What is the relation between works of fiction and the acquisition of knowledge?

The article pays homage to the leading authority of 20th century Hungarian music aesthetics, József Ujfalussy, by connecting his heritage to more recent research on the problems of musical time and notably to the study pursued by Raymond Monelle. Rather than a perennial invariant, Monelle interpreted musical time as a historically changing phenomenon constituting implicitly the basic levels of musical semantics, as they have developed throughout the Baroque, Classical and Romantic eras. The present study focuses on the last of these (...) paradigms, claiming that the Romantic experience of musical time has dominated both the production and the reception of music culture up to this day. The Romantic musical experience is based on a latent ‘framework contract’ between composition and audience, which drives the meanings attached to the experience of musical temporality. This latent agreement warrants a need for conventional compositional forms and simultaneously the insufficiency thereof. (shrink)

Since the second half of the twentieth century, the influential concept of aesthetic experience has been strongly criticized by powerful voices both in analytic philosophy and in continental theory, sometimes to the point of rejecting its significance for art or even to denying its very existence. Nonetheless, it stubbornly reasserts itself as central to understanding art's meaning and value. Philosophical critique of aesthetic experience takes multiple forms. Theorists seeking a definition of art generally reject aesthetic experience as inadequate for this (...) task because it is both too wide and too narrow. Aesthetic experience surely occurs beyond the limits of art, as in our encounter with natural beauty, but it... (shrink)

When Richard Shusterman burst on the academic scene some decades ago he quickly became the golden boy of aesthetics. Now in his late sixties he is hardly a boy anymore, but possibly a golden oldie. Nevertheless, he is still prone to boyish pranks as can be seen in parts of his new book, The Adventures of the Man in Gold. Paths between Art and Life.

El neopragmatismo norteamericano en la actualidad integra una serie de discusiones que ponen en tela de juicio el carácter fundacionalista de la filosofía. Una de ellas es justamente que al repensar el arte y la estética desde la experiencia se repiensa también el papel de la filosofía actual. El mayor promotor de esta idea es Richard Shusterman quien inspirado por Dewey en este sentido, desarrolla su pensamiento en íntimo diálogo con la tradición continental en una abierta crítica a la estética (...) analítica y a las hermenéuticas universalistas, donde propone de paso la filosofía como forma de vida, la hermenéutica de la comprensión, la legitimidad del arte popular y la somaestética. (shrink)