This paper explores Moritz Geiger’s work on the role of emotions in aesthetic appreciation and shows its potential for contemporary research. Drawing on the main tenets of Geiger’s phenomenological aesthetics as an aesthetics of value, the paper begins by elaborating his model of aesthetic appreciation. I argue that, placed in the contemporary debate, his model is close to affective models which make affective states responsible for the apprehension of the aesthetic value of an artwork, though Geiger also makes important concessions (...) to the intellectualist. Indeed, like proponents of the affective model, Geiger argues that a work’s aesthetic values are extracted by means of an affective state though the affective state in question is neither an emotion nor a feeling but a “liking”. In fact, like the intellectualist, he considers that a focus on the emotions might on certain occasions interfere in the aesthetic appreciation of the artwork. Next, I reconstruct Geiger’s distinction between surface and depth effects in terms of a distinction between two types of emotional responses to artworks. It is argued that Geiger’s distinction offers a powerful tool to distinguish those emotions that are intrinsically related to aesthetic values from those that are not and that this distinction can be useful to understand how different kinds of emotions contribute to aesthetic appreciation. I proceed to examine the historical sources of Geiger’s distinction between surface and depth effects in Theodor Lipps’s aesthetics and compare Geiger’s account with the works of other early phenomenologists working on values. In the final part, I illustrate the place of Geiger’s model in the contemporary discussion by means of an example. (shrink)

Music has strong emotional powers. How are we to understand affective responses to music? What does music teach us about emotions? Why are musical emotions important? Despite the rich literature in philosophy and the empirical sciences, particularly psychology and neuroscience, little attention has been paid to integrating these approaches. This extensive review aims to redress this imbalance and establish a mutual dialogue between philosophy and the empirical sciences by presenting the main philosophical puzzles from an affective science perspective. The chief (...) problem is contagion. Sometimes, listeners perceive music as expressing some emotion and this elicits the same emotion in them. Contagion is perplexing because it collides with the leading theory of emotions as experiences of values. This article mostly revolves around the critical presentation of the philosophical solutions to this problem in light of recent developments in emotion theory and affective science. It also highlights practical issues, particularly the role of musical emotions in well-being and health, by tackling the paradox of sad music, i.e., the question of why people enjoy sad music. It thus bridges an important gap between theoretical and real-life issues as well as between philosophical and empirical investigations on affective responses to music. (shrink)

This thesis is about moods in works of art, and how moods expressed in art can change how we view the world. Among those who speak of the value of discussing moods in philosophical aesthetics, it is normally assumed that the value of moods is in the way they are induced in the viewer of the work. In this thesis, I will argue that such an argument is not the best. Those who think moods are not relevant to aesthetics have (...) only to argue either that being induced with emotions is not an ideal way of approaching art, or that such reactions as being induced with mood belong to the more rare cases of approaching art. Therefore, focusing on how moods are induced hinders the potential of discussing moods in art. Instead I argue that the value of moods is in the way they are expressed. I argue that moods can be understood as a form of symbolic schemas. They affect how the world appears, and how one sorts and organizes things in the world. One can therefore use moods as resources for getting knowledge about the world. Because some works of art express moods, where expression is understood as metaphorical exemplification, they make the viewer epistemically aware of the mood. Thus one can imagine being in the mood expressed. Thereby moods can lead to knowledge, also in cases where they are not literally induced. When one succesfully imagines being in an expressed mood, parts of the world are sorted and organized differently as in accordance with the mood. (shrink)

In this paper I present an account of musical arousal that takes into account key demands of formalist philosophers such as Peter Kivy and Nick Zangwill. Formalists prioritise our understanding and appreciation of the music itself. As a result, they demand that any feelings we have in response to music must be directed at the music alone, without being distracted by non-musical associations. To accommodate these requirements I appeal to a mechanism of contagion which I synthesize with the expectation-based arousal (...) mechanism proposed by Leonard Meyer. This account connects musical expressivity and arousal in a way that formalists have rejected, but I argue that it provides the best explanation of our observations of listener responses while also focusing on the music itself. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beardsley for the Twenty-First CenturySusan L. Feagin (bio)When I was a graduate student in the early 1970s, Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art,1 published originally in 1968, was all the rage, eclipsing Beardsley's monumental Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism as the most important book in the field at the time. Goodman's book veered decidedly away from aesthetics and toward the philosophy of art; insofar as "the aesthetic" remained, (...) it was explained in cognitive terms. However, Beardsley's Aesthetics continued to provide a valuable resource for those of us who took questions about value and evaluation to be central to the philosophical enterprise, even if we chose to focus on the philosophy of art more or less independently of the aesthetic. Beardsley's functionalist account of aesthetic value is adaptable as a framework for understanding artistic value and evaluation, as is his opposition to (what also seemed to me to be) the too-easy ploy of attributing intrinsic value to our experiences of art. I ended up writing my dissertation on general criteria of criticism—with a chapter devoted to Beardsley's views—arguing that once one employs the notion of artworks having a function, general criteria are not needed to provide a logical connection between a work's good-making or bad-making qualities and its value as a work of art.Nevertheless, Beardsley's instrumentalist view that the value of an artwork resides in its capacity to provide an aesthetic experience contains a major structural problem—what I shall call "Beardsley's dilemma," which he continued to struggle with in his later work.2 The problem lies in the tension between the claim that the value of a work resides in its capacity to evoke an experience having a certain phenomenological quality, and the claim that the properties or qualities of the work are valuable not merely as a means for producing such an experience. [End Page 11]Fifty years on, philosophers of art continue to struggle with this dilemma in various guises. Though the nature of aesthetic experience is still a lively topic of debate, it is just as common to find the evocation of emotions and other affective responses—from Aristotelian pity and fear; to anger and pride and horror; to moods such as sadness and melancholy—touted as among the functions of art.3 In the first section of this essay, I describe why understanding Beardsley's dilemma is important if one takes having emotions and other affective responses to art as part of what is valuable about it. Emotions, after all, are typically alleged to be "in us," not in the object; simply jettisoning the concept of aesthetic experience or aesthetic emotion does not make the dilemma go away. In the second section I distinguish between Beardsley's instrumentalism and a noninstrumentalist version of functionalism as two different models for understanding art's value. Noninstrumentalist functionalism involves the idea that the value of a work lies in the activity of appreciating what is (aesthetically or artistically) valuable about it, rather than in an experience that occurs as a result of perceiving the work. Some exercises involving the evaluation of art and nonart objects—exercises that might usefully be undertaken by students using objects of their own choosing—illustrate how functionalism skirts Beardsley's dilemma and better explicates the nature and locus of the values concerned.I: From Aesthetic Experience to Garden-Variety EmotionsThe view that at least some artworks have as part of their function the production of emotions or other affective responses is a contemporary analogue of Beardsley's instrumentalist view that the function of artworks is to provide an aesthetic experience. The contemporary analogue, however, is not committed to the view that all artworks have, in some abstract sense, the same function but only insists, minimally, that it is at least part of the function of some works of art to produce some variety of emotions and other affective responses. That is, producing emotions may be conceived of as part of the function of a work, and a perceiver's having them as part of appreciating its value.Beardsley's dilemma arises when (at... (shrink)