Experimental Philosophy (X-Phi) is now a fully-fledged methodological project with applications in almost all areas of analytic philosophy, including, as of recently, aesthetics. Another methodological project which has been attracting attention in the last few years is conceptual engineering (CE). Its areas of implementation are now diverse, but as was the case initially with experimental philosophy, aesthetics has unfortunately been left out (or perhaps aestheticians have failed to pay attention to CE) until now. In this paper, I argue that if (...) conceptual engineers are interested in expanding their project to the field of aesthetics, which would greatly benefit the field, then they should rely on the existing experimental work of aestheticians. Experimental philosophers have only recently started to join forces with conceptual engineers in various fields, as well as to explore the methodological implications of such an alliance. This paper goes a step further by not only arguing that CE has potential in aesthetics, but that the way to realize this potential is to piggyback, so to speak, on the work of experimental aestheticians. In other words, instead of building a CE project in aesthetics from the ground up, this paper describes the support that CE can and should derive from current experimental aesthetics, thereby making the former’s development more efficiently realizable. Furthermore, I argue that doing so would also be beneficial to experimental aesthetics. Currently, the integration of X-Phi to the wider field of aesthetics is losing ground because certain objections—notably, the objection that X-Phi cannot be of relevance to normative questions—have not been properly refuted. By pairing up with a normative programme like CE, though, experimental aestheticians should finally be able to put these objections to rest. (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. 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: such aesthetic maneuvers play a significant role in oppression and social hierarchy related to race, gender, fatness, and disability. 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)

On several current views, including those of Matthew Kieran, Gary Iseminger, Jerrold Levinson, and Noël Carroll, aesthetic appreciation or experience involves second-order awareness of one’s own mental processes. But what if it turns out that we don’t have introspective access to the processes by which our aesthetic responses are produced? I summarize several problems for introspective accounts that emerge from the psychological literature: aesthetic responses are affected by irrelevant conditions; they fail to be affected by relevant conditions; we are ignorant (...) of their causes and thus confabulate in explaining them; our attempts to offer explanations change our preferences; and the preferences we form after explanation are lower in quality. I suggest that by distinguishing introspective awareness of mental processes from introspective awareness of mental states, we can safeguard a worthwhile concept of aesthetic experience. In addition, we should recognize that theoretical, rather than introspective, understanding of our mental processes may play a valuable role in aesthetic appreciation. (shrink)

Traditionally, the sense of touch—alongside the senses of taste and smell—has been excluded from the aesthetic domain. These proximal modalities are thought to deliver only sensory pleasures, not the complex, world-directed perceptual states that characterize aesthetic experience. In this paper, I argue that this tradition fails to recognize the perceptual possibilities of haptic touch, which allows us to experience properties of the objects with which we make bodily contact, including their weight, shape, solidity, elasticity, and smoothness. These features, moreover, may (...) be indicative of how well-suited an object is for its function, and in feeling them we can thus feel the positive aesthetic quality of functional beauty. (shrink)

ABSTRACTDespite the huge interest in different philosophical questions surrounding literature, particularly analytic philosophers have had relatively little to say about literature’s specifically a...

When one starts reading in the nascent field of everyday aesthetics of aestheticians from predominantly the Anglo-American sphere, it soon becomes apparent that some are attempting to carve out an academic niche for everyday aesthetics by defining it against art. I agree with Thomas Leddy, who has the following to say about the problem of philosophical definitions in general: “Although philosophical definition can be valuable, the process of creating a philosophical definition, insofar as it involves making strict distinctions, tends to (...) hide continuities and dynamic interactions, the understanding of which is sometimes more important than setting up limitations.”1 I am concerned that the attempts under... (shrink)

Open Access: This article argues for an aesthetic approach to resisting oppression based on judgments of bodily unattractiveness. Philosophical theories have often suggested that appropriate aesthetic judgments should converge on sets of objects consensually found to be beautiful or ugly. The convergence of judgments about human bodies, however, is a significant source of injustice, because people judged to be unattractive pay substantial social and economic penalties in domains such as education, employment and criminal justice. The injustice is compounded by the (...) interaction between standards of attractiveness and gender, race, disability, and gender identity. -/- I argue that we should actively work to reduce our participation in standard aesthetic practices that involve attractiveness judgments. This does not mean refusing engagement with the embodiment of others; ignoring someone’s embodiment is often a way of dehumanizing them. Instead, I advocate a form of practice, aesthetic exploration, that involves seeking out positive experiences of the unique aesthetic affordances of all bodies, regardless of whether they are attractive in the standard sense. I argue that there are good ethical reasons to cultivate aesthetic exploration, and that it is psychologically plausible that doing so would help to alleviate the social injustice attending judgments of attractiveness. -/- This essay was the winner of the 30th Anniversary of the American Society for Aesthetics Feminist Caucus Committee Feminist Research Essay prize in 2020. (shrink)

