In refutation of hedonism, Nozick offered a hypothetical thought experiment, known as the Experience Machine. This paper maintains that end-of-life-suffering of the kind that is resistant to state-of-the-art palliation provides a conceptually equal experiment which validates Nozick’s observations and conclusions. The observation that very many terminal patients who suffer terribly do no wish for euthanasia or terminal sedation is incompatible with motivational hedonism. Although irreversible vegetative state and death are equivalently pain-free, very many people loath the former even at the (...) price of the latter. This attitude cannot be accounted for by hedonism. Following these observations, the goals of palliative care are sketched along four circles. The first is mere removal or mitigation of noxious symptoms and suffering. The second targets sufferings that stymie patients’ life-plans and do not allow them to be happy, the third targets sufferings that interfere with their pursuance of other goods (palliation as a primary good). The fourth is the control of sufferings that do not allow the person to benefit from any human good whatsoever (“total pain” or critical suffering). Only in the fourth circle are people hedonists. (shrink)

The sublime in classical aesthetics arrived at a famous formulation with Kant as a subjective quality more elevated than beauty, linked to commotion and respect followed by reaffirmation. However, a new interpretation of the Schopenhauerian sublime is necessary in its transforming appreciation of the importance of this feeling as a psychological state, which is not yet metaphysical as usually understood, when dealing with struggling situations without resolution. Here the focus will be on a variety of the sonorous sublime in contemporary (...) music, which finds resonances with Schopenhauer’s sublime: Witold Lutoslawski’s Three Poems of Henri Michaux for mixed chorus and orchestra focuses on unpredictability and form-contrariness, “picturing” surrealist texts of uncertainty in Pensées, violence in Le Grand Combat, and resignation in Repos dans Malheur. (shrink)

It is generally agreed that the prime mover of contemporary consumerism is aesthetics. However, today's consumer aesthetics often leads to decisions and actions that have negative environmental consequences. By taking apparel industry, represented by fast fashion, as a quintessential example of this problem, I argue that aesthetics can no longer claim immunity from environmental considerations—there needs to be a paradigm shift for consumer aesthetics. A proposed new environmentally minded consumer aesthetics promotes a paradoxical role for material ephemerality in enhancing an (...) object's longevity, and it places importance on the personal connection with an object's story, as well as our engagement with the material world more generally. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article attempts to construct a distinct formulation of the sublime via an inspection of some of Jacques Derrida's principal works. Through a reading of his assessment of Kantian sublimity and a development of the dialectical from deconstruction, two patterns of the sublime can be formulated. These two constructed patterns of the sublime, which I shall name “sublime of différance” and “aporetic sublime,” are predicated on the notions of infinity and dialecticism. The aporetic sublime includes in its constitutive structure the (...) element of an orientation to an irreducible other. It is argued in the article that these constructions are open to an incorporation of the sublime as located beyond subjectivity and discourse. (shrink)

The idea that there are features of or in our conscious experience that are, in some important sense, private has both a long history in philosophy and a large measure of intuitive attraction. Once this idea is in place, it will be very natural to assume that one can think and judge about one’s own private features. And it is then only a small step to the idea that we might communicate such thoughts and judgements about our respective private features (...) with each other. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence is at a turning point, with a substantial increase in projects aiming to implement sophisticated forms of human intelligence in machines. This research attempts to model specific forms of intelligence through brute-force search heuristics and also reproduce features of human perception and cognition, including emotions. Such goals have implications for artificial consciousness, with some arguing that it will be achievable once we overcome short-term engineering challenges. We believe, however, that phenomenal consciousness cannot be implemented in machines. This becomes (...) clear when considering emotions and examining the dissociation between consciousness and attention in humans. While we may be able to program ethical behavior based on rules and machine learning, we will never be able to reproduce emotions or empathy by programming such control systems—these will be merely simulations. Arguments in favor of this claim include considerations about evolution, the neuropsychological aspects of emotions, and the dissociation between attention and consciousness found in humans. Ultimately, we are far from achieving artificial consciousness. (shrink)

Wollstonecraft's early works express a coherent view of moral psychology, moral education and moral philosophy which guides the construction of her early fiction and educational works. It includes a valuable account of the relation between reason and feeling in moral development. Failure to recognize the complexity and coherence of the view and unhistorical readings have led to mistaken criticisms of Wollstonecraft's position. Part I answers these criticisms; Part II describes and textually supports her view.

