Rick Visser over at Artrift has started a new project entitled The Gift as Art. It looks to be very very good.

The project is an interview with Stephen David Ross who is Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at State University of New York at Binghamton. Stephen is also a Director of PIC, a program of interdisciplinary studies in Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture, that addresses the ways in which cultural forms of knowledge and expression shape and are shaped by human practices and experience. Alas the philosophy journal is not online. Another example of the closed world of academia.

And I have not even finished commenting on Rick's Susan Sontag project Regarding the Pain of Others. I'm just going to have pull my socks up on junk for code.

So what is being said by Stephen David Ross. The interview proper starts here. Ross talks about the disjuncture between the practice of art and aesthetics.

Stephen Ross says that:

"I was particularly interested in the ways in which philosophy was able to reinvent itself, to find new and deep questions that had never been asked before.Yet when I took courses and read philosophical works in aesthetics and philosophy of art they seemed to me to have nothing to do with my own artistic experiences, which seemed to me as far reaching as philosophy, yet far more intense. That was both a loss and a silencing. For several years I avoided aesthetics. I did not avoid art. I found something similar in art and philosophy, intense and profound encounters with the world and with possibilities of expression. Yet they did not speak to me effectively of each other."

Stephen Ross then charts his pathway. And what you know. I walked the same pathway:

"I later found my way into Continental philosophy through Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida, for whom questions of art, aesthetics, and literature were both deeply important for philosophy itself and of fundamental importance for new forms of life and practice. At this point aesthetics and ethics joined in my thinking as part of the project Nietzsche described as the revaluation of all values."