Control is typically accepted as a necessary condition for moral responsibility. Thus, humans are morally responsible for their actions only if we can realise the right kind of control. Are there good reasons to think that humans can psychologically realise control? This paper is an attempt to address this question by establishing choice and agenthood as separate but interconnected aspects of control. I consider two challenges to the claim that humans can realise the kind of control required for moral responsibility. (...) First, an empirical challenge from cognitive neuroscience provides a familiar way to argue against the realisation of the choice aspect by human psychology. Second, a more formidable conceptual challenge to the aspect of agenthood presents us with scepticism about the kind of explanations that psychology can provide. The second challenge suggests that, in psychological accounts of choice, the agent disappears. Drawing on recent empirical models of cognitive control and philosophical accounts of agency, I conclude that the psychological explanation of choice is consistent with the aspect of agenthood being realised by human psychology. (shrink)

Per il dialeteismo ci sono contraddizioni vere. Questa concezione filosofica ha assunto una forma chiara e definita a partire dal lavoro del filosofo e logico Graham Priest – uno dei suoi padri fondatori, nonché uno dei suoi più strenui difensori. Questo libro intende portare il dialeteismo all’attenzione di un ampio pubblico, che non sia solo quello degli addetti ai lavori. Il volume è suddiviso in due parti. La prima include le cinque lezioni su "Dialeteismo e storia della filosofia" tenute da (...) Priest e Filippo Casati a Padova nel 2016, in occasione del Corso di Eccellenza per il dottorato in filosofia dell’Università di Padova. La seconda contiene quattro contributi sul dialeteismo di autori italiani. (shrink)

Logical abductivism is the epistemic view about logic according to which logical theories are justified by abduction (or Inference to the Best Explanation), that is on how well they explain the relevant evidence, so that the correct logical theory turns out to be the one that explains it best. Arguably, this view should be equally applied to both deductive and non-deductive logics, abduction included. But while there seems to be nothing wrong in principle in using abduction to determine the correct (...) logical theories of deduction and induction, things might be more complicated regarding logical theories of abduction. We may wonder whether allowing for an abductive justification of a theory of abduction is an epistemically legitimate move, since here circularity casts its shadow and makes the situation darker. This is the issue to which this work is devoted. I will defend that, to be effective, an abductive justification for a theory of abduction calls for a justification of abduction in advance, which we do not yet have. (shrink)

We provide a framework for understanding agnosticism. The framework accounts for the varieties of agnosticism while vindicating the unity of the phenomenon. This combination of unity and plurality is achieved by taking the varieties of agnosticism to be represented by several agnostic stances, all of which share a common core provided by what we call the minimal agnostic attitude. We illustrate the fruitfulness of the framework by showing how it can be applied to several philosophical debates. In particular, several philosophical (...) positions can be aptly conceived of as instances of agnosticism whilst retaining their differences and distinguishing features. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEcumenical Alethic Pluralism is a novel kind of alethic pluralism. It is ecumenical in that it widens the scope of alethic pluralism by allowing for a normatively deflated truth property alongside a variety of normatively robust truth properties. We establish EAP by showing how Wright’s Inflationary Arguments fail in the domain of taste, once a relativist treatment of the metaphysics and epistemology of that domain is endorsed. EAP is highly significant to current debates on the nature of truth insofar as (...) it involves a reconfiguration of the dialectic between deflationists and pluralists. (shrink)

Some philosophers have argued that truth is a norm of judgement and have provided a variety of formulations of this general thesis. In this paper, I shall side with these philosophers and assume that truth is a norm of judgement. What I am primarily interested in here are two core questions concerning the judgement-truth norm: (i) what are the normative relationships between truth and judgement? And (ii) do these relationships vary or are they constant? I argue for a pluralist picture—what (...) I call Normative Alethic Pluralism (NAP)—according to which (i) there is more than one correct judgement-truth norm and (ii) the normative relationships between truth and judgement vary in relation to the subject matter of the judgement. By means of a comparative analysis of disagreement in three areas of the evaluative domain—refined aesthetics, basic taste and morality—I show that there is an important variability in the normative significance of disagreement—I call this the variability conjecture. By presenting a variation of Lynch’s scope problem for alethic monism, I argue that a monistic approach to the normative function of truth is unable to vindicate the conjecture. I then argue that normative alethic pluralism provides us with a promising model to account for it. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy is beginning to pay to problems of linguistic justice the attention that they deserve in today’s heavily interconnected world. However, contemporary philosophy, as a part of today’s world, has problems of linguistic justice of its own which deserve meta-philosophical attention. At least in the philosophical tradition that is mainstream in much of the world today, viz. analytic philosophy, methodological and sociological mechanisms make it the case that the voices of non-native-speaking philosophers are substantially less heard. In this essay, (...) I briefly outline the problems non-native speakers face in contemporary analytic philosophy. I then move on to analysing the possible causes of the current problems. Among these reasons, I argue, is the emphasis given to linguistic style and appearances as signs of clarity, precision and rigour in the treatment of philosophical problems. I argue that the current emphasis on linguistic style in analytic philosophy is not justifiable, in part because it deprives contemporary analytic philosophy of a wider variety of philosophical perspectives. I argue that an important remedy for the emphasis on linguistic appearances within philosophy is to foster greater linguistic diversity. I conclude by presenting and motivating a recent initiative that aims to achieve such a goal. (shrink)

