Aesthetics, Misc

Centers have been out of intellectual and political fashion, because they have been often oppressive. We both celebrate and worry about postmodern fragmentation as we enact it in our technology, while fearing hidden centralization. But centering is important. I would like to mull over some issues concerning centers and criticism.

ABSTRACT. Consider this scenario: you discover that an artwork you greatly admire, or a captivating novel that deeply moved you, is in fact the product of artificial intelligence, not a human’s work. Would your aesthetic judgment shift? Would you perceive the work differently? If so, why? The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) in the realm of art has sparked numerous philosophical questions related to the authorship and artistic intent behind AI-generated works. This paper explores the debate between viewing AI as (...) a tool employed by human artists and perceiving AI as a new form of artistic expression with minimal human involvement. While we often seek a human mind behind certain artwork, we may still appreciate and engage with works that lack this element but have aesthetic value nonetheless. The paper also considers the traditional concept of “implied author”, suggesting that readers or artwork viewers might construct an authorial presence from the work itself, regardless of its actual origin. It will be finally suggested how AI-generated art might change our perceptions of human authorship itself. (shrink)

Chapter 1 of the ongoing online publication "Artificial Aesthetics: A Critical Guide to AI, Media and Design", Lev Manovich and Emanuele Arielli -/- Book information: Assume you're a designer, an architect, a photographer, a videographer, a curator, an art historian, a musician, a writer, an artist, or any other creative professional or student. Perhaps you're a digital content creator who works across multiple platforms. Alternatively, you could be an art historian, curator, or museum professional. -/- You may be wondering how (...) AI will affect your professional area in general and your work and career. Our book offers intellectual tools to help us better see the future of creative fields. These tools come from philosophy of art, experimental psychology, media theory, digital culture studies and data science. The book is the first to combine these different perspectives together. -/- We started the work on the book in summer 2019, exchanging numerous messages, commenting on each other ideas, and sharing drafts of sections. The final book is a result of this process. Although each chapter is written by one author, it reflects the discussions we had over 27 months. (shrink)

Chapter 3 of the ongoing publication "Artificial Aesthetics" Book information: Assume you're a designer, an architect, a photographer, a videographer, a curator, an art historian, a musician, a writer, an artist, or any other creative professional or student. Perhaps you're a digital content creator who works across multiple platforms. Alternatively, you could be an art historian, curator, or museum professional. -/- You may be wondering how AI will affect your professional area in general and your work and career. Our book (...) offers intellectual tools to help us better see the future of creative fields. These tools come from philosophy of art, experimental psychology, media theory, digital culture studies and data science. The book is the first to combine these different perspectives together. -/- We started the work on the book in summer 2019, exchanging numerous messages, commenting on each other ideas, and sharing drafts of sections. The final book is a result of this process. Although each chapter is written by one author, it reflects the discussions we had over 27 months. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s politics is aesthetic rather than practical, motivated by enjoyment rather than well-being, and so it should be rejected. I begin with an account of aestheticism as the doctrine according to which seemingly non-aesthetic things are actually aesthetic, parts of a whole dimension of reality that we might simply call “the aesthetic.” We access it by taking a disinterested attitude, one that affirms things for their own sakes, and there are four ways of doing this: disinterested appreciating (e.g., of (...) beautiful art), fun playing, fantasizing, and putting on shows or spectacles. While Arendt’s politics takes a classical republican form that is like a competitive game, an analysis of her conceptions of acting and judging reveals that the modes of disinterested showing and appreciating are also present. Her philosophy has another motivation, however, alongside enjoying the aesthetic: the need to escape the reality of evil. (shrink)

