Current Publications (DOWNLOAD all these papers free from Philpeople.org)
 

Harmonising Humanity with Nature: Metaphor, the Person, and Art's Higher Meaning
Trimarchi, N. 2025. “Harmonising Humanity With Nature: Metaphor, the Person, and Art’s Higher Meaning”. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 21 (1):11-118.

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Mythology, as we know, is at the heart of everything. This paper advances an argument for creating harmony among humanity, and with nature, by changing how we ‘world’ reality in modern mythologising. The connection between metaphor, the person, and art is proposed as key, since artmaking and admiring presents our most powerful way of creating a mythology. Metaphor is the unique form of meaning productivity, originating in nature’s ‘semiotic freedom’, which is fundamental to expressing human embodiment in a ‘world’. Symbol merely represents; but metaphor places us in the realm of the part-whole relation simultaneously with the becoming-being polarity. These are processes inherent in all life and emerging consciousness, hence ‘spiritual’ phenomena (in the most scientific sense), producing what Peirce claimed as the evolution of thought toward Reason. And, equally, the key processes in artmaking. Though high mathematics is metaphoric, revealed religion is essentially symbolic; and arguably the highest ‘spiritual’ expression is made, not even in philosophical discourse, but through Art. Linking meaning with valuing, I show where neuroscience is helpful, but hamstrung, in accounting for the primacy of metaphor in art. Benefits of Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology and Max Scheler’s philosophical anthropology over Lakoff & Johnson’s more generalised ‘experientialist’ approach to metaphor are examined. Ricoeur’s account of “symbolism’s” confusion with metaphor here reveals that, to activate the ‘re-productive’ imagination, art must present a ‘proper’ metaphoric utterance (as does Schelling’s: T2024a & 2024b). This was distinguished from the ‘productive’ imagination’s merely reflective engagement with symbol and concept; and later argued to move us ‘beyond interpretation’ as Bradley (2009) suggests necessary, via Peircian semiotics (T2024c). Further detailed exploration here of this key relation between metaphor, the person, and art, hence reveals how philosophical anthropology provides the basis for re-empowering art to transcend Danto’s ‘artworld’. Making it thus capable of producing a realistic collectivising Spirit able to inspire the essential longer term humanistic ‘new deal’ with Nature, that is much needed to avert our possible extinction or descent into ‘posthuman’ mechanism.

  

Peirce's Suspended Second, and Art's 'Ethical Phenomenology'
Trimarchi, N. (2024). Peirce’s Suspended Second, and Art’s ’Ethical Phenomenology’. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 20(2), 318–401

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The fundamental problem for theoretical aesthetics is its inability to account for art’s meaning-value (Trimarchi, 2022).  As previously argued, Art’s higher meaning is only found emerging from the artwork’s tacit dimensions, where empirical-historical intentionality is almost completely inconsequential (Trimarchi, 2024b).  The latter’s interpretable ‘phenomenology of sequence’ produces a false theorising tendency, disconnecting art from the history of ideas and severing aesthetics from ethics and logic.  Art appears ‘infinitely interpretable’, hence entirely subjective.  Adapting Arnold’s (2011) actantial processual approach, I show how Peircian semiotics, via ‘real Secondness’, uncovers art’s higher meaning.  Peirce’s ‘diagrammatic thinking’ exposes art’s unique role of ‘objectifying’ the Person (in any subject, via appropriate propositions), without de-valuing this bearer of moral values.  His ‘semiotic realism’ helps unveil Scheler’s anthropological (also termed ‘ethical’) phenomenology emerging from Merleau-Ponty’s ‘obscure zone’, to discern poetic from other speculation.  Art’s ‘subject-objectivation’ (or, ethical intentionality) is thus able to be mapped phenomenologically to reveal any artwork’s meaning-value orientation.  This paper combines Peirce’s ‘phenomenology of reason’ with Scheler’s hierarchy of values and Schelling’s ‘mythological categories’ (Trimarchi 2024b) to suggest a methodology for moving beyond neo-Kantian theoretical aesthetics (and analytical philosophy’s grip on the anti-art of ‘modernity’).  That is, moving from the realm of perception to knowing, reviving art’s ontological connection to normative aesthetics.  In conclusion, Peirce’s ‘science of ideals’ is thus revealed as Complexity Science, which – via his ‘suspended second’ (or, Ricoeur’s ‘second ontology’) - vindicates Schelling’s claim for how ‘aesthetics becomes objective’ (Trimarchi, 2024a).​​