In Truth and Objectivity, Crispin Wright argues that because truth is a distinctively normative property, it cannot be as metaphysically insubstantive as deflationists claim.1 This argument has been taken, together with the scope problem,2 as one of the main motivations for alethic pluralism.3 We offer a reconstruction of Wright’s Inflationary Argument (henceforth IA) aimed at highlighting what are the steps required to establish its inflationary conclusion. We argue that if a certain metaphysical and epistemological view of a given subject matter (...) is accepted, a local counterexample to IA can be constructed. We focus on the domain of basic taste and we develop two variants of a subjectivist and relativist metaphysics and epistemology that seems palatable in that domain. Although we undertake no commitment to this being the right metaphysical cum epistemological package for basic taste, we contend that if the metaphysics and the epistemology of basic taste are understood along these lines, they call for a truth property whose nature is not distinctively normative—contra what IA predicts. This result shows that the success of IA requires certain substantial metaphysical and epistemological principles and that, consequently, a proper assessment of IA cannot avoid taking a stance on the metaphysics and the epistemology of the domain where it is claimed to be successful. Although we conjecture that IA might succeed in other domains, in this paper we don’t take a stand on this issue. We conclude by briefly discussing the significance of this result for the debate on alethic pluralism. (shrink)

Some time ago, the philosopher Luciano Floridi suggested that Western philosophy, and the mainstream contemporary approach to it traditionally called ‘analytic philosophy’, is in dire need of a reboot. The concern was that the discipline might be in a period of decadence. Analytic philosophy would be benefited by greater internationalization, wider and more transparent decision-making, and the reduction (as much as possible) of conflicts of interest as well as of its current habit of hiring and providing publication opportunities on the (...) basis of contacts, networking, and academic pedigree. If we are right, then we need a reconditioning of the institutional framework of analytic philosophy that adjusts it to the current global and interconnected world. (shrink)

Can someone who suspends judgement about a certain proposition <p> be in a relational state of disagreement with someone who believes <p> as well as with some- one who disbelieves <p>? This paper argues for an af- firmative answer. It develops an account of the notions of suspended judgement and disagreement that explains how and why the suspender is in a relational state of disagreement with both the believer and the disbeliever about the very same proposition <p>. More specifically, the (...) paper first provides a characterisation of the norma- tive profile associated with the state of suspended judge- ment in terms of the set of normative commitments that it engenders in the context of inquiry. It then provides a characterisation of the notion of disagreement in terms the incompatibility between the sets of normative com- mitments characteristic of the three states in question— belief, disbelief, and suspension. (shrink)

In recent years, increasing attention has been devoted to the underrepresentation, exclusion or outright discrimination experienced by women and members of other visible minority groups in academic philosophy. Much of this debate has focused on the state of contemporary Anglophone philosophy, which is dominated by the tradition of analytic philosophy. Moreover, there is growing interest in academia and society more generally for issues revolving around linguistic justice and linguistic discrimination (sometimes called ‘linguicism’ or ‘languagism’) (see e.g. Van Parijs 2011). Globalization (...) and the increasing adoption of English as global linguistic vehicle or lingua franca push these issues at the forefront of much of the world’s attention. The convergence of these two trends suggests the appropriateness of an analysis of the condition of non-native speakers of English in analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Assessment relativism, as developed by John MacFarlane, is the view that the truth of our claims involving a variety of English expressions—‘tasty’, ‘knows’, ‘tomorrow’, ‘might’, and ‘ought’—is relative not only to aspects of the context of their production but also to aspects of the context in which they are assessed. Assessment relativism is thus a form of truth relativism which is offered as a new way of understanding perspectival thought and talk. In this article, I present the main theses of (...) assessment relativism, focusing in particular on highlighting the points of commonality and contrast with other forms of truth relativism. I then offer some critical remarks concerning the motivation of assessment relativism in relation to matters of taste. (shrink)

A series of recent experimental studies have cast doubt on the existence of a traditional tension that aestheticians have noted in our aesthetic judgments and practices, viz. the problem of taste. The existence of the problem has been acknowledged since Hume and Kant, though not enough has been done to analyse it in depth. In this paper, we remedy this by proposing six possible conceptualizations of it. Drawing on our analysis of the problem of taste, we argue that the experimental (...) results in question are not a real challenge to its existence. By contrast, they provide empirical evidence in its support. (shrink)

