Date Due: End of Week 4
This first assignment is designed to help you understand health data collection, where data can be obtained, and how it can help you design a health promotion intervention.
Answer all of the following questions. Your answers do not have to be extensive but they should be precise:
1. Find health statistics for your Local Government Area (LGA), or state (or small country), and answer the following questions?
Name of the LGA/state/country:
a. What is/are your source(s) of information?
2. What are the main demographic features of your chosen area? (ie. population size, ethic/age breakdown etc)
3. What is/are the major preventable health problem(s) in your chose area? (Nominate up to 3)
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4. What is the prevalence of these in your chosen area (or nationally if not available by area)?
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5. What is/are the suspected immediate cause(s) of each of these problems: Site any reference you have for this.
Health Problem 1:
Causes: Reference:
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Health Problem 2:
Causes: Reference:
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Health Problem 3
Causes: Reference:
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6. Select one of these diseases. What, in your opinion, would be the single most effective way of reducing this problem in your chosen area? (just a simple statement will suffice at this stage).
7. Suggest possible way(s) of funding a prevention campaign to do this (max of 3 realistic means):
8. Who would you approach for this funding?
9. Use Haddon’s matrix (see Chapter 1) to describe 3 factors within each box associated with this disease, and a potential intervention for dealing with each of these (Hint: Read Haddon, 1980 from your recommended readings. An example for motor vehicle injuries is: ‘Host’: Pre-event = untrained young driver; Event = collision; Post event = hospitalisation; Intervention = better driver training etc. The environment in this case might be slippery road and the vector, speed)
Pre-event Event Post-event Intervention
Host (who is this
likely to be?)
Environment (what
is the environment
encouraging the
action?)
Vector (agent)
10. Name three differences in your LGA or the society in which you live now compared to when you were growing up, which may encourage ill-health in the next geLecture M.1: Danto on mimesis W. Vaughan Phil 318
1. The philosophical puzzle that Arthur Danto faces is fairly straightforward, and was evinced by the actions of two crafty artists Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. Duchamp’s Fontaine was a urinal signed “R. Mutt 1917” and exhibited for the first time at the Society for Independent Artists in 1917. It was recently voted the most influential work of art of the 20th century in a survey of British museum curators! Warhol’s Brillo Boxes were first exhibited in the Stable Museum in New York in 1964. Why are such things art? If they are to count as art, what distinguishes those objects from other objects indiscernible from them that are not art? How does a urinal or a Brillo box get to be an artwork. Is it good art or lousy art? What property or properties distinguish an artwork Brillo box from an ordinary Brillo box? Danto considered such works, now known as readymades or indiscernibles, to be the greatest challenge in the history of art, and indeed may have even signaled the ‘end’ of art. In response, he put forward what today is known as the institutional theory of art. First let’s look at his remarks in his article, and then review what the institutional theory of art is all about.
2. Danto’s article opens with a discussion of mirror images. He is commenting on a very ancient conception of art as mimesis, or ‘imitation’. Plato’s references to mirror images indicated that art was but imperfect copies of reality, one step removed from the essential platonic forms. Shakespeare’s Hamlet understands mimesis in a more positive light, that art as a mirror sometimes reveals the truth by showing things how they really are. The Hamlet reference also identifies art to have some cognitive utility, that it embodies knowledge in some important sense. The remainder of Danto’s paper is an attempt to expand on this point. There is another difficulty with Socrates’ discussion. If art is imitation, as Plato avowed, then mirror images, which are likewise imitations, must also be considered art. The point is that since mirror images are not art but they are imitations, then being an imitation cannot be a sufficient condition of art. This deficiency was not apparent until the advent of photography (Ross, p. 470), with its ability to provide instant imitations at the press of a button, triggered the recognition of the shortcoming of the theory of mimesis.
