Unlawful Blockades and Origins of Art in the Stone Age Writing Paper Please write about 120 words for each topic. Total about 600 words. Topic: Origins of

Unlawful Blockades and Origins of Art in the Stone Age Writing Paper Please write about 120 words for each topic. Total about 600 words. Topic: Origins of Art in the Stone Age
Topic: Artifacts and Artworks
Topic: Plato vs. Aristotle
Topic: The Institutional Theory of Art
Topic: Making the Mona Lisa
Encyclopedia of Science and Religion
J. Wentzel Vrede van Huyssteen
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Encyclopedia of science and religion / J. Wentzel Vrede van Huyssteen,
editor in chief. — 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-02-865704-7 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-02-865705-5 (v. 1 : alk. paper)
— ISBN 0-02-865706-3 (v. 2 : alk. paper)
1. Religion and science—Encyclopedias. I. Van Huyssteen, Wentzel.
BL240.3 .E43 2003
291.1’75—dc21
2002152471
Printed in the United States of America
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A RT, O RIGINS OF
nearby—felines, horses, bison, and mammoth—
some with incised markings. Personal decorations
appear even earlier. Some beads made from shells
from distant shores indicate something special
about the materials themselves. Some of the paintings in Chauvet Cave in France have been dated to
thirty thousand years before the present, and other
cave art may be just as old. Painted slabs from
South Africa’s Apollo Cave are more than twentyseven thousand years old, and Australian wall engravings, though less securely dated, may be forty
thousand years old. Early Aurignacian sites from
thirty-two thousand years ago have produced multiholed bone flutes. Percussion instruments are
nearly as old. Footprints beaten into the floors of
some Paleolithic caves may suggest dancing.
Over twelve thousand items of Paleolithic
portable art have been found in Western Europe
alone. There are now three hundred decorated
cave sites known, some with only a handful of figures, others with thousands. Humans have been
producing art for at least three hundred centuries,
portable and parietal, in varied materials, and in
widely separate parts of the world. Unfortunately,
it is not clear how much this knowledge reveals
about the origins of art.
Temporal beginnings and the nature of art
A RT, O RIGINS OF
Some thirty-three thousand years ago a human
being living in what is now Germany carved a figure like a man with a lion’s head from a piece of
mammoth tusk. Other ivory figurines were made
Even asking where and when art began is more
complicated than it seems. Because researchers depend on the vagaries of preservation and sometimes chance discovery, it is likely that many other
works were created but not (yet) found. Even
Chauvet Cave was unknown before 1994. A further
complication concerns what qualifies as art or can
be conceived as a “precursor” to art. The zoologist
Jane Goodall observed wild chimpanzees engaged
in a kind of rain dance. Desmond Morris found
that apes like to paint—they do so without rewards—and their paintings show balance, control,
and varied themes. John Pfeiffer detected among
Homo habilis (an extinct member of the human
genus that lived in Africa approximately 2.5 million
years ago) a possible a preference for green lava
and smooth pink pebbles, and the geologist and
anthropologist Kenneth Oakley notes that fossils
that may have been used as charms are common
in Paleolithic sites. A rough female form on a pebble from Berekhat Ram, Israel, dated to 230,000
years ago. Is this art or our own imagination? The
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A RT, O RIGINS OF
amazingly early date makes it both more interesting and more difficult to accept.
Art is not easily defined. Robert Layton notes
an imprecise, shifting boundary, and different approaches that are hard to correlate, especially with
regard to the aesthetic perspective and to art as
communication. Anthropologists now commonly
shy away from using the term art. Margaret Conkey and Olga Soffer advocate not thinking of these
images as art but studying them as examples of
human symbolic behavior. Some forms of art, such
as song, dance, and storytelling, are transient, but
other art is more enduring, separating communication from the constraints of time and location. External symbolic storage is of inestimable value in
human history, and the arts were among the first
media so used.
