In some cultures, people tend to believe that it is very important to be sexually exclusive in romantic relationships and idealise monogamous romantic relationships; but there is a tension in this ideal. Sex is generally considered to have value, and usually when we love someone we want to increase the amount of value in their lives, not restrict it without good reason. There is thus a call, not yet adequately responded to by philosophers, for greater clarity in the reasons §why (...) it might be reasonable for a couple to adopt a policy of sexual exclusivity. This article argues that we cannot justify the demand for sexual exclusivity by a need to protect the relationship from the risk of one partner ‘trading-up’, or by appealing to jealousy. However, sexual exclusivity can be intelligible if it supports the romantic relationship and helps to distinguish it from other relationships. Nonetheless, sexual exclusivity ought not to be the hegemonic social norm that it currently is in some societies because this diminishes the potential value it might have and gives the idea of faithfulness the wrong focus. (shrink)

Natasha McKeever argues that prima facie, a friends-with-benefits relationship can be, at the same time, a good friendship. This is because sex is compatible with friendship in that it can complement and potentially even strengthen the three core characteristics of friendship: mutual liking, mutual caring, and mutual sharing. She acknowledges that, by generating uncertainty and having the potential to generate feelings of romantic love, sex does pose risks to friendship. However, she argues that while these risks are significant considerations, (...) they can be mitigated and managed and so do not provide strong reasons against friends-with-benefits relationships. (shrink)

Sexual infidelity is widespread, but it is also widely condemned, yet relatively little philosophical work has been done on what makes it wrong and how wrong it is. In this paper, I argue that sexual infidelity is wrong if it involves breaking a commitment to be sexually exclusive, which has special significance in the relationship. However, it is not necessarily worse than other kinds of infidelity, and the context in which it takes place ought to be considered. I finish the (...) paper by looking at how the hegemonic norm of monogamy makes infidelity both more likely and more difficult to deal with. (shrink)

Harry Frankfurt has a comprehensive and, at times, compelling, account of love, which are outlined in several of his works. However, he does not think that romantic love fits the ideal of love as it ‘includes a number of vividly distracting elements, which do not belong to the essential nature of love as a mode of disinterested concern’. In this paper, I argue that we can, nonetheless, learn some important things about romantic love from his account. Furthermore, I will suggest, (...) conversely, that there is distinct value in romantic love, which derives from the nature of the relationship on which it is based. Frankfurt tries to take agape and reformulate it so that it can also account for love of particular people. Whilst he succeeds, to some extent, in describing parental love, he fails to accurately describe romantic love and friendship, and, moreover, overlooks what is distinctly valuable about them. Although it was not his intention to describe romantic love, by failing to include features such as reciprocity in his account of love, Frankfurt leaves no room for a kind of love that is important and valuable to many people. (shrink)

In this chapter, Natasha McKeever and Luke Brunning consider (sexual) jealousy in romantic life. They argue that jealousy is best understood as an emotional response to the threatened loss of love or attention, to which one feels deserving, because of a rival. Furthermore, the general value of jealousy can be questioned, and jealousy’s instrumental value needs to be balanced against a range of potential harms. They assess two potential ways of managing jealousy (which are not mutually exclusive)—firstly by adopting (...) a policy of monogamy and secondly by engaging in emotional work. Neither of these methods is easy, and neither will solve jealousy altogether, but Brunning and McKeever argue that the second strategy should be taken more seriously. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that we can make sense of moral norms against consensual, adult incest by appealing to the value of familial relationships and the potential for sex to damage them. Viewing sex as unconscionable between family members helps to enable the loving intimacy normally associated with family relationships. Therefore, there is good reason for incest, even when consensual and between adults, to remain taboo. That being said, I argue that there is insufficient legal justification for all consensual, (...) adult incest to be criminalised. I examine four potential arguments in favor of consensual, adult incest being illegal, and conclude that none of them succeeds in justifying a total legal prohibition against it. (shrink)

