<P>While there are many books on the romantics, and many books on Heidegger, there has been no book exploring the connection between the two. Pol Vandevelde’s new study forges this important link. </P> <P>Vandevelde begins by analyzing two models that have addressed the interaction between literature and philosophy: early German romanticism (especially Schlegel and Novalis), and Heidegger’s work with poetry in the 1930s. Both models offer an alternative to the paradigm of mimesis, as exemplified by Aristotle’s and Plato’s discussion of (...) poetry, and both German romanticism and Heidegger owe a deep debt to Plato. The study goes on to defend the view that Heidegger was influenced by romanticism. The author’s project is thus both historical, showing the specificity of the romantic and Heideggerean works, and systematic, defending aspects of their alternative mode of thinking while also pointing to their weaknesses. </P>. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the role of attention in Kant’s aesthetic theory in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. While broadly Kantian aestheticians have defended the claim that there is a distinct way that we attend to objects in aesthetic experience, Kant himself is not usually acknowledged as offering an account of aesthetic attention. On the basis of Kant’s more general account of attention in other texts and his remarks on attention in the Critique of the Power of (...) Judgment, I reconstruct Kant’s account of aesthetic attention. On this account, aesthetic attention is simultaneously directed at the form of an object and at the judging subject’s own mental states as she attends to the object. In the experience of beauty, we specifically attend to the harmonious relation between the faculties of imagination and understanding. (shrink)

On a widely held view in aesthetics, appreciation requires disinterested attention. George Dickie famously criticized a version of this view championed by the aesthetic attitude theorists. I revisit his criticisms and extract an overlooked challenge for accounts that seek to characterize appreciative engagement in terms of distinctive motivation: at minimum, the motivational profile such accounts propose must make a difference to how appreciative episodes unfold over time. I then develop a proposal to meet this challenge by drawing an analogy between (...) how attention is guided in appreciation and how practical action is guided in ‘striving play’—a mode of game play recently foregrounded in the philosophy of games. On the resulting account, appreciation involves an ‘inverted’ motivational structure: the appreciating agent's attention is guided by cognitive goals taken up instrumentally, for the sake of the cognitive activity that results from attending under the guidance of those goals. (shrink)

Richard Stopford, in criticizing my defense of purist restoration, attributes to me and refutes a metaphysical view I do not have concerning the identity and persistence conditions of an art work. I took for granted the ordinary idea of identity as continuity-in-space-and-time-under-a-sortal-concept, such as statue. I argued that Michelangelo’s Pietà remained the same statue after it was disfigured but that the damage was irreparable. By fixing molded prosthetics to the ruined work of art, the Vatican introduced a macaronic element into (...) one’s aesthetic attitude toward the Pietà by making one attend simultaneously, without any visual guidance as to which is which, to parts of the statue that were completed by Michelangelo’s hand and intended to be a work of art and pieces added in the twentieth century for an different purpose, e.g., to make viewing the statue less disconcerting than a recognition of the damage would demand. An integral restoration, in contrast, allows one both to envision the art work as created and to grieve for what has been lost. (shrink)

In philosophy of aesthetics, scholars commonly express a commitment to the premise that there is a distinctive type of judgment that can be meaningfully labeled “aesthetic”, and that these judgments are distinctively different from other types of judgments. We argue that, within an Aristotelian framework, there is no clear avenue for meaningfully differentiating “aesthetic” judgment from other types of judgment, and, as such, we aim to question the assumption that aesthetic judgment does in fact constitute a distinctive kind of judgment (...) that is in need of, or can be subject to, distinctive theorizing. We advance our argument primarily through demonstrating that leading contemporary accounts of aesthetic judgment do not successfully distinguish a type of judgment in that they do not tell us how making an aesthetic judgment differs substantially from judging that 2 + 3 = 5, that football is entertaining, or that today is Tuesday. (shrink)

In recent debates about how we ought to aesthetically appreciate nature, one important argument (the Respect Argument) claims that appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature involves taking nature “on its own terms.” Some object that, while respect morally constrains the actions we take toward certain people or things, aesthetically appreciating nature does not involve action, but only mere contemplation. The Respect Argument therefore fails. In this article, I reply to this objection, arguing that the concept of respect can yield a kind (...) of moral constraint even upon contemplative activities such as aesthetic appreciation. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to argue that what is distinctive about aesthetic experiences has to do with what we do -- not with our perception or evaluation, but with our action and, more precisely, with our interaction with whatever we are aesthetically engaging with. This view goes against the mainstream inasmuch as aesthetic engagement is widely held to be special precisely because it is detached from the sphere of the practical. I argue that taking the interactive nature of (...) aesthetic experiences seriously can help us to understand some of the most important features of aesthetic experiences and the role they play in our life: their normativity, their crucial role in the ways in which the aesthetic domain looms large in our self-image and in the social dimension of aesthetic engagement. (shrink)

The idea that nature is importantly frame-less is an entrenched dogma in much of environmental aesthetics. Although there are powerful arguments that support this position, there are also powerful arguments supporting the view that observers often - or even inevitably - frame, bound, or otherwise confine natural objects in the course of aesthetic regard. Facing these opposing arguments off against each other produces the 'framing paradox': On the one hand, frames seem to be an indispensable condition for the aesthetic experience (...) of anything whatsoever, and on the other hand the aesthetic appreciation of natural environments seems to require the dissolving or penetrating of boundaries of all sorts. To resolve this paradox, we must abandon an overly narrow conception of 'frame' that has generally been assumed throughout the debate and pay closer attention to what various framing devices (in both natural and artifactual settings) do to focus, rather than confine, aesthetic attention. Doing this enables us to make better sense of the way intelligence and imagination cooperate in carrying attention beyond perceptual phenomena. From the perspective that results, rival claims about the framability of nature can be seen as variable markers on an endless scale of aesthetic selectivity. (shrink)

