J. M. Coetzee and Making Sense in LIterature. Focusing on the work of Nobel Prize winning South African-Australian novelist J. M. Coetzee, this project examines how Coetzee’s fiction develops techniques that generate or produce meaning about the world and involves levels of ‘translatability’ that allow it to maintain relevance across cultures. A detailed analysis that focuses on how Coetzee makes us question the nature of meaning itself has not yet been undertaken, even though this is of central ....J. M. Coetzee and Making Sense in LIterature. Focusing on the work of Nobel Prize winning South African-Australian novelist J. M. Coetzee, this project examines how Coetzee’s fiction develops techniques that generate or produce meaning about the world and involves levels of ‘translatability’ that allow it to maintain relevance across cultures. A detailed analysis that focuses on how Coetzee makes us question the nature of meaning itself has not yet been undertaken, even though this is of central importance to his work.Read moreRead less
Taste and community: the cultural origins of personal experience. This project explores how artistic value and meaning are attributed to artworks and how cultural artefacts and imaginative constructs may be seen to motivate ethical or socially oriented behaviour. It investigates this theme through an innovative new medium, involving a website and imagery, through which the expertise of philosophers and artists can be brought to bear on a social problem. Its outcomes will include new understandi ....Taste and community: the cultural origins of personal experience. This project explores how artistic value and meaning are attributed to artworks and how cultural artefacts and imaginative constructs may be seen to motivate ethical or socially oriented behaviour. It investigates this theme through an innovative new medium, involving a website and imagery, through which the expertise of philosophers and artists can be brought to bear on a social problem. Its outcomes will include new understanding of the process of perceiving meaning and value as a response to cultural artefacts.Read moreRead less
M.C.Escher and his Contemporaries: the Genesis of the Impossible. The project aims to produce a conceptual history of the twentieth-century impossible pictures movement which developed around M.C.Escher, to classify kinds of impossible pictures, and particularly to establish priorities over who discovered what. This requires geometrical construction, and rigorous logical and mathematical analysis. The project will employ the novel techniques available within the theory of inconsistency. The sign ....M.C.Escher and his Contemporaries: the Genesis of the Impossible. The project aims to produce a conceptual history of the twentieth-century impossible pictures movement which developed around M.C.Escher, to classify kinds of impossible pictures, and particularly to establish priorities over who discovered what. This requires geometrical construction, and rigorous logical and mathematical analysis. The project will employ the novel techniques available within the theory of inconsistency. The significance of this work is that it demonstrates the rich conceptual resources available within inconsistent content. Expected outcomes are a book aimed at the general reader, technical articles in logic and mathematics journals, and a expanded understanding of our human ability to grasp inconsistent visual contents. Read moreRead less