In his lecture “Philosophy and the Unheard,” Cavell invites us to observe a pervasive analogy between Schoenberg’s idea of the twelve-tone row and Wittgenstein’s idea of grammar, which is supposed to encapsulate an expansive, sweeping philosophical program—Cavell’s own. For Cavell, the analogy evinces not only the kind of reading of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigation, which is attuned to Wittgenstein’s seemingly paradoxical amalgamation of embrace and resistance in regarding to the conditions of modernity, but also a kind of philosophy of music, which (...) is illuminated by musical procedure. In this essay I probe into Cavell’s analogy, which, I contend, rests on Cavell’s interpretation (contra Von Wright) of Spengler’s influence on Wittgenstein. I argue that Cavell delineated the analogy in a way which does not consider a deeply felt gradation in Wittgenstein’s philosophical attitude toward modern music. This ultimately renders Schoenberg’s composition with twelve-tone incommensurate with Wittgenstein’s Spenglerian scheme of musical decline. I also argue that “Schoenbergian unheard” is not analogous to its purported Wittgensteinian counterpart. While the former inheres in comprehensibility—namely, correct, conscious application of the kind of contrived rules that would ensure coherence—the latter inheres in transparency, namely, a familiar physiognomy, which is internally related to the preconditions as well as the lived, embodied realities of musical intelligibility. From Wittgenstein’s perspective, the Schoenbergian idea of the row with its unforeseen yet pervasive consequences turns out to be tantamount to an idea of grammar for music for the meaning-blind. I conclude that in this “tale of two unheards,” Cavell invariably remains on the side of Wittgenstein. Philosophy, as it mattered most to him, has no business with music for the meaning-blind. (shrink)

A "good" arguer is like an architect with a penchant for civil and civic engineering. Such an arguer can design and present their reasons artfully about a variety of topics, as good architects do with a plenitude of structures and in various environments. Failures in this are rarely hidden for long, as poor constructions reveal themselves, often spectacularly, so collaboration among civical engineers can be seen as a virtue. Our logical virtues should be analogous. When our arguments fail due to (...) being uncivil and demagogic, since we inhabit the arguments we build, we are all crushed beneath our flawed reasoning. This mixed metaphor takes us to a self-referential analysis of argumentation, analogy, and humor. I argue that good argumentation strives to collaboratively convince rather than belligerently persuade. A convincing means toward this end is through humorous analogical arguments, whether the matter at hand is ethical, logical, theological, phenomenological, epistemological, metaphysical, political, or about baseball. (shrink)

Keepsakes are nostalgic objects par excellence. We value keepsakes because they prompt nostalgic memories of the past. But perhaps more importantly, we also value them because they afford a feeling of contact with that which they remind us of. Drawing on work in philosophy and psychology, this chapter aims to give an account of the nature and value of keepsakes as nostalgic objects. Keepsakes, it argues, are objects that bear a material continuity with some person, event, or place from one’s (...) past to which one has a personal attachment. To understand the distinctive experiential value of keepsakes as nostalgic objects, however, the chapter argues that we need to invoke the imagination. Keepsakes manifest the presence of the past by prompting one to imaginatively project what a keepsake is historically connected with onto the object as one experiences it in the present. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s experiments on rhythm (1912-13) were based on Charles Myers’s 1911 written protocols for laboratory exercises. The experiments provided an early onset for Wittgenstein’s career-long exploration of the philosophically pervasive implications of aspects. Years before the Tractatus, Wittgenstein already got a glimpse of a philosophical angle, which was bound to become very important to him not only in aesthetics, but also for his overarching philosophical development. He became interested in the possibilities of aesthetic conversation, in what we actually do when (...) we re-phrase, compare, come up with good similes in order to illuminate something definite within the space of possibility. These initial insights were bound to recede into the background for a while by the mounting demands of the Tractatus framework, only to fully bloom in Wittgenstein’s later work. (shrink)

While Wittgenstein harked back to Romantic sentiments concerning the ineffable connection between musical depth and knowledge of human inner life, he nonetheless responded to them critically, while at the same time interweaving them into his forward thinking about the philosophic entanglements of language and the mind. In this paper I offer a thorough reading of Wittgenstein’s reorientation of metaphors of musical depth in a way that is conducive to a conception of knowledge of human beings which pushes beyond the inner/outer (...) dichotomy. (shrink)

