Aesthetics is the part of contemporary academic philosophy that is concerned with art, beauty, criticism, and taste. As such, it must address metaphysical issues, epistemic problems, and questions of value. This makes it difficult to present a coherent account of the subject matter of aesthetics. In this article, I argue that this difficulty is the result of ambiguities and contradictions that arose in disputes about the relationship between the science of aesthetics, the critique of taste, and the philosophy of art (...) in German philosophy during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. By reconstructing the history of these debates, I hope to shed new light on the origins of aesthetics as a discipline and to explain why its subject matter and status within philosophy are still so difficult to define. (shrink)

Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory offers one of the most powerful and comprehensive critiques of art and of the discipline of aesthetics ever written. The work offers a deeply critical engagement with the history and philosophy of aesthetics and with the traditions of European art through the middle of the 20th century. It is coupled with ambitious claims about what aesthetic theory ought to be. But the cultural horizon of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory was the world of high modernism, and much has (...) happened since then both in theory and in practice. Adorno's powerful vision of aesthetics calls for reconsideration in this light. Must his work be defended, updated, resisted, or simply left behind? This volume gathers new essays by leading philosophers, critics, and theorists writing in the wake of Adorno in order to address these questions. They hold in common a deep respect for the power of Adorno's aesthetic critique and a concern for the future of aesthetic theory in response to recent developments in aesthetics and its contexts. (shrink)

Aesthetic alienation may be described as the paradoxical relationship whereby art and truth have come to be divorced from one another while nonetheless remaining entwined. J. M. Bernstein not only finds the separation of art and truth problematic, but also contends that we continue to experience art as sensuous and particular, thus complicating and challenging the cultural self-understanding of modernity. Bernstein focuses on the work of four key philosophers—Kant, Heidegger, Derrida, and Adorno—and provides powerful new interpretations of their views. Bernstein (...) shows how each of the three post-Kantian aesthetics to construct a philosophical language that can criticize and displace the categorical assumption of modernity. He also examines in detail their responses to questions concerning the relations among art, philosophy, and politics in modern societies. (shrink)

To what extent do aesthetic taste and our interest in the arts constitute who we are? In this paper, we present a series of empirical findings that suggest an Aesthetic Self Effect supporting the claim that our aesthetic engagements are a central component of our identity. Counterfactual changes in aesthetic preferences, for example, moving from liking classical music to liking pop, are perceived as altering us as a person. The Aesthetic Self Effect is as strong as the impact of moral (...) changes, such as altering political partisanship or religious orientation, and significantly stronger than for other categories of taste, such as food preferences. Using a multidimensional scaling technique to map perceived aesthetic similarities among musical genres, we determined that aesthetic distances between genres correlate highly with the perceived difference in identity. Further studies generalize the Aesthetic Self Effect beyond the musical domain: general changes in visual art preferences, for example from more traditional to abstract art, also elicited a strong Self Effect. Exploring the breadth of this effect we also found an Anaesthetic Self Effect. That is, hypothetical changes from aesthetic indifference to caring about music, art, or beauty are judged to have a significant impact on identity. This effect on identity is stronger for aesthetic fields compared to leisure activities, such as hiking or playing video games. Across our studies, the Anaesthetic Self Effect turns out to be stronger than the Aesthetic Self Effect. Taken together, we found evidence for a link between aesthetics and identity: we are aesthetic selves. When our tastes in music and the arts or our aesthetic interests change we take these to be transformative changes. (shrink)

