One of the aims of Aesthetics is to understand aesthetic experience, that of our own and that of others. Yet, the underlying question of how_ _we can get information about other people’s aesthetic experience has not been granted enough attention. This article contributes to bridging this gap. The main argument is that by resorting to aesthetic judging, we can get information about other people’s aesthetic experience without sharing it. This article outlines how aesthetic judging works as an interface to aesthetic (...) experience. Aesthetic judging allows us to access aesthetic experience indirectly: with it, we can get some information about aesthetic experience. Aesthetic judging thus positions us in relation to someone else’s aesthetic experience. In a nutshell, learning about aesthetic experience happens via aesthetic judging in at least three ways proposed and analyzed here: “aesthetic participation”, “affective appropriation”, and “distanced aesthetic empathy”. (shrink)

Danto, Arthur Coleman, 2021. Po konci umění: Současné umění a oblast mimo dějiny. Prel. Šárka Lojdová. Praha: Academia.

In this article I focus on Jerold J. Abrams’ recently edited volume on Richard Shusterman’s somaesthetics and I assume as a starting point the concept itself of soma, widely cited and examined in various contributions collected in Abrams’ book. Then, I specifically concentrate my attention on one of the essays, the one authored by Stefán Snævarr, which connects in an interesting, original and sometimes also challenging way Shusterman’s thinking to some questions that have characterized the current debates in the field (...) of the philosophy of mind. On this basis, in the final part of my short essay I try to offer some provisional remarks on the potential and mutually enriching dialogue between Shusterman’s somaesthetics and embodied, extended and enactive approaches to perception and mind, such as those, for example, of contemporary theorists like Andy Clark, Shaun Gallagher and Alva Noë. (shrink)

Ageing is basically a natural or physical phenomenon. For a human being, it belongs to the body. When this fact is noticed, a drama of oldness and life/death begins: ageing is a problem of experience. There are losses and gains in this experience. Indeed, a particular respect was paid to a rhapsodist/bard and a hermit because of their memory power and deep wisdom respectively. Since we recognize in these cases accumulation and maturation, the core subject in the experience of ageing (...) is memory and the time structure. Vis-à-vis the hard memories such as stone monuments and IC memory, the live memory is characterised by a creativity, which vivifies our past time. I pay a particular attention to friendship, because one of the most painful experiences of ageing consists in the loss of dear friends. Recollecting creatively the time shared with them, we can vivify our past, i.e. our being: that is the appropriation of ourselves. (shrink)