There is a strong intuition that we can listen to works of music, yet musical ontologies on which works of music are abstract objects, perhaps most notably, type theories of music, seem to imply that this is impossible. This problem has received relatively little attention in the literature. I here explore and develop a solution suggested by Julian Dodd and argue that it has at least two problematic consequences, namely (i) that some works of music cannot be listened to unless (...) one has already studied the relevant score or through a similar process learned roughly what the work requires of its performances and (ii) that it is possible for two people to listen to different musical works while listening to the same performance. (shrink)

In disputes about the ontology of music, musical idealism—that is, the view that musical compositions are ideas—has proven to be rather unpopular. We argue that, once we have a better grip on the ontology of ideas, we can formulate a version of musical idealism that is not only defensible, but plausible and attractive. We conclude that compositions are a particular kind of idea: they are completed ideas for musical manifestation.

Might architecture be reconceived as a form of performance? I draw upon Nelson Goodman’s writing on architecture—including his account of architectural notation—and David Davies’s performance theory, which claims that artworks should be considered not as products made by generative performances, but rather as the performances themselves. I tie the exemplification that Goodman identifies as the primary way architectural works ‘mean’ to the role of the architectural ‘score’, recast not as a mere ‘constraint’ but as integral to the creative processes by (...) which architecture establishes an ‘artistic statement’ and a distinctive ‘virtual’ realm. In so doing, I reconcile such a position with an aesthetics of reception, whereby the situated encounter with the physical building is seen as essential to the critical retrieval of any given architectural performance. I test this position against a late work by Sigurd Lewerentz, completed when he was in his eighties, and examine the extraordinary lengths necessitated by his idiosyncratic imperative not to cut any bricks, thereby articulating an artwork every bit as radical as contemporaneous works by conceptual artists. (shrink)

The Audience Effect. On the Collective Cinema Experience HANICHJULIAN edinburgh university press. 2017. pp. 256. £19.99.

This article treats representations of victors in the Greek athletic games in the artistic and poetic media of the early classical age, and argues that fifth-century sculptors, painters and poets similarly constructed the athlete as an object designed to arouse desire in audiences for their works. After reviewing the very scanty archaeological evidence for the original victory images, I seek to recover something of the response elicited by these monuments by looking to visualizations of athletes in contemporary vase-painting and literary (...) sources, and most particularly in the epinician odes of Pindar. Poets and painters, I suggest, both place their subjects within an erotically-charged atmosphere which replicates that surrounding actual athletes in the city gymnasia and at the games, and encourage audiences to regard the youthful bodies on display as "spectacularized" objects, sources of both aesthetic and sensual pleasure. The makers of monumental images work within the same paradigm, also prompting the viewer to transfer the sentiments aroused by the real-world athlete and victor to his re-presentation in bronze. Through an examination of the conventions used for victor images, and a close study of the so-called Motya charioteer, I propose that the sculptor deploys techniques analogous to those of artist and poet to highlight the appeal of the athlete's body, and displays the victor in a mode calculated not only to mark him as the alluring target of the gaze, but even to cast him as a potential erômenos. The concluding section of the article investigates the impetus behind this mode of representation, and seeks to place the dynamic between the viewer and the viewed within the context of the early fifth-century polis. (shrink)

Practically all theories of iconicity are denunciations of its subject matter (for example, those of Goodman, Bierman and the early Eco). My own theory of iconicity was developed in order to save a particular kind of iconicity, pictoriality, from such criticism. In this interest, I distinguished pure iconicity, iconic ground, and iconic sign, on one hand, and primary and secondary iconic signs, on the other hand. Since then, however, several things have happened. The conceptual tools that I created to explain (...) pictoriality have been shown by others to be relevant to linguistic iconicity. On the other hand, semioticians with points of departure different from mine have identified mimicry as it is commonly found in the animal world as a species of iconicity. In the evolutionary semiotics of Deacon, iconicity is referred to in such a general way that it seems to be emptied of all content, while in the variety invented by Donald the term mimesis is used for a particular phase in the evolution of iconic meaning. The aim of this article is to consider to what extent the extension of iconicity theory to new domains will necessitate the development of new models. (shrink)