This is one more edition of Voltaire's "Candide", meant to highlight the wealth of philosophical and theological discussions hidden behind the apparently innocent veil of the most renowned fable of modernity. The rather extended apparatus accordingly consists of a series of short chapters by Filippo Bruni on the Enlightenment and Metaphysics, and in more detail, on theology, Free choice, the problem of evil, and happiness in an imperfect world and another by Sergio Cremaschi on the Enlightenment and morality, and (...) in more detail on moral universalism, religion without metaphysics, toleration, and pacifism. -/- Table of contents I. Before the text A trick for priests A scandalous book Garden with view -/- II. Text Candide or optimism -/- III. Context Biography 1. The seven years war 2. Calvinists and Socinians 3. Jiansenists and Gesuits 4. Marranos and inquisitors 5. Conquistadores and slave-traders 6. Paraguay under the Jesuits -/- IV. Co-text 1. Enlightenment and Metaphysics 1.1. Theology 1.2. Free choice 1.3. The problem of evil 1.4. Being happy in an imperfect world -/- 2. Enlightenment and morality 2.1. Universal morality 2.2. Religion without Metaphysics 2.3. Toleration 2.4. Pacifism -/- 3. Enlightenment and the images of other places 3.1. The image of Eldorado 3.2. The image of Paraguay 3.3 The image of the Islamic world 3.4. The image of the Jew -/- 4. The conte philosophique -/- Bibliography Lexicon Index of names and concepts -/- V. Reader’s guide. (shrink)

In Savoring Disgust, Carolyn Korsmeyer argues that disgust is peculiar amongst emotions, for it does not need any of the standard solutions to the so-called paradox of fiction. I argue that Korsmeyer’s arguments in support of the peculiarity of disgust with respect to the paradox of fiction are not successful.

We offer a critical survey of the most discussed accounts of epistemic peer disagreement that are found in the recent literature. We also sketch an alternative approach in line with a pluralist understanding of epistemic rationality.

In Propelled, Elpidorou persuasively argues that the three prima facie undesirable conditions of boredom, frustration and anticipation are, in fact, importantly valuable to human life. His method is an interesting combination of existentialist explorations and reporting of cognitive science research, all written in a style more friendly to the analytic-philosophical tradition. However, I argue, the book’s precision and depth of philosophical analysis have some limitations. This is so in two main respects: first, in the relative lack of discussion of important (...) philosophical antecedents, and secondly, in the relative lack of critical engagement with some of the empirical literature the book discusses. (shrink)

Noël Carroll’s influence on the contemporary debate on the horror genre is hard to overestimate. His work on the topic is often celebrated as one of the best instances of interdisciplinary dialogue between film studies and philosophy of art. It has provided the foundations for the contemporary study of horror in art. Yet, for all the critical attention that his views on horror have attracted over the years, little scrutiny has been given to the nature itself of the emotion of (...) horror in the genre. This article offers a critical understanding of the nature of the emotion of horror for Carroll, with a view to informing future investigations into the nature of horror in film (and beyond). (shrink)

The pragmatist tradition in philosophy has left a sound legacy in many contemporary research fields. John Dewey’s continuist and emergentist approach to the nature-or-nurture problem in relation to the individual human mind has been regained lately in evolutionist psychology and related disciplines. For Dewey, language plays a fundamental role in creating and maintaining this continuity between the individual mind and the social and physical environment humans inhabit. The present article will focus on a few contemporary lines of research that identify (...) language as the ‘glue’ that bonds each individual to one another and to society, with a decisive impact on the development of one’s own mind. (shrink)

Inspired by american pragmatism and Hans Joas' proposal of an affirmative genealogy, I argue in this paper that a genealogical inquiry (both on the biografical and on the historical level) can explain what motivates individuals to moral agency better than Kantian moral philosophy, without renouncing an historically-informed conception of universal moral values.

