The thesis analyses the relation between Rousseau’s musical writings and elements of his moral, social and linguistic philosophy. In particular, I am concerned to demonstrate: (i.) how the core of Rousseau’s theory of musical imitation is grounded in the same analysis of the nature of man which governs his moral and social philosophy; (ii.) how this grounding does not extend to the stylistic prescriptions the justification of which Rousseau intended his musical writings to offer. The central argument draws on Rousseau’s (...) analysis of the origin of man as distinctively human. This origin extends to the awareness of moral and aesthetic value, and to communication in speech and song. Rousseau’s moral analyses of social and political life usually take the form of relating contemporary practice to the original structure in which man’s awareness of his own good is commensurate with that of the good of others. The analysis of music follows a similar model: music is to be considered good in so far as it replicates, or faithfully reflects, the original model of communication. The value of music is thereby understood to extend to moral as well as aesthetic goodness. Given the subtlety of Rousseau’s understanding of the ‘origin’, I argue that this analysis of music’s aesthetic value is powerful and far‐ reaching in its relevance for contemporary musical aesthetics. However, I also argue that while the analysis in general is good in this way, it does not entail the specific kind of musical‐stylistic preferences which Rousseau sought to use it to advance. (shrink)

We present the structure and guiding principles of this Special Issue, with a brief description of the participants’ contributions and the relations holding between them. The intersection between aesthetics and ethics as a field of philosophical enquiry is presented under the guise of a ‘layer cake’: at the top layer we find the most general metaphysical and epistemological issues concerning the nature of value, aesthetic and ethical; the middle layer encompasses several normative issues about the interactions of aesthetic, moral and (...) cognitive values in art; finally at the bottom layer we introduce issues of a more restricted focus, like the aesthetic peculiarity of political songs and the ethics of artistic appropriation. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the importance of wonder in human flourishing and is orientated towards the dynamics between the two, but with an emphasis on how the former is important for illuminating the latter. It begins with a preliminary sketch of both wonder and human flourishing and subsequently moves on to highlight three aspects of human flourishing: 1) ‘Individuality’, 2) ‘Relations’ and 3) ‘The political’, and why these play to wonderment.

Why focus on the work of William Blake in a journal dedicated to religious ethics? The question is neither trivial nor rhetorical. Blake's work is certainly not in anyone's canon of significant texts for the study of Christian or, more broadly, religious ethics. Yet Blake, however subversive his views, sought to lay out a Christian vision of the good, alternated between prophetic denunciations of the world's folly and harrowing laments over the wreck of the world's promise, and wrote poetry as (...) if poetry might mend the world. Setting imagination against the calculations of reason and the comfort of custom, Blake's poems inspire questions about the relationship of ethics to prophecy, and open the possibility that ethics itself would be markedly enriched could it find a place for what Thomas J. J. Altizer has called Christian epic poetry. (shrink)

The claim that God is perfectly beautiful has played a key role within the history of a number of religious traditions. However, this view has received surprisingly little attention from philosophers of religion in recent decades. In this article I aim to remedy this neglect by addressing some key philosophical issues surrounding the doctrine of divine beauty. I begin by considering how best to explicate the claim that God is perfectly beautiful before moving on to ask what consequences accepting this (...) claim will have for our broader theorizing in philosophy. (shrink)

The Water Margin is one of the four great classical novels of China. It describes how people from different walks of life were driven to become outlaws as a result of poor governance and widespread corruption. These outlaws have been regarded by some commentators as heroes, despite the fact that they perform wanton killing, over retribution, and cannibalism. Liu Zaifu 劉再復 argues that the novel has contributed to the moral downfall of the Chinese people. In this essay, I put forward (...) various arguments in objection to Liu. I think Liu’s argument is unsound, partly because he fails to address the nature of the cultural confrontation between modern readers and The Water Margin. By conducting an evaluation of Liu, I also consider a range of issues concerning how we may understand The Water Margin, and how the novel may morally relate to us in modern society. (shrink)

Work in feminist and critical race aesthetics brings out a complex interaction between aesthetic, ethical, and political value. The interest in ethico-political considerations is also found in recent literature around art and ethics, such as debates about the work of immoral artists, cultural appropriation and heritage, and art in public spaces. These discussions are characterized by a social structural approach to the ethico-political value of art that focuses on relations between artworks, other artefacts, and individuals in specific sociohistorical contexts and (...) as they emerge from specific social organizations. In this paper I present the main features and assumptions behind these social structural approaches to the values of art. I examine accounts that take ethico-political value to depend on artworks’ contributions to public discourse and on their role in constituting social structures. (shrink)