Aesthetic preferences and practices vary widely between individuals and between cultures. How should aesthetics proceed if we take this fact of aesthetic diversity, rather than the presumption of aesthetic universality, as our starting point? How should we theorize the cultural origins and cultural basis of aesthetic diversity? How should we think about the value and normativity of aesthetic diversity? In an effort to model what the turn toward diversity might look like in aesthetic inquiry, each author defends a different account (...) of aesthetic diversity, and they engage in a collective dialogue about these issues. (shrink)

According to the scientific image, aesthetic experience is constituted by private reverie or mindless gratification of some kind. This image fails to fully acknowledge the theoretical and hence cultural aspect of perception, which includes aesthetic experience. This chapter reframes aesthetic reflective judgment in terms of perceptual processes (section 2); intentional pleasure (section 3); non-perceptually represented perceptual properties (section 4); and intersubjectivity (section 5). By clarifying the relevant terms, the liberal naturalist account of the sublime provides the link between the sublime (...) and moral motivation (section 6). (shrink)

The article’s aim is to clear the ground for the idea of aesthetic archaeology as an aesthetic analysis of remote artifacts divorced from aesthetic criticism. On the example of controversies surrounding the early Cycladic figures, it discusses an anxiety motivating the rejection of aesthetic inquiry in archaeology, namely, the anxiety about the heuristic reliability of one’s aesthetic instincts vis-à-vis remote artifacts. It introduces the claim that establishing an aesthetic mandate of a remote artifact should in the first place be part (...) of a quest after the norms of engagement an artifact’s kind signaled to the intended audience by its appearance. Rather than advocating for a new subdiscipline, the concept of aesthetic archaeology serves to bring into theoretical focus an aesthetic engagement with an artifact’s appearance under circumstances that rule out any acquired competence in distinguishing its aesthetic mandate perceptually—and thus rule out any aesthetic expertise. (shrink)

Bence Nanay, in Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception, and Murray Smith, in Film, Art, and the Third Culture, have given us a pair of rich and interesting works about the relationships between aesthetics and the sciences of mind. Nanay’s work focuses on perception and attention, while Smith’s addresses the relations among experiential, psychological, and neuroscientific understandings of a wide range of aesthetically relevant phenomena, particularly as they occur in film. These books make a valuable contribution to a project that remains (...) fledgling: that of taking seriously the relevance of the sciences to our conceptions and explanations of experiential phenomena in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. I will focus on a specific issue from each of these works. Nanay offers an account of aesthetic experience that ties it closely to the concepts of focused and distributed attention that are invoked in the sciences of perception. While I agree with Nanay that attention should play a central role in accounts of aesthetic experience, I raise questions about his specific account of the relationship. With Smith, we zoom out to a broader issue, that of the mutual explanatory relationships among phenomenological, functional/cognitive, and neurophysiological observations in our aesthetic theorizing. Smith makes a strong claim that all three of these levels are essential and irreducible, and none is subsidiary to the others. I argue that given the current state of the science, we should not regard neurophysiological observations as being on a par with observations at the other two levels. I also raise some doubts about the prospect of neurophysiological data making an independent contribution to aesthetic theorizing, even once the science is far more advanced. (shrink)