Wittgenstein composed five original musical fragments during his transitional middle period, in which he employs musical notation as a means by which to convey his philosophical thoughts. This is an overlooked aspect of the importance of aesthetics, and musical thinking in particular, in the development of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. We explain and evaluate the way the music interlinks with Wittgenstein’s philosophical thoughts. We show the direct relation of these musical examples as precursors to some of Wittgenstein’s most celebrated ideas (the push (...) beyond the inner/outer picture, the problem of rule-following, and aspect perception). We also show how important broad aesthetic notions such as style and composition concerning the very possibility of philosophizing were to Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Since the beginning of the 21st century, technologies like neural networks, deep learning and “artificial intelligence” (AI) have gradually entered the artistic realm. We witness the development of systems that aim to assess, evaluate and appreciate artifacts according to artistic and aesthetic criteria or by observing people’s preferences. In addition to that, AI is now used to generate new synthetic artifacts. When a machine paints a Rembrandt, composes a Bach sonata, or completes a Beethoven symphony, we say that this is (...) neither original nor real art, but simply the complex imitation and reproduction of existing products of human culture. We face the old question concerning the nature of creativity: what kind of recombination of ideas, unusual analogies, and conceptual connections are considered the mark of originality? Can AI produce artworks? Could machines reach a point at which we consider them genuinely creative? We also need to investigate the challenges posed by AI-art to the notion of authoriality: Who is the author of an artificially generated artifact? An artificial system could be considered just an artist’s and a programmer’s tool. However, we are also fascinated by the idea of autonomous artificial creativity in the aesthetic domain, as a manifestation of highly intelligent behavior. This paper will try to define some key questions around what could it mean to consider a machine creative or even equipped with artistic intentionality. (shrink)

How to be being to be being/ next to the united and firm/ and trembling/ mouth of the poem?”, “How to say what is clearer than clarity [...]?” or “How to unite a light design and an obscure gesture?” These questions, as well as many others that emerge from the poetic and essay writing of António Ramos Rosa (1924-2013), represent different modulations of the same angular question: that of the relation between poem and reality, or, more radically, between poem and (...) being. And if such a question spreads into so many formulations it is because, in António Ramos Rosa, its scope is total, simultaneously aesthetic and ontological, metaphysical and spiritual. It is, therefore, this question that we will try to answer by looking into one of its possible faces: how can poetic creation be at the same time the most intimate gesture and the one that touches most deeply the undomesticated matter of the real, that absolute and unapprehensible Other? (shrink)

Karl Pfeifer argues against the view that an aesthetic experience must be a uniquely special kind of experience by means of an analogy with sexual experiences. Nonetheless, he leaves open the possibility that some aesthetic experiences might still be of a special kind.

A review of James Young's "Radically Rethinking Copyright in the Arts: A Philosophical Approach" (Routledge 2020).

The notion of coolness is connected with a broad range of different meanings that involve personal attitude, taste, fashion choices but also the recognition of uniqueness and authenticity by others. Moreover, coolness is related to self-confidence and imperturbability, as the usual historical reconstructions of its meaning show. In fact, the manifestation of subjective invulnerability is the expression of the general need to avoid any weakness that could challenge one’s own autonomy through other people’s gaze. In other words, the opposite of (...) cool is to be excessively self-conscious, too dependent on the approval of others, and to be exposed and vulnerable to external judgment. Taking cues from these different meanings, this contribution will try to argue how the need for individual autonomy, social recognition and aesthetic fulfilment are closely intertwined in the practices of coolness, defined as acts of “self-construction” and, in particular, as aesthetic self-fashioning. From this perspective, it will be argued that even the most frivolous search for coolness as a stylistic attitude in everyday’s aesthetic domain like fashion, consumption and lifestyle, plays a role in the dynamics of self-assertion and becomes an instrument for recognition and autonomy. (shrink)

This paper responds to recent developments in the field of sensory augmentation by analysing several technological devices that augment the sensory apparatus using the tactile sense. First, I will define the term sensory augmentation, as the use of technological modification to enhance the sensory apparatus, and elaborate on the preconditions for successful tactile sensory augmentation. These are the adaptability of the brain to unfamiliar sensory input and the specific qualities of the skin lending themselves to be used for the perception (...) of additional sensory information. Two devices, Moon Ribas’ Seismic Sense and David Eagleman’s vest, will then be discussed as potential facilitators of aesthetic experiences in virtue of the tactile sensory augmentation that these devices allow. I will connect the experiences afforded by these devices to the Kantian categories of the mathematical and the dynamical sublime, and to existing accounts of tactile sublimity. Essentially, the objects these devices make sensible, earthquakes for the Seismic Sense and digital information for the vest, produce pleasurable feelings of potential danger, awe, and respect. The subsequent acclimation to this new way of sensing and the aim to comprehend its sensed object are then discussed as possible objections to the interpretation of these experiences as sublime, and as aesthetic in general. To exemplify these issues and concretise my thesis of tactile sensory augmentation as a trigger of the sublime, I will outline an experiment to use the vest as an aid for faster decision making on the stock market. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide a cross-cultural comparison between the life and work of the English land- and seascape painter, J.M.W. Turner, and the conception of aesthetic experience and artisanship f...

