Kitaro Nishida condensed his thinking about art in his later essay "Artistic creation as historical formative process", which was written as a result of a long period of thinking. In this essay, he took artistic creation as a historical formative process, and studied essential problems of aesthetics from the view-point of historical philosophy. In the system of Nishida's philosophy, the concept of "history" doesn't mean the succession of historical facts or events, but a force which drive "the acting self" or "the operating self". In other words, it is the "TOPOS" where the historical facts take place : i.e. "a creative process" which produces history. Nishida's method of art philosophy is to explain the essence of arts from the view point of "historical formative process". So he criticized K. Fiedler's theory of Vision, and tried to base it on the historical formative process. Then he criticized J. Harrison and explained that societies and cultures have originally the religious character. Nishida aimed at not only making a connection between TOPOS and artistic creation, but he thought various cultural phenomena as movements around the two axes ; "immanence" and "transcendence", and placed them in the system of his philosophy, which is based on "TOPOS of the absolute Nothingness".

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My paper deals with the aporiae inherent in the British Enlightenment's theories of taste. I argue, first, that the "naturalistic" theory of taste in the first half of the eighteenth century-which presupposes the Enlightenment theory of "natural right" and whose representatives are Addison, Hume and Burke-results in an aporia : its upholders seek the standard of taste in "human nature" and approve a taste free from prejudices, but they are faced with the necessity of positing a cultivation of taste that cannot be brought about in a naturalistic way. Secondly, I claim that in the second half of the century an objection to the naturalistic theory of taste is raised by Reynolds. Especially in his late discourses, he legitimates the role that the "prejudices" play in cultivating a national taste, but comes to deny their variability ; thereby demonstrating another kind of aporia that is peculiar to conservatism. It is concluded that the aporiae in British theories of taste in the eighteenth century follow from the aporia inherent in the modern ideas of the "individual" and the "human".

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Rustication (Rustika or bugnato) is a stone masonry technique that creates rough surfaces with deeply sunk grooves at the joints. In Florence, this stonework had been traditional since the Middle Ages, and frequently applied to palaces, especially in the Early Renaissance. In this paper, the author addresses this architectural element, namely rustication, focusing on its interpretation and reception in 16th century Florence. At this century, the Vitruvian principles of order, which was starting to dominate the entire architectural theory, was contrary to this type of stonework. As a result, the rustication came to a crisis. In the Florentine court of the Medici dynasty, the theorists and artists like Vasari or Ammannati, tried to justify this tradition. They followed Serlio's theoretical solution which had proposed a marriage with the Tuscan order, based on their formal and functional affinity, and their ethnographic identity. In Florence, rustication was renamed "ordine rustico" or "toscano", and completely identified with the Tuscan order in the terminology. In practice, also, the new mode of unity between column and rustication was experimented. Through these attempts, rustication was legitimized, given a place of privilege, and became the "national order" of the Tuscany.

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Postminimalism, in the narrow sense, means the art by the generation next to minimalist artists, such as Eva Hesse and Richard Serra, who were representative artists at that time, and in the broad sense, it means "a series of art movements in the decade from 1965 to 1975, " which indicates the coinstantaneous developments of the time, including process art, earthworks, conceptual art, performance, and installations. Postminimalism, as well as minimalism, seems to correspond to the turning point from modernism to postmodernism, and therefore, seems to be one of the important clues, when we consider the argument about art and sites, such as current installations and public art. Arthur Danto, in his essay "Postminimalist Sculpture, " found the end of modern art in these works. The object made of daily and ephemeral materials, or the "dematerialized" work as an idea or a plan itself, for instance, as the object approaches zero, the environment or space where it stands is emphasized all the more, and in the end, art replaces the reality itself. However, I wonder if it is not until viewers participation in the empty space that postminimalist art takes shape, and we could find the potentialities of art in the setting and presentation of such devices.

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In this paper I make a study of B. Eno's Ambient Music by examining its conceptual and methodological relationship with experimental music. In particular, I approach Discreet Music (1975), which could be regarded as the incipient work of Ambient Music, through (1) a comparison of Eno's idea of hearing music as part of the ambience of the environment with E. Satie's "furniture music" ; Satie is "the only pre-experimental composer whose work is more than merely relevant..." (Nyman) ; (2) studying the relationship between the methodology of the Tape Delay System in Discreet Music and J. Cage's "rhythmic structure"-Cage belonging to the first generation of experimental music-and (3) the examination of the influence of S. Reich's early tape music It's Gonna Rain (1965) and of his methodological essay, Music as a Gradual Process (1968) ; Reich is typical of the composers of the post-Cage generation. Through the discussions in this paper, I would like to clarify what Ambient Music is, and show how I have arrived at the interpretation of it as "music as perceived sound".

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