1999-2001, and since 2001 has taught in the United States at St. Olaf College, Minnesota where he is now Associate Professor of Philosophy Emeritus. He is the author of Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical (1993); Expressing the World: Skepticism, Wittgenstein and Heidegger (2003); and Self, Value and Narrative: a Kierkegaardian Approach (2012).
Rudd applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Painting and Presence: Why Paintings Matter, and reported the following:
The Page 99 Test works in a way for my book; at that point I am discussing a specific example or set of examples which I use to support my general thesis. The book is a philosophical inquiry into why paintings matter – that is, into whether and why we should care about them. (Why do people go to art galleries? Hang paintings on their walls? Why do artists create paintings?) My basic idea is that paintings matter primarily because they can put us into touch with reality – not so much by accurately depicting it, but by making things immediately present to us in their essential natures. My initial model for this is a certain kind of religious painting – the Orthodox icon, which aims, not to accurately depict the way a saint looked, but to bring us (if we approach it in the right frame of mind) into the presence of sanctity. I go on to argue that paintings of all sorts – e.g. a Cezanne picture of a mountain, or a bowl of apples - do something similar, in that they make the essential natures of things immediately present to us; bring us into relation to them. On page 99 I am in the middle of another of my case-studies, in which I discuss classical Chinese landscape paintings and cite contemporaneous Chinese art critics and historians to show that they understood the purpose of painting in this way:Learn more about Painting and Presence at the Oxford University Press website.The artist intuits the inner essence of things and by so doing is able to make it manifest in the painting. But the appreciator of that painting is then able to experience this making manifest or making present; what the artist was able to intuit is thus made manifest to the viewer as well. Guo Xi emphasizes the way in which a good painting can make the landscape present to its viewer: ‘Without leaving your room you may sit to your heart’s content among streams and valleys. The voices of apes and the calls of birds will fall on your ears faintly. The glow of the mountain and the call of the waters will dazzle your eyes glitteringly.’ The idea that a (monochrome) painting can show you glow and dazzle – and make you hear birds and apes – makes it clear that it is not literal, illusionistic representation that is the concern here, but conjouring up the total effect of a place. The painter needs to visit the landscape, not for the sake of photo-realism, but in order to grasp its significant aspects. And if he or she succeeds, the painting enables the viewer, in a sense, to be in the presence of what it depicts; as the icon allows the devout viewer to be in the presence of the saint that it depicts.So page 99 does contain a pretty clear (I hope) summary of the basic thesis of my book, although applied to the specific context of one particular tradition of painting.
--Marshal Zeringue
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