Why are moral actions beautiful, when indeed they are? This paper assesses the view, found most notably in Schiller, that moral actions are beautiful just when they present the appearance of freedom by appearing to be the result of internal harmony (the Schillerian Internal Harmony Thesis). I argue that while this thesis can accommodate some of the beauty involved in contrasts of the ‘continent’ and the ‘fully’ virtuous, it cannot account for all of the beauty in such contrasts, and so (...) needs to be weakened considerably (to the Internal Harmony Thesis). To account for the remaining beauty that cannot be fully accommodated even by this revised thesis, as well as the beauty contained in contrasts that involve agents who experience internal conflict as a result of being sensitive to different sources of moral value to an appropriate extent, a number of further theses need to be posited: namely, that the beauty of some moral actions is to be accommodated in terms of internal disharmony (the Internal Disharmony Thesis), and in terms of a felt harmony between the appreciator of the action and the executor of the action (the Affective Harmony Thesis). As such, in contrast to Schiller, I suggest that we need to take a pluralist and context-sensitive approach to accommodating the beauty of moral actions. (shrink)

How to account for the power that art holds over us? Why do artworks touch us deeply, consoling, transforming or invigorating us in the process? In this paper, we argue that an answer to this question might emerge from a fecund framework in cognitive science known as predictive processing (a.k.a. active inference). We unpack how this approach connects sense-making and aesthetic experiences through the idea of an ‘epistemic arc’, consisting of three parts (curiosity, epistemic action and aha experiences), which we (...) cast as aspects of active inference. We then show how epistemic arcs are built and sustained by artworks to provide us with those satisfying experiences that we tend to call ‘aesthetic’. Next, we defuse two key objections to this approach; namely, that it places undue emphasis on the cognitive component of our aesthetic encounters—at the expense of affective aspects—and on closure and uncertainty minimization (order)—at the expense of openness and lingering uncertainty (change). We show that the approach offers crucial resources to account for the open-ended, free and playful behaviour inherent in aesthetic experiences. The upshot is a promising but deflationary approach, both philosophically informed and psychologically sound, that opens new empirical avenues for understanding our aesthetic encounters. -/- This article is part of the theme issue ‘Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives’. (shrink)

Schiller says that “it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.” Here I attempt to defend a claim in the same spirit as Schiller’s but by different means. My thesis is that a person’s autonomous agency depends on their adopting an aesthetic identity. To act, we need to don contingent features of agency, things that structure our practical thought and explain what we do in very general terms but are neither universal nor necessary features of agency (...) as such. Without these things, the question of what to do for any individual would be underdetermined. The problem is that adopting such a contingent form of agency amounts to a restriction on what we can do, and so it is a prima facie threat to our autonomy. I will argue that one way, and indeed the only way, of meeting this challenge lies in aesthetic experience. Granting our capacity for aesthetic pleasure the authority to determine the particularities of our agency is compatible with autonomy because doing so means identifying with one’s capacity for pleasure in free and creative activity. Doing this allows us to be both particular sorts of agents and creatures regulated by the universalizing demands of reason. (shrink)

What is the value of intellectual playfulness? Traditional characterizations of the ideal thinker often leave out playfulness; the ideal inquirer is supposed to be sober, careful, and conscientiousness. But elsewhere we find another ideal: the laughing sage, the playful thinker. These are models of intellectual playfulness. Intellectual playfulness, I suggest, is the disposition to try out alternate belief systems for fun – to try on radically different perspectives for the sheer pleasure of it. But what would the cog-nitive value be (...) of such playfulness? I suggest that intellectual playfulness function as, at the very least, a kind of intellectual insurance policy against epistemic traps. An epistemic trap is a belief system that re-directs good-faith inquiry to bad results. Am epistemic trap manipulates background beliefs to fend off contrary evidence. For example, a conspiracy theory might include a set of beliefs about how the mainstream media has been taken over by some vicious cabal. Normal epistemic attempts will be captured by a well-wrought epistemic trap, because normal attempts at inquiry are guided by these background beliefs -- which set what counts as a plausible path to explore, and what is implausible or beyond the pale. And a clever epistemic trap will manipulate those background beliefs for ill effect. Intellectual playfulness, on the other hand, isn’t motivated by an epistemic interest in the truth, but in the sheer pleasure of intellectual exploration. Since intellectual playfulness isn’t oriented towards the truth, it won’t be constrained by an agent’s background beliefs – it won’t, for example, prefer to investigate apparently more plausible pathways. Intellectual playfulness offers an opportunity to escape from epistemic traps. But intellectual playfulness has its own limitations. It will only drive us to explore belief systems when that exploration is fun. What we need is an array of differently-motivated exploratory tendencies – empathy, curiosity, playfulness – each of which will each cover for the others’ limitations. (shrink)