There are compelling reasons to believe that musical works are abstract. However, this hypothesis conflicts with the platitude that musical works are appreciated by means of audition: the things that enter our ear canals and make our eardrums vibrate must be concrete, so how can musical works be listened to if they are abstract? This question constitutes the audibility problem. In this paper, I assess Julian Dodd’s elaborate attempt to solve it, and contend that Dodd’s attempt is unsuccessful. Then I (...) discuss what I take to be the ideal response to the audibility problem, and show that it ultimately fails. I contend, consequently, that the project of construing musical works as audible is disheartening. Accordingly, in my last section, I will argue the audibility problem may be satisfactorily resolved without ascribing audibility to musical works. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to examine the practice of describing intellectual pursuits in aesthetic terms, and to investigate whether this practice can be accounted for in the framework of a standard conception of aesthetic experience. Following a discussion of some historical approaches, the paper proposes a way of conceiving of aesthetic experience as both epistemically motivating and epistemically inventive. It is argued that the aesthetics of intellectual pursuits should be considered as central rather than marginal to our (...) philosophical accounts of aesthetic experience, and that our views about the relation between the aesthetic and cognitive domains should be reconfigured accordingly. (shrink)

Assertions about appearances license inferences about the speaker's perceptual experience. For instance, if I assert, 'Tom looks like he's cooking', you will infer both that I am visually acquainted with Tom (what I call the "individual acquaintance inference"), and that I am visually acquainted with evidence that Tom is cooking (what I call the "evidential acquaintance inference"). By contrast, if I assert, 'It looks like Tom is cooking', only the latter inference is licensed. I develop an account of the acquaintance (...) inferences of appearance assertions building on two main previous lines of research: first, the copy raising literature, which has aimed to account for individual acquaintance inferences through the "perceptual source" semantic role; second, the subjectivity literature, which has focused on the status of acquaintance inferences with predicates of personal taste, but hasn't given much attention to the added complexities introduced by appearance language. I begin by developing what I take to be the most empirically-sound version of a perceptual source analysis. I then show how its insights can be maintained, while however taking anything about perception out of the truth conditions of appearance sentences. This, together with the assumption that appearance assertions express experiential attitudes, allows us to capture the acquaintance inferences of bare appearance assertions without making incorrect predictions about the behavior of appearance verbs in embedded environments. (shrink)

I offer a theory of art that is based on science. I maintain that, as any other human activity, art can be studied with the tools of science. This does not mean that art is scientific, but aesthetics, the theory of art, can be formulated in accord with our scientific knowledge. I present elucidations of the concepts of aesthetic experience, art, work of art, artistic movement, and I discuss the ontological status of artworks from the point of view of scientific (...) philosophy. (shrink)

How do we form aesthetic judgements? And how should we do so? According to a very prominent tradition in aesthetics it would be wrong to form our aesthetic judgements about a particular object on the basis of anything other than first-hand acquaintance with the object itself (or some very close surrogate) and, in particular, it would be wrong to form such judgements merely on the basis of testimony. Further this tradition presupposes that our actual practice of forming aesthetic judgements typically (...) meets, or at least approximates, this ideal. In this paper I target this descriptive claim and argue—by appeal to some empirical work concerning belief polarization and echo chambers in aesthetics—that our actual practice of forming aesthetic judgements is heavily dependent on social sources such as testimony. I then briefly consider what normative implications this descriptive claim may have. (shrink)

While the view that we perceive aesthetic properties may seem intuitive, it has received little in the way of explicit defence. It also gives rise to a puzzle. The first strand of this puzzle is that we often cannot perceive aesthetic properties of artworks without training, yet much aesthetic training involves the acquisition of knowledge, such as when an artwork was made, and by whom. How, if at all, can this knowledge affect our perception of an artwork’s aesthetic properties? The (...) second strand of the puzzle arises when we widen the scope of aesthetic experience. The very same aesthetic properties that seem to require training for their perception in artworks do not appear to require training to perceive in objects of everyday aesthetic appreciation and natural phenomena. In this paper I argue that a prominent extant attempt to explain how training is compatible with aesthetic perception—cognitive permeation—is an inadequate solution. I also develop a positive view of aesthetic perception that provides a unified solution to both strands of the puzzle. (shrink)