It is usually taken for granted that romantic relationships will be sexual, but it seems that there is no necessary reason for this, as it is possible for romantic relationships to not include sex. Indeed, sometimes sex is a part of a romantic relationship for only a relatively short period of it. Furthermore, scientific explanations of the link between sex and love don’t seem fully satisfying because they tell us only about the mechanics of sex, rather than its meaning or (...) phenomenology. Therefore, the question of why it is that the archetypal romantic relationship includes sex, calls for philosophical analysis, yet it has been under-explored in philosophy. In this paper, I attempt to remedy this. I argue that sex is important to romantic love because it partly constitutes, builds, and expresses four of the central goods of a romantic relationship: 1) pleasure, 2) union, 3) intimacy, and 4) vulnerability and care. Thus, sex can be, and often is, an important vehicle for romantic love, though it is not essential for it. (shrink)

In Sascha Settegast’s recently published article, “Prostitution and the Good of Sex” in Social Theory and Practice, he argues that prostitution is intrinsically harmful. In this article, I object to his argument, making the following three responses to his account: 1) bad sex is not “detrimental to the good life”; 2) bad sex is not necessarily unvirtuous; 3) sex work is work as well as sex, and so must be evaluated as work in addition to as sex.

Let me begin with a quote: “The universal organum of philosophy—the ground stone of its entire architecture—is the philosophy of art.”1 This statement, made in 1800 by the German Idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling, is rather striking, not only because of its grandiosity, but also because it contrasts with what the majority of contemporary philosophers would be prepared to say on the subject. There is nevertheless a grain of truth in the claim that there is a peculiar connection between art and (...) philosophy and in the claim that aesthetics is a central area of philosophy. First of all, it is worth noting that, even if the philosophy of art has not played a role in the systems of all the indisputably great philosophers, or even of most of them, it has occupied an important place in the thought of quite a few, among them Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hegel and Sartre. And a good number of philosophers of lesser rank—including Croce, Collingwood, Dewey, Bergson, Santayana, Gadamer and, evidently, Schelling, also had a philosophy of art; one finds them perhaps more interested in it than in, say, ethics. Why this natural, even if not inevitable, link between philosophy and art? (shrink)

The norm of monogamy is pervasive, having remained widespread, in most Western cultures at least, in spite of increasing tolerance toward more diverse relationship types. It is also puzzling. People willingly, and often with gusto, adhere to it, yet it is also, prima facie at least, highly restrictive. Being in a monogamous relationship means agreeing to give up certain sorts of valuable interactions and relationships with other people and to severely restrict one’s opportunities for sex and love. It is this (...) restrictiveness which has led for calls among some philosophers for the justification of the norm, and some have argued that it cannot be justified. John McMurtry, for example, writing in 1972, compared monogamy to private property and argued that it serves the capitalist order (McMurtry 1972, 596–97). More recently, Harry Chalmers (2019) has argued that monogamy is morally impermissible. In this chapter we argue that rather than justify the norm, we ought to explain and understand its pervasiveness. Not everyone who follows the norm is doing so blindly, irrationally, or immorally. Indeed, many people are monogamous because being monogamous supports their needs and best enables them to flourish. We suggest that the human need for trust and attachment could underlie many people’s desires for monogamy and, therefore, explain monogamy’s pervasiveness. Focusing on the human need for trust and attachment security can also help us to understand why sexual infidelity can feel like such a betrayal. It can make sense to mutually agree to exclusivity in relationships, in spite of the apparent restrictions this brings. In a sense, not all restrictions are restrictive, because holding ourselves to limits on our behavior can in fact help us to invest in and experience the things we value most. (shrink)

La créativité est une valeur aujourd’hui abondamment conférée à des objets fort divers. Ainsi, bien qu’elle soit principalement discutée dans le domaine de l’art, on en parle souvent à propos des sciences, du sport, de l’entrepreneuriat, de la politique, de la pédagogie ou encore de situations plus ordinaires, telles que la créativité culinaire ou humoristique. En quoi ces diverses formes de créativité se ressemblent-elles ? Qu’est-ce qui fait leur valeur et en quoi se distinguent-elles de proches parentes comme l’originalité, l’inventivité (...) ou l’intelligence ? (shrink)