Potentialities of attention and distraction with respect to images are critically reprised by Neapolitan artist Domenico Antonio Mancini. In Landscapes (2019), Google Street View addresses painted on canvases take the place of outlying areas of Italian cities, and of canonical oil ‘vedute’ paintings, obliging the viewer to switch from aesthetic absorption to a multitasking, reflexive attention enabled by the tools of mobile devices and the operative agency between the displayed and depicted images. Attracted by the ephemeral, geo-localized vistas displayed on (...) their smartphones, spectator-users must deal with the dynamis of the on-line GSV images: rhetorical and predictable, though, at the same time, and perhaps unintentionally, serendipitous and figural. (shrink)

Philosophy’s place, at the intersection of the scientific and humanities disciplines, makes it an interesting test case for the role of English and other languages and cultures in our contemporary knowledge economy. The humanities’ attention to the richness of the world’s languages and cultures is in tension with the science’s essentially cosmopolitan project. This tension is perhaps especially evident in ‘analytic’ or ‘Anglo-American’ philosophy. Despite complementarity in earlier stages of the discipline, the humanities and scientific tendencies are now clashing with (...) undesirable results. This is in an important part due to analytic philosophy’s underexamined focus on a single vehicular language. One symptom of this malaise is that the voices of non-native-speaking philosophers are significantly less heard than those of native speakers. Especially problematic is, I argue, the current emphasis given to aesthetic considerations, and in particular linguistic form or style, as a sign of scientific rigour in the analysis of philosophical problems. I discuss this emphasis critically, arguing that it is not justifiable, in part because it deprives contemporary analytic philosophy of a wider variety of philosophical perspectives arising from different languages and cultures. I conclude by briefly presenting a recent attempt to make contemporary philosophy more linguistically inclusive. (shrink)

In this book, we interpret post-truth as a multifaceted phenomenon which involves fake news, emotion-driven rhetoric (vs fact-driven discussion), credulism in the social-media, conspiracy theories and scientific denialism. We develop three models intended to represent the multifaceted nature of post-truth in terms of deviated forms of enquiry – which we label “post-enquiries”. The first form of post-enquiry posits the existence of alternative facts; the second prioritizes emotions over facts; the third limits the scope of the norms of enquiry. We elaborate (...) on the third model in relation to scientific denialism and we apply it to analyse the case of flat-earthism. (shrink)

Fish Night, an episode of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS (S01E12, 2019) based on a 1982 short story by Joe R. Lansdale, can be interpreted as an allegory of the impossibility of immersive experience: if real, it is deadly, because the images are no longer such or ghosts but living beings present in a shared environmental habitat, acting with but also against the subject, in turn no longer a spectator. Comparing the story and film, and ancient ekphrastic literature, I discuss, in (...) a trans-medial imaginary genealogical perspective, the symptoms of this cultural topos and of the regressive desire for immersion and for transparent immediacy that shapes and drives it, dwelling in particular on the ambivalent phenomenological and ontological relations between living bodies, pictures and media as deep time-bending. (shrink)

The study of the arts in philosophy has often concentrated on the role that emotions (and affective responses more generally) play in art’s creation and value. Philosophical theories of art have sometimes even defined art in terms of its capacity to elicit or express emotions. Philosophers have debated such questions as what it is to express an emotion in art; whether emotions form part of the value of an artwork; whether the emotions involved in art appreciation are of the same (...) kind as those that we experience in real life, or of a different, even sui generis kind (i.e., aesthetic emotions); whether it is rational or appropriate to experience emotions in response to art; and what value, if any, there is in art that evokes unpleasant emotions. Although the focus here will be on what, to a first approximation, can be characterized as the “Western mainstream philosophical tradition,” discussion of the role of emotions in art can also be found in different approaches and traditions of thought: from Indian philosophy to cognitive science, to so-called Continental philosophy. (shrink)

“Art”—what is it? What sort of entities are artworks? “Art”—when is it? Normally, when we visit an art exhibition, when we listen to a concert or when we look at a performing art in a setting, we use to read the titles, the tags or something textual, a threshold not crafted by the author, about the exposed or executed artworks in order to grasp their subject, style, history, and author. But: how does a title, a non-fiction depiction or a pointing, (...) and different ways of para-textual activation, entitle and unable us to such an operation and to live an aesthetic relation? This issue of “Aisthesis” explores the conditions under which it could be useful to distinguish between aesthetic objects and artworks–visual, musical, literary, performing arts– and to admit that the existence of the latter depends on a marginal and basic component of them: tags. The issue contains articles by Jerrold Levinson, Bernard Sève, Filippo Focosi, Alberto Voltolini, Giulia Alberti, Pietro Kobau, Jean-Pierre Cometti, Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel, Filippo Fimiani, Bertrand Rougé, Leardo Botti, Michel Déguy, Jean-Marie Klinkenberg, Micla Petrelli, Andrea Olivieri, Alessandro Ottaviani. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the theme of natural rights, as it emerges from the works of Alasdair MacIntyre. In "After Virtue" he argues that «there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns», but in later works he endorsed a thomistic view on natural law, which is compatible with the acknowledgment of universal human rights. MacIntyre’s writings contain the premises for an ontological foundation of natural rights, despite his rejection of any (...) formulation of them. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to recall Frank Jackson's 1982 knowledge argument and some prominent objections that were brought against it. Is there a new path we can take in order to bring something new to the table? Is the debate on the argument and its powerful conclusion over?