Sources of art: cogitations, motivations,
adaptations, and inspirations
Just as fundamental as the timing and context of its
first appearance are the sources from which art
arose. Steven Mithin believes the dramatic development of culture, seen in some places as early as
fifty thousand years ago and established wherever
humans lived by thirty thousand years ago, represents a major redesign of the human mind. The
premodern mind had consisted of a suite of relatively separate, specialized intelligences (social, linguistic, natural historical, technical) and the rapid
appearance of art and religion is evidence that a
generalized intelligence, similar to that of modern
humans, allowed people to combine thoughts
from the formerly separate intelligences.
Psychological explanations had proliferated
even by 1900 when Yrjö Hirn’s The Origins of Art
reviewed many suggestions, from James Mark
Baldwin’s “self-exhibiting impulse” to Hirn’s own
preference for locating the art impulse in the
human tendency to externalize feeling states,
heightening the pleasure and relieving the pain of
these feelings and awakening similar feelings in
others. The nineteenth-century Russian novelist
Leo Tolstoy similarly saw art as a communication
of feelings, dependent upon and nurturing empathy. Jumping ahead many years and theories,
Nancy Aiken also attributes the origins of art to its
emotional effects. This need not involve beauty but
could engage any emotion. Some of the same stimuli (lines, shapes) that naturally trigger reactions
are used in art to trigger emotional responses that
are evaluated as aesthetic. This connection with
biologically built-in responses accounts for the universality of the human aesthetic response.
Many models are selectionist, proposing more
or less plausible scenarios for how art aids adaptation and so is increasingly favored in early populations. Charles Darwin suggested that the ability to
create feelings with music gave certain individuals
an edge in attracting mates. Interestingly, his fellow
discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, believed natural selection could not account
for artistic faculties and proposed a “spiritual
essence,” a kind of God-of-the-gaps view of
human development. Some arguments involve
ecological adaptation rather than the psychology
of emotion or sexual selection. Pfeiffer proposed
that art arose out of necessity to hold the group together, reduce conflict, and pass on a growing
body of wisdom. Looking back, art is an advance,
but Terrence Deacon believes it was really a desperate response to change, perhaps to a degrading
environment. Such models seem to take a pessimistic view of human freedom and creativity, yet
wracking one’s brains for a solution takes as much
creativity as dreaming on a sunny afternoon.
Ellen Dissanayake’s ethological approach involves finding core behaviors that natural selection
could work on. Most important is “making special,”
through which reality is elaborated, reformed, and
placed in a different realm, usually a magical or supernatural world, though often today a purely aesthetic realm. In contrast Helena Cronin suggests a
pre-adaptation route in which art arose as an unselected by-product of some other adaptation. This
may be true of many potentials of the human mind,
some of which, perhaps, have yet to be discovered.
John Barrow pushes the causal nexus with the
fascinating notion that the structure of the universe
itself helped shape human creativity and aesthetic
sense. Scale is important—if people were the size
of ants, they would lack the strength to break
chemical bonds as they do when chipping stones
or carving ivory. Human associations of colors with
emotions may relate to properties of light. Barrow
also attempts to trace some aesthetic preferences
to human adaptation to an ancestral savanna
homeland. While intriguing, however, there really
was no single “ancestral environment” upon which
—30—
A RT, O RIGINS OF
to base such an argument. Indeed, Rick Potts convincingly argues that the time of human evolution
was marked by intense environmental variability
and that the flexible cognition of human beings
was an adaptation to instability. Perhaps human
creativity and the aesthetic sense also developed in
response to environmental instability.
Or did the arts grow from the human need to
impose order on human intelligence and its capacity for self-revelation? Once human beings “left the
garden,” they needed art to cope with their new
knowledge, for natural selection could not keep
up. In thus recognizing art’s connection with the
deepest questioning of humans, sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson offers an almost theological argument, though his aim is consilience, the interlocking of causal explanations across disciplines.