This paper is about what we call Deontically-flavored Nominal Constructions (DNCs) in English, such as "No ice cream" or "Dogs on leash only". DNCs are often perceived as commands and have been argued to be a type of non-canonical imperative, much like root infinitives in German or Russian. We argue instead that DNCs at their core are declaratives that cite a rule but can be used performatively in the right context. We propose that DNCs contain an elided deontic modal, i.e., (...) allowed, whose presence explains their distributional restrictions and interpretational properties. Among other things, we speculate on the licensing conditions of DNCs (the presence of 'only' or the negative determiner 'no'), suggesting that these are tied to the properties of discourses in which rules can be used naturally. (shrink)

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium that comprises leading informaticians, biologists, clinicians, and ontologists, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap, to develop innovative technology and methods that allow scientists to record, manage, and disseminate biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. The goals of the Center are (1) to help unify the divergent and isolated efforts in ontology development by promoting high quality open-source, standards-based tools to create, manage, and use ontologies, (2) to create (...) new software tools so that scientists can use ontologies to annotate and analyze biomedical data, (3) to provide a national resource for the ongoing evaluation, integration, and evolution of biomedical ontologies and associated tools and theories in the context of driving biomedical projects (DBPs), and (4) to disseminate the tools and resources of the Center and to identify, evaluate, and communicate best practices of ontology development to the biomedical community. Through the research activities within the Center, collaborations with the DBPs, and interactions with the biomedical community, our goal is to help scientists to work more effectively in the e-science paradigm, enhancing experiment design, experiment execution, data analysis, information synthesis, hypothesis generation and testing, and understand human disease. (shrink)

In “Artistic Worth and Personal Taste,” Jerrold Levinson develops a problem for those who think we should strive to be “ideal critics” in our aesthetic lives. He then offers several solutions to this problem. I argue that his solutions miss the mark and that the problem he characterizes may not be genuine after all.

This paper is an extended critical discussion of Jerrold Levinson's historical definition of art. I try out various different avenues of attack; it is not clear whether any of them is ultimately successful.

In his article untitled Messages in Art Jerrold Levinson discusses the idea of a message behind a work of art. He argues that despite certain disclaimers put forward by artists it is „hard to deny that artworks (...) very often do have messages, and far from inexpressible ones”. From given examples it would seem that Levinson assumes that musical work just as other artworks sometimes generate messages and that in order for a work of music to be successful (...) in expression this message should be comprehensible and certainly not incoherent. The author of this paper draws on Levinson's “Messages in Art” as well as his “Music as Narrative and Music as Drama” to explore further the issues mentioned above. In particular the author argues that seeing musical works through the message it may generate is somewhat reductive and that musical work as well as other artworks are prone to abiding by an aesthetic code and therefore even when they allow for interpretation in terms of messages or morals these messages are incoherent or vague at best. (shrink)

Jerrold Levinson conveniently summarizes the main argument of his essay "Erotic Art and Pornographic Pictures" in the following way:Erotic art consists of images centrally aimed at a certain sort of reception R1.Pornography consists of images centrally aimed at a certain sort of reception R2.R1 essentially involves attention to form/vehicle/medium/manner, and so entails treating images as in part opaque.R2 essentially excludes attention to form/vehicle/medium/manner, and so entails treating images as wholly transparent.R1 and R2 are incompatible.Hence, nothing can be both erotic (...) art and pornography; or at the least, nothing can be coherently projected as both erotic art and pornography.1I have argued elsewhere .. (shrink)

Disagreeing with Jerrold Levinson's claim that being conscious of broad-span musical form is not essential to understanding music, I will argue that our awareness of musical architecture is significant to achieve comprehension. I will show that the experiential model is not incompatible with the analytic model. My main goal is to show that these two models can be reconciled through the identification of a broader notion of understanding. After accomplishing this reconciliation by means of my new conception, I will (...) close the paper by discussing some reasons to accept an enhancing notion of musical understanding that includes levels and degrees of understanding. /// En desacuerdo con la afirmación de Jerrold Levinson: que ser consciente de la forma musical a gran escala no es esencial para comprender la música, sostendré que nuestra conciencia de la estructura musical es significante para alcanzar comprensión. Mostraré que el modelo experiencial no es incompatible con el modelo analítico y que ambos pueden ser reconciliados mediante una noción de comprensión más amplia. Después de llevar a cabo está reconciliación mediante la nueva concepción que propongo, concluiré discutiendo algunas razones para aceptar una noción de comprensión musical enriquecida que incluye niveles y grados de comprensión. (shrink)

