Author Archives: Michael Schwartz

11/30 – Prolegomena to Art’s Transdisciplinarity

November 2018 / Feature Articles

Michael Schwartz

The Project

This paper is prolegomena to art’s transdisciplinarity, a project ontologically motivated through inquiry into the transcendental conditions of art. It opens with the question: “what does the socio-cultural world need to be like for art to have emerged and endured as a human activity and product?” A answer to this question, as retrodictive explanation (proper to critical realist social theory[1]), is that art emerges as response to the tetra-arising matrix of certain …

4/28 – Transfiguring the Everyday: Socio-Cultural Ontologies and Philosophical Transgression

Feature Articles / April-June 2016

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Michael Schwartz

Disenchantment, Philosophy, Meta-Philosophy

Disenchantment is a recurring, if at times underground, concern in contemporary continental and comparative philosophy. To get some quick bearings, let us recall Weber’s famous characterization of modern instrumental reason and its rationalizing processes as dissolving and displacing pre-modern senses of an inherently meaningful and magical world. Similarly, in a more directly philosophical register, Heidegger’s history of being culminates in the reign of Gestell, a mode of sending …

6/16 – On Bhaskarian and Laskean Dialectics

Feature Articles / April - June 2015

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(In Memory of Roy Bhaskar 1944-2014)

Michael Schwartz

Roy Bhaskar, who passed away last fall, was a leading philosopher and meta-disciplinarian who founded the school of Critical Realism, an international academic movement encompassing many research domains, including an annual international conference, a peer-reviewed journal, and four active book series on Routledge press. Bhaskar himself wrote eleven books and edited many others, his philosophical itinerary now well documented. Starting out as a young man in economics in …