This paper explores what happens when artists fail to execute their goals. I argue that taxonomies of failure in general, and of failed-art in particular, should focus on the attempts which generate the failed-entity, and that to do this they must be sensitive to an attempt’s orientation. This account of failed-attempts delivers three important new insights into artistic practice: there can be no accidental art, only deliberate and incidental art; art’s intention-dependence entails the possibility of performative failure, but not of (...) failed-art; and art’s intention-dependence is perfectly compatible with the role that luck plays in artistic creation. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on the topic of reproducibility (and irreproducibility) of aesthetic experience and effects, distinguishing it from the traditional subject of artifact reproducibility. The main aim is to outline a typology of the various kind of irreproducibility of aesthetic experience and to draw some implications for the aesthetic discussion concerning contemporary art. Depending on the type of artwork, we can define the difference (or the “ratio”) between aesthetic experience in the presence of the artwork and aesthetic experience (...) in its absence, that is, in the presence of its reproductions or documentations. For instance, in an easily reproducible painting the difference between experiencing the real artwork or its reproduction could be considered relatively small, while the difference between real experience and reproduction would be high in a complex roomfilling installation. This ratio could depend on ontological, material, or practical reasons and could also depend on the technological means of reproduction and documentation. In conclusion, following Groys (2017), I will suggest that the application of different "strategies of irreproducibility” testifies the urge to escape the replicability of aesthetic experience and the desire to generate forms of uniqueness and exclusivity in the fruition of art, and could therefore be seen as one of the reasons why art today is strongly based on documentations, installations or performative events. You really need to make the real effort to queue up and attend them, no substitute would be otherwise possible. (shrink)

The “film as philosophy” (FAP) hypothesis turned into a field if its own right during the 2000s, after S. Mulhall’s On Film (2001). In this work, Mulhall defended that some films philosophize for themselves. This caused controversy. Around the same time of On Film’s release, B. Russell published the article “The philosophical limits of film” (2000). This article had one of the first attacks against FAP, posing some main objections based on metaphilosophical grounds, which were called the “generality” and the (...) “explicitness” objections. These objections made by Russell and by M. Smith are based on the idea that film and philosophy are too different in their purposes or ways of presentation, ideas that are grounded in implicit or explicit conceptions of philosophy. In this chapter, these will be analyzed, as well as some other metaphilosophically grounded objections, as a line of reasoning connecting to attempts of responding to them will be drawn. After doing so, it will be concluded that their metaphilosophical grounds are implausible, and, thus, they are not definite objections against FAP. (shrink)

Peter Kivy claims that expressivists in aesthetics cannot explain why we argue about art. The situation would be different in the case of morals. Moral attitudes lead to action, and since actions affect people, we have a strong incentive to change people’s moral attitudes. This can explain why we argue about morals, even if moral language is expressive of our feelings. However, judgements about what is beautiful and elegant need not significantly affect our lives. So why be concerned with other (...) people’s feelings about art? Kivy thinks the best explanation of our tendency to argue about art is that we implicitly believe in objective facts about aesthetics. This would count against expressivism. I argue two things: that there is no good reason to think that we don’t care about preferences and emotions unless they have significant practical consequences and that the truth of expressivism about aesthetic language is compatible with beliefs about objective aesthetic facts. (shrink)

