Aesthetic Value

This is a 1000 word summary of my theory of aesthetic value. I claim that value should be understood as an activity rather than a property, that aesthetic values are objectified final values, that they are distal versions of practical values, and that each one involves balancing a tension. This is for an upcoming symposium at the JAAC in which 11 philosophers outline their positions on aesthetic value.

In this paper, I attempt to formulate an Ingardenian conception of the literary work’s aesthetic value. Following Mitscherling’s lead, I attempt to place Ingarden’s aesthetics within his overall phenomenological-ontological project. That is, I argue that Ingarden’s aesthetics can only be properly fathomed in the context of his ontological deliberations, since, as he himself often enunciated, all his philosophical investigations constitute a realist rejoinder to Husserl’s turn toward transcendental idealism. To this end, I bring together insights from his aesthetics and ontology (...) to establish a coherent account of values, where artistic and aesthetic values are analyzed as they manifest themselves in the literary work of art. By attending to the ontology of its aesthetic (and artistic) values, I argue, the literary work’s stratified formation becomes more explicit. Keywords: Roman Ingarden, aesthetic value, artistic value, the literary work of art, ontology, aesthetics. (shrink)

As aesthetic beings, we are receptive to and engaged with the sensuous phenomena of life while also knowing that we are targets of others’ awareness: we are both aesthetic agents and aesthetic objects. Our psychological health, our standing within our communities, and our overall wellbeing can be profoundly affected by our aesthetic surroundings and by whether and how we receive aesthetic recognition from others. Being aware of and responsive to how others aesthetically experience us shapes our sense of self and (...) our ability to function in a world with others who are also both agents and objects. When our embodied selves and our cultural products are valued, and when we have rich opportunities for aesthetic experience and for the exercise of aesthetic agency, the aesthetic can foster and sustain wellbeing and help to make our lives worthwhile. But when we are subjected to aesthetic blight, restriction of our aesthetic agency, and aesthetic devaluing of our embodied selves and our communities’ cultural products, the aesthetic can do great harm. This essay explores the notions of aesthetic objects and aesthetic agents, their relations with each other, and the unique affordances of persons’ status as simultaneously aesthetic objects and aesthetic agents. It examines the prospects for bodily aesthetic experience to promote wellbeing and, at the end, considers how the aesthetic might play a role in establishing forms of mutual vulnerability and recognition to combat oppressive social hierarchies. (shrink)

Our paradigms of aesthetic value condition the philosophical questions we pose and hope to answer about it. Theories of aesthetic value are typically individualistic, in the sense that the paradigms they are designed to capture, and the questions to which they are offered as answers, center the individual’s engagement with aesthetic value. Here I offer some considerations that suggest that such individualism is a mistake and sketch a communitarian way of posing and answering questions about the nature of aesthetic value.

Arthur Danto argued from the premise that artworks are essentially cognitive to the conclusion that they are incidentally aesthetic. I wonder why Danto, and the very many of us he persuaded, came to believe that the cognitive and the aesthetic oppose one another. I argue, contrary to Danto’s historical claims, that the cognitive and the aesthetic did not come into opposition until the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, and that they were brought into opposition for reasons of art-critical expediency (...) rather than philosophical necessity. I conclude that a robustly cognitive notion of the aesthetic remains an option for us. (shrink)

This article explores the compatibility of posing and authenticity in portraiture. Often understood as a source of inauthenticity, I propose that posing in fact functions as an artistic tool that can support a truthful portrayal. My argument first discusses authenticity in relation to portraiture through the lens of Bernard Williams’s idea of “truthfulness,” which relies on his notions of “accuracy” and “sincerity.” Second, I introduce a phenomenology of posing. I identify two aspects of posing that can be present in the (...) portrait; these are the “posing sitter,” who holds the actual physical pose, but also point out the use of a “posing effect” in the image, which I call the “posed sitter.” Third, I address the worry of posing as a source of inauthenticity and demonstrate how this can be reframed in order to lay bare its capacity for enhancing truthfulness. The pose then need not be regarded with suspicion of artifice that clouds the authenticity of the sitter; instead, it can offer an approach to truthfully portray the sitter. (shrink)

This reference essay surveys recent work in the emerging sub-discipline of everyday aesthetics, which builds on the work of John Dewey to resist sharp distinctions between art and non-art domains and argue that aesthetic concepts are properly applied to ordinary domains of experience.

