Musing in Florence in June of 1858, Nathaniel Hawthorne said of himself, "I am sensible that a process is going on--and has been, ever since I came to Italy--that puts me in a state to see pictures with less toil, and more pleasure, and makes me more fastidious, yet more sensible of beauty where I saw none before." This is a book devoted to the reflective analysis of the enterprise in which many of us, like Hawthorne, find ourselves engaged: the (...) cultivation of our taste. Charles Wegener writes for and from the standpoint of thoughtful amateurs, those who, loving the beautiful and the sublime, wish to become more fully the sort of person to whom these goods reliably disclose themselves. Here traditional aesthetic analysis is redirected to a search for the norms that tell us how we use our intelligence, our imagination, and our senses in becoming "more fastidious, yet more sensible," exploring such concepts as disinterestedness, catholicity, communicability, austerity, objectivity, and authority. Finally, Wegener discusses questions about the relation of our aesthetic lives to other activities, norms, and human goods, arguing that taste, far from being a mere grace or luxury, is a necessary expression of that freedom which is at once the fruit and the condition of all culture. "This book should be required reading for anyone concerned with aesthetic education, for this is exactly what it is about, and I have come across no more searching investigation of the topic."--Hugo Meynell, Journal of Aesthetic Education "Using the analysis of aesthetic experience found in Kant's Critique of Judgment as a point of departure, Wegener has written a remarkably intelligent book which presents meaningful encounter with art as the "discipline of taste and feeling. The book reads not simply as an exposition but as a conversation in which the author thoughtfully and meticulously explores with the reader those norms that structure and define aesthetic experience. . . . The book occupies an important place in contemporary aesthetic discussion."--M. Feder-Marcus, Choice. (shrink)

This paper argues that the structural obscurity in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment reflects his tacit employment of three correlated but distinct notions: necessity considered as the universal validity of the judgment of taste; necessity considered as a feature of the judgment itself; and necessity considered as a feature of the mental free harmony that obtains in judging certain forms with taste. These distinctions have not been sufficiently recognized by commentators so far. Clarification of these three notions can (...) shed new light on the structure of the first part of Kant’s third Critique as well as on debates over the plausibility of his claims regarding taste. (shrink)

Taste, according to Hans, governs our lives. It determines the choices we make in life, the judgments we pass on other people and their actions, the patterns and rhythms of our existence. For such a large claim, one would expect a rigorous account of what taste is and a convincing explanation of the ontological, aesthetic, and moral roles that Hans attributes to it. Unfortunately, the reader will be disappointed. To be sure, Hans tells us that he wants to “resist defining (...) the word” but promises to make the word “richer over the course of the book”, as he thought he did with the word “play” in his first book. However, the reader is likely to feel that, over the course of this book, the word “taste” either has been rendered too rich to be digestible or remains too bland to justify Hans’s own “great claims for taste”. The introduction gives a number of apparently inconsistent characterizations of taste that the patient reader hopes will somehow be made consistent by the end of the book, such as “taste is an inborn capacity”, “Taste is shaped by experience, by cultural milieu, by the historical circumstances”, and “taste is a function of biological mechanisms”. Taste is also said to be a capacity, a faculty, a mechanism, and a device. By the end of the introduction, we already have a rich brew which ironically threatens to produce a bland concept, the concept of “taste [as] everything”. (shrink)

Allison begins this book by observing that although the eighteenth century is often called the “age of reason,” it has also been called the “century of taste.” There is a clear enough connection, however, between the two names, for anyone with eyes open enough to see it. For the phenomenon of taste—of likings and dislikings conforming to sharable standards, and invited or sought from others precisely for the sake of sharing them universally—was recognized by eighteenth-century rationalists, and certainly by Kant, (...) as a necessary adjunct or perhaps even a precondition for universally valid judgments based on reason, about science or morality or politics. Taste was also seen by them as overcoming the division between reason and sensation, and thus of making human beings whole; it is a way for reason to gain access to people’s feelings and motives, hence a precondition for it to shape their conduct. For Kant, a critique of aesthetic judgment is the inquiry in which the “great gulf” between knowledge and practice, theoretical understanding and moral reason is to be overcome and philosophy itself is to be made whole. (shrink)

All the essays contained herein, with the exception of the last two—"On Suicide" and "On the Immortality of the Soul"—have appeared in the author's Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary ; the others were published posthumously. In this wide-ranging collection Hume addresses himself to aspects of aesthetics and literary criticism, the philosophy of history, philosophical "types", human nature and belief. The volume conveys a side of Hume too often forgotten in our present admiration of his foreshadowing of analytical philosophy: the man (...) of letters. The editor has provided a useful introduction setting Hume's work in its eighteenth century context.—P. J. M. (shrink)

