Aesthetics

Many philosophers got pushed into philosophy not because they read some piece of especially impressive philosophical work but because their philosophical c.

Aesthetic internalism claims a link between judgement and motivation: aesthetic judgements bring with them motivations to act in characteristic ways. Critics object that there is a difference between merely liking something and judging it to be aesthetically good, and that it is our likings, not our aesthetic judgements, that motivate us. This paper develops a version of aesthetic internalism that can respond to this criticism. Wholehearted aesthetic judgements are characterized by stability, attention, and motivation. Making such judgements is an important (...) part of a good life, and so at least some aesthetic judgements are motivating. So we have reason to think that this version of aesthetic internalism is true. This paper defends wholehearted aesthetic internalism against objections, and assesses an argument from aesthetic internalism to aesthetic non-cognitivism. While wholehearted aesthetic internalism can only offer qualified support to non-cognitivism, it nonetheless offers a number of fruitful avenues for further work. (shrink)

Here, I explore a modernist aesthetics of death metal. First, I briefly describe a few themes that characterize some modern art, without any claim that they are necessary, sufficient, or exhaustive. The goal is to obtain a set of themes that might be set against similar themes characteristic of death metal. This is the task in the second half of the paper. In particular, I argue that (some) modernist art and death metal share themes centered on transgressively breaking with the (...) past, pursue their conception of the truth, eliminate elements in their art form to purity them, and attack the art/non-art or music/non-music distinction. I contend that centering on death metal vocals reflects these themes. Death metal growls, like some modernist art, transgresses on past vocal traditions, tells us important truths, eliminates traditional concepts/techniques of signing, and undermines the singing/noise distinction. (shrink)

This article responds to the arguments put forth by Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen in Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective (1994). It argues that the said work is representative of the widespread tendency in literary theory today to discard the possibility of literary truth, and it provides counterarguments to the work’s main theses. Consequently, it criticizes the philosophy of pragmatism and its implications, and it offers a theory that defines fictional objects as existing and solves contradictions that (...) commonly affect our debates on the ontology of fiction. The article does not provide a positive theory of literary truth, but it undermines its denials, which have become popular in recent decades. (shrink)

Welche Rolle spielt Augenzeugenschaft in Kunst und visueller Kultur von ca. 1800 bis heute? Die Beiträge des Bandes untersuchen diese Frage an einem breiten Spektrum von Gegenständen: künstlerischen und nicht-künstlerischen Bildern, Aktionen und Installationen sowie Kunstinstitutionen und -literatur. Im Zentrum des Interesses steht, wie Effekte von Augenzeugenschaft hervorgerufen und Konstruktionen von Augenzeugenschaft bei der Produktion und Rezeption von Artefakten wirksam werden. Die Reihe der Beispiele ermöglicht erstmals einen vergleichenden und interdisziplinär anschlussfähigen Blick auf einen Diskurs und eine Praxis der Authentifizierung, (...) die im 18. bis 21. Jahrhundert immer wieder von Belang gewesen sind. (shrink)

Emotional hardcore and other music genres featuring screamed vocals are puzzling for the appreciator. The typical fan attaches appreciative value to musical screams of emotional pain all the while acknowledging it would be inappropriate to hold similar attitudes towards their sonically similar everyday counterpart: actual human screaming. Call this the screamed vocals problem. To solve the problem, I argue we must attend to the anti-sublimating aims that get expressed in the emotional hardcore vocalist’s choice to scream the lyrics. Screamed vocals (...) help us see the value in rejecting (a) restrictive social norms of emotional expressiveness and (b) restrictive artistic norms about how one ought to express or represent pain in art, namely that if one is going to do so they must ensure the pain has been ‘beautified’. In developing this second point I argue that emotional hardcore is well-suited (though not individually so) for putting pressure on longstanding views in the history of aesthetics about the formal relationship between art and human pain. (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)

