Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and Grade Point Averages. We are vulnerable to value capture because of the competitive advantage that such crisp and clear expressions of value have in (...) our private reasoning and our public justification. There is, however, a price. In value capture, we take a central component of our autonomy — our ongoing deliberation over the exact articulation of our values — and we outsource it. And the metrics to which we outsource usually engineered for the interests of some external force, like a large-scale institution’s interest in cross-contextual comprehensibility and quick aggregability. That outsourcing cuts off one of the key benefits to personal deliberation. In value capture, we no longer adjust our values and their articulations in light of own rich experience of the world. Our values should often be carefully tailored to our particular selves or our small-scale communities, but in value capture, we buy our values off the rack. In some cases – like decreasing CO2 emissions – the costs of non-tailored values are outweighed by the benefit of precise collective coordination. In other cases, like in our aesthetic lives, they are not. This suggests that we should want different values suited to different scales. We should want value federalism. Some values are perhaps best pursued at the largest-scale level, others at smaller scales. The problem occurs when we exhibit an excess preference for the largest-scale values – when we consistently let the universal metrics swamp our quieter interests. (shrink)

Aesthetic communities offer us opportunities for collective, communal, and value-disclosing shared aesthetic experiences. This paper develops an account of shared aesthetic experiences and provides an answer to the question of their significance: when they occur within aesthetic communities, their distinctive phenomenology is a powerful resource for creating a sense that our lives are aesthetically meaningful.

The aesthetics of tea, in some practices, seems to focus on appreciating the mental effects of tea — the altered states of mind. Wine aesthetics, on the other hand, seems to actively exclude any inebriative effects. Wine experts are supposed to spit, in order to avoid inebriation when they judge wine. Why? The answer, I suggest, lies deep in several key suppositions in the traditional model of aesthetic experience: that aesthetic experience needs to be accurate of its object, and that (...) it needs to be inseparable from the particular details of its object. But, I argue, that model is not really incompatible with an aesthetics of drugs. The problematic presupposition is that the aesthetics of drugs is either an aesthetics of the world, as experienced while drugged, or an aesthetics of the physical substance itself. The aesthetics of some drugs, such as LSD, will turn out, instead, to be a self-reflective aesthetics — one in which the primary object of appreciation is the alteration of one’s own cognitive faculties. This can be valuable as a humbling aesthetic vision, of one’s own cognitive fragility. But the aesthetics of gastronomical drugs, such as wine and tea, will turn out to be even more complicated. Gastronomical drugs demand that we bridge the inwardly-focused aesthetics of inebriation and an outwardly focused gastronomical aesthetics. They open the door to the possibility of an aesthetic reconciliation between our capacity to get onto the world, and our fears about the fragility of that capacity. (shrink)

This is a reply to commentators in the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport's special issue symposium on GAMES: AGENCY AS ART. I respond to criticisms concerning the value of achievement play and striving play, the transparency and opacity of play, the artistic status of games, and many more.

We can look at paintings, listen to music, dance, play instruments, and watch movies, on our own almost anytime, anywhere. That is, we have effortless, on-demand access to an abundance of private aesthetic experiences. Why, then, do we seek out aesthetic experiences together? Indeed, it is not controversial to claim that listening to music, dancing, and watching films are activities that we do together more so than we do on our own. While the significance of interpersonal aesthetic experiences, and what (...) explains that significance, is not uncharted territory, I claim that more precision regarding the kinds of relations and interactions that modulate and enable different kinds of interpersonal aesthetic experiences is warranted than is offered in extant literature. As such, an enactive approach that not only foregrounds embodiment and intersubjectivity in cognition, but duly explains how variations in them cause variations in cognition, is paramount to my explanation. Here, then, I marshal three ‘varieties’ of interpersonal aesthetic experience that I term aggregative, synchronised, and shared aesthetic experiences. In doing so, I explain what makes them particularly worthwhile, while introducing terminological and explanatory clarity to the literature as a unifying base from which future research can unfold. (shrink)

Current debates in food aesthetics are moving away from a focus on whether food is art, and worries about the subjectivity and objectivity of taste, and towards questions about food's aesthetic properties, the cultural and social significance of food, our modes of aesthetic engagement with food, and issues involving cultural appropriation and the authenticity of dishes.