What should we do, aesthetically speaking, and why? Any adequate theory of aesthetic normativity must distinguish reasons internal and external to aesthetic practices. This structural distinction is necessary in order to reconcile our interest in aesthetic correctness with our interest in aesthetic value. I consider three case studies—score compliance in musical performance, the look of a mowed lawn, and literary interpretation—to show that facts about the correct actions to perform and the correct attitudes to have are explained by norms internal (...) to a practice. Practice-internal norms, however, cannot settle the distinct question of which practices we have reason to opt into. When it comes to the source of aesthetic normativity—in virtue of what aesthetic value is genuinely reason-giving—I argue that existing accounts, which appeal to pleasure or achievement, are inadequate. The only practice-external aesthetic requirement is a generic one to opt into at least some aesthetic practices. (shrink)

We’ve been led to believe that museums are temples of knowledge. The historical ideal of the European museum has been to improve us morally by educating us about the globe’s myriad different cultures, creative practices, and belief systems. We’re taught that museum spaces are neutral: that they represent the world from an ‘objective’ point of view. But we have been lied to.As art historian Alice Procter shows in this incisive book, Western museums fall devastatingly far from this ideal. They do (...) not merely represent the harms done by colonialist forces; they perpetuate them. Museums tell us stories about their objects on display—many stolen from their original homes—and push narratives which, often subtly, express harmful ideologies about cultures ‘discovered’ in the Age of Imperialism. As viewers, our perception is narrowed and moulded while the voices of the displayed marginalized identities are silenced.Procter takes us on one of her ‘Uncomfortable Art Tours’, guiding us through four types of museum, presenting a selection of objects ranging from a Gweagal Shield to art performances of human zoos, each with their own sobering story. Procter sensitively reveals the histories and meanings behind these pieces, which are often obscured or overlooked, to highlight the imperial and colonial reality of our art collections. Part 1 opens with the ‘Palace’; spaces which functioned as homages to a collector’s taste, often an aristocrat or royal, who displayed their private collections in an attempt to shape the taste of elite audiences. Part 2 takes us to the ‘Classroom’, a didactic space which sees the origin of categorization—taxonomy sinisterly extended to notions of race, pre-empting nineteenth-century eugenics. Part 3 presents the solemn ‘Memorial’ space, a site for remembrance and display of human remains. Part 4 closes with the ‘Playground’, a self-reflexive space of activism and social art, which challenges the museum institution itself. (shrink)

Philosophical analysis of metaphor in the non-linguistic arts has been biased towards what I call the ‘aesthetic metaphor’: metaphors in non-linguistic art are normally understood as being completely formed by the work'sinternalcontent, that is, by its perceptual and aesthetic properties such as its images. I aim to unearth and analyse a neglected type of metaphor also used by the non-linguistic arts: the ‘artistic metaphor’, as I call it. An artistic metaphor is composed by an artwork's internal content, but also by (...) itsexternalcontent, which is provided by the work's artistic properties such as its history. The artistic metaphor has been gestured at but not afforded a considered analysis; I aim to do this. Identifying the artistic metaphor has at least two benefits. It shows how curation plays a role in generating metaphors in artworks, which has been overlooked, and it illuminates a potentially powerful tool to interpret and understand ‘conceptual’ art. (shrink)

This essay deals with the terms “form” and “function” as well as their relationship insofar as they are still used in philosophical and design-theory discourse to determine the aesthetic dimension of designed artefacts, especially of everyday objects, and often also to distinguish them from objects of art. I discuss whether our common understanding of these terms and their relationship is an appropriate instrument for such determinations. What is up for discussion here are not only conceptions of functional beauty with regard (...) to design methodology and the philosophical discourse on aesthetics, in which form and function become thematic, but also basic concepts of philosophical aesthetics itself. It is shown that the philosophical understanding of design aesthetics and the concepts of form and function are determined by profound preliminary decisions that restrict our access to the aesthetic dimension of designed artefacts, and a conceptualisation of an initial change in thinking is proposed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Aesthetic disinterestedness is one of the central concepts in aesthetics, and Jerome Stolnitz, the most prominent theorist of disinterestedness in the 20th century, has claimed that (i) ancient thinkers engagement with this notion was cursory and undeveloped, and consequently, (ii) the emergence of disinterestedness in the 18th century marks the birth of aesthetics as a discipline. In this paper, I use the extant works of Epicurus to show that the ancient philosopher not only had similar concepts, but also motivated (...) them in careful and complex ways. I argue that, in the Epicurean theoretical framework, arts belong to the category of ‘merely natural’ desires, and this classification, combined with what we know of Epicurus’ rejection of art criticism, shows he had carefully worked out reasons supporting the idea that art ought to be approached terminally, rather than instrumentally. Finally, I compare the notion of aesthetic disinterestedness with Epicurus’ views on arts and argue that in many ways the latter are not inferior to the former, and therefore ought to belong to the history of aesthetics. (shrink)