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)

This article explores two different conceptions of the postmodern surface and their take up in relation to mainstream science fiction cinema. Each offers a rather different genealogy for considering the surfaces of the science fiction film. The first traces Frederic Jameson's conception of postmodern superficiality and its dual role as a mode of reading texts and an aesthetic paradigm. The second traces Judith Butler's conception of gender performativity, its application to technology, and the expansion of performativity as a key mechanism (...) for the enactment of “humanness”. The reading of Ex Machina will explore the aesthetics of film's mise-en-scène with its plurality of textured and reflective surfaces. It will trace the performative constructions of gender and humanness that intersect across the film, before finally focussing on the ending as a way of addressing key issues at stake in the conceptualisation of surface readings. (shrink)

This thesis examines some of the contested meanings of what it is to be a self, person and individual. The law of obligations sets the context for this examination. One of the important aspects of contemporary feminist philosophy has been its move beyond highlighting inconsistencies in political and legal theory, in which theoretical frameworks can be shown to rely upon an ambiguous treatment of women. The feminist theorists whose work is considered use these theoretical weaknesses as a point of departure (...) to propose different conceptual frameworks. I start by analysing contemporary work on the self from within both philosophy of science and feminist metaphysics to draw out common approaches from these diverse positions. These themes are then discussed in the context of the law. I then critically examine the concept of legal personhood in the work of Drucilla Cornell and her proposals for the amendment of tort law. This is juxtaposed with an analysis of the practical operation of tort law by adapting François Ewald's work on risk and insurance to English law. I concentrate on women's ambiguous position with regard to both risk and to the image of the individual that is the subject of Ewald's critique. This is followed by an examination of the changing position of women with regard to 'possessive individualism', 'self-ownership' or 'property in the person' in relation to contract law and social contract theory. There are a number of different social contracts discussed in the thesis: Cornell's reworking of John Rawls and the stories of Thomas Hobbes and of Carole Pateman. The final 'social contract' to be discussed is that of 'new contractualism', the employment of contract as a technique of government. I argue that Pateman's critique of possessive individualism continues to be relevant at a time when the breadwinner/housewife model has broken down. (shrink)

In perceptions of their landscapes the Latvians have denied the existence of the sublime, elevating rural and natural aspects as beautiful and good. While Latvian landscape aesthetics and ethics are based on the profound transformation of nature-landscape attitudes that occurred in Europe during the second half of the 18th century, when ideas of the beautiful, sublime, and the picturesque were debated, the existence of sublime characteristics within the borders of Latvia has not been recognized. In part the attitude derives from (...) the lack of dramatic topography in Latvia. Part of it is due to historic contrasts of sublime wonders in foreign lands with the simple rural beauties and virtues of Latvia. Travelers' observations of rural beauty in specific places reinforced such attitudes. But it is also bound up with the complex history of Latvians as an underclass during colonial rule that began during the 13th century and did not truly end until 1991. As during the 19th century, Latvians began to develop their own national traditions; they used a voluminous collection of rural folk songs on which to build subtle literary and other artistic interpretations of what is moral and beautiful in rural life, work, and landscapes. A particularly important motif in Latvian writing is earth. The ethics of work, social responsibility, and care for living things are a powerful theme. If the sublime is mentioned, it is brought into the compass of the rural and the tame. Sublime elements of nature occur as metaphors for human actions. Thoroughly imbued with the above traditions, the author, at first unselfconsciously, discovered sublime aspects in Latvian landscapes and nature during the course of the past 11 years. It is his belief that as Latvians distance themselves from past colonial rule, they will begin to see their land in a less narrow fashion and recognize its sublime characteristics. (shrink)

Are we really sure to correctly know what do we feel in front ofan artwork and to correctly verbalize it? How do we know what weappreciate and why we appreciate it? This paper deals with the problem ofintrospective opacity in aesthetics (that is, the unreliability of self-knowledge) in the light of traditional philosophical issues, but also of recentpsychological insights, according to which there are many instances ofmisleading intuition about one’s own mental processes, affective states orpreferences. Usually, it is assumed that (...) aesthetic statements are intuitivelyclear and self-evident. However, a long tradition in psychological researchhas called the idea of introspective transparency and the infallibility of self-knowledge into question (Wilson 2002). This topic has only recently beenrecognized as an interesting problem in aesthetics (Melchionne 2011, Irvin2014). In this paper I will discuss the main shortcomings in introspective self-knowledge, mostly referring to psychological findings. As a consequence, thedevelopment of a folk psychological account of aesthetic experience could beneeded, investigating how people develop intuitive and naïve theories abouttheir aesthetic reactions, taste, and feelings, distinct from a more objectiveand empirically grounded account of how judgment and preferences areactually formed in ourselves, even on a neurobiological level. However, itwill also be argued that bypassing the individual judgment and his expressedchoices in favor of allegedly more objective levels of description would notbe an innocent step to take. (shrink)