All of these essays focus on the concept of modernity in the philosophical work of Jurgen Habermas - an ambitious and carefully argued intellectual project that invites, indeed demands, rigorous scrutiny. Following an introductory overview of Habermas's work by Richard Bernstein, Albrecht Wellmer's essay places the philosopher within the tradition of Hegel, Marx, Weber, and Critical Theory. Martin Jay discusses Habermas's views on art and aesthetics, and Joel Whitebook examines his interpretations of Freud and psychoanalysis, Anthony Giddens offers a critical (...) reading of Habermas's major work, "The Theory of Communicative Action. Richard Rorty criticizes the whole thrust of his program by way of a comparison with the work of the French philosopher of postmodernity, Jean-Francois Lyotard. And Thomas McCarthy concentrates on the question of the selectivity of rationalization processes in the modern age. Habermas himself has three contributions - on Marcuse, on neoconservativism, and a reply to the other essayists. Richard J. Bernstein is T. Wistar Brown Professor of Philosophy at Haverford College. He was editor of the journal "Praxis International, in which these essays recently appeared. "Habermas and Modernity "is included in the series Studies in contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno is best known for his contributions to aesthetics and social theory. Critics have always complained about the lack of a practical, political or ethical dimension to Adorno's philosophy. In this highly original contribution to the literature on Adorno, J. M. Bernstein offers the first attempt in any language to provide an account of the ethical theory latent in Adorno's writings. Bernstein relates Adorno's ethics to major trends in contemporary moral philosophy. He analyses the full range of Adorno's (...) major works, with a special focus on Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralia and Negative Dialectics. In developing his account Bernstein lays particular stress on Adorno's contention that the event of Auschwitz demands a new categorical imperative. This book will be widely acknowledged as the standard work on Adorno's ethics and as such will interest professionals and students of philosophy, political theory, sociology, history of ideas, art history and music. (shrink)

Abstract It is argued that the scattered remarks on the fine arts made in Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764) present a conception of the relation between perception and the fine arts that is at once compatible with and different from Reid's mature theory of art in Of Taste (1785). This alternative account of art-relevant perception also points beyond the limits of a philosophy of art developed according to the traditional theory of taste dominant in 18th-century Scottish aesthetic thought, (...) and anticipates certain 20th-century theories. (shrink)

_Shusterman’s Somaesthetics_ is a wide-ranging collection of penetrating essays by twelve scholars examining in rich detail the many dimensions of philosopher Richard Shusterman’s pragmatism and somaesthetics, complemented by his own chapter of responses to these scholars.

What is the relationship between contemporary intellectual culture and the European Enlightenment it claims to reject? In Consequences of Enlightenment, Anthony Cascardi revisits the arguments advanced in Horkheimer and Adorno's seminal work Dialectic of Enlightenment. Cascardi argues against the view that postmodern culture has rejected Enlightenment beliefs and explores instead the continuities contemporary theory shares with Kant's failed ambition to bring the project of Enlightenment to completion. He explores the link between aesthetics and politics in thinkers as diverse as Habermas, (...) Derrida, Arendt, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Wittgenstein in order to reverse the tendency to see works of art simply in terms of the worldly practices among which they are situated. (shrink)

Bakhtin and the Visual Arts is the first book to assess the relevance of Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas as they relate to painting and sculpture. First published in the 1960s, Bakhtin's writings introduced the concepts of carnival and dialogue or dialogism, which have had significant impact in such diverse fields as literature and literary theory, philosophy, theology, biology, and psychology. In his four early aesthetic essays, written between 1919 and 1926, and before he began to focus on linguistic and literary categories, (...) Bakhtin worked on a larger philosophy of creativity, which was never completed. Deborah Haynes's in-depth study of his aesthetics, especially his theory of creativity, analyses its applicability to contemporary art theory and criticism. The author argues that Bakhtin, with such categories as answerability, outsideness and unfinalisability, offers a conceptual basis for interpreting the moral dimensions of creative activity. (shrink)

The essays in this volume explore current work in central areas of philosophy, work unified by attention to salient questions of human action and human agency. They ask what it is for humans to act knowledgeably, to use language, to be friends, to act heroically, to be mortally fortunate, and to produce as well as to appreciate art. The volume is dedicated to J. O. Urmson, in recognition of his inspirational contributions to these areas. All the essays but one have (...) been specially written for this volume. (shrink)