A most interesting attempt to weld together a Marxist and a semiotic approach to art. The Marxist insistence upon the historicity of consciousness and the categories in which it expresses itself is accompanied by a systematic semiotically oriented reflection upon the epistemological conditions of meaning. The principal target of della Volpe's project is the Crocean theme that there is something supra-rational conveyed by a work of art, some cosmic feeling or some ineffable content, accessible only to intuition. Della Volpe's position, (...) on the contrary, is rationalist, though with a very specific twist. (shrink)

According to Guyer, Kant’s entire aesthetic theory rests on the imputation of intersubjectivity to judgments of taste. Empiricist theories could not establish intersubjectivity; rationalist ones could do so only by construing aesthetic judgment as confused cognitive or moral judgment. But even in the pre-Critical aesthetics, which Guyer teases out of Reflexionen, letters, and student notes, anticipations of a duality in intersubjectivity’s aesthetic function can be found. The first version and the printed version of the Critique of Judgment’s Introduction, in differentiating (...) aesthetic judgment from determinant and teleological judgment, reveal that intersubjectivity must both cause aesthetic pleasure and ground aesthetic judgment. (shrink)

Today is dedicated to the remembrance of the Holy Innocents, who were victims of a state sponsored terrorist attack at the very beginning of the Christian era. We believe this is an appropriate spiritual time to review and question the moral judgement of the Catholic Bishops of the United States of America that our nation's war on the people of Afghanistan is just. We do this in a spirit of fidelity to the teachings of the Catholic Church and (...) to the charism bequeathed to us as Catholic Workers by our founders, the Servants of God Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day of New York. Our statements, questions, and conclusions may seem startling to you, they may make you uncomfortable. This is because we come to you, not as the rich and powerful, but as the weak, poor, and powerless. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Walking the Bodhisattva Path/Walking the Christ PathU.S. Conference of Catholic BishopsCatholics and Buddhists brought together by Dharma Realm Buddhist Association, the San Francisco Zen Center, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) met 20-23 March 2003 in the first of an anticipated series of four annual dialogues. Abbot Heng Lyu, the monks and nuns, and members of the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association hosted the dialogue (...) at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Talmage, California. The community had transformed their Confucius Hall into a chapel, with a large, newly constructed wooden cross on a wall above an altar facing out from a raised platform, so the Catholic delegation would have a space for worship. A special poster announcing the theme of the conference, "Walking the Bodhisattva Path/Walking the Christ Path," showing a Buddhist dharma wheel at one foot of a bridge and a Celtic cross at the other foot, had been created by the hosting community.The daily schedule for the dialogue did not interfere with the monastic routine at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, which included early morning chanting (4:00-5:00 am), daily rituals in the Buddha Hall, and the single large meal for monastics before noon to which all participants were invited. Catholics and Buddhists meeting in the dialogue began each day with an optional forty-five minutes of quiet sitting together in the monastery meditation hall, each following their own form of meditation and prayer. There was a Eucharist on Friday and Saturday evenings for the Catholics and to which the Buddhists were invited, and additional meals of breakfast and supper throughout the meeting at the City's Jyun Kang Restaurant.Fourteen Buddhists and fourteen Catholics participated in the formal discussions. Each participant spoke on what it means to them to follow Christ or the way of the Bodhisattvas or enlightened beings. In addition to speaking, each participant distributed a short passage, usually from a traditional text, on this topic. Several passages from Master Dogen's Shobogenzo and the Gospel of John were among those shared by the group. Other passages shared were taken from the Avatamsaka Sutra and the Shurangama Sutra and from the other gospels and the writings of Zen master HakuinZenji, the Dalai Lama, Korean Zen Master I-sahn Hye-yeon, the teachings of Master [End Page 247] Hsuan Hua, Shantideva, Origen, St. Ignatius, St. Benedict, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, St. John of the Cross, and Chiara Lubich. A minute of silence separated the fifteen-minute segments for each presentation. With so large a group, most of the time in the formal sessions involved listening to series of presentations; however, during discussion periods the participants asked several challenging questions of one another.Some participants noted the tension they felt between belonging to a particular religious group and the need to let go of any consequential narrowness. The goal of the discussion was to promote understanding of the differences and similarities between Christianity and Buddhism. At one point, the participants noted several concerns about mutual enrichment: whether Buddhist methods can be separated from Buddhism and Christian methods from Christianity, and what specific aspects of Christian practice truly enrich Buddhists and which Buddhist practices likewise enrich Christians. Several times participants discussed their understanding of terms such as transformation, grace, the incarnation and the passion of Jesus, discernment of spirits, prayer, Buddha-nature, and related terms. There was consensus that Buddhists and Catholics can practically help one another regarding mental cultivation and religious precepts. They expressed this consensus in their choice of the topic forthe next dialogue, "Transformation of Hearts and Minds: Chan/Zen-Catholic Approaches to Precepts."The group agreed to reconvene in 2004 to respond to six presentations, three from each side, on different aspects of this topic.Chairing the sessions were Rev. Heng Sure for the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association, Rev. Taigen Dan Leighton for the San Francisco Zen Center, and Bishop John Webster for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Their three organizations are the sponsors of the Northern California Chan/Zen-Catholic Dialogue. Chan and Zen are respectively the Chinese and Japanese terms for the meditation school... (shrink)