Discussions of aesthetic reasons and normativity are becoming increasingly popular. This piece outlines six basic questions about aesthetic reasons, normativity, and value and discusses the space of possible answers to these questions. I divide the terrain into two groups of three questions each. First are questions about the shape of aesthetic reasons: what they favour, how strong they are, and where they come from. Second are relational questions about how aesthetic reasons fit into the wider normative landscape: whether they are (...) distinctive, what their normative status is, and how they interact with each other and with non-aesthetic reasons. This piece aims to provide a taxonomy to clarify and organise the burgeoning literature and to make a few concrete suggestions for avenues of future research. (shrink)

Our paradigms of aesthetic value condition the philosophical questions we pose and hope to answer about it. Theories of aesthetic value are typically individualistic, in the sense that the paradigms they are designed to capture, and the questions to which they are offered as answers, center the individual’s engagement with aesthetic value. Here I offer some considerations that suggest that such individualism is a mistake and sketch a communitarian way of posing and answering questions about the nature of aesthetic value.

Are there aesthetic obligations, and what would account for their binding force if so? I first develop a general, domain‐neutral notion of obligation, then critically discuss six arguments offered for and against the existence of aesthetic obligations. The most serious challenge is that all aesthetic obligations are ultimately grounded in moral norms, and I survey the prospects for this challenge alongside three non‐moral views about the source of aesthetic obligations: individual practical identity, social practices, and aesthetic value primitivism. I conclude (...) by raising questions for further work in this area. (shrink)

Nature aesthetics is concerned with four core questions: What is a natural environment? What is relevant, psychologically speaking, to the aesthetic appreciation of natural environments? How ought we to aesthetically appreciate natural environments? What is the relationship between nature aesthetics and environmental ethics? In this essay, I first address in Section 2 whether theorizing about nature aesthetics is possible by challenging the non‐aesthetics view, according to which aesthetic appreciation of nature is not possible, and the relativity view, according to which (...) aesthetic appreciation of nature is possible, but it is an anything goes affair. In Section 3, I outline the core arguments for scientific cognitivism and provide objections to those arguments, making room for alternative views. In Section 4, I outline the distinction between cognitivism and non‐cognitivism and discuss the benefits of the engagement view. In Section 5, I outline the sympathetic imagination view of nature aesthetics. In Section 6, I discuss the emotions view. In Section 7, after summarizing the lessons learned from these debates, I argue for a new view— Enacting Nature's Value— which proposes that we need to rethink nature aesthetics in terms of an enactivist account of aesthetic agency according to which the aesthetic appreciation of nature is a skilled action. In Section 8, I close by considering four future directions for nature aesthetics in the second generation of inquiry. (shrink)

Most people are in agreement that guilty pleasures exist, and that we feel them at some point in our life. In my masters thesis I am going to try and answer why guilty pleasure exists and if it should exist. I am going to do this by exploring three different types of situations where our aesthetic tastes may not align with what we think is correct to like. I will call these situations the self theory, the social theory and the (...) moral theory. I will discuss each one in turn and suggest reasons for and against them, ultimately concluding that the moral theory is the only theory that gives good reasons to think that guilty pleasure is justified. (shrink)

Friedrich Schiller’s notion of moral virtue includes self-determination through practical rationality as well as sensual self-determination through the pursuit of aesthetic value, i.e., through beauty. This paper surveys conceptual assumptions behind Schiller’s notions of moral and aesthetic perfections that allow him to ground both, moral virtue and beauty on conceptions of freedom. While Schiller’s notions of grace and dignity describe relations between the aesthetic and the moral aspects of certain determining actions, the ‘aesthetic condition’ conceptualises human beings from the perspective (...) of aesthetic self-determinability. Schiller thereby provides a normative aesthetic standard that not only affects the moral nature of our motives and actions, but also of what we, as human beings, want to and should be conceived of in the first place. As I argue in this paper, considering this aesthetic self-determinability from a moral perspective results in an aesthetic constitution of moral virtue, which in turn justifies aesthetic obligations. Schiller thereby merges the perfections of the two normative domains for an extended anthropological conception of aesthetically infused notion of moral virtue while assuring the conceptual autonomy of each normative domain. Giving aesthetic demands a practical normative role by partly constituting moral virtue and thereby still maintain their aesthetic normative source is a move that opens up many resources for current research on the interactions between various normative demands, such as aesthetic reasons for moral or legal judgements and action, aesthetic obligations or weighing varying sources and elements of normative authority and hegemony against each other. (shrink)

This paper examines the iconic conception of aesthetic education in the work of Friedrich Schiller, with the aim of elucidating Schiller’s unique innovation of this notion in understanding i) the relationship between aesthetic and ethical value and ii) the transformative possibilities within a collective, social dimension of aesthetic experience. The paper provides an overview of the Kantian origins of Schiller’s aesthetic programme (Section 1). It then considers Schiller’s critique of the perceived failings of the Kantian and Enlightenment republican models of (...) ethical value and political emancipation (Section 2) before turning to his positive alternative aesthetic programme (Section 3). The paper concludes (Section 4) with some evaluation and reflection on Schiller’s original contributions. (shrink)

This article outlines arguments in Schiller's major philosophical works, including his writings on tragedy, "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man" and "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry.".