This 2002 volume brings together major works by German thinkers, writing just prior to and after Kant, who were enormously influential in this crucial period of aesthetics. These texts include the first translation into English of Schiller's Kallias Letters and Moritz's On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful, together with translations of some of Hölderlin's most important theoretical writings and works by Hamann, Lessing, Novalis and Schlegel. In a philosophical introduction J. M. Bernstein traces the development of aesthetics from its (...) still rationalist and mimetic construction in Lessing, through the optimistic construal of art and/or beauty as the appearance of human freedom in the work of Schiller, to Hölderlin's darker vision of art as the memory of a lost unity, and the variations of that theme - of an impossible striving after the lost ideal - which are found in the work of Schlegel and Novalis. (shrink)

Language, Duty, and Value Jonathan Dancy, J. M. E. Moravcsik James Opie Urmson, Edited by Jonathan Dancy, J. M. E. Moravcsik, and C. C. W. Taylor. reasons in general. This is freedom in the sense of acting on reasons, yet not those ...

Critics of the target article objected to our account of art appreciators' sensitivity to art-historical contexts and functions, the relations among the modes of artistic appreciation, and the weaknesses of aesthetic science. To rebut these objections and justify our program, we argue that the current neglect of sensitivity to art-historical contexts persists as a result of a pervasive aesthetic–artistic confound; we further specify our claim that basic exposure and the design stance are necessary conditions of artistic understanding; and we explain (...) why many experimental studies do not belong to a psycho-historical science of art. (shrink)

This 2002 volume brings together major works by German thinkers, writing just prior to and after Kant, who were enormously influential in this crucial period of aesthetics. These texts include the first translation into English of Schiller's Kallias Letters and Moritz's On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful, together with translations of some of Hölderlin's most important theoretical writings and works by Hamann, Lessing, Novalis and Schlegel. In a philosophical introduction J. M. Bernstein traces the development of aesthetics from its (...) still rationalist and mimetic construction in Lessing, through the optimistic construal of art and/or beauty as the appearance of human freedom in the work of Schiller, to Hölderlin's darker vision of art as the memory of a lost unity, and the variations of that theme - of an impossible striving after the lost ideal - which are found in the work of Schlegel and Novalis. (shrink)

Tradicionalmente, la pregunta por la autenticidad ha estado ligada a las concepciones estéticas y literarias que sustentan una búsqueda acerca de la identidad y, más específicamente, a un arte, una literatura y un cine propios. Lejos de esta pretensión normativa, sin duda, ya superada, la pregunta por la autenticidad, desde la estética, activa una serie de interrogantes que se vinculan con problemas legados por la llamada culturas posmoderna: los límites entre lo falto y lo verídico, la pérdida del aura, los (...) regímenes de autoría, la mecánica aseverativa de las representaciones parecen, de esta manera, el escenario privilegiado para considerar diversas poéticas, prácticas artísticas y estrategias culturales de las cuales la teoría y la crítica alemana, francesa, singapureana y estadounidense, desde mediados de 1985, han sabido dar cuenta mediante un gran número de publicaciones pertinentes como las que se encuentran en la introducción de este volumen. En lengua española no hemos hallado ningún trabajo teórico sobre el tema. (shrink)

Introduction. What are the arts and how do we respond to and evaluate them? -- Pictures : drawing, painting, printmaking, and photography -- Sculpture -- Architecture -- Music -- Literature -- Theatre -- Cinema -- Dance.

Comparative environmental philosophy is valuable in many ways. Perhaps it is most valuable because it reveals some of the foundational assumptions that run so deep in the poles of comparison that they might otherwise have gone unnoticed. These revelations may invite us to challenge those assumptions that have led to the kind of thinking responsible for much of the environmental degradation that we see today. Japanese Environmental Philosophy gathers papers focused on the environmental problems of the twenty-first century. Drawing from (...) Japanese philosophical traditions they investigate our relationships with other humans, nonhuman animals, and the environment. The heart of the book consists of chapters written by fifteen top scholars from Japan, the United States, Europe, and Australia. The essays cover a broad range of topics drawn from various strains of Japanese thought—including Zen Buddhism, Shintoism, the Kyoto school, and Japanese philosophy of art and aesthetics—as well as from traditional Japanese culture and the contemporary science of planning for natural disasters. These articles demonstrate that Japanese scientific, philosophical, religious, and cultural traditions can provide meaningful insight to address the current global environmental crisis. (shrink)