The present essay argues that Bergson’s account of the comic can only be fully appreciated when read in conjunction with his later metaphysical exposition of the élan vital in Creative Evolution and then by the account of fabulation that Bergson only elaborates fully three decades later in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. The more substantive account of the élan vital ultimately shows that, in Laughter, Bergson misses his own point: laughter does not simply serve as a means for (...) correcting human behavior but is rather the élan vital’s vital summons, the demand of life itself, that human beings challenge their obligations, question their societal forms, and thereby create new and, for Bergson, more ideal forms of life and community. (shrink)

The main claim of the paper is that, on Kant's account, aesthetic pleasure is an exercise of rational agency insofar as, when proper, it has the following two features: (1) It is an affective responsiveness to the question: “what is to be felt disinterestedly”? As such, it involves consciousness of its ground (the reasons for having it) and thus of itself as properly responsive to its object. (2) Its actuality depends on endorsement: actually feeling it involves its endorsement as an (...) attitude to have. I claim that seeing that nature of aesthetic pleasure requires that we divest ourselves of the following dilemma: either feelings are the non-cognitive, passive ways through which we are affected by objects; or they are cognitive states by virtue of the theoretical beliefs they necessarily involve. On my reading of Kant, this dilemma is false. Aesthetic pleasure is neither passive, nor theoretically cognitive, and yet, it is an exercise of rational agency by virtue of belonging to a domain of rationality that is largely overlooked in the history of philosophy, but that deserves, I argue following Kant, our close attention: aesthetic rationality. In the first section, I explain this nature of aesthetic pleasure, and in the second section, I respond to a charge of “over-intellectualism.". (shrink)

In this paper we explain Wittgenstein’s claim in a 1933 lecture that “aesthetics like psychoanalysis doesn’t explain anything away.” The discussions of aesthetics are distinctive: Wittgenstein gives a positive account of the relationship between aesthetics and psychoanalysis, as contrasted with psychology. And we follow not only his distinction between cause and reason, but also between hypothesis and representation, along with his use of the notion of ideals as facilitators of aesthetic discourse. We conclude that aesthetics, like psychoanalysis, preserves the verifying (...) phenomena in their fullness. (shrink)

Mobile phones are reportedly the most rapidly expanding e-reading device worldwide. However, the embodied, cognitive and affective implications of smartphone-supported fiction reading for leisure (m-reading) have yet to be investigated empirically. Revisiting the theoretical work of digitization scholar Anne Mangen, we argue that the digital reading experience is not only contingent on patterns of embodied reader–device interaction (Mangen, 2008 and later) but also embedded in the immediate environment and broader situational context. We call this the situation constraint. Its application to (...) Mangen’s general framework enables us to identify four novel research areas, wherein m-reading should be investigated with regard to its unique affordances. The areas are reader–device affectivity, situated embodiment, attention training and long-term immersion. (shrink)

Are aesthetic judgements cognitive, belief-like states or non-cognitive, desire-like states? There have been a number of attempts in recent years to evaluate the plausibility of a non-cognitivist theory of aesthetic judgements. These attempts borrow heavily from non-cognitivism in metaethics. One argument that is used to support metaethical non-cognitivism is the argument from Motivational Judgement Internalism. It is claimed that accepting this view, together with a plausible theory of motivation, pushes us towards accepting non-cognitivism. A tempting option, then, for those wishing (...) to defend aesthetic non-cognitivism, would be to appeal to a similar argument. However, both Caj Strandberg and Walter Sinnott-Armstong have argued that Internalism is a less plausible claim to make about aesthetic judgements than about moral judgements by raising objections against aesthetic internalism. In this paper, I will argue that both of these objections can be raised against internalism about moral judgements as well. As a result, internalism is no less plausible a claim to make about aesthetic judgements than about moral judgements. I will then show how a theory of internalism about normative judgements in general is capable of avoiding both of these objections. (shrink)

