Aesthetic Formalism has fallen on hard times. At best it receives unsympathetic discussion and swift rejection. At worst it is the object of abuse and derision. But I think that there is something to be said for it. In this paper, I shall try to find and secure the truth in formalism. I shall not try to defend formalism against all of the objections to it.1 Instead I shall articulate a moderate formalist view that draws on aesthetic0nonaesthetic determination and Kant’s (...) distinction between free and dependent beauty. I shall examine four central art forms—painting, sculpture, lit-. (shrink)

The paper asks whether gardens may be objects of ‘serious’ (in Ronald Hepburn's sense) and distinctive appreciation. Dismissive attitudes to the possibility of such appreciation, including Hegel's, are rejected, as is the view—Kant's, for example—that garden appreciation is ‘factorizable’ into the modes appropriate for artworks and ‘raw’ nature respectively. That view entails that there is nothing distinctive in garden appreciation. Attention then turns to the idea that it is the representational/symbolic capacities of gardens that render them objects of distinctive appreciation. (...) That idea is criticized, but a related one, appealing to more ‘penumbral’ semantic notions like evocation, is defended. It is argued, in particular, that gardens may distinctively evoke the ‘creative receptivity’, to cite Gabriel Marcel, of human beings. Gardens, more perhaps than any other artworks, vividly testify to the dependence of their makers on what is beyond human artifice and control. (shrink)

In this paper, I lay out a case for why those objects of aesthetic attention which are principally characterized as natural objects should be understood not statically, as existing in merely a three-dimensional fixed state, but as dynamic, as existing in a space-time context, complete with change, movement, and flux. After this, I explain why this is important, how the dynamic nature of natural objects raises a concern for aesthetically evaluating natural objects, and how that concern may be addressed.