We offer a new answer to the paradox of tragedy. We explain part of the appeal of tragic art in terms of its acknowledgement of sad aspects of life and offer a tentative explanation of why acknowledgement is a source of pleasure.

[Final version in Philosophical Papers, 2000] Much has been made over the past few decades of two related problems in aesthetics. First, the "feeling fiction problem," as I will call it, asks: is it rational to be moved by what happens to fictional characters? How can we care about what happens to people who we know are not real?[i] Second, the so-called "paradox of tragedy" is embodied in the question: Why or how is it that we take pleasure in artworks (...) which are clearly designed to cause in us such feelings as sadness and fear?[ii] Various solutions to these puzzles have been proposed, but my primary aim is neither to offer a novel solution nor to summarize and critique most of the alternatives.[iii] My focus instead will be on the issue of consciousness and, more specifically, to view these problems from the point of the view of the so-called "higher-order thought theory of consciousness" . Although some work on these puzzles have raised important questions about the nature of consciousness and "aesthetic experience," no attempt has yet been made to examine them in light of a specific theory. (shrink)

While there is hardly an aspect of Hume’s work that has not produced controversy of one sort or another, deciphering and evaluating his views on aesthetics involves overcoming interpretive barriers of a particular sort. In addition to what is generally taken as the anachronistic attribution of “aesthetic theories” to any thinker of the eighteenth century, Hume presents the added difficulty that unlike the other founding-fathers of modern philosophical aesthetics, he produced no systematic work on the subject, and certainly nothing comparable (...) to his efforts in epistemology, morals, politics, history, and religion. Even interpreting Hume’s most definitive expression of his views on aesthetic questions—the famous essay “Of the Standard of Taste”—is fraught with difficulties and, as the diversity of views on the piece demonstrates, only the most confident reader would take it as an unambiguous statement of Hume’s position. (shrink)