The words we call slurs are just plain vanilla descriptions like ‘cowboy’ and ‘coat hanger’. They don't semantically convey any disparagement of their referents, whether as content, conventional implicature, presupposition, “coloring” or mode of presentation. What distinguishes 'kraut' and 'German' is metadata rather than meaning: the former is the conventional description for Germans among Germanophobes when they are speaking in that capacity, in the same way 'mad' is the conventional expression that some teenagers use as an intensifier when they’re emphasizing (...) that social identity. That is, racists don’t use slurs because they’re derogatory; slurs are derogatory because they’re the words that racists use. To use a slur is to exploit the Maxim of Manner (or Levinson’s M-Principle) to signal one’s affiliation with a group that has a disparaging attitude towards the slur’s referent. This account is sufficient to explain all the familiar properties of slurs, such as their speaker orientation and “nondetachability,” with no need of additional linguistic mechanisms. It also explains some features of slurs that are rarely if ever explored; for example the variation in tone and strength among the different slurs for a particular group, the existence of words we count as slurs, such as 'redskin', which almost all of their users consider to be respectful, and the curious absence in Standard English of any commonly used slurs—by which I mean words used to express a negative attitude toward an entire group—for Muslims and women. (shrink)

I present unexplored and unaccounted for uses of 'wants'. I call them advisory uses, on which information inaccessible to the desirer herself helps determine what she wants. I show that extant theories by Stalnaker, Heim, and Levinson fail to predict these uses. They also fail to predict true indicative conditionals with 'wants' in the consequent. These problems are related: intuitively valid reasoning with modus ponens on the basis of the conditionals in question results in unembedded advisory uses. I consider (...) two fixes, and end up endorsing a relativist semantics, according to which desire attributions express information-neutral propositions. On this view, 'wants' functions as a precisification of 'ought', which exhibits similar unembedded and compositional behavior. I conclude by sketching a pragmatic account of the purpose of desire attributions that explains why it made sense for them to evolve in this way. (shrink)

I explain a tension between musical creationism (the view that musical works are abstract artifacts) and the view that there is no vague existence. I then suggest ways to reconcile these views. My central conclusion is that, although some versions of musical creationism imply vague existence, others do not. I discuss versions of musical creationism held by Jerrold Levinson, Simon Evnine, and Kit Fine. I also present two new versions. I close by considering whether the tension is merely an (...) instance of a general problem raised by artifacts, both abstract and concrete. I argue that on at least one defensible account of music the tension is especially problematic for abstracta. I focus on musical works, but much of the paper straightforwardly applies to other kinds of abstract artifacts. (shrink)

Richard Wollheim claimed that twofoldness is a necessary condition for the perception of pictorial representations and it is also a necessary condition for the aesthetic appreciation of pictures. Jerrold Levinson pointed out that these two questions are different and argued that though twofoldness may be a necessary condition for the aesthetic appreciation of pictures, it cannot be a necessary condition for the perception of pictorial representations. I argue that Wollheim's use of the term ‘twofoldness’ alternates between two concepts: the (...) simultaneous visual awareness of the surface and of the represented object on the one hand and the simultaneous visual awareness of the represented object and the way it is represented on the other. Finally, I argue that twofoldness in the first sense is a necessary condition for the perception of pictorial representations, whereas twofoldness in the second sense is a necessary condition for the aesthetic appreciation of pictures. (shrink)

On several current views, including those of Matthew Kieran, Gary Iseminger, Jerrold Levinson, and Noël Carroll, aesthetic appreciation or experience involves second-order awareness of one’s own mental processes. But what if it turns out that we don’t have introspective access to the processes by which our aesthetic responses are produced? I summarize several problems for introspective accounts that emerge from the psychological literature: aesthetic responses are affected by irrelevant conditions; they fail to be affected by relevant conditions; we are (...) ignorant of their causes and thus confabulate in explaining them; our attempts to offer explanations change our preferences; and the preferences we form after explanation are lower in quality. I suggest that by distinguishing introspective awareness of mental processes from introspective awareness of mental states, we can safeguard a worthwhile concept of aesthetic experience. In addition, we should recognize that theoretical, rather than introspective, understanding of our mental processes may play a valuable role in aesthetic appreciation. (shrink)