This book contains programmatic essays that focus on broad-ranging proposals for re-envisioning a discipline of comparative philosophy of religions. It also contains a number of case studies focussing on the interpretation of particular religio-historical data from comparatively oriented philosophical perspectives.

Newman’s view of the heart corresponds with the recent Catechism of the Catholic Church. His motto, Cor ad cor loquitur, exhibits his central religious preoccupation. There are three factors involved in religious existence: intellectual apprehension, emotional realization, and moral action. The center, located in the heart, is typically considered secondary: clear conception and moral action are all that is required. For Newman, this is truncated religion, for religion has its deepest root in the heart. Here is where he considers (...) conscience. Like taste and common sense, it is an intellectual virtue; but unlike the former, it is always emotional. It is a privileged place of relation to God, the Supreme Judge. A peculiar set of emotional matters cluster around this relation. It plays in relation to the work of intellect as theology in relation to devotion. This exhibits an instance of the larger relation between notional and real assent. The latter deals with concrete matters and is a relation of “the whole person.” Its aim is to realize what we already accept. That may occur organically through experience, but it can also be invoked meditatively in solitude. Imagination is the chief vehicle of that realization. (shrink)

Kant’s theory of taste, as expounded in the Critique of Judgment, deals exhaustively with judgments of beauty. Rarely does Kant mention ugliness. This omission has led to a debate among commentators about how judgments of ugliness should be explained in a Kantian framework. I argue that the judgment of ugliness originates in the disharmonious play between the faculties of imagination and understanding. Such disharmony occurs when the understanding finds that it cannot in principle form any concept suitable to a representation (...) as it is presented by the imagination. (shrink)

In the attempt of post-Hegelian philosophies to substitute ethics with politics, failure is most evident in Marxism, the most powerful, politically speaking, post-Hegelian philosophy. This failure points out the need to rethink ethics. In La Crisi della Morale Buttiglione does not claim to satisfy this need, but this is for him the horizon to deal with a specific moral question: sexual ethics. The focus of this book is Humanae Vitae and the teaching of Karol Wojtyla, as Pope John Paul II. (...) This collection of essays is particularly interesting for Catholic philosophers, and for whomever is interested in a rational discussion and justification of Catholic "opinions" on sexuality, marriage, contraception. Moral norms are rational norms for Catholicism, and even if the adherence to these norms may be external to a rational-philosophical process, as is normally the case, their content is rational. In this review I will not be able to summarize the entire book essay by essay, but will try to give a taste of some of the major points, as an invitation, for those who read Italian, to read this book directly. (shrink)

This anthology has had a fantastic success in the U.S., selling over 200,000 sets in a few months, and prompting its astounded editor to remark that the tasteful four-volume set must have been secretly pushed by interior decorators! We have had so much of anthologies in late years that one automatically inclines to discount their lasting value in a field where profound and hard thinking is so necessary. Let it be said at once that Mr. Newman has not attempted to (...) give us any “straight” mathematics. No, this is a book about mathematics, not of mathematics. But it is one which—if I may use an overworked phrase—no one who is interested in mathematics, be he a philosopher, economist, strategist, historian or even mathematician, can possibly afford to be without. Its generous excerpts from the works of great mathematicians and perceptive commentators on mathematics are stimulating reading. The excerpts number 133 and range in length from five to seventy pages. There is something here for anyone with any interest in one of the mightiest adventures of the human mind. (shrink)