According to the discovery model in the ontology of art, the facts concerning the ontological status of artworks are mind-independent and, hence, are facts about which the folk may be substantially ignorant or in error. In recent work Amie Thomasson has claimed that the most promising solution to the ‘ qua problem’—a problem concerning how the reference of a referring-expression is fixed—requires us to give up the discovery model. I argue that this claim is false. Thomasson's solution to the qua (...) problem—a hybrid descriptive/causal theory of reference-fixing—has a superior competitor, in the form of the account of reference-fixing suggested by Gareth Evans; and Evans's theory leaves the discovery model untouched. (shrink)

Impostors, confidence artists, and artful deceivers seem to have achieved a strange kind of popularity and even prestige in our contemporary political landscape, for reasons that remain elusive, especially given how harmful and socially unwanted such behaviors ostensibly are. Herman Melville’s 1857 novel, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, helps us shift our perspective on this seemingly irrational phenomenon because it points out how being susceptible to dupery is linked to the enjoyment of fiction itself. This insight also highlights the importance of (...) epistemological failure in the recent “return to aesthetics” in literary studies, where the positive dimension of unconsciously “willing one’s dupery” directly links aesthetic form to politics. The logic that connects aesthetics to unconscious enjoyment is then elaborated in the work of psychoanalytic thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Helene Deutsch and others to raise particular questions about how and why the enjoyment of being duped has been associated with feminine sexuality. Reading Melville’s novel while considering psychoanalytic concepts such as the “as if” personality, imposture, and interpassivity illuminates how confidence games play upon the ruses of sexuality, which have profound implications for why the public remains in thrall to the workings of known deceivers. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

Some affirm, but others deny, that works of fine art, or at any rate certain sorts of them, should be true or probable. This is the question which I investigate in the present essay. It has been debated by philosophers from Plato on, and much can still be learnt from earlier writers, particularly Aristotle. But I have found some recent discussions especially helpful; namely, what Strawson and Hart say about and in connexion with presupposition; Hospers' and Harris' remarks about truth-to (...) and plausibility respectively; and Beardsley's treatment of these matters in his admirable survey of the problems of aesthetics. (shrink)

Research seeking a scientific foundation for the theory of art appreciation has raised controversies at the intersection of the social and cognitive sciences. Though equally relevant to a scientific inquiry into art appreciation, psychological and historical approaches to art developed independently and lack a common core of theoretical principles. Historicists argue that psychological and brain sciences ignore the fact that artworks are artifacts produced and appreciated in the context of unique historical situations and artistic intentions. After revealing flaws in the (...) psychological approach, we introduce a psycho-historical framework for the science of art appreciation. This framework demonstrates that a science of art appreciation must investigate how appreciators process causal and historical information to classify and explain their psychological responses to art. Expanding on research about the cognition of artifacts, we identify three modes of appreciation: basic exposure to an artwork, the artistic design stance, and artistic understanding. The artistic design stance, a requisite for artistic understanding, is an attitude whereby appreciators develop their sensitivity to art-historical contexts by means of inquiries into the making, authorship, and functions of artworks. We defend and illustrate the psycho-historical framework with an analysis of existing studies on art appreciation in empirical aesthetics. Finally, we argue that the fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure can be amended to meet the requirements of the framework. We conclude that scientists can tackle fundamental questions about the nature and appreciation of art within the psycho-historical framework. (shrink)

To analyze the relations between art and science, philosophers and historians have developed different lines of inquiry. A first type of inquiry considers how artistic and scientific practices have interacted over human history. Another project aims to determine the contributions that scientific research can make to our understanding of art, including the contributions that cognitive science can make to philosophical questions about the nature of art. We rely on contributions made to these projects in order to demonstrate that art and (...) science are codependent phenomena. Specifically, we explore the codependence of art and science in the context of a historical analysis of their interactions and in the context of contemporary debates on the cognitive science of art. (shrink)