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Schelling's Art in the Particular (Re-orienting Final Cause)
Trimarchi, N. (2024). Schelling’s ’Art in the Particular’: Reorienting Final Cause. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 20(1), 416–499 

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​​F. W. Schelling’s Principle of Art returns us to an ancient epic sensibility, as argued elsewhere, laying the foundations for how we might reverse the ‘modern mythology’ at the core of humanity’s ecological/existential crisis.  This paper advances that argument by examining Schelling’s systematic approach to constructing art ‘in the particular’ (art-forms/works).  ‘Particularity’ is subject only to the reason inherent in the potences (or consequences) of the affirmation of the whole unity (the Principle).  This suggests how Schelling’s ‘affirming principles’ determine the boundary conditions of his ‘mythological categories’, and how his generalities inform a ‘scientific sequence’ for explaining the features of the Formative and Verbal arts.  I examine these in detail in various artforms, and how they resolve key difficulties (eg., appearance/reality, form, intentionality, and purpose) for assessing art’s higher meaning-value directionality.  My analysis reveals why phenomenology is key to understanding meaning in art, and ultimately why we arrived at the problematic modern ‘epic’ reversal of ancient universalising, focusing our attention on means over ends (‘final causes’) in art-making/admiring.  By explaining the practical application of the Principle-in-action, in constructing/assessing any artforms/works ‘for all time’ in terms of meaning-value, I expand on my earlier argument that Schelling’s ‘dialectical aesthetics’ presents a radical advance on Kant’s.  And, in the process, I suggest why our dominant mythological approach to Literature, Drama, and even fundamental conceptions of Tragedy and Comedy begs revision.  My conclusion summarises what shifts in our attendance to the art object Schelling’s system demands, to reverse our unrealistic mythological orientation.  Why his Philosophy of Art offers a suitable framework for collectively re-worlding the world, becomes clear in praxis; revealing the need to change practices, traditions, and institutions, in order to advance a New Mythology. ​​​

The Poles of Idea and Reality (and the De-futurising of Art and Humanity)
Trimarchi, N. (2023). The Poles of Idea and Reality: (and the De-futurising of Art and Humanity). Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 19(1), 426–457

Fred Polak’s futurology takes up where F. W. Schelling’s claims about the ‘modern mythology’ leaves off.  Linking these, I argue Art and humanity’s joint meaning crisis originates in ‘symbolic idealism’, de-futurising both and crippling humanity’s attempts to develop a proper internal ‘narrative order of goods’ needed for our survival.  Polak’s tracing of how various forms of Expressionism emerged from Impressionism in later modernism, transforming our images of reality and the future, vindicates Schelling’s earlier claims that our symbolic mode of ‘worlding’ creates a materially positivistic idea of progress.  And our modern repurposing of art has produced what Polak calls a disorienting ‘false and deluded realism’ partly responsible for the counter-utopian, post-humanist tendencies prevalent today in both the East and West.
 

The Aesthetics of Meaning 
Trimarchi, N. (2022). “The Aesthetics of Meaning,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 18(2), 251–304

Following C. S. Peirce’s claim that aesthetics precedes ethics and logic, I argue for reconceiving aesthetics as a normative science.  The deteriorated relations between these links in the ‘modern mythology’ is associated with art’s decline and apparent indistinguishability from the ‘general aesthetic’ (aided by ‘aesthetics as theory’).  ‘Naturalizing’ art, according to F. W. Schelling’s system, is proposed to ameliorate this.  Bringing together Peircian semiotics with Schelling’s ‘process metaphysics’ suggests how to restore the historicized split between Art ‘as principle’ and the Person (two ‘perfect signs’) by attending to the ‘ethical phenomenology’ of artworks.  An argument is then made for how modern ethics and ‘morals’ may be reconnected.