The solipsist, on the analogy of our dream-experience, imagines a higher mode of selfhood or spirit to whom the world is like a dream; his own self is a lower or deluded mode of this selfhood and to it the world appears as real. Thus objectivity appearing to the lower self is illusory and contingent, not ultimate. This analogical argument for a higher self, as against an alien God, has this counter-argument. In dreams I have unpleasant experiences because of certain (...) external causes, such as physiological and psychological. But what compels my higher self to have the unpleasant dreams that are my waking experiences of life? In other words, why cannot my higher self have nothing but rosy dreams when there cannot be anything else than itself to force on it bad ones? The answer to this is that in our dreams and fantasies we do not have unpleasant experiences due to external causes only, but also due to our inherent love of experience for its own sake. Our dreams are our wish-fulfilments too. We love to have all sorts of experiences, to taste all kinds and shades of emotion. Thirst for passions, curiosity after the unknown, and adventure for the strange and the new mark our empirical self. So it is not absurd to conceive the higher self fashioning its dreams, our waking experiences, as a mixture of pleasant and unpleasant elements rich in variety and complexity. And just as my empirical self is said to enjoy the experiences of my dreams, so this higher self may be said to enjoy his dreams, my waking experiences. (shrink)

THE PAST DECADE has witnessed an extraordinary resurgence of interest in Kant's writings on aesthetics, politics, and history. On the Continent much of this interest has centered on the debate between modernism and postmodernism. Both sides of the debate are in agreement that Kant's differentiation of cognitive, practical, and aesthetic domains of rationality anticipated the fragmentation of modern society into competing if not, as Weber assumed, opposed lifestyles, activities, and value spheres, and that this has generated a crisis of judgment. (...) Tradition is deprived of its authority as a common reference point for deliberation; judgment appears to be all but submerged in the dark void of relativism. Yet, having both accepted Kant's differentiation of reason as emblematic of the pluralism of modern life, modernists and postmodernists remain divided in their response to its implications. Modernists--Habermas and Arendt too, I believe, can be classified under this rubric--attempt to circumvent the relativism of cultural fragmentation by appealing to a universal ideal of community. This solution recalls Kant's own grounding of judgments of taste in the notion of a sensus communis. By contrast, postmodernists such as Lyotard embrace relativism. Whereas the modernist emphasizes the capacity of rational agents to rise above the parochial limits of local community in aspiring toward an autonomous perspective, the postmodernist denies the possibility of impartiality altogether, thus binding judgment to the traditional constraints of practice. (shrink)

FROM ITS INCEPTION PRAGMATISM HAS DISPLAYED an ambivalent relation to Hegelianism. John Dewey conceived his experimentalism as a more modest alternative to Hegel's system of absolute idealism, which he deemed "too grand for present tastes." At the same time, pragmatists from James and Dewey to Quine and Rorty have all assimilated important Hegelian motifs. These include most importantly a deep suspicion of modern representationalist epistemology, in both its rationalist and empiricist versions; a conception of intelligence as a form of (...) practice, best conceived in terms of making, doing, and acting; and a commitment to a nonreductionist, holistic appreciation of our beliefs about the world. To this list Rorty adds an appreciation of Hegel's conception of the philosophical enterprise as Nachdenken, as a kind of edifying recollective summary. (shrink)

In two of their major works, Hegel and Kierkegaard seek philosophical instruction in the very same example: that of trying to learn to swim before one has entered the water. But they reach diametrically opposed conclusions about what this example shows. It might seem troubling that an example can teach two incompatible lessons. I argue that we will be troubled only if we make an implausible assumption about examples: that the lessons they teach are theory-neutral facts equally available to all. (...) Drawing on work by Onora O’Neill, I argue against this assumption. I try to show that philosophical examples can be quite mysterious: both free and rule-governed, both determinate and indeterminate—or, better, determinately indeterminate. In this respect, they may be fruitfully compared to Kantian judgments of taste. (shrink)

There is an intimate relation between these two aspects of the judgment: the predictive judgment is certainly not a priori. It presupposes some antecedent judgment that the sugar in the spoon does taste sweet or that it did taste sweet. This does not necessarily presuppose the antecedent direct experience of tasting the sugar, for its antecedent could be an inferred judgment, or a communicated and believed judgment. But, on the other hand, neither is the produced judgment of an experienced sweetness (...) clearly a posteriori; for to determine that what was tasted is sweet involves a subtle interplay of expectation and antecedent definition of sweetness which is of the nature of the judgment event, and which is, broadly speaking, predictive. It would be terribly neat if predictions were clearly a priori and postdictions clearly a posteriori and both logical atomism and its correlate functional form, mechanism, would be able to build unassailable causal systems on such hard "givens.". (shrink)

There are several reasons that have contributed to the neglect of the Treatise as a classic of modern democratic theory. In the first place, Spinoza's political theory is buried three quarters of the way through the Treatise and comes to light only after the reader has slogged through a long and painstaking discussion of biblical philology and criticism. Second, Spinoza's defense of democracy is undergirded by a naturalistic metaphysics that is more immoralist than Hobbes and scarcely to the taste of (...) most modern readers. And third, Spinoza remained wedded to certain premodern notions about the difference between the intellectuals and the vulgar which, it is believed, undercut his democratic commitments. (shrink)