This paper argues for several claims about the moral relevance of the aesthetic: that attention to aesthetic values may promote moral motivation; that aesthetic values should be regarded as constraining moral demands; and that the pursuit of aesthetic satisfactions may itself have positive moral value. These arguments suggest that moral thinking should be aesthetically informed to a much greater degree than has been typical. The aesthetic is a central dimension of a good life, and a life’s being good for the (...) person living it has considerable moral weight, both in itself and because of the positive consequences for others that stem from it. Moral thinking that neglects aesthetic considerations, then, is likely to result in theories that are deficient not only from an aesthetic but from a moral point of view. (shrink)

Discussions of aesthetic reasons and normativity are becoming increasingly popular. This piece outlines six basic questions about aesthetic reasons, normativity, and value and discusses the space of possible answers to these questions. I divide the terrain into two groups of three questions each. First are questions about the shape of aesthetic reasons: what they favour, how strong they are, and where they come from. Second are relational questions about how aesthetic reasons fit into the wider normative landscape: whether they are (...) distinctive, what their normative status is, and how they interact with each other and with non-aesthetic reasons. This piece aims to provide a taxonomy to clarify and organise the burgeoning literature and to make a few concrete suggestions for avenues of future research. (shrink)

Why is there a long-standing debate about paraphrase in poetry? Everyone agrees that paraphrase can be useful; everyone agrees that paraphrase is no substitute for the poem itself. What is there to disagree about? Perhaps this: whether paraphrase can specify everything that counts as a contribution to the meaning of a poem. There are, we say, two ways to take the question; on one way of taking it, the answer is that paraphrase cannot. Does this entail that there is meaning (...) mysteriously locked in a poem, meaning that cannot be represented in any way other than via the poem itself? If that were so it would have profound implications for poetry’s capacity to convey insight. We suggest reasons for thinking that the entailment does not hold. Throughout, we connect the traditional debate over paraphrase, which has largely been conducted within the fields of philosophy and literary theory, with recent empirically oriented thinking about the communicability of meaning, represented by work in pragmatics. We end with a suggestion about what is to count as belonging to meaning, and what as merely among the things that determine meaning. (shrink)

This paper seeks to refute the claim that architectural value is one and the same value as the artistic value of architecture. As few scholars explicitly endorse this claim, instead tacitly holding it, I term it the implicit claim. Three potential motivations for the implicit claim are offered before it is shown that, contrary to supporting the claim, they set the foundations for considering architectural value and the artistic value of architecture to be distinct. After refuting the potential motivations and (...) offering some counterexamples to the claim, I provide some comments upon the interaction(s) between aesthetic, artistic, and architectural values, which are benefitted and supported by Louise Hanson’s discussion of attributive value in the artistic domain. (shrink)

Engaging with the philosophical writings of Iris Murdoch, we submit that there are difficulties associated with providing a good description of morality that are intimately connected with difficulties in understanding other human beings. We suggest three senses in which moral philosophical reflection needs to account for our understanding of others: the failure to understand someone is not merely an intellectual failure, but also engages us morally; the moral question of understanding is not limited to the extent to which we understand (...) a particular person, but also presents itself in how we picture difficulties in understanding people; and “philosophical pictures of morality” fundamentally shape the conceptual framework we use to investigate morality, as well as the analysis of morality we find illuminative and satisfactory. Exploring the implications of these claims, we ask what it means to think of others as the same, or as different, from ourselves. We then consider the ethical significance of finding, or not finding, our feet in our encounters with others, dwelling on how the metaphor of movement reveals one way in which we are never at peace in the exploration of morality. (shrink)

This is my reply to commentators in the symposium on my book, GAMES: AGENCY AS ART. The symposium features commentary by Thomas Hurka, Quill Kukla, and Alva Noe, and originally appeared in Analysis 81 (2).