It has been recently argued, contrary to the received eighteenth-century view, that disgust is compatible with aesthetic pleasure. According to such arguments, what allows this compatibility is the interest that art appreciators sometimes bestow on the cognitive content of disgust. On this view, the most interesting aspect of this cognitive content is identified in meanings connected with human mortality. The aim of this paper is to show that these arguments are unsuccessful.

The contemporary debate around consciousness presents us (and often leads us to embrace) a specific current of thought: physicalism, which states that everything in our reality is physical1. In this paper I want to introduce the main points of the opposite view, dualism, according to which there are two different realms of reality: the mental and the physical one. In the introduction I give the main idea and sketch the general intuition behind dualism. In Section 1 I present substance dualism (...) and its more refined version, which is interactionism. In sub-section 1.1 I describe property dualism, which is the mainstream form of dualism adopted nowadays. In sub-sections 1.1.2 and 1.1.3 are proposed two variations of property dualism: epiphenomenalism and panpsychism. Finally, in Section 2 and its two sub-sections (2.1 and 2.2.) I recall Frank Jackson’s famous 1982 thought experiment and two classical objections to it, which are the Ability Hypothesis and the phenomenal concept strategy one. I conclude with a short reflection if we were to take under consideration the acceptance of dualism as an explanation of consciousness and its nature. PS: there's a mistake at page 12, as there's a note in the middle of the page that is not supposed to be there. (shrink)

According to the so-called transparency thesis, what is disgusting in nature cannot but be disgusting in art. This paper critically discusses the arguments that have been put forward in favour of the transparency thesis, starting with Korsmeyer's (2011) sensory view of disgust. As an alternative, it offers an account of the relationship between disgust and representation that explains, at least in part, whatever truth there is in the transparency thesis. Such an account appeals to a distinction between object-centric and situation-centric (...) emotions. (shrink)

This thesis engages with three topics and the relationships between them: (i) the phenomenon of disagreement (paradigmatically, where one person makes a claim and another denies it); (ii) the normative character of disagreements (the issue of whether, and in what sense, one of the parties is “at fault” for believing something that’s untrue); (iii) the issue of which theory of what truth is can best accommodate the norms relating belief and truth. People disagree about all sorts of things: about whether (...) climate is changing, death penalty is wrong, sushi is delicious, or Louis C.K. is funny. However, even focusing on disagreements in the evaluative domain (e.g., taste, moral and comedic), where people have the intuition that there is ‘no fact of the matter’ about who is right, there are significant differences that require explanation. For instance, disagreement about taste is generally perceived as shallow. People accept to disagree and live comfortably with that fact. By contrast, moral disagreement is perceived as deep and sometimes hard to tolerate. Comedic disagreement is similar to taste. However, it may involve an element of ‘intellectual snobbery’ that is absent in taste disagreement. The immediate questions are whether these contrasts allow of precise characterization and what is responsible for them. I argue that, once a case is made for the truth-aptness of judgments in these areas, the contrast can be explained in terms of variable normative function of truth – as exerting a lightweight normative constraint in the domain of taste and a stricter constraint in the moral domain. In particular I claim that while truth in the moral domain exerts a sui generis deontic control, this normative feature of truth is silent in both the taste and the comedic domains. This leads me to investigate how to conceive of truth in the light of normative variability. I argue that an amended version of deflationism – minimally inflated deflationism – can account for the normative variability of truth. (shrink)

En el verano de 1947, Yves Klein, Claude Pascal, Armand Fernández, sentados en la playa de Niza: contemplan el mar y el cielo azul, no hacen nada, y hacen declaraciones sobre el arte que llegará, sobre el Arte y el Gran Estilo del Futuro. A partir de ese momento, y de esas palabras, cada una de sus vidas cambia radicalmente: se convertirá en una vida nueva, una vida de artista sin obras, hecha solo de palabras, narraciones, gestos. En ese episodio, (...) nace el Nouveau Realisme y la voluntad artística de la superación del problema del arte según el Modernismo y la Action Painting. En ese episodio y en su narración, hecha sucesivamente por los tres jóvenes artistas, se puede localizar el nacimiento del propio y auténtico mito del artista contemporáneo. (shrink)

According to the recent Perceptual Confidence view, perceptual experiences possess not only a representational content, but also a degree of confidence in that content. The motivations for this view are partly phenomenological and partly epistemic. We discuss both the phenomenological and epistemic motivations for the view, and the resulting account of the interface between perceptual experiences and degrees of belief. We conclude that, in their present state of development, orthodox accounts of perceptual experience are still to be favoured over the (...) perceptual confidence view. (shrink)

The transparency thesis for disgust claims that what is disgusting in nature is always also disgusting in art. Versions of the thesis have been endorsed by, among others, Kant, Lessing, Mendelssohn, and, more recently, Arthur Danto, Carolyn Korsmeyer, and Jenefer Robinson. The present paper articulates and discusses different readings of the thesis. It concludes that the transparency thesis is false.