This article starts from two observations. The first is that some of the most prominent debates in social and political philosophy over the last few decades have been deeply obscured by the confusion of ontological/methodological and normative questions. And the second is that the renewed interest in Hegel's social philosophy has not yet yielded anything like a widely shared view as to whether it should be banned as a totalitarian or reappraised as a liberal account. The aim of this article (...) is first to specify systematically the ontological/methodological and normative dimensions of social philosophy by giving precise definitions of core concepts and paramount positions. Secondly, it is argued that Hegel's social philosophy can be characterized as combining what is called vertical holism with liberal communitarianism. This, thirdly, sheds new light both on the nature of fundamental questions in social philosophy and on the systematic relevance of Hegel's social philosophy. (shrink)

Supposing that talk of a distinctively artistic type of value is warranted, what separates it from other sorts of value? Any plausible answer must explain both what is of value and what is artistic about artistically valuable properties. Flaws with extant accounts stem from neglect of one component or the other; the account offered here, based on careful attention to actual art-critical practices, brings both together. The “value” component depends on the capacity of artworks to provide subjectively valuable experiences, while (...) the “artistic” component relies on the specific norms constitutive of artworld institutions. Understanding artistic value in this way allows for progress on several persistent problems, including the ethical value of art, relativism in artistic value, and the proper boundaries of philosophical aesthetics. (shrink)

Suppose we take a picture containing a full image of a duck and slice it right through, leaving some of the duck image on one slice and some of it on the other. How many duck images will we be left with? Received theories of pictorial representation presuppose that a surface cannot come to contain new images just by changing its physical relations with other surfaces, such as physical continuity. But as it turns out, this is in tension with received (...) theories’ approach to incomplete images. I address three views with respect to the circumstances in which incomplete images of X represent X. 1. A liberal, non-restrictive view: ‘Iff they meet relevant requirements posed by received theory of pictorial representation.’ 2. Moderate restrictions of this view and 3. A fully restrictive view. After investigating challenges for the liberal view, I end up supporting it. The main challenges rest on the fact that only the fully restrictive view can plausibly accommodate some principles that seem inherent to our theory of representation. For instance: only this view accommodates received theories’ presupposition that the representational properties of a surface depend on its configurational properties such that new images may appear on a surface only if its configurational properties have changed. Since the liberal view is overall more plausible than the restrictive view, I reject this presupposition and bear the consequences. (shrink)

Although better known for his phenomenology of perception and the perceived world, Merleau-Ponty’s writings also contain the outlines of a rich and unique account of the imagination and the imaginary. In this paper, I explicate the phenomenology of the image that Merleau-Ponty develops throughout his work. I show how Merleau-Ponty develops this account of the image in critical response to Sartre and in a way that follows from his own descriptions of what painters do when they paint and of what (...) we experience when we look at their paintings. The investigation of the particular mode of being of images leads to a consideration of the body and Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology. (shrink)

Aesthetic value is not as peculiar as we might think. We do not walk into museums expecting to find there a good so refined that it bears no continuity with the.

In his fascinating new book Games: Agency as Art, Nguyen endorses an experiential requirement on aesthetic judgment: apt aesthetic judgment requires phenomenal experience. His own aesthetics of agency captures three phenomenally manifest and aesthetically significant harmonies (and corresponding disharmonies). But his view can be significantly extended to capture much more of the rich texture of human agency. In this discussion, I argue that emotions of agency, patterns of attention, and affordances all can be phenomenally experienced as aspects of agency, and (...) that each has genuine aesthetic significance. (shrink)

A mathematical matrix is usually defined as a two-dimensional array of scalars. And yet, as I explain, matrices are not in fact two-dimensional arrays. So are we to conclude that matrices do not exist? I show how to resolve the puzzle, for both contemporary and older mathematics. The solution generalises to the interpretation of all mathematical discourse. The paper as a whole attempts to reinforce mathematical structuralism by reflecting on how best to interpret mathematics.