3. If mimesis cannot serve as a sufficient condition for art, neither can it serve as a necessary condition either. Danto mentions the work of Kandinsky as an example (Ross, p. 471). Presumably he is referring to the development by Kandinsky of the first purely abstract paintings from 1900-1920. Thus a ‘mimetic’ theory does not work. It is at once too inclusive (since it includes both mirror images and any photograph as art) and too exclusive (since it excludes abstract art). Now the situation is reversed: it is difficult for some work which displays mimetic qualities to be considered art at all. The problem is in finding a suitable definition for those articles which are already known to be art: in the present day it is no easy matter even to distinguish what is art and what is not art. That is the primary philosophical task. A theory of art is required to enable us to distinguish what is artistic terrain in the first place.
4. In the next section Danto talks about how we would deal with the discovery of a completely new class of artworks, a group of objects newly created that were quite different from our accepted views of art. His example is that of the post-Impressionists. Danto’s idea is that the treatment of new artwork parallels with the situation in science where a hypothesis has to add a lot of auxiliary hypothesis to account for a failing theory. He returns to the theory of mimesis of art and calls it the Imitation Theory of Art (IT). The IT theory was faced with a similar situation with the post-Impressionists, regarded by many at the time as pranksters. What is needed is not more auxiliary hypotheses but a new theory that can accommodate all of the new examples that constitutes a threat to its parameters. One particular theory was forwarded as a replacement theory for IT, namely the Reality Theory of Art (RT) (Ross, p. 472). Basically the essence of what Danto calls the reality theory is that it does not rely on imitation as the ground for its judgments. His initial examples are a little bit strange, but in general we can grant that Cezanne and Gauguin and van Gogh did not place the criterion of ‘conformity to appearance’ as the highest artistic value. These works were not intended to be imitations but new creations in their own right. Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters is not the representation of potato eaters but a new entity.
5. Danto’s arguments are a little bit obscure at first. It is not clear why we should accept the analogy between art and science here. He takes the development of new forms of art to be analogous to how the discovery of a whole new class of facts poses a challenge to a scientific theory. But scientific facts are not artworks. Facts have a demand on us that command attention in ways that things not already accepted as artworks do not. But in general the philosophical problem is that of providing a definition of art, and whether or not a definition is possible. Danto seems to hold that any successful definition of art would have to be immune to any future counter-examples. That is, for a definition to be successful it must be able to accommodate any potential new work of art that may be encountered.
6. To close off the discussion Danto gives examples of mimetic art to illustrate the weakness of the It theory, namely the works of Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns. Lichtenstein’s works are blow-ups from comic strip panels. Danto makes the point that Lichtenstein’s painting is indiscernible from a photograph of the original panel from the comic strip, except the painting is a new entity because of its huge scale. He also references Rauschenberg’s and Oldernburg’s use of real beds as part of their artwork. They could easily be mistaken to be real beds. Danto invents a hard-headed character named Testadura who thinks that they beds (Ross, p. 473). In this they make the same mistake as birds pecking at the paintings of grapes made by the ancient artist Zeuxis. But the philosophical issue is: what kind of error would this be, since the works use real beds and not images or representations of beds? How is Danto’s character Testadura to distinguish beds in art from regular beds, since one cannot discover that a bed is not a bed?
7. Danto notices that, in the two works he is discussing, the beds in question are only part of the artwork. The Rauschenberg bed is a compound creation: it happened to be a bed smeared with paint: Danto calls it a paint-bed. Here Danto points out a parallel with Strawson’s conception of persons: persons are not just material bodies but a complex irreducible ‘whole’ made up of mind and body. So too for Danto works of art are irreducible to their material, constituitive elements. There is a unique use of the word ‘is’ here that he tries to explain. (Ross, p. 475). He makes use of an example concerning the painting The Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Danto imagines pointing out the figure of Icarus to a companion in the gallery. The painting seems to be a traditional pastoral composition. Closer inspection reveals the unfortunate Icarus plunging to his death, but the image of Icarus is tiny compared to the whole painting. Danto uses this need for the tiny figure as an example of his special use of the word ‘is’. It is a unique use, the ‘is’ of artistic identification.
a) In the end, do you think art is capable of definition? What are the stakes if the answer is no? b) If the answer is yes, must such a definition be immune from ‘future’ examples refuting ineration.
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