Some philosophers, like Mark Richard and Paul Boghossian, have argued against relativism that it cannot account for the possibility of faultless disagreement. However, I will contend that the objections they moved against relativism do not target its ability to account for the possibility of faultless disagreement per se. Ra- ther, they should be taken to challenge its capacity to account for another element of our folk conception of disagreement in certain areas of discourse—what Cris- pin Wright has dubbed parity. What (...) parity demands is to account for the possibil- ity of coherently appreciating, within a committed perspective, that our oppo- nent’s contrary judgement is somehow on a par with our own judgement. Under- stood in this way, Boghossian’s and Richard’s objections put indeed considerable pressure on relativism—or so I will argue. I will consider John MacFarlane’s at- tempt to resist their objections and I will show that, once their arguments are properly understood as targeting parity, the attempt is not successful. In the last section of the paper I will offer a diagnosis of what is at the heart of the relativist inability to account for parity—namely its assumption of a monistic conception of the normativity of truth. (shrink)

Arthur Danto asserts that Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington really embodies the beauty of his meaning. For him, the Memorial’s “internal beauty” is felt and read because she is built as a text by the rhetoric of enthymeme, as a syllogism based on some tacit knowledges and highly probables communplaces. However, the relationship to the Kant’s pulchritudo adhaerens and philosophy of architecture is not an easy one : Danto rejects as unreadable the self-referent formalism of Greenberg’s Modernism and (...) the environmental non-monumentality of Richard Serra’s Minimalism, but the agency of the Memorial’s shared internal beauty is haunted by an unquestioned spectral logic. Actually, the image embodiment in this work can always exceed the rhetoric of reconnaissance supported by the syllogistic rhetoric and disturb the identity framework of the nord-american community. The beholders’ reflecting shape on the Memorial can become, finally, an unreadable and pathetic index, or be perceived as a figural imprint, ephemeral and troubling ; these disembodied pictures can achieve a medial incarnation – e.g. a Verkörperung – of the underworld. (shrink)

The horror genre (in film, literature etc.) has, for its seemingly paradoxical aesthetic appeal, been the subject of much debate in contemporary, analytic philosophy of art. At the same time, however, the nature of horror as an affective phenomenon has been largely neglected by both aestheticians and philosophers of mind. The standard view of the affective nature of horror in contemporary philosophy follows Noël Carroll in holding that horror in art (or “art-horror”) is an emotion resulting from the combination of (...) disgust and fear. The view is also often accompanied by the view that horror in art is a distinct affect from horror in real life. This raises the question of what the relationship between horror in art and in real life might be. By looking within and outside art and the horror genre, and using a combination of historical, philosophical and empirical arguments, I argue for a departure from such standard views on the affective nature of horror. In alternative, I outline a novel view, on which horror is common to both real life and art and is primarily, typically individuated by a set of (output) affective reactions. (shrink)

Peter Vaudreuil Lamarque is one of the most prominent members of the golden generation of analytic aestheticians born immediately after the Second World War. If, to follow Archilochus via Isaiah Berlin (via Peter Kivy), “a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing,” Lamarque is perhaps the biggest hedgehog of his generation. Lamarque’s “important thing” is not a single idea but, as he would put it, the practice that we call “literature.” His distinctive achievement has been to integrate (...) a number of different ideas into a systematic philosophical account of literature, which also sheds light on art more generally. (shrink)

Mimicry, camouflage, transvestism, chance or cryptic anamorphism, fascination – all ways of changing clothes, habits and habitats in nature as well as in culture, in any symbolic field created by human beings during their history. Art and artification, aestheticization, stylization and beautification are all practices reflecting the need and desire for biological as well as social adaptation, all performances producing functional and fictional frames, boundaries or hierarchies in ordinary life, including the artworld. They can persuade and convince by creating consensus (...) and belief, but they can also lead to a different common sense, a sensorium – a sensorial medium and an aesthetic mediation open to a new world and to new experiences. -/- By investigating mimetism as a fundamental and polymorphic aesthetic performance, this issue of «Aisthesis» aims to rethink the concept, value, and function of mimesis and its media in the context of camouflage, simulation, and dissimulation, where images do not reveal themselves as such, but are to be perceived unambiguously as what they are not – as hieroglyphs or puzzles. In the animal kingdom, as well as in war or in ordinary public life, camouflage consists in taking on the traits, colours, and shapes of a given form or environment. This is a twofold process: on the one hand, by blending two or more shapes in one, the camoufleur seeks to remain hidden and to mislead the others in order to keep a vital secret or an ephemeral whim; on the other hand, however, he/she aims to be recognized by a specific milieu or group, thus betraying a craving for communication and familiarity, as well as a need to convey an agreeable appearance and to share a way of life. (shrink)