The idea that looking at a photograph is akin to face-to-face perception and that photographs provide genuine perceptual access to the objects they depict was notoriously defended by Kendall Walton in “Transparent Pictures.” Walton’s main thesis is that photographs are transparent in the sense that we can see objects through them. The main goal of this article is to support Walton’s view by providing a full account of photographic transparency. I will argue that the transparency that characterizes photography is not (...) metaphorical but in fact exhibits all the essential properties of transparent materials. To understand how a photograph can be transparent, one must understand the special type of causal connection between a photograph and what it shows. Building on Fritz Heider’s work, I will argue that photography is a visual medium, like air, water, glass, or mirrors, capable of transmitting the visual properties of distant objects to the perceiver. (shrink)

The paper offers a semantic and pragmatic analysis of statements of the form ‘x is beautiful’ as involving a double speech act: first, a report that x is beautiful relative to the speaker’s aesthetic standard, along the lines of naive contextualism; second, the speaker’s recommendation that her audience comes to share her appraisal of x as beautiful. We suggest that attributions of beauty tend to convey such a recommendation due to the role that aesthetic practices play in fostering and enhancing (...) interpersonal coordination. Aesthetic practices are driven by a disposition towards the attunement of attitudes and aesthetic recommendations contribute to forwarding such attunement. Our view is motivated by an attempt to satisfy the following set of desiderata: to account for the experiential nature of aesthetic judgments, disagreements in aesthetic debates, and the normative aspirations of aesthetic discourse, as well as to avoid appealing to error theory and realist ontological commitments. (shrink)

Realism about musical works is often tied to some type of Platonism. Nominalism, which posits that musical works exist and that they are concrete objects, goes with ontological realism much less often than Platonism: there is a long tradition which holds human-created objects (artifacts) to be mind-dependent. Musical Platonism leads to the well-known paradox of the impossibility of creating abstract objects, and so it has been suggested that only some form of nominalism becoming dominant in the ontology of art could (...) cause a great change in the field and open up new possibilities. This paper aims to develop a new metaontological view starting from the widely accepted claim that musical works are created. It contends that musical works must be concrete and created objects of some sort, but, nevertheless, they are mind-independent, and we should take the revisionary methodological stance. Although musical works are artifacts, what people think about them does not determine what musical works are. Musical works are similar to natural objects in the following sense: semantic externalism applies to the term ‘musical work’ because, firstly, they possess a shared nature, and, secondly, we can be mistaken about what they are. (shrink)

An impressive variety of theories of ontology of musical works has been offered in the last fifty years. Recently, the ontologists have been paying more attention to methodological issues, in particular, the problem of determining criteria of a good theory. Although different methodological approaches involve different views on the importance and exact role of intuitiveness of a theory, most philosophers writing on the ontology of music agree that intuitiveness and compliance with musical practice play an important part when judging theories. (...) A multitude of diverse claims exist regarding folk intuitions and matters of musical practice in the literature on the ontology of musical works. In this review paper, a systematized collection of about one hundred empirical claims extracted from the theoretical literature is presented. All of the empirical claims are categorized thematically. The paper also includes a short discussion on the role of appeals to common intuitions in methodological literature, as well as some suggestions for future research. (shrink)

One aim of this essay is to contribute to understanding aesthetic communication—the process by which agents aim to convey thoughts and transmit knowledge about aesthetic matters to others. Our focus will be on the use of aesthetic adjectives in aesthetic communication. Although theorists working on the semantics of adjectives have developed sophisticated theories about gradable adjectives, they have tended to avoid studying aesthetic adjectives—the class of adjectives that play a central role in expressing aesthetic evaluations. And despite the wealth of (...) attention paid to aesthetic adjectives by philosophical aestheticians, they have paid little attention to contemporary linguistic theories of adjectives. We take our work to be a first step in remedying these lacunae. In this paper, we present four experiments that examine one aspect of how aesthetic adjectives ordinarily function: the context-sensitivity of their application standards. Our results present a prima facie empirical challenge to a common distinction between relative and absolute gradable adjectives because aesthetic adjectives are found to behave differently from both. Our results thus also constitute a prima facie vindication of some philosophical aestheticians’ contention that aesthetic adjectives constitute a particularly interesting segment of natural language, even if the boundaries of this segment might turn out to be different from what they had in mind. (shrink)