This article relates the ideas of Stanisław Brzozowski (1878-1911) with those of Bernard Stiegler (1952-2020), both of whom problematize the "work" of art understood as a labor practice. Through the conceptual analysis of epigenetics and epiphylogenetics for aesthetic theory, I claim that both thinkers develop practical concepts relevant to contemporary art philosophy. First, I present an overview of Brzozowski's aesthetics, for whom literature and the arts are linked with ethics, and aesthetic form is tied with moral judgment. Then, I continue (...) with an outline of Stiegler's, for whom the role of artists is to sculpt a new culture and historical epoch called the Neganthropocene. Finally, the notion of "work" as a type of memory practice is analyzed. The comparison shows that Stiegler develops epigenetics phenomenologically via memory ("tertiary retentions") and phylogenetics to epiphylogenetics. Both philosophers argue against determinism. This study suggests that their key ideas advance and complement each other. (shrink)

El filósofo checo Jan Mukarovsky (1891-1975) fue uno de los fundadores del Círculo de Praga. Fue el primero en intentar desarrollar una estética semiológica, cuya herramienta metodológica fundamental es el signo. Él está consciente de que el fenómeno estético no es igual ni reductible al lingüístico, por lo que procura una definición del signo mucho más amplia de la que es habitual en los medios lingüísticos. Por ese camino se topa con el tema de los valores estéticos. Su enfoque de (...) la estética, totalmente original en su momento, le permite adelantar fecundas ideas sobre los valores estéticos. (shrink)

I offer the first sustained defence of the claim that ugliness is constituted by the disposition to disgust. I advance three main lines of argument in support of this thesis. First, ugliness and disgustingness tend to lie in the same kinds of things and properties (the argument from ostensions). Second, the thesis is better placed than all existing accounts to accommodate the following facts: ugliness is narrowly and systematically distributed in a heterogenous set of things, ugliness is sometimes enjoyed, and (...) ugliness sits opposed to beauty across a neutral midpoint (the argument from proposed intensions). And third, ugliness and disgustingness function in the same way in both giving rise to representations of contamination (the argument from the law of contagion). In making these arguments, I show why prominent objections to the thesis do not succeed, cast light on some of the artistic functions of ugliness, and, in addition, demonstrate why a dispositional account of disgustingness is correct, and present a novel problem for warrant-based accounts of disgustingness (the ‘too many reasons’ problem). (shrink)

"C.E. Emmer’s article addresses the ongoing debates over how to classify and understand kitsch, from the inception of postmodern culture onwards. It is suggested that the lack of clear distinction between fine art and popular culture generates 'approaches to kitsch – what we might call 'deflationary' approaches – that conspire to create the impression that, ultimately, either 'kitsch' should be abandoned as a concept altogether, or we should simply abandon ourselves to enjoying kitschy objects as kitsch.' The author offers critical (...) insight into 'kitschy' items made in response to 9/11 and tries to examine the reception of these products through scrutinizing a selection of remarks posted by the Internet commentators." Editor Justyna Stępień's summary from her introduction to Redefining Kitsch and Camp in Literature and Culture (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), p. 2. The final pages of the chapter analyze the seemingly sweet landscape paintings of Thomas Kinkade to show the spirit of revenge their Christian coding can conceal. (shrink)

La identidad, el cuerpo y los imaginarios, en su vínculo con el arte y la cultura, son los conceptos básicos presentes en este libro. La asociación entre ellos no es nada casual. Responde a importantes necesidades epistemológicas y prácticas en la comprensión de lo que somos, de la medida en que el arte y la cultura nos constituyen y del modo en que lo corporal y lo imaginario se convierten en depositarios de los atributos que nos identifican. Esta sexta entrega (...) de La Fuente nace como iniciativa para el trabajo conjunto del Cuerpo Académico “Estética y Arte” de la BUAP y extiende su concepción y realización a otros cuerpos, asociados, junto al primero, en la Red de Investigaciones en Arte (RIA). Participan en el libro, de esta forma, investigadores de las universidades Autónoma de Puebla, Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, Autónoma de Querétaro y de Barcelona. Se compone de tres secciones, precedidas cada una de ellas por Mesas Redondas dedicadas, respectivamente, al vínculo entre identidad y universalidad, a la estética del cuerpo femenino y a los imaginarios como depositarios de las identidades promovidas por el arte. Las secciones se completan con trabajos en torno a los mismos temas, realizados por integrantes de diferentes cuerpos académicos de la RIA o que colaboran con ella. (shrink)