Some philosophers writing on the possibility of faultless disagreement have argued that the only way to account for the intuition that there could be disagreements which are faultless in every sense is to accept a relativistic semantics. In this article we demonstrate that this view is mistaken by constructing an absolutist semantics for a particular domain – aesthetic discourse – which allows for the possibility of genuinely faultless disagreements. We argue that this position is an improvement over previous absolutist responses (...) to the relativist's challenge and that it presents an independently plausible account of the semantics of aesthetic discourse. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s later remarks on music, those written after his return to Cambridge in 1929 in increasing intensity, frequency, and elaboration, occupy a unique place in the annals of the philosophy of music, which is rarely acknowledged or discussed in the scholarly literature. These remarks reflect and emulate the spirit and subject matter of Romantic thinking about music, but also respond to it critically, while at the same time they interweave into Wittgenstein’s forward thinking about the philosophic entanglements of language and (...) the mind, and also his pervasive pessimism as a philosopher of culture. In this essay I explore and explicate some of the major tenets of this unique position. I argue that Wittgenstein appropriates the Romantic focus on the specificity of musical expression by means of the idea that gesture consists in complex vertical interrelations between language games. Understanding what a musical passage is about logically presupposes a myriad of correlate moves in the entire range of our language-games. Wittgenstein explicates the notion of musical aboutness in terms of intransitive understanding, which expresses an internal relation conjoining musical gesture and our culture, our entire life in practice, whereupon the related concepts cannot be identified independently of the relation which holds them together. Wittgenstein responds to the Romantic focus on the unique knowledge of human life which is afforded by musical experience with his idiosyncratic later notion of Menschenkenntnis. I conclude that, in the context of Wittgenstein’s late work, ineffability pertaining to musical meaning is not a shortcoming, but rather constitutional of the type of games, which admit what Wittgenstein calls ‘imponderable evidence’, or indefiniteness. (shrink)

In this paper I borrow from Maria Lugones’ work on playful “world-traveling” and W.E.B. Du Bois’ notion of “double consciousness” to make the case that humor can facilitate an openness and cooperative attitude among an otherwise closed, even adversarial audience. I focus on what I call “subversive” humor, that which is employed by or on behalf of those who have been continually marginalized. When effectively used, such humor can foster the inclination and even desire to listen to others and, if (...) only for brief moments, adopt their point of view. To be able to see oneself as others see you can also be a desirable capacity, because along with such multidimensional seeing comes an epistemic advantage lacking in those who have no need nor desire to see as others do, especially if the vision of the others happens to be from below where one perceives that the promises of our explicit ideals are constantly being implicitly broken. Such humor is aesthetic, pleasurable in and of itself, and not amenable to scientific dissection. But it is also a skill that can be honed into a powerful tool of persuasion in circumstances where straightforward arguments are less effective. It can raise consciousness about the lived experiences of those suffering under systemic oppression and foster world travelling. Subversive humor encourages audiences, especially those who contribute to what Jean Harvey calls “civilized oppression”, to playfully travel across worlds and “tarry along” with the perspectives of the marginalized. (shrink)

What is it to have and act on a personal ideal? Someone who aspires to be a philosopher might imaginatively think “I am a philosopher” by way of motivating herself to think hard about a philosophical question. But doing so seems to require her to act on an inaccurate self-description, given that she isn’t yet what she regards herself as being. J. David Velleman develops the thought that action-by-ideal involves a kind of fictional self-conception. My aim is to expand our (...) thinking about personal ideals by developing another way of understanding them. On this view action-by-ideal involves a kind of metaphorical self-conception. I investigate some salient differences between these views with the aim of understanding the different perspectives they take on the rationality of action-by-ideal. Where the fiction view runs into problems of literary coherence, the metaphor view exploits the richness of poetic invention. But action-by-ideal is a complex phenomenon about which there may be no tidy story to be told. This paper is an attempt to clarify and understand more of this messy terrain. (shrink)

This transcription of a keynote for the Speculative Art Histories conference in May 2013 is a mixture of the main argument of The Sympathy of Things and some new insights. The text might be helpful for those who have not read the Sympathy book, which has been sold out for a number of years. This essay will appear as a chapter in Sjoerd van Tuinen's Speculative Art Histories, to be published with Edinburgh University Press in 2017.