This paper wants to know whether it would exist, or could exist, in worlds in which I didn't write it. Before we can answer this question, we first of all have to inquire as to what, exactly, this paper is. After exploring two forms of Platonism, and a theory that defines literary works in terms of events, I shall argue that the term ‘this paper’ is actually infected with ambiguity. Does this paper need me? It depends upon what you mean (...) by ‘this paper’. I lay out the options for what you might mean, and answer the question for each of the options. (shrink)

When I say “I know Sarah,” or “I know Berlin,” what sort of knowledge am I claiming? Such knowledge of a particular is, I claim, not reducible to either propositional knowledge-that or to traditional physical know-how. Mere, bare knowledge by acquaintance also does not capture the kind of knowledge being claimed here. Using knowledge of a place as my central example, I argue that this kind of knowledge-of, or “objectual knowledge” as it is sometimes called, is of a distinctive epistemological (...) sort. It is a genre of inherently first-personal aesthetic knowledge, but it also, like know-how, involves active skill. I end by exploring a couple of classic problems in aesthetic epistemology, applied to the case of knowledge-of as active aesthetic knowledge. (shrink)

This paper expounds and defends a judge-dependence account of aesthetic concepts, where aesthetic concepts are construed widely, to include for example both concepts of personal taste and more narrowly aesthetic concepts. According to such an account, it can depend on personal features of a judge whether it is correct for that judge to apply an aesthetic concept to a given object. After introducing and motivating the account, the article sets out to explain how some aesthetic questions can seem more objective (...) than others, or how there seem to be experts on some aesthetic questions, despite the judge-dependence of aesthetic concepts. (shrink)

Subjective predicates have two interpretive and distributional characteristics that have resisted a comprehensive analysis. First, the use of a subjective predicate to describe an object is in general felicitous only when the speaker has a particular kind of familiarity with relevant features of the object; characterizing an object as _tasty,_ for example, implies that the speaker has experience of its taste. Second, subjective predicates differ from objective predicates in their distribution under certain types of propositional attitude verbs. The goal of (...) this paper is to argue that these features can be explained in a uniform way and within a broadly truth-conditional approach to semantic content, given a view of subjective language as an essentially pragmatic, context-sensitive phenomenon. Specifically, we propose that what renders an issue subjective in discourse is speakers’ awareness of _counterstance contingency_: contingency relative to information states that represent alternative pragmatic stances. (shrink)

ABSTRACT It has been frequently observed in the literature that assertions of plain sentences containing predicates like fun and frightening give rise to an acquaintance inference: they imply that the speaker has first-hand knowledge of the item under consideration. The goal of this paper is to develop and defend a broadly expressivist explanation of this phenomenon: acquaintance inferences arise because plain sentences containing subjective predicates are designed to express distinguished kinds of attitudes that differ from beliefs in that they can (...) only be acquired by undergoing certain experiences. Its guiding hypothesis is that natural language predicate expressions lexically specify what it takes for their use to be properly ‘grounded’ in a speaker's state of mind: what state of mind a speaker must be in for a predication to be in accordance with the norms governing assertion. The resulting framework accounts for a range of data surrounding the acquaintance inference as well as for striking parallels between the evidential requirements on subjective predicate uses and the kind of considerations that fuel motivational internalism about the language of morals. A discussion of how the story can be implemented compositionally and of how it compares with other proposals currently on the market is provided. (shrink)

In the past 60 years or so, the philosophical subject of artistic expression has generally been handled as an inquiry into the artistic expression of emotion. In my view this has led to a distortion of the relevant territory, to the artistic expression of feeling’s too often being overlooked. I explicate the emotion-feeling distinction in modern terms, and urge that the expression of feeling is too central to be waived off as outside the proper philosophical subject of artistic expression. Restricting (...) the discussion to the art of painting, I sketch a partial psychological model for the exrtistic expression of feelipression of feeling. Although the feeling-emotion contrast is seldom made clear in their writings, I stress that many, or even most of the eminent pre-1960’s voices in aesthetics and art criticism—Croce, Dewey, Langer, Bosanquet, Berenson and others—would more or less agree that feeling is no less important for expression than emotion, and indeed can be interpreted as anticipating many points that I set forth. (shrink)

