With increased use of front-facing cameras, mirrors and Zoom calls, we’re being faced with our own reflections more than ever before.

Is it heightening our preoccupation with the way we look?

Warwick’s Professor Heather Widdows (Philosophy) spoke to Dazed Digital about how our sense of self has changed in recent years

Dr Andrew Cooper has been named a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker for 2023. Each year a select group of ten early career researchers from across the UK are chosen by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and BBC Radio 3 to become a New Generation Thinker. This prestigious NGT status will provide Dr Cooper with a unique opportunity to make radio broadcasts for the BBC, and disseminate his research on German philosopher Amalia Holst to a wider audience. Dr Cooper will also benefit from training and development provided by the AHRC. For further details about the scheme see here: https://www.ukri.org/news/career-changing-opportunity-for-researchers-with-big-ideas/

Professor Diarmuid Costello has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2023-4) to work on his next book project, a collection of essays provisionally titled Spurs to Thought: Philosophical Engagements with Contemporary Art.

Professor Costello says: "The goal of this research is two-fold: to demonstrate the remarkable capacity of selected works of contemporary art to function as spurs to philosophical reflection, if approached in the right spirit; and, in so doing, to establish the value of what I call “philosophical criticism” as an alternative to currently dominant methodologies in the philosophy of art, whether analytic or continental. The project brings this method to bear on the kind of contemporary works that often elicit hostility or confusion, so as to make clear the challenge that such works may implicitly pose to our unreflective understanding of normative concepts we make use of every day".

Professor Costello's previous, recently completed monograph, Aesthetics after Modernism will appear in 2024 with Oxford University Press (NYC) in Noël Carroll and Jesse Prinz’s ‘Thinking Art’ series.

"Aesthetics after Modernism argues for the ongoing relevance of aesthetics to appreciating art after modernism. It aims to show that even the hardest of “hard cases” remain amenable to aesthetic analysis on an adequate conception of the latter. The book traces the contrary view of much recent art criticism and theory to Clement Greenberg’s success in recruiting Kant’s aesthetics to underwrite a formalist conception of aesthetic value. This has led later theorists to miss the resources in the third Critique for understanding our cognitive relation to the kinds of art in which they are interested. It is widely assumed that Kant’s aesthetics cannot speak to the semantic dimension of art; I provide an interpretation of Kant’s theory of art, taking Conceptual Art as my test case, that suggests otherwise. If it can be shown that Kant’s aesthetics can accommodate the appreciation of art with no sensible features, then it should in principle be able to accommodate any kind of art".

As part of Oxford UP's focus in March on 'Women in the History of Philosophy'Link opens in a new window, Eileen John's paper on the poetry of Emily Dickinson, 'Dickinson and Pivoting Thought', in The Poetry of Emily Dickinson (ed. Elisabeth Camp), has been made available for open access this month. How does Dickinson's poetry address our limitations and ambitions as knowers? E.g., what do you make of ... 'I found the words to every thought / I ever had - but One - ' (Fr 436, J 581; 1862)?

Dickinson and Pivoting Thought, Eileen John | The Poetry of Emily Dickinson | Oxford Academic (oup.com)Link opens in a new window.

Professor Fabienne Peter, together with co-author Jonathan Heawood, have officially launched the report of their project, ‘Co-Creational Media: Committing to Truth and Public Participation’. The report assesses the ethical and practical implications of a new form of participatory journalism, produced not only for, but with communities. The full report can be viewed on the Public Interest News Foundation website. See here: https://www.publicinterestnews.org.uk/post/co-creational-media-committing-to-truth-and-public-participation.

The project was funded by an ESRC Impact Acceleration Award from The University of Warwick.