Logic played an important role in Wittgenstein’s work over the entire period of his philosophizing, from both the point of view of the philosopher of logic and that of the logician. Besides logical analysis, there is another kind of logical activity that characterizes Wittgenstein’s philosophical work after a certain point during his experience as a soldier and, later, as an officer in the First World War – if not earlier. This other kind of logical activity has to do with what (...) appears to be the literary form of Wittgenstein’s philosophical prose, and it is likely to be seen as the most modernist feature of his preoccupation with logic. (shrink)

In this article, I want to understand the nature of aesthetic experiences of landscapes. I offer an understanding of aesthetic appreciation of landscapes based on a notion of a landscape where landscapes are perspectival observer-dependent entities, where the 'creator' of the landscape necessarily happens to be the same person as the spectator, and where her scientific (and other) knowledge and beliefs matter for the appreciation to be complete. I explore the idea that appreciating a landscape in this sense has quite (...) a lot in common with taking and appreciating a photograph. On our way, we will see how imagination plays a crucial role in the story. (shrink)

An epistemology of art has seemed problematic mainly because of arguments claiming that an essential element of a theory of knowledge, truth, has no place in aesthetic contexts. For, if it is objectively true that something is beautiful, it seems to follow that the predicate “is beautiful” expresses a property – a view asserted by Plato but denied by Hume and Kant. But then, if the belief that something is beautiful is not objectively true, we cannot be said to know (...) that something is beautiful and the path to an epistemology of art is effectively blocked. The article places the existence aesthetic properties in the proper context; presents a logically correct argument for the existence of such properties; identifies strategies for responding to this argument; explains why objections by Hume, Kant, and several other philosophers fail; and sketches a realization account of beauty influenced by Hogarth. (shrink)

I defend the view that it is not impossible to see the impossible. I provide two examples in which one sees the impossible and defend these examples from potential objections. Theories of depiction should make room for impossible depictions.

La noción de mundos posibles, sostiene que nuestro mundo es un mundo entre otros, un subconjunto de todas las cosas que existen. Esto implica aceptar que existen mundos estructuralmente equivalentes con sus propios lenguajes [formales], que entre sí no tienen ningún estatuto privilegiado, p.e., el mundo y lenguaje del arte o el mundo y lenguaje de la física; no obstante, la idea de aceptar otros mundos equivalentes como mundos posibles epistémica y ontológicamente legítimos para acceder y expresar lo cognoscible del (...) mundo no goza de gran aceptación. En este sentido, de entre las múltiples dimensiones de la noción de mundos posibles anotada, su dimensión lógica, es una de las más extendidas, ésta se entiende como un posible estado de cosas o un posible curso de eventos. Empero, esta concepción es la más restrictiva de la noción de mundos posibles, no sólo porque dicha noción transmuta en una especie de «técnica predictiva» que nos permite analizar y visualizar posibles escenarios de un estado de cosas o un curso de eventos, sino porque fundamentalmente, la noción de mundos posibles pierde gran parte de su potencia conceptual. Hablar de proposiciones como conjuntos de mundos posibles, no es un error, pero es limitar innecesariamente el alcance y campo de acción de la noción de mundos posibles. Si entendemos dicha noción en la versión primaría de Lewis [«Nuestro mundo actual es sólo un mundo entre otros»], sería plausible recuperar, entre otras, las dimensiones ontológica y epistémica de la noción de mundos posibles, y por ende la posibilidad objetiva de indagar en formas alternativas y legitimas de acceder y expresar lo cognoscible del mundo; en este sentido, en este trabajo me propongo: (1) retomar la noción primaria de mundos posibles de Lewis, para analizar y explicitar brevemente sus limitaciones, virtudes y requerimientos; (2) examinar las condiciones de posibilidad de un mundo; y, (3) sugerir los lineamientos epistémicos que deberían considerarse y explicitarse cuando se habla de y desde un mundo posible a la hora de expresar un enunciado. (shrink)

There is something peculiar about aesthetic testimony. It seems more difficult to gain knowledge of aesthetic properties based solely upon testimony than it is in the case of other types of property. In this paper, I argue that we can provide an adequate explanation at the level of the semantics of aesthetic language, without defending any substantive thesis in epistemology or about aesthetic value/judgement. If aesthetic predicates are given a non-invariantist semantics, we can explain the supposed peculiar difficulty with aesthetic (...) testimony. (shrink)