In his fascinating new book Games: Agency as Art, Nguyen endorses an experiential requirement on aesthetic judgment: apt aesthetic judgment requires phenomenal experience. His own aesthetics of agency captures three phenomenally manifest and aesthetically significant harmonies (and corresponding disharmonies). But his view can be significantly extended to capture much more of the rich texture of human agency. In this discussion, I argue that emotions of agency, patterns of attention, and affordances all can be phenomenally experienced as aspects of agency, and (...) that each has genuine aesthetic significance. (shrink)

What can the philosophy of agency learn from Nguyen’s book on games? The most important lesson concerns, to use Nguyen’s terms, the ‘layered’ structure of our agency and the ‘fluidity’ requ...

This is my reply to commentators in the symposium on my book, GAMES: AGENCY AS ART. The symposium features commentary by Thomas Hurka, Quill Kukla, and Alva Noe, and originally appeared in Analysis 81 (2).

By thinking on my personal (som)aesthetic experience as a would-be jazz saxophonist, I will argue that the relationship between musician and instrument can exemplify the “extended self” thesis in the artistic/aesthetic realm. As can happen with a human partner, a special affective relationship may arise between human being and instrument and, through repeated practice, the instrument can become an indispensable element of the aesthetic habits by virtue of which we interact with the environment, thus becoming part of the (extended) self. (...) As I will suggest, this special bodily and affective relationship is due to the affordances offered by the instrumental partner and to the expressive experiences that this encounter makes possible. This affective relationship is one of the reasons behind the regret we feel for the destruction or loss of artifacts. Thanks to the assiduity of a somaesthetic relationship, it happens that these objects become extensions not only of the body but also of the mind or “soul”. (shrink)

By thinking on my personal (som)aesthetic experience as a would-be jazz saxophonist, I will argue that the relationship between musician and instrument can exemplify the “extended self” thesis in the artistic/aesthetic realm. As can happen with a human partner, a special affective relationship may arise between human being and instrument and, through repeated practice, the instrument can become an indispensable element of the aesthetic habits by virtue of which we interact with the environment, thus becoming part of the (extended) self. (...) As I will suggest, this special bodily and affective relationship is due to the affordances offered by the instrumental partner and to the expressive experiences that this encounter makes possible. This affective relationship is one of the reasons behind the regret we feel for the destruction or loss of artifacts. Thanks to the assiduity of a somaesthetic relationship, it happens that these objects become extensions not only of the body but also of the mind or “soul.”. (shrink)

Can there be improvised recipes? This paper argues that improvised recipes are possible. I call them instantaneous-recipes. They emerge at the same instant where a dish is also prepared. The improvisational freedom of instantaneous-recipes is displayed in the spontaneity of using what is available in terms of ingredients, tools, utensils, and techniques. Similar to what graffiti writers do while tagging – that is, leaving their signatures on – a wall or the side of a train car, in creating their signature (...) dishes, improvisers of the kitchen are forced to adapt on the spot to changing contextual conditions just like a missing or newly available ingredient, a technical failure, or a mistake. Analogously to tags, improvised recipes are formally imperfect: they do not comply with established ones and are often rough, unpolished, broken, and disordered. But their imperfections are not aesthetic flaws, but merits. Imperfectionism in cooking, as I call the view rejecting the idea that only perfect instantiations of pre-existing recipes afford positive aesthetic experiences, is linked with three values: aesthetic, humanistic, and sustainable. By bringing imperfect features within the domain of gastronomic appreciation, instantaneous-recipes broaden the range of our aesthetic palette, while also reminding us of our finitude as humans. By encouraging creative uses of available ingredients and leftovers, improvisation in the kitchen also embodies a more sustainable approach to food waste. (shrink)