periphery looks at you with hate. This phrase in red neon struck the visitors of Landscapes, an exhibition by Domenico Antonio Mancini in the Lia Rumma Gallery in Naples, in 2019. It was not addressed to the public but to the nineteenth-century pictorial views relocated in the last room of the exhibition, as if repainted by the immaterial vandalism of the colored light. The exhibition’s theme was the visibility of contemporary suburban environments, now accessible through Google street view visualizations. Mancini’s (...) non-representational Landscapes are Google addresses, not aesthetically appreciable but pragmatically challenging: the visitor must type on a touch screen to access to the outskirts of Naples, Palermo, Catania, Rome and Milan. The words at the end of the exhibition almost literally replicated a black graffiti drawn on Palazzo Missori in Milan. Are these relocation and remediation just about artification? What happens when, browsing Google street view, I take a close look at that graffiti recalling the political protests during the streets the 1960s? The deictic transitability in space and time of the hypermediated image can activate a fortuitous narrative and an open interpretation by looking back on the present as if it were past. Even a digital landscape is a moral landscape like that of public art for Danto, with a «internal beauty» whose meaning is not already embodied in architectural and artistic media but accessible and shareable through our portable devices. (shrink)

According to Hume, the pleasures that appreciators experience from good tragedies are critically accounted for by the unpleasantness associated with the events that those tragedies represent. This account appeals to a process of conversion of the unpleasant into the pleasant. Two of the more prominent contemporary interpretations of Hume’s conversion process – respectively advanced by Malcolm Budd (1991) and Alex Neill (1998) – put forward two contrasting views of the role of unpleasantness in Hume’s view of the pleasures of tragedy. (...) In the present paper, I argue that, whilst Budd’s and Neill’s readings find some textual support in “Of Tragedy”, neither of them can do complete justice to the text of Hume’s essay. By contrast, I show that what I call a ‘two-stage interpretation’ of Hume’s conversion thesis is consistent with a body of textual evidence that neither Budd’s nor Neill’s interpretations can accommodate in its entirety. (shrink)

What happens to artist and to viewer when painting or sculpture emancipates itself from all physical mediums? What happens to art-world experts and to museum goers and amateurs when the piece of art turns immaterial, becoming indiscernible within its surrounding empty space and within the parergonal apparatus of the exposition site? What type of verbal depiction, of critical understanding and specific knowledge is attempted under these programmed and fabricated conditions? What kind of aesthetic experience–namely embodied and sensitive–is expected when a (...) performative utterance of the artist about his art takes the place of a real piece of artwork seen or perceived, or that may be seen or perceived? For Andy Warhol, «wasted space is any space that has art in it.» In the spring of 1958, in Paris, an artist already well-known among the neo-avantgardes and accredited by the international art-world, shows up empty-handed and presents himself as a painter without paintings in a empty space. In a singular never-wasted space, Yves Klein displays himself as a snob, with an extraordinary showbiz glamour and literally sine-nobilitate, without the traditional marks of artistic manual skills. Against the modernist issues, he writes: «Credit was given to me. The gesture alone was enough. The public had accepted the abstract intention.» What’s the matter with this powerful prestige and its influence on the critic and public? How to understand the public trust in the artist as a producer of an institutional “make-believe” without any objecthood, devoid of any individual artwork presented to the sight or to any other sense? For Modernism and Minimalism, the work of art seems to have an internal coherence, whether formal or expressive, and is thus autonomous from the surrounding world, existing with only the clear opposition to the living space and set as a specialized and situated objection to the enclosing field. Instead, now the object melts into the air and becomes undetectable, confused with the atmosphere of the theory of art and with the stylish and snobbish life of the artist. What type of interpretation is put on regarding this unclassifiable and ambiguous field, simultaneously an-aesthetic and existential, theoretical and sensitive, charismatic and motionless, at same time without a specialized position in the world made by the artist himself? And what kind of embodied experience is performed by the spectatorship? What type of phenomenology and pragmatics of aesthetic relationship is necessary to describe how the body of the beholder absorbs this vacated and boring space via a direct and immediate perception-assimilation? What kind of artistic rhetoric, what kind ontology of art? Until this day, after more than 50 years, Yves Klein’s The Void has not ceased asking these and other questions on aesthetics, philosophy and the history of art. (shrink)

