Haecceities: Essentialism, Identity, and Abstraction is both an artistic and philosophical examination of the limits of Abstraction in art and of kinds of radical identity that are determined in the identification of those limits. Building on his work Subjects and Objects, Strayer shows how the fundamental conditions of making and apprehending works of art can be used, in concert with language, thought, and perception, as ‘material’ for producing the more Abstract and radical artworks possible. Certain limits of Abstraction and possibilities of radical identity are then identified that are critically and philosophically considered. They prove to be so extreme that the concepts artwork, abstraction, identity, and object in art, philosophy, and philosophy of art, have to be reconsidered.

Featuring chapters by a diverse range of leading international artists and theorists, this book suggests that contemporary art is increasingly characterized by the problem of where and when it is situated. While much advanced artistic speculation of the twentieth-century was aligned with the question “what is art?,” a key question for many artists and thinkers in the twenty-first century has become “where is art?” Contributors explore the challenge of meaningfully identifying and evaluating works located across multiple versions and locations in space and time. In doing so, they also seek to find appropriate language and criteria for evaluating forms of art that often straddle other realms of knowledge and activity. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, art criticism, and philosophy of art.

This handbook brings together the most current and hotly debated topics in studies about images today. In the first part, the book gives readers an historical overview and basic diacronical explanation of the term image, including the ways it has been used in different periods throughout history. In the second part, the fundamental concepts that have to be mastered should one wish to enter into the emerging field of Image Studies are explained. In the third part, readers will find analysis of the most common subjects and topics pertaining to images. In the fourth part, the book explains how existing disciplines relate to Image Studies and how this new scholarly field may be constructed using both old and new approaches and insights. The fifth chapter is dedicated to contemporary thinkers and is the first time that theses of the most prominent scholars of Image Studies are critically analyzed and presented in one place.

The subject matter of Subjects and Objects is the limits of Abstraction in art. The notion of Abstraction, its development in art history, and the relation of art and philosophy regarding Abstraction are considered in addition to identifying and examining things that are essential to artworks. Any artwork has an identity, and comprehension of that identity depends on a perceptual object. A subject’s apprehension of such an object creates an “artistic complex” of which the object, the subject, and the apprehension are constituents. The essential elements of this kind of complex are the subject of the final part of the work. Its concluding section considers these elements as ‘material’ to be used to determine the limits of Abstraction.

Subjects and Objects provides the philosophical groundwork for the determination of the limits of Abstraction in art. This involves extensive consideration of the subject-object relationship and properties of subjects and objects that pertain to making and apprehending works of art.

This book supports a version of the trope-bundle view of individual substances matching also with a coherent account of change, individuation and individual essences. In particular, it is argued that qualitative individuation and qualitative individual essences can be tackled within the frames of a trope account. The adoption of a trope BT together with the individuation of tropes via the bearer substance might create the feeling of circularity since tropes and substances seem mutually to individuate each other. The novel solution to the problem developed here consists in showing that the individuation of concrete individual substances is independent, in crucial respects, from the fact that they are construed as bundles of tropes. Apart from metaphysician colleagues, the book is recommended for advanced students in analytic metaphysics.

Baruch Brody contends that the fundamental assumption on which the tradition is based is erroneous and that once this assumption is shown to be in error, all philosophical problems in this area have to be rethought. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.