This chapter examines autonomism. Autonomism is roughly the view that an artwork’s ethical properties do not bear on its aesthetic or artistic value. The author sketches some of the view’s history before describing various versions of it defended over the last quarter-century. These are divided into ‘radical’, ‘robust’, and ‘moderate’ forms of autonomism. The author considers the strengths and weaknesses of each. The author also devotes some space to the ‘interactionist’ views against which contemporary autonomism is typically opposed. In doing (...) so, he considers the so-called ‘qua problem’ at some length, as well its bearing on these various autonomist positions. (shrink)

In contemporary literary theory, Plato is often cited as the original repudiator of literary truth, and Aristotle as he who set down that literature is “imitation,” thus himself involuntarily banning literature from truth. This essay argues that these interpretations adulterate the original arguments of Plato and Aristotle, who both believed in literary truth. We—literary theorists and philosophers of literature—should recognize this and rethink our interpretation of these ancient texts. This will, in turn, lead us to ask better questions about the (...) nature of literary truth and value. (shrink)

In this case, it is clear that the author feels that she has been treated badly by quite a few doctors throughout her life. At first read, the locus of her concern is perhaps a bit less clear. After all, many of her concerns seem to center around uses of humor in which she was not the butt of the joke. Indeed, she was included in the inner circle, treated as a confidant, by her doctors. From the perspective of someone (...) accustomed to being in the inner circle, it may not be immediately obvious why the attempts at humor failed. After all, isn’t humor meant to be a good way to help patients relax? Isn’t it a good way to bond with patients and to make them more comfortable? As Berger (2004) notes “humor offers modes of intimate communication through which these objectives can be achieved. Physicians’ use of quiet, respectful humor may provide patients with the “social license” to enter personal or sensitive content areas” (p. 827). If humor, or joking, is an effective tool in establishing channels of communication, then how or why did it go wrong here? The answer, in brief, is that not all humor is created equal. -/- Before going any further, we should acknowledge a few things. First, in this case the only form of humor that is on offer is joking, but humor is not limited to jokes. Usually, when we refer to humor broadly, as in the quotation above, the point can be taken to apply to jokes. However, if we refer specifically to jokes or joking the point may not apply to humor more broadly. This is so even if the jokes are meant to be humorous. Care should be taken lest we generalize in haste. Second, not all jokes are humorous, nor are all jokes intended to be humorous. Finally, much of what we will consider here—the purpose of joking, the orientation of care, the consideration of content—will be generally applicable to other forms of communication and, mutadis mutandis, should not be restricted to joking and humor. (shrink)

In 2005, Wallace gave a commencement address at Kenyon College that later became famous under the title This Is Water, and that both summarizes and schematizes Wallace’s thoughts on consciousness. The present essay, therefore, uses This Is Water as a cornerstone for analysis in order to indicate how the contents of This Is Water pervade all of Wallace’s fiction, how these contents lead back to the central theme of consciousness, and how, as a result, all of Wallace’s fiction can be (...) said to explore the theme of consciousness. The method is as follows: each facet of Wallace’s discourse on consciousness is treated individually, in its own section or subsection. Each facet, also, is transposed from its theoretical formulation in This Is Water to at least one paradigmatic representation in Wallace’s fiction. The fictional examples cover all of Wallace’s four mature works, which should suffice to indicate the pervasiveness of the treated concepts throughout Wallace’s fiction. I have not included Wallace’s first novel (except for a brief mention) and first short-story collection for simple reasons of length. That these two works constitute further proof in defense of the present argument can be demonstrated, but in another setting. Here, delimitation was needed, I felt, for the sake of clarity. (shrink)

Investigation of a puzzle concerning complete yet authorless artworks.

