This article focuses on the intimate relationship between German aesthetic theory, particularly the philosophies of Kant and Schiller, and the pragmatic tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that many aspects of Kantian aesthetic theory – his development of reflective judgement, genius, and common sense – are reflected in the thinking of C. S. Peirce. I conclude, however, that such a comparison risks selling short the way that German idealism influenced American thinkers and instead suggest that it (...) is more fruitful to concentrate on ‘aesthetic experience’. I argue that attending to the aesthetic dimensions of experience might re-orient contemporary approaches to pragmatism that continue to focus on the way that pragmatism might intervene in debates in epistemology and philosophy of language. (shrink)

Kalevi Kull’s target article importantly rejects the argument from biological aesthetics, that beauty is a product of natural selection. Instead, beauty is a reflection of the ongoing diversity of free semiotic choosing and fitting. From this view, biosemiotic aesthetics could become the semiotic branch par excellence, in its theorization of the origins of what has always been the central interest of general semiotics. The narrow argument about sexual selection is couched inside the broader ambition to establish a biological but nonreductive (...) definition and scope for aesthetics itself. One of the most important services biosemiotics can provide to the larger community is to bestow upon it some really unifying general principles applicable to all branches of semiotics, and the theory of biosemiotic aesthetics promises to do just this. General semiotics may later adopt some of Kull’s present theorization and apply it to the textual concerns which Kull prefers to consign to other specialists. (shrink)