faculté de juge
Hegel : L’esthétique
Platon : La République
Aristote : Poétique
Schopenhauer : Le Monde comme volonté et comme représentation
 

4 Responses

la citation
Rep

fi fá 4

http://www.les-philosophes.fr/bibliographie.html



http://la-philosophie.com/grands-philosophes


http://www.philosophybro.com/












Citations sur l’art


[Téléchargez l'application La-Philosophie sur Google Play]


L’art est un sujet brûlant de philosophie : il déchire les philosophes depuis Platon jusqu’à Heidegger. De discipline mineure à l’Antiquité, l’art est devenue une thématique propre (la philosophie esthétique) tardivement.
Kant, dans la Critique de la faculté de juger, fait de l’art et du sentiment esthétique le troisième pilier de la raison. Certains, comme Nietzsche ou Kierkegaard, feront de l’esthétique un mode de vie, une catégorie existentielle (authentique chez Nietzsche, inauthentique chez Kierkegaard). Plus tard, l’Ecole de Francfort et la théorie critique feront de l’art une forme de résistance à la déshumanisation du monde moderne.
Les grandes questions relatives à l’art sont les suivantes :
– L’art est-il une technique ?
– Qu’est-ce que le génie ?
– Le beau est-il universel ?
– Qu’est-ce qu’une oeuvre d’art ?
– Quel est le rôle de l’artiste ?
Pour aller plus loin, voyez notre article sur la définition de l’art

Phrases célèbres sur l’art

Platon : L’art est l’illusion d’une illusion
Aristote : C’est par l’expérience que la science et l’art font leur progrès chez les hommes

Baumgarten : Science de la connaissance sensible ou gnoséologie inférieure
Kant : Le jugement de goût, c’est-à-dire un jugement qui repose sur des fondements subjectifs et dont le motif déterminant ne peut être un concept, ni par suite le concept d’une fin déterminée (Critique du Jugement)
Arthur Schopenhauer : L’art est contemplation des choses, indépendante du principe de raison
Friedrich Nietzsche : Chez l’homme l’art s’amuse comme la perfection (Nietzsche et l’art)
Oscar Wilde : La Vie imite l’Art bien plus que l’Art n’imite la Vie (citations Oscar Wilde)
Alain : Tous les arts sont comme des miroirs où l’homme connaît et reconnaît quelque chose de lui-même
Martin Heidegger : L’essence de l’art, c’est la vérité se mettant elle-même en œuvre
Herbert Marcuse : L’art brise la réification et la pétrification sociales. Il crée une dimension inaccessible à toute autre expérience – une dimension dans laquelle les êtres humains, la nature et les choses ne se tiennent plus sous la loi du principe de la réalité établie. Il ouvre à l’histoire un autre horizon (L’homme Unidimensionnel)

Bibliographie sur l’Art :

Nietzsche : La Naissance de la Tragédie
Kant : Critique de la faculté de juge
Hegel : L’esthétique
Platon : La République
Aristote : Poétique
Schopenhauer : Le Monde comme volonté et comme représentation
 

4 Responses

la citation
Rep

filo-faque 3


https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-clear-and-concise-summary-of-a-famous-philosophers-philosophy

What is a clear and concise summary of a famous philosopher's philosophy?

Feel free to provide summaries of the philosophies of more than one philosopher.
8 Answers


David McKerracher
David McKerracher, I'm a Philosophy Major.
Warning: sarcastic content.

Feel free to suggest edits, I always appreciate those.


Socrates: "I know I don't know but neither do you."

Aristotle: "Well, I know the good is in the mean."

Epicurus: "Simplify and enjoy life."

Diogenes: "You're all idiots!" *masturbates in the town square*

Aquinas: "I agree with Aristotle except he's wrong about the number of gods,
there's actually only one and I can prove it."

Machiavelli: "Let's just be practical: the ends justify the means."

Hobbes: "A social contract is necessary because anarchy is more terrifying."

Locke: "God granted us the inalienable right to our property (which includes our own bodies) and the labor we put fourth has value to accumulate more property."

Rousseau: "We've got it all wrong, but since we can't go back to living as solitary primitive men we may as well try to combat the alienation by writing a social contract based on equality."

Descartes: "I think therefore God is more obvious than anything."

Hume: "Ya'll don't know."

Kant: "Holy shit, I really don't know, but now wait a sec, ok, now I do!"

Hegel: "We're all connected through spirit in an epic journey progressing towards some final conclusion."

Nietzsche: "Now that we've killed God, let's figure out what it's all about, and especially how to avoid the pitfall of nihilism."

Heidegger: "I'd tell you in simple terms what I think, but then I'd have to kill you."

Marx: "Capitalism sucks but it's laying the groundwork for the inevitable rise of communism."



Sartre: "Myself and Camus are the first real hipster philosophers."

Camus. "^Yep."

