From: Yuri Cath <>
To: Pat McConville <>
Subject: Re: Invitation to interview on Concept : Art podcast
I still feel (following points in my old email below) that I couldn’t say that any art works/genres have influenced my work in philosophy in any direct way.
But there are definitely connections between the artists and art movements that interest me and my philosophical work, and I’ve said some things below about those connections. I hope that is close enough to what you’re after:
two or three art works, genres, artists, or other artistic influences on your work; a
At art school I was mainly interested in late modernist paintings including abstract expressionism. One broadly philosophical connection there is that I was especially interested in art in these movements that can be seen as trying to induce or enable certain contemplative states of mind and experiences, and many artists in post-war American abstract painting were influenced by Zen Buddhism as they received it through figures like the philosopher D. T. Suzuki. Agnes Martin and Mark Rothko are artists that were an influence on me in this broad area and I was also inspired by Japanese temple gardens for similar reasons. On the other hand, I was also taken with abstract painting that was much more dynamic and which tried to evoke more passionate feelings and memories through bold uses of colour and gestural marks. Howard Hodgkin is an artist of this kind whose work I love.
More recently I’ve got interested in the work of Tomislav Nikolic (a contemporary Australian abstract painter) firstly because I find his works to be striking and beautiful but then I also found out (through the titles of his works and interviews) that he seems to be interested in ideas that I explore in my recent work including things like the relationship between imagination and empathy, and the limits of language in conveying experiential knowledge.
These were all artists and art movements that influenced my art (apart from Nikolic) and not my philosophical work, but these artistic influences might also partly explain why when I moved from art to philosophy I was inclined to see a disconnect those two activities (I now see more continuities though). As the art I was interested in was more about trying to stimulate certain kinds of experiences than, say, provoking abstract reflections on philosophical concepts (like conceptual art movements).
But, more positively, I can see a connection between my interests in abstract art and my interests in the qualitative or ‘what it is like’ features of experience. As I think the movement in modernism from representation to abstraction can plausibly be viewed as encouraging us to attend to the more purely qualitative/phenomenal rather than representational features of our visual experiences.
two or three of your own scholarly works or pursuits (whether general or specific) which have been influenced by art.
My recent work on ‘what it is like’ knowledge is broadly influenced by art, or at least by certain problems that artists often grapple with. For example, I think many artists are interested in trying to express and share experiences and feelings that are, if not ineffable, at least very difficult to put into words (or images, or installations), and yet we still attempt to share these experiences and feelings with each other despite those difficulties. And this is a topic I’ve explored in my work on how ‘what it is like’ knowledge can come in degrees, and which I’m continuing to explore in further work in this area. Two key works here of mine are:
- Knowing what it is like and testimony
https://philpapers.org/rec/CATKWI
- Book draft Knowing What It Is Like (a short book that is under review for Cambridge’s Elements series)
And in the book manuscript I apply my account of how ‘what it is like’ knowledge can come in degrees to debates about whether virtual reality is an “empathy machine” that can help us to learn about the experiences of other people. And artists are doing important work in exploring this issue on both sides of these debates and other related issues, see e.g., here and here. I’ve attached the draft book just in case you wanted to have a quick glance at it (the VR material is in the final section, Section 5).
And my work on both ‘what it is like’ knowledge and my work on knowledge-how (/practical knowledge) and their respective relations to knowledge-that (propositional knowledge) both connect with issues to do with aesthetic knowledge and the knowledge that artists have with respect to their own artistic practices. This is because these forms of aesthetic and artistic knowledge are forms of knowledge that can be hard to express and communicate in words which can lead people to argue that they are forms of non-propositional knowledge. One of more important works on knowledge-how is:
- Knowing How Without Knowing That
https://philpapers.org/rec/CATKHW-2
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