Davies argues that the ontology of artworks as performances offers a principled way of explaining work-relativity of modality. Object oriented contextualist ontologies of art (Levinson) cannot adequately address the problem of work-relativity of modal properties because they understand looseness in what counts as the same context as a view that slight differences in the work-constitutive features of provenance are work-relative. I argue that it is more in the spirit of contextualism to understand looseness as context-dependent. This points to the (...) general problem—the context of appreciation is not robust enough to ground modal intuitions about objective entities. In general, when epistemology dictates ontology there is always a threat of anti-realism, scepticism and relativism. Davies also appeals to the modality principle—an entity’s essential properties are all and only its constitutive properties. Davies understands essentiality in a traditional way: a property P is an essential property of an object o iff o could not exist and lack P. Kit Fine has recently made a convincing case for the view that the notion of essence is not to be understood in modal terms. I explore some of the implications of this view for Davies’ modal argument for the performance theory. (shrink)

Wie verändern sich Mensch und Körper durch Technik? Und welches Menschenverständnis vertritt der Transhumanismus? Anna Puzio befasst sich in der ersten philosophischen Studie zur Anthropologie des Transhumanismus mit führenden Personen des Feldes, u. a. mit Nick Bostrom, David Pearce und Natasha Vita-More. Neben Körperoptimierung und Medizintechnologien beleuchtet sie auch Alltagstechnologien wie Wearables. Dabei entwickelt sie einen neuen Ansatz zur Technikanthropologie und ein neues inklusives Menschen- und Körperverständnis im Anschluss an Donna Haraway und den Kritischen Posthumanismus im amerikanischen Raum.

The concept of expression in the arts is Janus-faced. On the one hand expression is an author-centered notion: many Romantic poets, painters, and musicians thought of themselves as pouring our or ex-pressing their own emotions in their artworks. And on the other hand, expression is an audience-centered notion, the communication of what is expressed by an author to members of an audience. Typically the word “expression” is used for the author-centered aspect of expression as a whole, and the word “expressiveness” (...) is used for the audience-centered aspect, and I shall keep to this usage. In this paper I shall argue that although expression is closely related to expressiveness, the two concepts are distinct and, in particular, expressiveness cannot be analyzed in terms of expression, as has been recently suggested by Stephen Davies and Jerrold Levinson. Nonetheless, the richest examples of expression in the arts involve both expression and expressiveness. (shrink)

What more do we need to fully appreciate perfumes, beyond considering them objects for aesthetic appreciation? My contention is that our appreciation of some perfumes would be largely incomplete, unless we acknowledged them as works of art. I defend the claim that some perfumes are works of art from the point of view of different definitions. Nick Zangwill’s aesthetic definition makes it easy to defend the proposed claim, but is not very informative for the purposes of fully appreciating some perfumes. (...) On the other hand, Jerrold Levinson’s intentional-historical definition and Dominic Lopes’s approach to defining art make it more challenging to defend the proposed claim. I show that, even so, the challenge may be met. Moreover, the challenge is well worth engaging with, since tackling it uncovers features of some perfumes that are essential to their full appreciation. (shrink)

Nelson Goodman notoriously distinguished between autographic works, whose instances should be identified by taking history of production into account, and allographic works, whose instances can be identified independently of history of production. Scholars such as Jerrold Levinson, Flint Schier, and Gregory Currie have criticized Goodman’s autographic/allographic distinction arguing that all works are such that their instances should be identified by taking history of production into account. I will address this objection by exploiting David Davies’ distinction between e-instances and p-instances (...) of a work, thereby restating the autographic/allographic distinction. Then, I will show that this way of restating this distinction leads us to effective accounts of relevant related phenomena such as forgery, plagiarism, and digital technologies. Finally, I will show the theoretical advantages of my account of the autographic/allographic distinction in comparison with an alternative account recently proposed by Jason D’Cruz and P.D. Magnus. (shrink)