Edmund Burke’s speeches and writings during the trial of Warren Hastings—from 1788 to 1795—remain one of the most comprehensive assessments of the effects of colonial trade and territorial expansion on Britain’s nationalist self. A rhetorical reading of his prosecution speeches reveals how they affected the public response to the trial by evoking the sublime and framing terror as the basic feature of Britain’s mercantile imperialist agenda in the colonies. Moreover, by associating Hastings’s governance of Bengal with sublime terror, Burke altered (...) the interpretations of virtue and corruption, thus distancing both Britain and India from the rampant profiteering of the East India Company. Burke’s critique of the degenerative influences of commercial imperialism along with the reformulation of his ideas in subsequent colonial historiography is crucial for assessing how the aesthetics of the sublime conferred greater moral force to the sporadic and fragmented reports about the Company’s abuses of power in India. (shrink)

How does Richard Shusterman’s Thinking Through the Body apply to the issues of everyday aesthetics? As it turns out, many chapters contribute significantly to everyday aesthetics, in particular the work on architecture, self-styling, the body as background, lovemaking, and the process of making a photographic portrait. Shusterman’s concentration on the art of living has special importance to everyday aesthetics. Current debates within the field of everyday aesthetics also raise problems for somaesthetics. I also question the limits of somaesthetics and Shusterman’s (...) rejection of defamiliarization in making the ordinary extraordinary. (shrink)

ArgumentDarwin's narrative of the earthquake at Concepción, set within the frameworks of Lyellian uniformitarianism, romantic aesthetics, and the emergence of geology as a popular science, is suggestive of the role of the sublime in geological enquiry and theory in the early nineteenth century. Darwin'sBeaglediary and later notebooks and publications show that the aesthetic of the sublime was both a form of representing geology to a popular audience, and a crucial structure for the observation and recording of the event from the (...) beginning. The awesome spectacle of the earthquake proved in turn the magnitude of the forces at stake in earth history, and helped to make geology an epic conjoining the history of civilization with the history of the earth. (shrink)

This chapter seeks to make a contribution to the growing interest in Nietzsche's relation to traditions of therapy in philosophy that has emerged in recent years. It is in the texts of his middle period that Nietzsche's writing comes closest to being an exercise in philosophical therapeutics, and in this chapter I focus on Dawn from 1881 as a way of exploring this. Dawn is a text that has been admired in recent years for its ethical naturalism and for its (...) anticipation of phenomenology. My interest in the text in this chapter is in the way it revitalises for a modern age ancient philosophical concerns, notably a teaching for mortal souls who wish to be liberated from the fear and anguish of existence, as well as from God, the ‘metaphysical need’, and romantic music, and are able to affirm their mortal conditions of existence. As a general point of inspiration I have adopted Pierre Hadot's insight into the therapeutic ambitions of ancient philosophy which was, he claims, ‘intended to cure mankind's anguish’. This is evident in the teaching of Epicurus which sought to demonstrate the mortality of the soul and whose aim was, ‘to free humans from “the fears of the mind”.’ Similarly, Nietzsche's teaching in Dawn is for mortal souls. In the face of the loss of the dream of the soul's immortality, philosophy for Nietzsche, I shall show, has new consolations to offer in the form of new sublimities. Indeed, for Nietzsche it is by reflecting, with the aid of psychological observation, on what is ‘human, all too human’, that ‘we can lighten the burden of life’. Nietzsche's thinking in Dawn contains a number of proposals and recommendations of tremendous value to philosophical therapeia, including a call for a new honesty about the human ego and human relations, including relations of self and other and love, so as to free us from certain delusions; the search for an authentic mode of existence which appreciates the value of solitude and independence; the importance of having a rich and mature taste in order to eschew the fanatical. After an introduction to Nietzsche's text the chapter is divided into two main parts. In the first main part I explore various aspects of his conception of philosophical therapy, including purification of the higher feelings and liberation from the destructive effects of ‘morality’ and Christianity. In the second main part I explore his conception of ‘the passion of knowledge’, which is the passion that guides modern free spirits as they seek to overcome the need of religion and constraints of ‘morality’, and to access the new sublimities of philosophy. (shrink)