Rawls: "If we take ourselves and all we know out of the equation to get an objective concept of justice, we would agree that a social contract would be very equal, although it would not give up on merit altogether."

Ayn Rand: "You're wrong. I'm right. Fuck off."





Marcus Aurelius (and many of the other Stoics)

"You're ok. No, seriously, no matter how much you hate yourself, you're ok."

"Don't get pissed off about other people's problems. Just do whatever you can today."

"Calm down."

"So what if other people are stupid. Fuck them. They don't own you. Also, you should feel sorry for them, because being stupid must be like living in Hell."

"The meaning of life is to help each other out."

"Everything has some kind of intrinsic beauty, and therefore, worth."

"You are the product, and creator, of your society."

"So what if it hurts. Walk it off."

"I wish I wasn't the Emperor of Rome. I wish I could be a philosopher."

"I'd like to thank my mother, father, stepfather, best friend, tutor..." (goes on for pages and pages in the Meditations)

Meditations is a series of personal writings by Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor 161–180 CE, setting forth his ideas on Stoic philosophy.


Jason Nathaniel Miller
Jason Nathaniel Miller, BA in Philosophy, Temple '15 (Existentialism & Environmental Ethics)

Schopenhauer: Existence is meaningless and absurd. You’re only still alive because of your will to live, which deceives you into thinking your aims aren’t fruitless. Also, love is your desire to reproduce tricking you into thinking you like people you probably won’t get along with once you’ve had babies. The best thing you can do is shut yourself away from the world and others and dedicate yourself to negating your stupid, stupid will. Also, why is everybody so damned loud?
Kierkegaard: Existence is pretty terrible, but God, though.
Nietzsche: Existence is absurd, and we used to be pretty good at dealing with that until Socrates ruined poetry with all his questions and tragic drama became too cerebral. In order to avoid nihilism, you must find affirmation outside the rational, especially in myth, and must give up on religious morality and forge your own sense of meaning based on your will.
Sartre: Existence is meaningless and absurd, which is really awful. Like, so so bad. But you can be partially redeemed by work. Also, socialism.
Camus: Existence is meaningless and absurd, which is sort of OK. You can be happy by giving in to it and existing in ways which are authentic to your nature and to nature as a whole. Also, literature is better at conveying philosophical ideas than academic philosophy.


Eric Griffiths
Eric Griffiths, What is there to say?
Socrates and the Socratic Method (a slight elaboration on David McKerracher's answer ;-) .) which is an abnegation of the notion of an idea should or could come quickly:

  1. Ask a person why they do or believe something in a relevant sphere of his or her life.
  2. Chip away at all assumtpions until there are none left.
  3. What is left is the truth of the matter.

-- And for this, he was made to drink hemlock (well, that and his generally intrusive manner -- Athenian life at the time was the Agora, which pretty much everyone passed through and could be approached -- his hygiene was questionable, and - shock and horror! - he generally refused to wear sandals.)


Michael Rodney Osborne
Michael Rodney Osborne, The unexamined life is not worth living, but feel free to disagree.
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard:

Growing up in a Christian community and attending church regularly does not make you a Christian. (Similar to Socrates' emphasis on realizing that we don't know what we think we know.)

You cannot read and understand the Bible unless you are able to accept paradox.

There are three stages along life's way:
Aesthetic stage - enjoyment of life's pleasures
Ethical stage - living a life of civic responsibility
Religious stage - doing whatever God says to do. (i.e. Abraham)

One can transition between the stages of life only by a leap. (Colloquialized as "a leap of faith". If you've seen the movie "Inception", then you get the idea.)

We should approach God with fear and trembling.

"Man is a synthesis of psyche and body, but he is also a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal."

You must risk everything to love unconditionally.

We all harbor deep anxiety.

(The above is merely a sip from a fire hydrant. SK wrote about nearly everything having to do with self, relationship to God and the existential crises we face throughout our lives.)


I'm going to do Nietzsche. I don't think he was a philosopher. More of a punk rocker of philosophy.

"People get impressed with themselves for not doing things they can't do. Then they make up a morality to prevent you from doing those things either."

"You have to learn to say 'no' before you can say 'yes.'"

"Humanity is going somewhere, but I don't know where. I hope it's better, because it kinda sucks now."

"Do your own thing."

"Germans are too damn serious."

"Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke."

"Don't beat up on horses."


Immanuel Kant:

In order to learn anything about the world it must be assumed that something may be learned, that phenomena have underlying reasons.

Wittgenstein:

I'm not very clever but I fooled a lot of even less clever people into thinking I was a genius.

Heidegger:

Being is a lot more than merely the most abstract noun.


I am the wisest because I know how unwise I am -- Socrates

His best line in The Apology  was his recommendation to the court on what to do with him.  He suggested that Athens give him free meals for the rest of his life.  And that is exactly what he got.