I clarify the arguments of my paper “Scratching an Itch” in response to a discussion piece by Brian Soucek. I also offer a new argument that objectivity is possible for aesthetic judgments about private phenomena such as somatic experiences.

This study looks at the emerging branch of everyday aesthetics from the perspective of the fracture which exists in its core, as a result of the double reading of the everyday: the first, which elevates it to the realm of the extraordinary and the second, in which it remains strictly ordinary. Our purpose here is to repair this fracture by turning to David Hume’s functionalist aesthetics, where disinterest and utility are reconciled through sympathy and the affective experience of otherness that (...) it provides. Once transferred to the everyday sphere, sympathy facilitates understanding between these two versions, since the aesthetic appreciation of everyday objects or common activities requires, like the second version, that they remain in the practical environment and, like the first, to see something special in them, which is the possibility of one’s own or another’s well-being. (shrink)

This paper is stimulated by and indebted to a study by Charles Altieri of the ways in which affect is present and articulated in art and literature, which, he argues, hold significance for the philosophy of emotion. I focus on Altieri's thesis that affective states may have aesthetic qualities and value. I pursue this notion first with reference to Nietzsche's attempt to recruit affect as a means of countering Schopenhauer's pessimism. I then attempt to show the coherence of the notion (...) that passion may exhibit an aesthetic dimension, drawing on Richard Wollheim's account of certain ideas in psychoanalytic theory, for which I suggest precedents in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

This article discusses Everyday Aesthetics seen from philosophical hermeneutics where aesthetics is understood as a form of knowledge. Two approaches are made, one concerning content, i.e. the knowledge made apparent to us in the aesthetic situation which is usually, but not exclusively, an exception to the everyday; another concerning the appearance of knowledge in form which, likewise, is also in danger of becoming isolated from the everyday. Everyday Aesthetics is reviewed through the same two approaches to understand how it differs (...) from hermeneutics and where possible exchanges between them appear. (shrink)

In “The Pervasiveness of the Aesthetic in Ordinary Experience,” Sherri Irvin claims that “our everyday lives have an aesthetic character that is thoroughgoing and available at every moment, should we choose to attend to it.”1 While distancing her paper from terminological debates about the scope of the term “aesthetic,” she nonetheless claims to have established, at least to the satisfaction of a sympathetic “Deweyan” skeptic, that this term is properly applicable to the character of a range of everyday experiences. Furthermore, (...) she insists that it is for many reasons very important that we extend our conception of the domain of the aesthetic to include the kind of phenomena that she has in mind. For, to the.. (shrink)

This essay offers an overview of the reasons why tattoos are philosophically interesting. Considered here will be a partial survey of potential areas of philosophical interest with respect to tattoos, fortified by a little historical context. Claims about the ethical significance of tattoos and about the significance of tattoos for self-expression and as expressions of identity will be canvassed in the first two sections, as will questions about what they express or signify, how they might do so, and whose expression (...) we might take it to be. The final sections will address the contention that at least some tattoos are art and will raise various considerations about their closest analogs as well as their authorship. Although it will be argued that analogs can be found between tattoos and works recognized as art, it will also be maintained that tattoos raise unique aesthetic issues for consideration. (shrink)

The aesthetic tradition has identified as paradigmatically sublime such objects as imposing mountains and intense storms, as well as monumental art. But the tradition also acknowledges less paradigmatic cases, including sometimes mathematical structures or abstract concepts. In this paper, we argue that there is also a case for considering phenomenal consciousness – the experiential quality of subjective awareness – as a sublime phenomenon. One appreciates this, we argue, when one is struck by (fitting) awe upon contemplating (a) the perplexing existence (...) of something like phenomenal consciousness in an otherwise completely material universe and (b) the role of consciousness in injecting meaning and value in an otherwise brutally factual reality. (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)