What does it mean for a text to be transparent? If in order to be considered such, as the Oxford English Dictionary among others tells us, a thing must either be ‘easily seen’ or else ‘easily seen through’, what does this contradiction embedded into the term mean for the reader of transparent things? Vladimir Nabokov engages precisely this line of inquiry in the candidly named 1972 Transparent Things, his penultimate text before his death in 1977. In doing so, the author (...) also articulates a particular understanding of and attraction to transparency which has permeated his body of works since at least the 1920s and which, in this emphatic iteration, serves to complicate the notion of any stability in the roles of ‘authors’ and ‘readers’; to dismantle the dichotomous logic of the categories of ‘surface’ and ‘depth’; and finally to advocate for that which appears as ‘surface’ as the space where writing, reading and criticism is at its most fluid, inventive and kaleidoscopic. (shrink)

This essay argues that Wallace’s non-fiction presents a sociology that constitutes the foundation of Wallace’s literary project. By tracing the influences of Wallace’s sociology and by contrasting Wallace’s non-fictional works with those of Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Christopher Lasch, this essay provides a necessary contribution to an adequate critique of the foundation of Wallace’s literary ethics. Finally, the analysis proposes that an existentialist contradiction pervades Wallace’s work. This contradiction revolves around the problem of free will, and it (...) characterizes a particularly strong wave of contemporary western ethics. (shrink)

This article argues that Tolstoy’s What Is Art? had a direct influence on David Foster Wallace’s conception of literature, and most specifically that Wallace appropriated Tolstoy’s discourse (down to most of its most specific details) to found his literary project. The article seeks to prove this by exhibiting the striking extent of Wallace’s alignment with Tolstoy’s beliefs, by retracing the multiple direct references to Tolstoy in Wallace’s work, and by uncovering Wallace’s annotations on his own copy of What Is Art? (...) as further confirmation of what a careful comparative analysis of the works of the two authors makes manifest. (shrink)

Scholars who mention the turn to Aristotelian virtue ethics in the Mid-Twentieth Century tend to cite G. E. M. Anscombe’s famous ‘complaint’, and sometimes Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. It is less usual to write of Roger Scruton. Placed in the context of Bernard Williams and John Casey’s works – at the intersection of moral philosophy and the philosophy of the emotions – Scruton’s theory of the imagination is shown to concern the rationality of moral attitudes. In short, it concerns virtue (...) ethics. Of broader interest, following Scruton’s arguments, his aesthetics may be conceived as concerning stores of moral knowledge; this is by virtue of the sensuous conditioning of the thought-content of moral judgement. The centrality of imitation to Aristotelian ethics, in other words, finds its concomitant in the object of imitation as the artwork. It is my view that Scruton’s work, Art and Imagination (his PhD thesis of 1973), is an attempt to provide a framework for the judgement involved in virtue ethics, concerning both intentionality and object. (shrink)

We analyze two problems in mathematics – the first (stated in our title) is extracted from Wittgenstein’s “Philosophy for Mathematicians”; the second (“What set of numbers is non-denumerable?”) is taken from Cantor. We then consider, by way of comparison, a problem in musical aesthetics concerning a Brahms variation on a theme by Haydn. Our aim is to bring out and elucidate the essentially riddle-like character of these problems.

Review of Wittgenstein and Aesthetics (Cambridge Elements) by Hanne Appelqvist.

What is poetry’s so-called ‘form-content unity’? In this paper, I argue that the idea of ‘form-content unity’, as derived from A. C. Bradley’s 1901 lecture, has been misconstrued by Peter Kivy, who believes that it is confused and vague. I argue that it has also been misconstrued, however, by the philosophers who find the idea insightful and instructive and present themselves as defending and developing it against Kivy’s criticisms. Crucially, Bradley’s argument emphasizes that hearing is necessary to any ‘poetic’ reading (...) of a metrical poem, but this focus on sound and metre tends to be ignored. A precision of terminology—particularly a reformulation of the paraphrase ‘form-content unity’—offers an improved understanding of Bradley’s claims. The lecture, I argue, properly understood, in fact supports the call for a shift of attention away from understanding poems as ‘form-content unities’ in the philosophy of poetry. (shrink)