While the idea of art as self-expression can sound old-fashioned, it remains widespread—especially if the relevant ‘selves’ can be social collectives, not just individual artists. But self-expression can collapse into individualistic or anthropocentric self-involvement. And compelling successor ideals for artists are not obvious. In this light, I develop a counter-ideal of creative receptivity to basic features of the external world, or artistic objectivity. Objective artists are not trying to express themselves or reach collective self-knowledge. However, they are also not disinterested (...) or emotionless. They can be unmoved by personal feelings and human concerns, but they are still receptive—just attuned to the more elemental forces that creatively inspire them. I elaborate this ideal in dialogue with John Ruskin’s influential critique of the pathetic fallacy. By contextualizing Ruskin’s view vis-à-vis Romantic and Modernist poetics, post-Kantian aesthetics, modern environmental art, and contemporary theories of expressiveness, I show how it indirectly motivates my account. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to reassess the prospects of a widely neglected affective conception of the aesthetic evaluation and appreciation of art. On the proposed picture, the aesthetic evaluation and appreciation of art are non-contingently constituted by a particular kind of pleasure. Artworks that are valuable qua artworks merit, deserve, and call for a certain pleasure, the same pleasure that reveals (or at least purports to reveal) them to be valuable in the way that they are, and constitutes (...) their aesthetic evaluation and appreciation. This is why and how art is non-contingently related to pleasure. Call this, the Affective View. While I don’t advance conclusive arguments for the Affective View in this paper, I aim to reassess its prospects by (1) undermining central objections against it, (2) dissociating it from hedonism about the value of artworks (the view that this value is grounded in, and explained by, its possessors’ power to please), and (3) introducing some observations on the practice of art in support of it. Given that the objections I discuss miss their target, and given the observations in support of it, I conclude that the Affective View is worth serious reconsideration. (shrink)

Kantian disinterest is the view that aesthetic judgement is constituted (at least in part) by a form of perceptual contemplation that is divorced from concerns of practical action. That view, which continues to be defended to this day, is challenged here on the basis that it is unduly spectator-focussed, ignoring important facets of art-making and its motivations. Beauty moves us, not necessarily to tears or rapt contemplation, but to practical action; crucially, it may do so as part and parcel of (...) its appreciation. This claim is defended via reflection on (i) the art of photography, (ii) the concepts of ‘attentional salience’ and ‘experienced mandates’, and (iii) a virtue-based account of aesthetic value. (shrink)

El cine de Jim Jarmusch es reconocible por captar momentos de quietud en los que la acción y el drama son secundarios. Es por ello que su film Only Lovers Left Alive ha sido tan destacado por críticos y académicos. Esta película ha llevado a la pantalla la estética ruinosa de Detroit. Este artículo amplía esas recientes investigaciones, para postular que la Detroit de Jarmusch es una ciudad estéticamente inorgánica. Siguiendo a grandes rasgos los lineamientos de Wilhelm Worringer, se analiza (...) el estilo postindustrial de la arquitectura de Detroit y la figura del vampiro. Esto permite concluir que lo inorgánico —Detroit— tiene capacidades estéticas propias, las cuales son exaltadas por el particular estilo de Jarmusch. (shrink)

Se trata de un estudio aproximativo al tema de la naturaleza axiológica del arte y la relación dentro de él entre valores estéticos y otros valores.

El trabajo cuestiona críticamente cierta visión extrema y unilateral apreciable en Adorno y Horkheimer al juzgar la relación de la industria cultural con la música. Es cierto que hoy prácticamente toda actividad humana se encuentra condiciona¬da por el mercado y que la música no es una excepción. Ella también es portadora de valor de cambio que tiende a ser dominante en los marcos de la industrial cultural. Pero es plausible que dentro de las industrias culturales mismas se empezara a hacer (...) una distinción entre los bienes culturales producidos por razones meramente comerciales y aquellos producidos por razones más artísticas. Un público demandante de obras de valor artístico, aun cuando pueda ser minoritario y estar inmerso también él en el mercado, condiciona de cierta manera la propia producción cultural, o, al menos, un segmento de ella. Esta posibilidad real no era muy reconocida por los autores de la “La industria cultural”. Según su lógica, como nada puede sustraerse a la industria cultural y como ésta compulsa a la prevalencia del valor de cambio o comercial y a la casi supresión de cualquier otro valor, entonces el arte, el verdadero arte, terminaría por desaparecer, sucumbiendo ante una lógica no interesada en su conservación o crecimiento, sino sólo en la maximización de ganancias a toda costa. Los hechos han contradicho esta conclusión. La relación de la música con la industria cultural, igual que las monedas, tiene dos caras. No basta con reconocer sólo la parte negativa, la que busca alienar las obras con tal de convertirlas en sólo mercancías. Es imprescindible tomar en cuenta también la posibilidad más que comprobable de que piezas con excelente factura estética surjan también en los marcos de esta industria. El asunto radicaría en develar las condiciones que lo posibilitan. El mercado, si bien puede favorecer la generación de productos pseudoculturales de escaso o nulo valor artístico, también se constituye en la única vía, dentro de la sociedad de consumo, por medio de la cual lo genuinamente valioso se convierte en patrimonio común. (shrink)