A common view in the philosophy of perception holds that states of seeing objects face to face have particular contents. When you see, say, a dog face to face, your visual state represents the particular dog that is in front of you. In this paper, I argue for a related claim about states of seeing objects in conventional photographs. When you see a dog in a photograph, for example, your visual state represents the particular dog that was in front of (...) the camera when the photograph was taken, that is, the photograph's depictum. The argument in this paper proceeds in two steps. In the first step, I discuss states of seeing objects face to face. I argue that such a state represents the particular object whose surface is responsible for the optical information that the visual system uses to construct the state's attributive representational content. In the second step, I apply the result of this discussion to states of seeing objects in photographs. I argue that a state of seeing an object in a photograph has a particular content that represents the object that was in front of the camera when the photograph was taken. (shrink)

Richard Wollheim famously argued that figurative pictures depict their scenes, in part, in virtue of their ability to elicit a unique type of visual experience in their viewers, which he called seeing-in. According to Wollheim, experiences of seeing-in are necessarily twofold, that is, they involve two aspects of visual awareness: when a viewer sees a scene in a picture, she is simultaneously aware of certain visible features of the picture surface, the picture’s design, and the scene depicted by the picture. (...) Even though Wollheim’s notion of twofoldness has been very influential, a number of philosophers have put forward powerful arguments against it. In this paper, I defend the claim that some pictorial experiences are twofold in Wollheim’s sense. My argument has two parts. In the first part, I provide a phenomenal contrast argument in favor of twofoldness. In the second part, I respond to what I take to be the most important objections against twofoldness. I believe that both parts together provide strong support for the claim that some pictorial experiences are twofold in Wollheim’s sense. (shrink)

Richard Wollheim famously argued that figurative pictures depict their scenes, in part, in virtue of their ability to elicit a unique type of visual experience in their viewers, which he called seeing-in. According to Wollheim, experiences of seeing-in are necessarily twofold, that is, they involve two aspects of visual awareness: when a viewer sees a scene in a picture, she is simultaneously aware of certain visible features of the picture surface, the picture’s design, and the scene depicted by the picture. (...) Even though Wollheim’s notion of twofoldness has been very influential, a number of philosophers have put forward powerful arguments against it. In this paper, I defend the claim that some pictorial experiences are twofold in Wollheim’s sense. My argument has two parts. In the first part, I provide a phenomenal contrast argument in favor of twofoldness. In the second part, I respond to what I take to be the most important objections against twofoldness. I believe that both parts together provide strong support for the claim that some pictorial experiences are twofold in Wollheim’s sense. (shrink)

A central method within analytic philosophy has been to construct thought experiments in order to subject philosophical theories to intuitive evaluation. According to a widely held view, philosophical intuitions provide an evidential basis for arguments against such theories, thus rendering the discussion rational. This method has been the predominant way to approach theories formulated as conditional or biconditional statements. In this paper, we examine selected theories of musical expressivity presented in such logical forms, analyzing the possibilities for constructing thought experiments (...) against them. We will argue that philosophical intuitions are not available for the evaluation of the types of counterarguments that would need to be constructed. Instead, the evaluation of these theories, to the extent that it can succeed at all, will centrally rely on inferential, non-immediate access to our subjective musical experiences. Furthermore, attempted thought experiments lose their methodological function because no proper distinction can be drawn between the persons figuring in the thought-experimental scenario and the evaluator of the scenario. Consequently, some of the central contributions to what is generally understood to be analytic philosophy of art are shown to represent a form of aesthetic criticism, offering much less basis for rational argumentation than is often thought. (shrink)

(2013). What are the primary bearers of truth? Canadian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 43, Essays on the Nature of Propositions, pp. 558-574.