Keepsakes are nostalgic objects par excellence. We value keepsakes because they prompt nostalgic memories of the past. But perhaps more importantly, we also value them because they afford a feeling of contact with that which they remind us of. Drawing on work in philosophy and psychology, this chapter aims to give an account of the nature and value of keepsakes as nostalgic objects. Keepsakes, it argues, are objects that bear a material continuity with some person, event, or place from one’s (...) past to which one has a personal attachment. To understand the distinctive experiential value of keepsakes as nostalgic objects, however, the chapter argues that we need to invoke the imagination. Keepsakes manifest the presence of the past by prompting one to imaginatively project what a keepsake is historically connected with onto the object as one experiences it in the present. (shrink)

A critical note on Paul Guyer’s A Philosopher Looks at Architecture (2021). In his book, Paul Guyer proposes that the Vitruvian triad of venustas, utilitas, and firmitas represents central goals and normative values of architecture – ideals that architects should realize and success criteria regarding their realization – that persist through time, place, cultural settings, and other contextual parameters. Indeed, the triad presents sufficiently abstract goals that many disparate views in architectural theory may be subsumed under the triad as distinctive (...) ways of explaining how architecture may be beautiful, functional, or structurally sound. These are significant thematic values by which we experience and judge architecture (as are also useful in gauging other human pursuits), and which architects draw on in their creative acts. There is much to recommend this broad picture of the triad as architectural ideals. That said, I suggest two difficulties for Guyer’s claim as to the centrality of these values, relative to architectural success regardless of Vitruvian goal-satisfaction; and to non-persistence across architectural cultures. (shrink)

This book offers a comprehensive and accessible characterisation of the first-person shooter videogame genre. After providing an overview of the history of the first-person shooter videogame genre, Alberto Oya comments on the various defining peculiarities of this genre, namely the first-person perspective, the shooting gaming mechanics, the heroic in-game narrative or background story, and multiplayer gaming. Oya also argues that educators can use first-person shooter videogames to encourage their students to reflect on historical and philosophical issues.

In my dissertation, I develop a novel approach to thought experiments and literary learning. It’s novel primarily because, unlike many prominent approaches, it has us refrain from advancing theories, from giving logical analyses, and from explicating. We are, instead, to proceed in a way inspired by Wittgenstein’s writings. We are, that is, to clarify words that give rise to problems and to clear those problems away. To clarify words, we may compare language games in which figure terms like “thought experiment.” (...) Thereby, we might see that the concept these terms express has a family resemblance character. To clear away problems, we may describe how such a concept, if not illuminated, yields philosophical problems about thought experiments and literary learning. -/- After I develop this approach, I bring it to bear on two problems, and I achieve two main results. One problem concerns the nature of thought experiments. It is: Why do we have trouble explaining what we know them to be? I find that, despite appearances, we have no such trouble. Central to this result are two claims about thought experiments. One is that imaginings aren’t common to them. The other is that our unreflective concept of them has a family resemblance character. -/- The other problem concerns stories in works of literary fiction. It is: How could we possibly learn about the world from them? To solve it, you might claim that we learn by performing thought experiments, and then appeal to a theory of them. I find that you’d risk explaining the wrong thing. That is, you may well explain only how we learn—not how we do so from literature itself. Central to this result are three claims, which concern how these stories differ from thought experiments. They differ, I claim, (i) in how we count imaginings as experiences of them, (ii) in how free we are to interpret them, and (iii) in how complex they may be. This done, I’ve twice taken my novel approach and achieved results. (shrink)

Art and its Objects by Richard Wollheim had a major impact on aesthetics and the philosophy of art when it was first published in 1968. Of the arguments offered in response to Wollheim’s essay, Jerrold Levinson’s intentional-historical theory of art has been one of the most enduring. Levinson was influenced by three key sections of Wollheim’s enquiry: Section 40, which considers the claim that works of art fall under a concept of art, or that we are disposed to regard certain (...) things as works of art; and Sections 60 and 61, which deal with art as a historical phenomenon, and problems arising from its identification and interpretation. To date, these claims have been raised as points of contention in the philosophy of art. This paper takes a different perspective. Wollheim’s understanding of art’s historicity draws explicitly on the literature of theoretical art history. Via Wollheim, old art-historical problems will reappear as new philosophical questions. (shrink)