Filosofie & Praktijk - Volume 46, Issue 2, 2025

Abstract Emotivism is the ethical view that moral judgements are mere expressions of emotions. On the internet we find a radical variety of this view, exported from the social media, where expressions of emotions are treated as truths about matters. One expresses an emotion that one has had; since one had it, this is a fact and cannot be doubted; hence what provoked it must have occurred, too. A claim to truth is hidden in Read More

Abstract How should we deal with works of art that are attributed great artistic value, but at the same time express values that are considered morally problematic today? In other words, what should we do with canonical works of art that today are seen as racist, sexist, etc.? Using Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a novel first praised for its critique of colonialism but later criticised as racist, I discuss three answers to the Read More

Abstract The article pits the controversial oeuvre of French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline against the contemporary discussion on wokeness. The question is not whether Céline is still ‘acceptable’, but how we can understand his mysogeny and anti-Semitism from his literature. It is argued that it is impossible to keep his literary work and his anti-Semitism separate. The relationship between Céline and the Jewish literary scholar Read More

Abstract Richard Wagner was Hitler’s favourite composer, but also his example in motivating his hatred towards Jews. Both claim that the cultural area is poisoned since Jews occupy all key positions. The Entartete Musik exhibition of 1938 illustrates how anti-Semitism can disguise as music criticism, to expose what the Nazis considered degenerate music. Both Jewish composers and black jazz musicians became victims of th Read More

Abstract This article answers the question of how to deal with the works of the artist Emil Nolde (1867-1956) given his anti-Semitism and Nazism. I argue that a moral flaw of a work of art can sometimes be an aesthetic flaw of a work of art. A work of art is always aesthetically flawed insofar as it possesses an ethical flaw which is aesthetically relevant. To answer this question, I first determine why the Nazi regime did not choose Read More

Abstract Following a recent exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2024) on the life and work of Marina Abramović (Belgrade 1946), in this article Anne-Marie Korte discusses the career of the controversial Serbian performance artist from the perspective of gender and religious studies. Korte emphasises the spiritual nature of Abramović’s art as increasingly characteristic of her performance art, as well as the use of her Read More

Abstract In the 1920s Marcel Duchamp started signing his art works with a new female ID: Rrose Sélavy. Can we argue that the artist is doing something ‘transgender’ here? And, in defiance of a century of historical distance, can we characterize his gesture as ‘woke’? This anachronistic question is the object of the thought experiment developed in this article. Taking Duchamp’s change into Rrose Sélavy for a woke-gestur Read More