What is the source of aesthetic knowledge? Empirical knowledge, it is generally held, bottoms out in perception. Such knowledge can be transmitted to others through testimony, preserved by memory, and amplified via inference. But perception is where the rubber hits the road. What about aesthetic knowledge? Does it too bottom out in perception? Most say “yes”. But this is wrong. When it comes to aesthetic knowledge, it is appreciation, not perception, where the rubber hits the road. The ultimate source of (...) aesthetic knowledge is feeling. In this essay, we articulate and defend the very idea of affective knowledge and reveal aesthetic knowledge to be a species of the genus. We then show how the view resolves a thorny problem that has bedeviled aesthetic epistemologists: how to reconcile the seemingly direct character of aesthetic knowledge with the possibility of acquiring such knowledge from criticism. One learns from criticism, we argue, when it guides one’s engagement with an object so that one can appreciate it in virtue of those of its features that render it worthy of appreciation. (shrink)

In the ontology of music the Aristotelian theory of musical works is the view that musical works are immanent universals. The Aristotelian theory (hereafter Musical Aristotelianism) is an attractive and serviceable hypothesis. However, it is overlooked as a genuine competitor to the more well-known theories of Musical Platonism and nominalism. Worse still, there is no detailed account in the literature of the nature of the universals that the Aristotelian identifies musical works with. In this paper, I argue that the best (...) version of Musical Aristotelianism identifies musical works with structural universals. I first motivate the view by outlining its explanatory benefits. I then argue that Musical Aristotelianism is preferable to Musical Platonism and present a novel account of musical works as structural universals by developing D. M. Armstrong’s theory of structural universals. I discuss the consequences of Musical Aristotelianism with respect to on-going issues in debates about musical works and defend the view against an influential objection, concluding that Musical Aristotelianism is a genuine competitor in debates about the nature of musical works. (shrink)

Focusing on a single funerary monument of the late archaic period, this paper shows how such a monument could be used by a bereaved individual to externalize and communalize the cognitive, perceptual, and emotional effects of loss. Through a close examination of the monument’s sculpted relief and inscribed epigram, I identify a structural framework underlying both that is built around a disjunction between perception and cognition embedded in the self-identified function of the monument as a mnema or memory-object. Through the (...) analysis of other epigrams and literary passages, this disjunctive framework is shown to be derived, in turn, from broader conceptualizations in archaic Greece about how both mental images, including memories, and works of art allowed continued visual, but not cognitive-affective, access to the deceased. From this perspective, the monument’s relief opens up to us the experience of the bereaved individual who is only able to connect with the deceased through a remembered mental image. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate an underappreciated element of Husserl’s phenomenology of images: the consciousness of the depicted subject, which Husserl calls the Sujetintention, e.g. the awareness of the sitter of a portrait. Husserl claims that when a consciousness regards a figurative image, it is absorbed in the awareness of the depicted subject and yet this subject some how withholds its presence in the midst of its appearance in the image-object. Image-consciousness is an intuitive consciousness that intends a being that (...) is both ‘in’ and ‘beyond’ the image: the depicted subject haunts the image. Borrowing Richard Wollheim’s language, the aim of this study is to determine what it means for a consciousness to see a depicted-subject in an image-depiction, which happens on the basis of seeing an image-object in a material image-thing, like paint, canvas, ink, paper etc. Restricting myself to figurative images, I will argue against the view that the relation to the depicted subject is symbolic or signitive. I argue that the consciousness of the Sujet is quasi-perceptual, which allows for a better account of the depicted subject’s sense of absence. I develop this view on the basis of Husserl’s claims that the depicted subject is the bearer of norms inherent to intuitive appearances, which concern how the profiles and movements of an object ought to unfold, though they fail to do so for image-consciousness. This failure is not a mere privation for the image as a perceptual appearance but is inherent to its status as a mediated and artificial presence. (shrink)