For Kierkegaard the ‘psychological experiment’ is a literary strategy. It enables him to dramatize an existential conflict in an experimental mode. Kierkegaard’s aim is to study the source of movement that animates the existing individual (this is the psychological part). However, he is not interested in the representation of historical individuals in actual situations, but in the construction of fictional characters that are placed in hypothetical situations; this allows him to set the categories in motion “in order to observe completely (...) undisturbed what these require” without caring to what extent someone has met this requirement or is able to meet it (this is the experimental part). -/- The ‘psychological experiment’ is a category of indirect communication that is developed most extensively by Frater Taciturnus, the pseudonymous author of the third part of Stages on Life’s Way. (I) Taciturnus introduces the psychological experiment as a new trajectory in modern literature that offers an alternative to poetry and speculative drama. He develops this new trajectory in praxis (in the novella ‘“Guilty?”/“Not Guilty?” A Story of Suffering: A Psychological Experiment by Frater Taciturnus’) as well as in theory (in the ‘Letter to the Reader’ that accompanies his novella). (II) Two other pseudonymous authors further enrich the conceptual field of the psychological experiment. Constantin Constantius develops the notion ‘experimenting psychology’; Johannes Climacus reflects on the reader’s contemporaneity with the character. (shrink)

This chapter summarizes Augustine’s often-neglected aesthetic theodicy that balances his metaphysical definitions of evil and human agency against the ultimately beautiful story Augustine sees God, as the author of all Creation, writing. First, Augustine’s neo-Platonic conception of evil as the “privation of goodness” is explained which effectively eliminates much of the apparent evil in the world under the guise of a preeminent God’s loving care of the Creation which He fashions as good, but is later corrupted. Secondly, Augustine’s conception of (...) the nature of this corruption at the hands of free agents is laid out with a particular sensitivity to the apparent shifts in Augustine’s thought as he aged. Finally, Augustine’s foundational aesthetic themes of contrast and universal harmony (in Greek, pankalia) are explained to demonstrate precisely why, in Augustine’s words, God might “judge it better to bring good out of evil than to allow nothing evil to exist.”. (shrink)

This article explores a concept of artistic transgression I call aesthetic disobedience that runs parallel to the political concept of civil disobedience. Acts of civil disobedience break some law in order to publicly draw attention to and recommend the reform of a conflict between the commitments of a legal system and some shared commitments of a community. Likewise, acts of aesthetic disobedience break some entrenched artworld norm in order to publicly draw attention to and recommend the reform of a conflict (...) between artworld commitments and some shared commitments of a community. Considering artistic transgressions under the concept of aesthetic disobedience highlights often-overlooked features of modern artworld practices. Most significantly, it draws attention to the deliberative participation of a wide variety of citizens of the artworld, including not just artists and performers but also members of audiences, in the transformation of the rules and boundaries of the artworld itself. (shrink)

This essay developed out of the final chapter of The Sympathy of Things where I related beauty to a notion of radical generosity. Tracing generosity back to the ancient Greeks brought me to a whole new world of grace and “charis”, the etymological root of words like charisma and charity. The essay establishes a fundamental connection between grace and beauty, deeply interrelating movement and object. In the second part the argument develops into an ontology based on the concept of radiance, (...) which we encounter in Aglaia, the first of the Three Graces, in fireworks, jewelry, makeup and in fashion, but also in acts of bravery, kindness and friendship. Radiance is subsequently defined as “thickened appearance”, where phenomenology and ontology become continuous in a “presence beyond the present”. (shrink)

The term "parody" derives from the ancient Greek word parodia and has come to include a variety of meanings connected with correlative terms such as "pastiche," "quotation," "satire," and "allusion." At the present time, more than a few commentators are eager to discuss contemporary parody as an art form particularly relevant to our era. Most approaches share a basic foundation that treats parody as a complex multilayered type of imitation (sometimes referred to as intertextuality). Only some theorists, however, include a (...) comic element in the defining character of parody. (shrink)

The term "pastiche" originally means a "pasty" or "pie" dish containing several different ingredients. It has come to be used synonymously with a variety of terms whose meanings are rarely fixed with clarity: parody, montage, quotation, allusion, irony, burlesque, travesty, and plagiarism. Al;though some definitions of pastiche strive to remain neutral, others have taken on a pejorative sense. Still others are more positive, especially within the realms of twentieth-century postmodern art and architecture.