Este libro inaugura la serie Homenaje de la Colección La Fuente. Con él se busca reconocer, de manera particular, al pensador, dramaturgo y director brasileño Augusto Boal (1931-2009), creador del teatro y la estética del oprimido, genuina aportación cultural latinoamericana que mucho tiene que ver con ese particular lugar de enunciación que es Nuestra América y sus siempre actuales expectativas emancipadoras. El libro fue precedido y nutrido por un Coloquio que en mayo de 2014 reunió a importantes especialistas y seguidores (...) del legado teórico-práctico de Boal y que tuvo como tema principal el del rescate y la continuación de su obra. Incluye los más importantes trabajos allí presentados, junto a un estudio biográfico, una contribución enviada por su hijo, una entrevista a su esposa y dos obras del propio Boal que (una parcialmente y la otra de manera completa) se publican por primera vez. (shrink)

El artículo busca acercarse a la comprensión de los rasgos particulares de los valores estéticos, fundamentalmente en las obras de arte. Para ello parte de la premisa de que el valor estético no es en sí mismo un atributo del objeto artístico, ni el resultado exclusivo de la plasmación en él de cierto ideal estético. Para que un objeto sea portador de valor estético ha de funcionar precisamente como tal, lo cual presupone la presencia y participación de otros sujetos que (...) así lo perciban y un contexto social que favorezca esa percepción. Asociar el valor estético a la función social del objeto, particularmente a su capacidad de enriquecer espiritualmente a su público receptor, permite comprenderlo dinámicamente y resolver muchas dificultades generadas por diferentes concepciones unilaterales del valor artístico. (shrink)

El texto sirve como capítulo introductorio y de presentación del libro Teatro y Estética del Oprimido. Homenaje a Augusto Boal. Se reflexiona y evalúa críticamente sobre los diferentes "usos" que se hacen del legado teórico-práctico de Augusto Boal, lo que se hace y lo que, ajuicio de los autores, se debe hacer con él. Se describe además las fuentes y el contenido capitular del libro en cuestión.

Classical authors were generally artistic realists. The predominant aesthetic theory was mimesis, which saw the truth of art as its successful representation of reality. High modernists rejected this aesthetic theory as lifeless, seeing the truth of art as its subjective expression. This impasse has serious consequences for both the Church and the public square. Moving forward requires both, first, an appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of the high modernist critique of classical mimetic theory, and, second, a theory of truth (...) which makes adequate reference to both subject and object. This paper argues that Lonergan offers just such an account of truth, and so cashes out the high modernist rejection of classical mimesis in Lonergan’s terms, thereby creating the opportunity for a synthesis of the two views. (shrink)

Proceeding on the basis of reports of a proposal in 2011 to criminalize public flatulence in Malawi, the normative significance of flatulence is considered from the respective standpoints of aesthetics, etiquette, and ethics, and it is indicated how aesthetics and etiquette may themselves also have ethical significance. It is concluded that etiquette and ethics may both require that certain violations of etiquette and ethics should sometimes be ignored.

Der Aufsatz ist in zwei Teile gegliedert. Im ersten Teil unterscheide ich das Phänomen der Empathie von ähnlichen Phänomenen. Im zweiten Teil werde ich auf die Bedingungen für Empathie eingehen. In diesem Teil geht es mir darum zu zeigen, dass wir es trotz einiger Unterschiede zwischen Empathie für Mitmenschen und Empathie für Figuren mit demselben Phänomen zu tun haben.

"Translation, as with any practice, is something to return to again and again. Opening this issue, curator and poet Srajana Kaikini’s multi-layered article, ‘The Return of the Translator’ underlines the relevance of translation as a critical process, available to anyone, in any field. Bringing in references to philosopher Sundar Sarukkai, poet Gangadhar Chittal, and Buddhist philosophical principles, she locates the place of translation. Kaikini looks closely at the ways “language and the world are in strange relation with each other,” to (...) borrow her words. Translation as a method, she main- tains, is a matter of intention, creation, and experience." from the Editorial, Marianna Maruyama. (shrink)