ABSTRACTCan a Naturalist Definition of art replace the historical and institutional positions argued for by philosophical aesthetics? This article considers Denis Dutton’s work in evolutionary psychology and his cluster Naturalist Definition of art. I begin with an analysis of the validity of what Dutton takes to be the most important criterion: Imaginative Experience. I propose a criticism of Dutton’s set of criteria coupled with a re-evaluation of what may be implied when referring to a naturalist basis for the arts. Specifically, (...) I argue that philosophical aesthetics, which has been criticized by Dutton as a form of cultural relativism, is instead able to address features of our interaction with the arts that have adaptive and evolutionary value. (shrink)

Many experiential properties are naturally understood as dispositions such that e.g. a cake tastes good to you iff you are disposed to get gustatory pleasure when you eat it. Such dispositional analyses, however, face a challenge. It has been widely observed that one cannot properly assert “The cake tastes good to me” unless one has tried it. This acquaintance requirement is puzzling on the dispositional account because it should be possible to be disposed to like the cake even if this (...) disposition has never been manifested. We argue that familiar response strategies on behalf of the dispositionalist fail. These include appeals to conversational implicatures, expressivism, semantic presuppositions and norms of assertion. Against this background, we propose a new analysis in terms of what we call tendencies, where a tendency is a disposition that has been manifested. The acquaintance requirement comes out as an entailment. We point out a hitherto unnoticed parallel to sentences ascribing character traits such as “Hannah is brave,” and extend our tendency-based analysis to this domain. (shrink)

A content theory of art would identify an artwork with the meaningful or representational content of some concrete artistic vehicle, such as the intentional, expressive, stylistic, and subject matter-related content embodied in, or resulting from, acts of intentional artistic expression by artists. Perhaps surprisingly, the resultant view that an artwork is nothing but content seems to have been without theoretical defenders until very recently, leaving a significant theoretical gap in the literature. I present some basic arguments in defence of such (...) a view, including the following. Content views of linguistic communication are ubiquitous, so why should they not be applicable in artistic cases as well? Also, propositional accounts of language involve two kinds of content (the proposition expressed by a sentence, plus the worldly state of affairs it represents), both of which kinds can be used in explaining artworks. In addition, the differing modal properties of artworks and concrete artefacts can be used to show that artworks could not be, or include, such physical artefacts. (shrink)

Sculptors, architects, and painters are three professional groups that require a comprehensive understanding of how to manipulate spatial structures. While it has been speculated that they may differ in the way they conceive of space due to the different professional demands, this has not been empirically tested. To achieve this, we asked architects, painters, sculptors, and a control group questions about spatially complex pictures. Verbalizations elicited were examined using cognitive discourse analysis. We found significant differences between each group. Only painters (...) shifted consistently between 2D and 3D concepts, architects were concerned with paths and spatial physical boundedness, and sculptors produced responses that fell between architects and painters. All three differed from controls, whose verbalizations were generally less elaborate and detailed. Thus, for the case of sculptors, architects, and painters, profession appears to relate to a different spatial conceptualization manifested through a systematically contrasting way of talking about space. (shrink)

Images in science are often beautiful but their beauty cannot be explained using traditional aesthetic theories. Available theories either rely upon concepts antithetical to science, e.g. regularity as an index of God’s design, or they omit concepts intrinsic to scientific imaging, e.g. the image is taken as a representation of “beautiful nature.” I argue that the scientific image is not a representation but a construction: a series of mutually defining intra-actions, where “intra-action” signifies that the object depicted cannot be extricated (...) from the technologies of picturing. But how can the beauty of intra-active, picturing-depicted constructions be explained, when philosophical aesthetics traditionally understands objects of appreciation to be distinct, discrete items? I argue that metaphor provides a model for the aesthetics of the scientific image, on the grounds that it is itself an intra-action that promotes salience in perception. (shrink)

Amongst the entities that have been created by human agents, and can be changed by human agents, besides concrete particulars, such as tables and chairs, our intuitions suggest that there are repeatables—entities that can each have multiple concrete instances. And since there is reason to think that repeatables are acausal, there is reason to think that that there are entities that are created, changeable, repeatable and acausal. Then again, it might be supposed that if an entity is created then it (...) is causal, and that if an entity is changed then it is causal. It is argued here that these suppositions are insufficiently motivated to undermine the case for the existence of entities that are created, changeable, repeatable and acausal. (shrink)