Because of the human predicament Wilson
captures so well, the arts have been deeply connected with religion. Much of the world’s art is religious and so are many interpretations. Returning
to the caves, the most influential is the idea, championed by the Abbé Breuil, that the art was involved in hunting magic. Structuralism, via Annette
Laming-Emperaire and André Leroi-Gourhan, has
also been important. Whatever one thinks of structuralism, art is deeply symbolic, and its meaning
not easily perceived from another culture. David
Lewis-Williams notes that Leonardo da Vinci’s Last
Supper has little to do with men eating. And for
Clifford Geertz, the cultural significance of art is a
“local matter.” Jean Clottes and Lewis-Williams
argue for a connection with shamanism in which
the caves are spaces for ritual such as making images expressing the trance and hallucinatory experiences of shamanic activity.
Noting Jeremy Begbie’s defense of art as
knowledge, John Polkinghorne sees art as a vehicle for access to truth, a view not uncommon
among artists and writers such as Madeleine L’Engle, C. S. Lewis, Larry Woiwode, and John Keats,
who famously wrote in Ode on a Grecian Urn that
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Ursula Goodenough
also sees in art a source of nobility, grace, and
pleasure, and Thomas Dubay notes that even in
mathematics and science, beauty is evidence for
truth. Beauty and art are not coextensive but surely
related. Polkinghorne points out “That a temporal
succession of vibrations in the air can speak to us
of eternity is a fact that must be accommodated in
any adequate account of reality” (p. 45). Intimations of truth and contact with eternity are powerful motivations. In art and music, like religion,
there is a dimension of reality that transcends the
material world. Indeed, Alejandro García-Riviera
suggests that if God is truth, goodness, and beauty,
experience of these is an experience of God.
Interlocking causal explanations
An interlocking of explanations may be crucial for
understanding the origins of art. Theological perspectives are not necessarily at odds with other
ideas, and they may add an important dimension
to theories of art’s causation and motivation. Art as
a window onto truth not otherwise apprehended
makes sense of the deepest experience of art. It is
a motivation for “making special” and may also be
why the shaman creates art after one spiritual journey as an aid to the next. In some models, this
“truth” consists in the capture and communication
of an experience or feeling. This also makes sense,
for whatever their ultimate sources, revelations
and intimations come to an artist through experiences or feelings dependent on the human nervous and cognitive systems. And by whatever route,
people have natural selection to thank for this
wonderful facility for exploring truth. It is the universality of certain human experiences and certain
truths so conveyed that allows (some) art to communicate across generations. Lascaux, arguably the
most famous of the painted prehistoric caves in
France, still conveys real truth, very possibly some
of what the artists had in mind, if only in the back
of their minds, so many centuries ago.
See also A NTHROPOLOGY ; C ULTURE , O RIGINS OF ;
PALEOANTHROPOLOGY
Bibliography
Aiken, Nancy E. The Biological Origins of Art. Westport,
Conn.: Praeger, 1998.
Bahn, Paul, and Vertut, Jean. Images of the Ice Age. Leicester, UK: Winward, 1988.
Barrow, John. The Artful Universe: The Cosmic Source of
Human Creativity. Boston: Little, Brown, 1996.
Clottes, Jean, and Lewis-Williams, David. The Shamans of
Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves.
New York: Abrams, 1998.
—31—
A RTIFICIAL I NTELLIGENCE
Conkey, Margaret W.; Soffer, Olga; Stratmann, Deborah,
eds. Beyond Art: Pleistocene Image and Symbol. San
Francisco: California Academy of Sciences, 1997
Dissanayake, Ellen. What is Art For? Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1988.
Geertz, Clifford. “Art as a Cultural System.” In Local
Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, 2nd edition, ed. Clifford Geertz. New York: Basic
Books, 2000.
Hirn, Yrjö. The Origins of Art: A Psychological and Sociological Inquiry. London: Macmillan, 1900.