Cross-linguistic strategies for mapping lexical and spatial relations from body partonym systems to external object meronymies (as in English ‘table leg’, ‘mountain face’) have attracted substantial research and debate over the past three decades. Due to the systematic mappings, lexical productivity and geometric complexities of body-based meronymies found in many Mesoamerican languages, the region has become focal for these discussions, prominently including contrastive accounts of the phenomenon in Zapotec and Tzeltal, leading researchers to question whether such systems should be explained (...) as global metaphorical mappings from bodily source to target holonym or as vector mappings of shape and axis generated “algorithmically”. I propose a synthesis of these accounts in this paper by drawing on the species-specific cognitive affordances of human upright posture grounded in the reorganization of the anatomical planes, with a special emphasis on antisymmetrical relations that emerge between arm-leg and face-groin antinomies cross-culturally. Whereas Levinson argues that the internal geometry of objects “stripped of their bodily associations” (1994: 821) is sufficient to account for Tzeltal meronymy, making metaphorical explanations entirely unnecessary, I propose a more powerful, elegant explanation of Tzeltal meronymic mapping that affirms both the geometric-analytic and the global-metaphorical nature of Tzeltal meaning construal. I do this by demonstrating that the “algorithm” in question arises from the phenomenology of movement and correlative body memories—an experiential ground which generates a culturally selected pair of inverse contrastive paradigm sets with marked and unmarked membership emerging antithetically relative to the transverse anatomical plane. These relations are then selected diagrammatically for the classification of object orientations according to systematic geometric iconicities. Results not only serve to clarify the case in question but also point to the relatively untapped potential that upright posture holds for theorizing the emergence of human cognition, highlighting in the process the nature, origins and theoretical validity of markedness and double scope conceptual integration. (shrink)

Claims that pornography cannot be art typically depend on controversial claims about essential value differences (moral, aesthetic) between pornography and art. In this paper, I offer a value-neutral exclusionary claim, showing pornography to be descriptively at odds with art. I then show how my view is an improvement on similar claims made by Jerrold Levinson. Finally I draw parallels between art and pornography and art and advertising as well as show that my view is consistent with our typical usage (...) of the term “pornographic art.”. (shrink)

In May 2017, my book ‘Conversations on Art and Aesthetics’ appeared. It contains conversations with, and photographic portraits of, ten prominent philosophers of art. They are Noël Carroll, Gregory Currie, Arthur Danto, Cynthia Freeland, Paul Guyer, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Jerrold Levinson, Jenefer Robinson, Roger Scruton, and Kendall Walton. The book has two main aims. One is to provide a broad and accessible overview of what aesthetics as a subfield of philosophy has to offer. The other is to stimulate new work (...) in this area of research. In this brief paper I’d like to say a bit more about this second objective. Current research is rarely conducted or communicated in the form of conversations, so the question arises: how can a book like mine fit with and feed into a research culture which is very much dominated by the format of the journal article? (shrink)

Music presents itself as a process, a continuation, following through. Musical works and music experience is perceived as development, succession, dialogical reaching out and harmonizing. Not one process but many. Among those various processes that make music the author focuses on a specific process of human development, which occurs during listening as much as during performing music. This is a process of growing and self-realization. In the course of the paper following the processual character of music, author turns to Maurice (...) Merleau-Ponty and Mikel Dufrenne in the phenomenological tradition, to Jerrold Levinson and his understanding of music through a listening moment to moment process and also to Theodor Adorno and his way of explaining music as a process of dialectical development. (shrink)