One important aspect of Nussbaum´s thesis on the moral value of literature concerns the power of literature to enhance our ability to empathise with other minds. This aspect will be the focus of the current article. My aim is to reflect upon this question regarding the moral value of our empathy for fictional characters. The article is structured in two main parts. I will first examine the concept of “empathy” and distinguish between empathy for human beings and empathy for fictional (...) characters. I will call the latter “literary empathy”. In the second part of the paper I will examine the arguments for and against the double thesis that reading literature enhances our ability to feel empathy, and that feeling empathy prompts altruistic behaviour. (shrink)

In diesem Aufsatz argumentiere ich für die These, dass alle Dokumentarfilme darauf abzielen, uns Erkenntnis über einen Aspekt der Realität zu vermitteln. Dieser These zufolge sind Dokumentarfilme – im Unterschied zu anderen Filmgattungen – der Wirklichkeit verpflichtet. Vor diesem Hintergrund sollen in diesem Aufsatz zwei Aspekte genauer untersucht werden: zum einen, wie der kognitive Wert von Dokumentarfilmen genauer zu verstehen ist, und zum anderen, inwiefern ausgehend von diesem epistemischen Aspekt Unterscheidungskriterien zwischen Dokumentarfilmen und anderen Filmgattungen entwickelt werden können. Der Aufsatz (...) gliedert sich in zwei Teile. Im ersten Teil werde ich die Frage untersuchen, inwiefern Dokumentarfilme „Dokumente“ der Realität sind. Dabei werde ich verschiedene Interpretationen des epistemischen Ziels von Dokumentarfilmen besprechen und auch die „Vergegenwärtigungsansicht“ als Ergänzung zu der „assertorischen Ansicht“ (Plantinga, Carroll und Currie) und zu der „Verstehensansicht“ (Dromm) anbieten. Im zweiten Teil sollen die Ähnlichkeiten und Unterschiede zwischen Dokumentarfilmen und Spielfilmen besprochen werden, um genauere Unterscheidungskriterien zu entwickeln. Ich werde hierfür den phänomenologischen Begriff der Imagination (Sartre, Meunier) einführen und seine Produktivität für die Debatte über den kognitiven Wert von Dokumentarfilmen aufzeigen. (shrink)

The notion of beauty has endured a troublesome history over the last few decades. While for centuries beauty has been considered one of the central values of art, there have also been times when it seemed old-fashioned to even mention the term. The present volume aims to explore the nature of beauty and to shed light its place in contemporary philosphy and art practice.

Abstract: For most people, mobile phones and various forms of personal information technology (PIT) have become standard equipment for everyday life. Recent theorists such as Sherry Turkle raise psychological and philosophical questions about the impact of such technologies and practices, but deeper further philosophical work is needed. This paper takes a pragmatic approach to examining the effects of PIT practices upon experience. After reviewing several main issues with technology raised by Communication theorists, the paper looks more deeply at Turkle’s analysis (...) of technology's impacts upon solitude and conversation. Because Turkle only raises but doesn’t pursue the philosophical dimensions of these issues, the work on experience of John Dewey, William James, and John J. McDermott is utilized to provide concepts and methods by which PIT’s effects might be judged. Finally, pragmatist aesthetics is introduced and consulted as a source of constructive ideals which might guide future amelioration of PIT’s more significant drawbacks. (shrink)

Abstract: According to Marcuse, esthetics is an essential component to the process of freedom of consciousness and behavior of individuals. It is, in Hegelian language, to free the absolute spirit. In this sense, art configures itself as fantasy, which makes the “apparent” reveal the essence of things. Essence here is understood not as a metaphysical field, but as an unveiling of questions, within a false truth of the (establishment), in the totality of relationships. In dialectical terms, art manifests itself in (...) the face of internal and external contradictions, seeking the opposition to the representation of the aesthetic form. Marcuse refutes the conceptions of some “orthodox Marxist aesthetes”, making, therefore, the defense in relation to the art when recognizing that it transcends the material relations. He still considers the literary currents of romanticism and surrealism fundamental to awaken critical consciousness, and that the autonomy of art (independence, freedom, and fantasy), integrate the categorical imperative that “things must change” against the realism of the Marxist aesthetes. In this sense, we intend to expose Marcuse’s critical to the Marxist esthetes in order to understand the critical function of art for the liberation struggle. Keywords: Aesthetics. Orthodoxy. Critic. (shrink)

Despite playing an important role in epistemology, philosophy of science, and more recently in moral philosophy and aesthetics, the nature of understanding is still much contested. One attractive framework attempts to reduce understanding to other familiar epistemic states. This paper explores and develops a methodology for testing such reductionist theories before offering a counterexample to a recently defended variant on which understanding reduces to what an agent knows.