Layton, Robert. The Anthropology of Art, 3rd edition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Lewis-Williams, J. D. Discovering South African Rock Art.
Cape Town, South Africa: David Philip, 1990.
Mithin, Steven. The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive
Origins of Art, Religion, and Science. New York:
Thames and Hudson, 1996.
Pfieffer, John E. The Creative Explosion: An Inquiry into
the Origins of Art and Religion. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1982.
Polkinghorne, John. The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of
a Bottom-up Thinker. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Renfrew, Colin, and Scarre, Chris, eds. Cognition and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Symbolic Storage.
Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1998.
Tattersall, Ian. Becoming Human: Evolution and Human
Uniqueness. New York: Harcourt, 1998.
PAUL K. WASON
—32—
From: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/artifact
Artifact
An artifact may be defined as an object that has been intentionally made or produced for a certain
purpose. Often the word ‘artifact’ is used in a more restricted sense to refer to simple, hand-made
objects which represent a particular culture. According to ?Webster’s Third New International
Dictionary?, an artifact is “a usually simple object (as a tool or an ornament) showing human
workmanship and modification as distinguished from a natural object.” ?The Oxford English
Dictionary? defines an artifact (artefact) as “anything made by human art and workmanship; an
artificial product.” This sense of the word can be seen from the word itself: it is derived from the
Latin words ?arte?, ablative of ?ars? (art), and ?factum?, the past participle of ?facere? (to make). In
experimental science, the expression ‘artifact’ is sometimes used to refer to experimental results
which are not manifestations of the natural phenomena under investigation, but are due to the
particular experimental arrangement, and hence indirectly to human agency.
1. On the Concept of Artifact
Aristotle divided existing things into those that “exist by nature” and those existing “from other
causes.” The former include “animals and their parts, … and the plants and the simple bodies (earth,
fire, air, water)”, the latter include “a bed and a coat and anything of that sort, ?qua? receiving these
designations, i.e., in so far as they are products of art.” (?Physica?, Book II, 192 b 9–18). Aristotle
makes here a distinction between natural objects and artifacts (“artificial products”, ?ibid.?, 192 b 28),
and describes the latter as products of the art of making things. The art of making something
involves intentional agency; thus an artifact may be defined as an object that has been intentionally
made for some purpose.
An artifact has necessarily a maker or an author; thus ?artifact? and ?author? can be regarded as
correlative concepts (Hilpinen 1993, 156–157):
(A1) An object is an artifact if and only if it has an author.
The concept of authorship is here assumed to involve the same kind and degree of intentionality as
the concept of an artifact. It should be noted that (A1) allows the possibility that an artifact has
several authors who contribute to its production. Such objects may be termed “collectively produced
artifacts”.
Intentional agency is not limited to human beings. For example, in a recent experiment a New
Caledonian crow called Betty bent a piece of straight wire into a hook and used it to lift a bucket
containing food from a vertical pipe (Weir at al., 2002). The action required for the solution of
1
Betty’s problem, bending a metal wire into the form of a hook, was quite “unnatural”, and
apparently an instance of intelligent, goal-directed action. Betty’s hook may be regarded as a simple
artifact made for the purpose of gaining access to the food bucket. Tool manufacture has also been
observed among animals in the wild, for example, chimpanzees strip leaves off twigs detached from
branches of trees and use the twigs for reaching termites or ants. (Beck 1980, 117.)
The products of an artifact maker’s actions can be divided into the objects intended by the author
and unintended products. When a tailor makes a coat for his customer, his intention is to make a
coat of a certain size and style, but he also produces scraps of cloth as by-products of his work. Such
by-products are products of an artifact maker’s intentional actions, but they are not intended
products. Stereotypical examples of artifacts, e.g., tools, weapons, and ornaments, are usually
intended products, and the definition of an artifact as an object intentionally made for a certain
purpose applies to such objects. However, in the anthropological and archaeological literature the
word is sometimes us…
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