- book
and dvd reviews
-
- dictionary
of wrestlingese
-
- links
-
- (bring
it on) home
-
- moves
defined and symbolized
-
- philosophical projects
-
- who's
who of wrestling
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[NOTE: Abstracts are to works in progress. The Project Brain
Trust Promotion is aggressively growing, and new members and
paper abstracts will be posted soon. For the kind of projects
forthcoming, check out the philosophical projects section.]
 Project Brain Trust Web-Master
& General Manager
- JON COGBURN
-
- homepage:
- http://www.artsci.lsu.edu/phil/phil1/cogburn/index.html
-
- contact:
- joncogburn@yahoo.com
-
- The Art of Professional Wrestling (abstract)
- I utilize recent work in cognitive psychology
to defend a neo-Weiszian view that the general notion of "art"
is parasitic on relevant similarity to good art. Given this,
the nature of art is best understood by considering goodmaking
features of art, and the question of whether wrestling is art
turns on whether it embodies central features of good art. A
brief exploration of traditional definitions and description
of canonical properties of professional wrestling ends up being
extraordinarily illuminating in this light.
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 Project Brain Trust
Wrestling Historian and Drama Theorist
- NEAL HEBERT
-
- [with Jon Cogburn] Going the (Aesthetic) Distance (abstract)
- Ever since the famed "Montreal screw
job," the predetermined nature of matches in professional
wrestling has been openly admitted by wrestlers and promoters
alike. This raises fundamental issues about the notion of aesthetic
distance. We argue that contemporary wrestling fans must not
only suspend disbelief, but also suspend the suspension of disbelief
in interesting ways. In this respect, professional wrestling
forms perhaps the purest Brechtian theater thus far manifest.
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 Project Brain Trust
Artist
- MATT MANARD
-
- [with Neal Hebert] Stone Cold Stunners and Semiotics:
Nuance, Relational Identity, and the Ontology of the Match
(abstract)
- We discuss recent aesthetic work on nuance
to develop a relational ontology of wrestling matches.
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 Project Brain Trust Associate
Member
- DAVID MERLI
-
- Normativity's Royal Rumble: On the Nature of Rules
(in Professional Wrestling) (Abstract)
- Rules in professional wrestling are allegedly
honored more in their breach than in their enforcement. Unfortunately,
philosophers from Kant to Davidson have produced compelling arguments
sabout the nature of normativity that this is a priori impossible.
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 Project Brain Trust Associate
Member
- MARK SILCOX
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- Is Wrestling Fake?: A Marxist Fantasia (Abstract)
- Karl Marx once famously remarked that whenever
history appears to repeat itself, it always does so “the
first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” In this paper,
I will employ Marx’s insight to defend professional wrestling
from certain sissy-assed charges that are often made against
it: i.e. that it is “fake,” inauthentic, manipulative
of its audience and aesthetically inferior to sports for which
the outcome is not decided in advance. Along the way, I’ll
provide a sketch of Marx’s economic theory of surplus value.
I’ll employ this theory to answer such vexed questions as:
Which Pro Wrestler kicks the most ass? Why should we all spend
much more time playing video games? And who was tougher, Plato
or Thomas Jefferson? I’ll conclude by outlining some responses
to the familiar charge against Marxists that the type of society
they aspire to bring about would impede human flourishing.
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