I offer a theory of art that is based on science. I maintain that, as any other human activity, art can be studied with the tools of science. This does not mean that art is scientific, but aesthetics, the theory of art, can be formulated in accord with our scientific knowledge. I present elucidations of the concepts of aesthetic experience, art, work of art, artistic movement, and I discuss the ontological status of artworks from the point of view of scientific (...) philosophy. (shrink)

Recensione del testo di Giorgio Agamben, "Gusto".

Games occupy a unique and valuable place in our lives. Game designers do not simply create worlds; they design temporary selves. Game designers set what our motivations are in the game and what our abilities will be. Thus: games are the art form of agency. By working in the artistic medium of agency, games can offer a distinctive aesthetic value. They support aesthetic experiences of deciding and doing. -/- And the fact that we play games shows something remarkable about us. (...) Our agency is more fluid than we might have thought. In playing a game, we take on temporary ends; we submerge ourselves temporarily in an alternate agency. Games turn out to be a vessel for communicating different modes of agency, for writing them down and storing them. Games create an archive of agencies. And playing games is how we familiarize ourselves with different modes of agency, which helps us develop our capacity to fluidly change our own style of agency. (shrink)

This paper asks what should be the basis of a global environmental ethics. As Gao Shan has argued, the environmental ethics of Western philosophers such as Holmes Rolston and Paul Taylor is based on extending the notion of intrinsic value to that of objects of nature, and as such it is not very compatible with Chinese ethics. This is related to Gao’s rejection of most—if not all—Western “rationalist” environmental ethics, a stance that I grant her for pragmatic reasons (though I (...) remain neutral about it theoretically). Gao argues that the Daoist notion of living in harmony with nature can instead become the basis of a Chinese environmental ethics. However, the involved Daoist conception of living in harmony with nature is, in my view, based on an aesthetic property. The paper argues that despite the appeal of the Daoist view for a Chinese environmental ethics, an aesthetic property cannot provide the basis for a global environmental ethics. The paper also considers another version of Daoist environmental ethics, which does not rely on an aesthetic notion, but I argue that it too fails as such a candidate. As an alternative, the paper considers and applies contemporary Western thinkers on gratitude (such as Robert Emmons and Elizabeth Loder), proposing that gratitude to nature (environmental gratitude) can indeed provide the needed basis. (shrink)

In the past decade, experimental philosophy---the attempt at making progress on philosophical problems using empirical methods---has thrived in a wide range of domains. However, only in recent years has aesthetics succeeded in drawing the attention of experimental philosophers. The present paper constitutes the first survey of these works and of the nascent field of 'experimental philosophy of aesthetics'. We present both recent experimental works by philosophers on topics such as the ontology of aesthetics, aesthetic epistemology, aesthetic concepts, and imagination, as (...) well as research from other disciplines that not only are relevant to philosophy of aesthetics but also open new avenues of research for experimental philosophy of aesthetics. Overall, we conclude that the birth of an experimental philosophy of aesthetics is good news not only for aesthetics but also for experimental philosophy itself, as it contributes to broaden the scope of experimental philosophy. (shrink)

Among semanticists and philosophers of language, there has been a recent outburst of interest in predicates such as delicious, called predicates of personal taste (PPTs, e.g. Lasersohn 2005). Somewhat surprisingly, the question of whether or how we can distinguish aesthetic predicates from PPTs has hardly been addressed at all in this recent work. It is precisely this question that we address. We investigate linguistic criteria that we argue can be used to delineate the class of specifically aesthetic adjectives. We show (...) that there are, in fact, good motivations for keeping PPTs and aesthetic predicates apart: the semantic structure of the former, but not the latter, entails an experiencer. There are many adjectives whose semantic structure arguably also entails an experiencer, yet which are readily used in expressing aesthetic judgments. Adjectives such as provocative or moving are a case in point, since as adjectives they arguably maintain the experiencer argument from the verb they are derived from. Nevertheless, when we describe, say, a sculpture as provocative, or a theater performance as moving, we clearly make aesthetic judgments. The difficult question, then, is to articulate the relationship between an aesthetic predicate (of which beautiful and ugly are paradigms) and other predicates that just happen to be used in making an aesthetic judgment. Tightly related to this point is the more general question of the relationship between an evaluative predicate and a predicate that occurs in an evaluative judgment. One of our aims is to make some progress in addressing these questions. (shrink)