We reply to various arguments by Otavio Bueno and Edward Zalta (‘Object Theory and Modal Meinongianism’) against Modal Meinongianism, including that it presupposes, but cannot maintain, a unique denotation for names of fictional characters, and that it is not generalizable to higher-order objects. We individuate the crucial difference between Modal Meinongianism and Object Theory in the former’s resorting to an apparatus of worlds, possible and impossible, for the representational purposes for which the latter resorts to a distinction between two kinds (...) of predication, exemplification and encoding. We show that encoding has fewer forerunners in the history of philosophy than Bueno and Zalta want, and that there’s a reason why the notion has been found baffling by some. (shrink)

Inspired by the text entitled The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (2004) of Hilary Putnam, the volume focuses on the theory and practice of knowledge, but one can legitimately extend it to other fields, most especially in aesthetics. Certain observable features in the fields of aesthetics, practice and artistic creation show that old evaluation criteria may now be obsolete. This is because upon further consideration, the definition of value remains opaque : should the artwork be judged according (...) to its moral value, its market value, or its formal value ? To side with or against the concept of value in art and aesthetics does not preclude a certain number of differences concerning the very nature of what is meant by value. If traditionally the ‘fact’ was the work, taken in all its tangibility, currently the materiality of the object no longer seems to play such a major role. Art is increasingly populated by so-called ‘immaterial’ or ‘ephemeral’ works and is therefore rarely, or badly, quantifiable according to old aesthetic and economic evaluation criteria. The progressively pragmatic contextualization of works within the social space puts forward a new definition of aesthetic value, no longer eternal and ideal, but rather anchored in the sensible and the politico-economic issues of a culturally specific situation. The current changes too support the idea that the question of ‘value’ and its confrontation with the concept of ‘fact’ is urgent. What role do artistic practices and aesthetic theories play ? A role of emancipation, of liberation, escape, or transformation ? Or on the contrary, could art become another means to subject individuals to the status quo ? As can easily be noticed, the question of maintaining or rejecting the dichotomy of facts and values is at the heart of the most pressing issues. (shrink)

Metaphor has often been seen as tightly associated with both aesthetics and cognition, as well as with other aesthetic and cognitive phenomena such as imagination, symbol, allegory, analogy and simile. This article offers a theory of metaphor that accounts for such aesthetic and cognitive associations. The theory is based on a suitably interpreted version of a tool originally developed in an epistemic context, viz. Floridi and Sanders’ method of abstraction.

This work develops a philosophically credible and psychologically realisable account of control that is necessary for moral responsibility. We live, think, and act in an environment of subjective uncertainty and limited information. As a result, our decisions and actions are influenced by factors beyond our control. Our ability to act freely is restricted by uncertainty, ignorance, and luck. Through three articles, I develop a naturalistic theory of control for action as a process of error minimisation that extends over time. Thus (...) conceived, control can serve to minimise the influence of luck on action and enable freedom in uncertainty. -/- In Article 1, Thor Grünbaum and I argue for a psychologically plausible account of the kind of control that is necessary for moral responsibility. We begin by establishing the relationship between agentive contribution and responsibility-level control. One way to determine whether one the right kind and degree of control to be morally responsible is to track one’s degree of contribution to an action. However, a psychologically plausible account of control in terms of agentive contribution may seem to contradict the types of functional-mechanistic explanations used in cognitive science. In cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, personal-level capacities are explained by a set of sub-personal mechanisms. Often, such explanations leave no room for a contribution by the agent. By integrating insights from theories of cognitive control and incorporating them into a philosophical account of intentions, we propose a way of thinking about the distribution of cognitive control resources as something the agent does. -/- Article 2 argues that a classic argument concerning luck, originally aimed at libertarianism, generalises beyond any specific theory of free will, and regardless of whether determinism or indeterminism is true. I call this mental luck. Because we all make decisions under conditions of relative uncertainty and limited information, it is possible for an agent to make decisions that are contrary to their own motivation. In such situations, it may be a matter of luck whether the agent makes the right decision. Mentally lucky decisions are not rationally governed by attitudes within the agent's perspective, and thus, may be indistinguishable from unlucky ones. From the perspective of the agent, such decisions may resemble the outcome of a lottery. Therefore, mental luck poses a challenge to most prominent theories of free action and moral responsibility. -/- Finally, article 3 engages with the issue of resultant luck, namely luck in how things turn out. Resultant luck raises a challenge for theories of moral responsibility because its existence suggests that one may be responsible for factors beyond one’s control. Prominent responses to resultant luck led to a choice between internalism and scepticism. I argue that familiar cases of resultant luck are based on the assumption that actions are events. Instead, I propose an alternative ontology of action as an ongoing goal-directed process with a many-shots structure. Described this way, cases of resultant luck are not representative of ordinary action. The proposal of action as a many-shots process is consistent with predictive coding, a cognitive architecture which centres around error minimisation. Under this framework, cases of resultant more luck are no longer failures of action, but rather anticipated errors to be settled within the ordinary process of action. (shrink)