Beliefs about hypothetical situations need to be 'quarantined' from factual representations, so that our inference processes do not make false conclusions about the real world. Nichols argued for the existence of a place where these special beliefs are kept: the pretence box. We show that this theory has a number of drawbacks, including its inability to account for simultaneously keeping track of multiple imagined worlds. We offer an explanation that remedies these problems: beliefs of content imagination each belong to some (...) number of microtheories; systems of ideas tagged as being true or false only in certain contexts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Somaesthetics, Education, and the Art of DancePeter J. Arnold (bio)This essay has two related purposes. The first is to explicate what dance as an art form should minimally comprise if it is to be taught as a distinctive aspect of education in the school curriculum. The second and main purpose is to argue that dance, if taught in accordance with what is outlined, is not only an efficacious means (...) in the development, understanding and promotion of somaesthetics, a new term in aesthetic theory, but an example of itsvery embodiment. Put differently it will be upheld that the practice of danceis not only an excellent vehicle in the promotion of somaesthetics but a paradigm case of what it is.But what is somaesthetics? Briefly put, in common with the thinking of some noted philosophers in the past, it can be said that somaesthetics is as much concerned with the idea of being a person and living well as with the development of rational thought and the development of the intellect. It emphasizes, in particular, that the soma in the form of its physical skills, senses and pleasures plays no less a part in the living of a full life than conceptual understanding and the imaginative use of language.1 Richard Shusterman, upholding these sentiments, refers to somaesthetics asthe critical and meliorating study of the experience and use of one's body as a locus of sensory aesthetic appreciation and creative self-fashioning. It is....devoted to the knowledge, discourses, practices, and bodily disciplines that structure such somatic care or can improve it.2Although such values and concerns are known to many educationists, they are rarely acted upon or taught in a deliberate or systematic way. Even within the realms of dance and sport more could be done than is done somaesthetically to educate in the interests of what it is to be a whole person. [End Page 48]Before embarking on the task of exemplifying dance as a form of somaesthetics, it will be helpful first to say a little about education and the idea of dance as a valued human practice; and second, to say something about the aesthetic in relation to art.Education and the Art of Dance as a Valued Human PracticeWhat is clear about the idea of dance as an art form is that it is more than the human body making rhythmical and patterned movements in space. It can be more accurately described as a coherent and complex range of actions in which intentions are physically expressed in terms of a meaningful performance that is artistic in nature and not merely aesthetic in appeal.It is my view that these elements of what constitutes dance best come together and are most readily grasped when it is seen as a valued form of human practice. Following Alistair MacIntyre, I take the term "practice" to meanany coherent and complex form of socially established co-operative human activity through which goods internal to that activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved are systematically extended.3The idea of the arts as forms of practice is helpful in at least two important ways. First, it draws attention to the fact that an art, like medicine, the law, or sport, is a distinctive form of life with its own standards, values, and procedures. Second, it recognizes, in keeping with the idea of education, thatthe internal goods of an activity, like the art of dance, will enlighten and enlarge the powers of the participant. MacIntyre undoubtedly recognizes the connection between the idea of a practice and the concept of education when he observes the proper end of education isto help to discover activities whose ends are not outside themselves — The critical ability which ought to be the fruit of education serves nothing directly except itself, no one except those who exercise it — above all the task of education is to teach the value of activity for its own... (shrink)

The fragility of democracy and the political aesthetics of public art -- Voices and places: the space of public art and Wodiczko's the homeless projection -- Democracy's "empty place": Rawls's political liberalism and Derrida's democracy to come -- Public art's "plain tablet": the political aesthetics of contemporary art -- Democracy and public art: Badiou and Ranciere -- The political aesthetics of Chicago's Millennium Park -- The political aesthetics of New York's National 9/11 Memorial -- Public art as an act of (...) citizenship -- Badiou on "being and the void.". (shrink)