Recent attention to the relationship between aesthetic value and cognitive value has focused on whether the latter can affect the former. In this article, I approach the issue from the opposite direction. I investigate whether the aesthetic value of a work can influence its cognitive value. More narrowly, I consider whether a work's aesthetic value ever contributes to or detracts from its philosophical value, which I take to include the truth of its claims, the strength of its arguments, and its (...) internal consistency. I argue that aesthetic value does have such an impact, at least sometimes and to some degree. The aesthetic merits of some works help to preserve their consistency, and the aesthetic defects of other works render them self-contradictory. (shrink)

Some have argued that the possibility of faultless disagreement gives relativist semantic theories an important explanatory advantage over their absolutist and contextualist rivals. Here I combat this argument, focusing on the specific case of aesthetic discourse. My argument has two stages. First, I argue that while relativists may be able to account for the possibility of faultless aesthetic disagreement, they nevertheless face difficulty in accounting for the intuitive limits of faultless disagreement. Second, I develop a new non-relativist theory which can (...) account for the full range of data regarding faultless disagreement. This view—‘Humean Absolutism’—integrates two of Hume’s central principles from Of the Standard of Taste into a truth-conditional framework, resulting in a non-bivalent theory of aesthetic truth. I argue that Humean Absolutism can underwrite the possibility of faultless disagreement whilst retaining reasonable limits around the phenomenon. I close by relating this positive account of faultless disagreement to broader issues concerning the cognitive role of truth-value gaps. -/- *NB - this is an unpublished paper and is no longer in progress.*. (shrink)

This paper comments on an article by V.S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein (JCS,1999) in which they purport to be identifying the neurological principles of beauty. I draw attention to the way the problem of beauty is construed in the philosophical literature by Mary Mothersill (1984) and Immanuel Kant (Critique of Judgment). I argue that Ramachandran and Hirsteins' principles do not address the problem of beauty because they do not differentiate between the experience of beauty and other closely related phenomena. I (...) then show how one might address the problem of beauty within the framework that they have adopted. (shrink)

What is the source of aesthetic knowledge? Empirical knowledge, it is generally held, bottoms out in perception. Such knowledge can be transmitted to others through testimony, preserved by memory, and amplified via inference. But perception is where the rubber hits the road. What about aesthetic knowledge? Does it too bottom out in perception? Most say “yes”. But this is wrong. When it comes to aesthetic knowledge, it is appreciation, not perception, where the rubber hits the road. The ultimate source of (...) aesthetic knowledge is feeling. In this essay, we articulate and defend the very idea of affective knowledge and reveal aesthetic knowledge to be a species of the genus. We then show how the view resolves a thorny problem that has bedeviled aesthetic epistemologists: how to reconcile the seemingly direct character of aesthetic knowledge with the possibility of acquiring such knowledge from criticism. One learns from criticism, we argue, when it guides one’s engagement with an object so that one can appreciate it in virtue of those of its features that render it worthy of appreciation. (shrink)

The primary aim of this chapter is to outline the consensuses that have emerged in recent philosophical works tackling normative questions about responding to immoral artist’s art. While disagreement amongst philosophers is unavoidable, there is actually much agreement on the ethics of media consumption. How should we evaluate immoral artist’s art? Philosophers generally agree that we should not always separate the artist from the art. How should we engage with immoral artist’s art? Philosophers generally agree that we should not always (...) reflexively turn away from them. In turn, these responses reveal that moral value is not autonomous from aesthetic value, and neither dominates the other. The secondary aim of this chapter is to explore the ramifications of this revelation. I argue that, in addition to an ethics of media consumption, we need an aesthetics of media consumption that is fundamentally social rather than solitary. (shrink)

This chapter offers an overview of issues posed by the problem of immoral artists, artists who in word or deed violate commonly held moral principles. I briefly consider the question of whether the immorality of an artist can render their work aesthetically worse (making connections to chapters in the Theory section of the handbook), and then turn to questions about what the audience should do and feel in response to knowledge of these moral failings. I discuss questions such as whether (...) audiences have reason not to purchase or consume work by these artists, whether their shows and exhibitions should be canceled, and how fans might grapple with the emotional turmoil they feel when artists whom they love act or speak in ways that are morally condemnable. (shrink)