Worte verletzen und kränken. Woher aber kommt diese Verletzungsmacht? Während in der deutschsprachigen Philosophie Sprache meist als Gegenmittel zur Gewalt begriffen wird, hat die US-amerikanische Debatte um "hate speech" gezeigt, dass das Sprechen Gewalt nicht nur androhen oder verhindern, sondern selbst eine Form von Gewaltausübung sein kann. Wie nun sind sprachliche Verletzung, Ausgrenzung und Missachtung zu erklären und zu verstehen? Aus der Sicht verschiedener Disziplinen untersuchen die Beiträge dieses Bandes, welcher Logik, Grammatik und Rhetorik unser verletzendes Sprechen gehorcht. Mit Beiträgen (...) von u.a. Pierre Bourdieu, Penelope Brown/Stephen Levinson, Harold Garfinkel und Rae Langton. Steffen Kitty Herrmann und Hannes Kuch sind wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiter am Institut für Philosophie der Freien Universität Berlin und arbeiten im Forschungsprojekt”Zur Performanz sprachlicher Gewalt“am Sonderforschungsbereich 447”Kulturen des Performativen“. Sybille Krämer ist Professorin für Philosophie an der FU Berlin und Permanent Fellow am Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin. (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 article examines the fourteen conditions constituting Levinson and Alperson’s taxonomy of conditions for temporal arts. It claims that some of the conditions and several of the lists of arts exemplifying them need revision. It recommends adding a new condition concerned with the effects of the passage of time on gardens, environmental sculpture, and outdoor installations. The article concludes that gardens may be a model for understanding and appreciating other arts sharing the same bi-(multi-) modality.

This paper provides an in-depth review of Jerrold Levinson’s most recent work in aesthetics, focusing especially on his account of the incompatibility of art and pornography. The author argues that this account does not fit well with Levinson’s own intentional-historical definition of art and his Wollheimian account of depiction.

Some philosophers of fiction – most famously Jerold Levinson1 - have tried to argue that fictional narrators can never be identified with real authors. This argument relies on the claim that narration involves genuine assertion (not just the pretense of assertion that lacks truthfulness) and that real authors are not in a position to assert anything about beings on the fictional plain - given that they don’t rationally believe in their existence. This debate on the status of narrators depends on (...) the idea that fictional beings and beings in the real worlds reside, as it were, at different levels. The assumption that there is a gap separating the levels of fiction and reality serves as a rationale for the claim that real authors could not possibly be en rapport with the fictional characters that they create (e.g. entertain beliefs about them, etc.). (shrink)

Recently, the debate on the ubiquity of fictional narrators – whether every fictional narrative has a fictional narrator – has spread from film to literature. George Wilson reacted to Noël Carroll’s and Andrew Kania’s claims that no fictional narrators but 1 explicit ones such as Ishmael from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick exist. a near-ubiquity position claiming that almost every fictional novel, except those consisting exclusively of dialogue, has at least a minimal narrating agency or a fictional narrator. Yet, he disassociated himself (...) from the usual ontological-gap argument made to support such claims. In other words, he denied the main tenet of an argument made by Jerrold Levinson; the claim that only fictional entities are able of presenting fictional events to the reader or viewer. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Scrutinizing the Art of TheaterAaron Meskin (bio)IntroductionIn his 1992 address to the American Society for Aesthetics, Peter Kivy suggested that philosophers of art might do best by giving up on “grand theorizing” (that is, pursuing the definition of art).1 In its place he proposed that they pursue the “careful and imaginative philosophical scrutiny of the individual arts and their individual problems.”2 Of course John Passmore and others had said (...) similar things at earlier points,3 but philosophical aesthetics has, it seems to me, finally and robustly taken the turn toward the philosophies of the arts. Much of the best work in philosophical aesthetics over the last fifteen years or so has pursued the route Kivy suggested. James Hamilton’s The Art of Theater is part of this turn—it is careful and imaginative scrutiny of the art of theater done at the very highest level, and I am delighted to have this opportunity to comment on it.4In what follows I shall address a number of issues raised by Hamilton’s work: the definition of theatrical enactment; the place of pretending and imagining in theatrical performance; the nature of Hamilton’s “ingredients model” and its relation to more traditional accounts of the work/performance relation; the account of theatrical style on offer; and the question of what we have learned from experimental theater.But before I move on to address those aspects of the book’s content in detail, let me say something about the pedagogical significance of this work. Although there are a number of legitimate ways to teach introductory courses on aesthetics and the philosophy of art (for example, by following a historical progression or by structuring it around certain key issues), one increasingly attractive option is to teach a course that focuses on those aforementioned individual arts and their individual problems. So, for example, I used to regularly teach graduate seminars in aesthetics to students enrolled [End Page 51] in a fine arts doctoral program. These students studied music, art education, the visual arts, theater, and dance; the seminars were designed to provide them with a broad foundation in philosophical aesthetics. Since they typically had no background in philosophy, I made the effort to assign readings and topics relevant to their own artistic practices and interests. Providing them with contemporary cutting-edge philosophical material on music and the visual arts was not hard. Kivy’s work, as well as that by Jerrold Levinson, Arthur Danto, Richard Wollheim, and others, makes that fairly easy. And intriguingly—since philosophers are commonly said to have ignored the art of dance—there’s even a decent amount of recent philosophical work on that art form by such authors as Graham McFee, Frances Sparshott, and Noël Carroll and Sally Banes.5 But where to turn to for the theater students? I would often read some of Aristotle’s Poetics with them, but I have to admit that the serious students of the theater that I encountered in those seminars typically knew that text much better than I did. (Still, I hope I challenged their breezy assumptions about catharsis!) We would read Hume on tragedy together—fun, but not really so much about the theater—and sometimes a bit of Nietzsche. But there was never much to give them from contemporary philosophers on the subject—a few articles here and there, of course, but nothing that clearly laid out the big and distinctive issues that the art form of theater raises. Nothing, to put the point a bit differently, that would provide any evidence that there really was a lively and extant philosophy of theater out there, as there are lively and extant philosophies of film, music, literature, and photography. In short, for those attracted to the prospect of teaching aesthetics as the philosophies of arts, the dearth of good work on theater by contemporary philosophers has been a significant source of frustration and even a bit of an embarrassment.The book in question is not the only recent philosophical work on theater. There are fine articles on the topic by David Osipovich, David Saltz, and Paul Woodruff, among others. Hamilton himself has a string of... (shrink)

This article discusses the relationship (or lack thereof) between authors’ intentions and the meaning of literary works. It considers the advantages and disadvantages of Extreme and Modest Actual Intentionalism, Conventionalism, and two versions of Hypothetical Intentionalism, and discusses the role that one’s theoretical commitments about the robustness of linguistic conventions and the publicity of literary works should play in determining which view one accepts.

Creations of many contemporary artists indicate the emergence of technoculture. Although artistic manifestations of technoculture may appear to be a provocation, they encourage fundamental ontological questions, such as whether a person has unchanging nature; what was and is our relationship to the Other, and what it should be; to what extent can body and mind be altered before they stop being “human”; what is the future of our species. To properly understand the works of technoculture artists, it appears necessary to (...) have a thorough grasp post- and transhumanism as their key sources of inspiration. As a result, the developed tools will be employed to indicate which aspects of technoculture are a manifestation of post- and transhumanist ideas. This analysis is based primarily on the works of Stelarc and Orlan – two widely commented artists of technoculture. (shrink)

The relationship of the author’s intention to the meaning of a literary work has been a persistently controversial topic in aesthetics. Anti-intentionalists Wimsatt and Beardsley, in the 1946 paper that launched the debate, accused critics who fueled their interpretative activity by poring over the author’s private diaries and life story of committing the ‘fallacy’ of equating the work’s meaning, properly determined by context and linguistic convention, with the meaning intended by the author. Hirsch responded that context and convention are not (...) sufficient to determine a unique meaning for a text; to avoid radical ambiguity we must appeal to the author’s intention, which actualizes one of the candidate meanings. Subsequent writers have defended refined versions of these views, and a variety of positions on the spectrum between them, in a debate that remains central to philosophical aesthetics. This Teaching and Learning Guide lists key readings and suggests how they might be incorporated within a syllabus. It also offers focus questions related to the readings. See also the companion article, Sherri Irvin, “Authors, Intentions and Literary Meaning.” Philosophy Compass 1 (2006), 114-128. (shrink)

Philosophers of music commonly distinguish performative from critical interpretations. I would like to suggest that the distinction between critical and performative interpretations is well captured by an analogy to legal critics and judges. This parallel draws attention to several features of performative interpretation that are typically overlooked, and deemphasizes epistemic problems with performative interpretations that I believe are typically blown out of proportion and ultimately fail to capture interesting features of performative interpretation. There is an important distinction to be made (...) between critical and performative interpretation, but its source lies in a difference between the authority of critical and performative interpretations. (shrink)