This chapter contains sections titled: Green Mill? Mill and Radical Environmentalism Mill and Romanticism Further Reading.

Research on ‘moral learning’ examines the roles of domain-general processes, such as Bayesian inference and reinforcement learning, in the development of moral beliefs and values. Alert to the power of these processes, and equipped with both the analytic resources of philosophy and the empirical methods of psychology, ‘moral learners’ are ideally placed to discover the contributions of nature, nurture and culture to moral development. However, I argue that to achieve these objectives research on (...) class='Hi'>moral learning needs to overcome nativist bias, and distinguish two kinds of social learning: learning from and learning about. An agent learns from others when there is transfer of competence—what the learner learns is similar to, and causally dependent on, what the model knows. When an agent learns about the social world there is no transfer of competence—observable features of other agents are just the content of what-is-learned. Even learning from does not require explicit instruction. A novice can learn from an expert who is ‘leaking’ her morality in the form of emotionally charged behaviour or involuntary use of vocabulary. To the extent that moral development depends on learning from other agents, there is the potential for cultural selection of moral beliefs and values. (shrink)

In this article, we want to show the relevance and importance of melancholy as an aesthetic emotion. Melancholy often plays a role in our encounters with art works, and it is also present in some of our aesthetic responses to the natural environment. Melancholy invites aesthetic considerations to come into play not only in well-defined aesthetic contexts but also in everyday situations that give reason for melancholy to arise. But the complexity of melancholy, the fact that it (...) is fascinating in itself, suggests the further thought that it may be considered as an aesthetic emotion per se. To this end, we argue that it is the distinctive character of melancholy, its dual character and its differences from sadness and depression, which distinguishes it as an aesthetic emotion. (shrink)

The climate crisis is an enormous challenge for contemporary societies. Yet, public discussions on it often lead to anger, mocking, denial and other defensive behaviours, one prominent example of which is the reception met by the climate advocate Greta Thunberg. The paper approaches this curious phenomenon via shame. It argues that the very idea of anthropogenic climate change invites feelings of human failure and thereby may also entice shame. The notion of “climate shame” is introduced and distinguished from “climate guilt”. (...) Whereas climate guilt prioritises the flourishing of the environment and is focused on actions and morality, climate shame is concerned with human identity and selfhood. The paper then explores whether shame is a morally destructive or constructive emotion. Making use of both psychological and philosophical literature on shame, it argues that although shame faces many challenges that question its usefulness in moral pedagogy, these challenges can be met with “moral maturity”—moreover, following a utilitarian approach, the overall benefits of climate shame can justify its costs to individuals. My argument is that climate shame holds the potential of being a highly effective moral psychological method of persuasion, capable of inviting wholesale critical reflection on current, environmentally damaging practices and cultivation of more virtuous ways of co-existing with the rest of the natural world and other species. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Significance of Music for the Moral and Spiritual Cultivation of VirtueDavid CarrIs There any Virtue in Music?Given its time-honored place, along with other arts, in many if not most past and present school curricula it would seem that at least some forms of music have been widely credited with educational value. Beyond the general association of music with high culture and, notwithstanding the (...) evident discipline involved in learning to play musical instruments, however, it is less clear what sort of value this might be. Despite the considerable ethical complexity of much art and the vexed nature of any relationship between the moral and the aesthetic, one may clearly regard very many works of literature, much representational painting, and even some dances as having some moral educational significance. That said, it may be less clear how other arts or art genres—such as music or abstract painting—could be said to have much significant moral import or content (as well as being unreasonably procrustean to insist that they should). Indeed, recalling the well-known point of Richard Peters about the inherently normative character of the concept of education—that it would be hard to regard a man as educated [End Page 103] who had not in some sense been made 'better'1 —one way of posing the present question might be to ask whether, regardless of its potential for pleasure, there is much if any real virtue in music?Plato and Scruton on Music and MoralsThere is, to be sure, a long tradition of reflection on the moral implications of music, and questions about the effects of music on moral development and character are of course raised in several Platonic dialogues. Thus, in one part of the Republic, Plato explores in some detail what he takes to be the effects on character of the various Greek musical modes, arguing for the moral superiority of those that foster courage and self-discipline over those that promote sensuality and self-abandon.2 Such claims also seem mostly consistent with a general Platonic aesthetics that precludes any role for the arts beyond service to a strict morality of individual self-control and social order. There are also, however, other sections of the Republic in which Plato envisages another softer role for music (broadly construed to include also literature and poetry) as a counterbalance to an excess of physical education, which can produce "savagery and hardness."3 Still, to whatever extent Plato might here be trying to have his case and eat it, his explicit claim that only the Dorian and Phrygian modes are suitable for moral consumption are probably more consistent with the broad drift of Platonic aesthetics. Generally, Plato's view appears to be that music—in the narrower rather than broader (Greek) sense—is a kind of ordered affect-charged auditory experience, that some forms of musical order are more conducive to the harmony or balance of the soul than others, and that a healthy human soul or character should in some way reflect the harmony of appropriate or approved forms of music.Although the logical and/or psychological status of such bygone claims is far from easy to evaluate, something of the spirit of Platonic thought on music and virtue seems discernible in more recent writings on the philosophy of music. Thus, Roger Scruton's case for the musical and moral superiority of serious classical works over much latter day popular music would appear to rest mainly on considerations relating to the greater structural order, organization, and complexity of the former over the latter.4 Like Plato, Scruton would seem to regard musical form, order, and organization as directly linked to emotional discipline, so that whereas the classics may be expected to cultivate ordered passion and sensibility, the unmelodic, discordant, and rhythmically unsubtle sounds of much modern popular music can only be expected to engender crude, disorganized, and uncontrolled feelings. Scruton makes much of the decline of dance under the influence of such contemporary musical anarchy, as precisely exhibited in the abandonment of conventions governing the control, for individually and [End Page 104] socially significant purposes, of physical gesture and bodily movement. Hence, although Scruton... (shrink)

The multiple aesthetic representations of the sacred throughout our troubled human history account for the variety of the ways the sacred has been appropriated as a regulatory moral and civilizing force by groups and large communities of peoples. Nature has always been part of the everyday life of human beings, and the natural environment has been perceived as a medium for the manifestation of the sacred and as a source of moral behavior. Because of this, (...) humans developed a peculiar relationship with nature, imbued with both fear and fascination, which Bernard Williams has called “promethean fear,” “a fear of taking too lightly or inconsiderately our relations to nature,” with the potential of nourishing “our... (shrink)

This thesis concerns the relation between aesthetically valuable objects and the agents that aesthetically value them. An investigation is undertaken into the psychology and rationality of such agents. I argue that self-related elements such as emotions and standing value commitments play an irreducible role in successful aesthetic engagement. I further demonstrate that these psychological elements of aesthetic engagement are both self-related and subject to rational constraints. In this connection, I propose a revisionary account according to which valuing agents are subject (...) to a coherence requirement pertaining to their aesthetic judgments and aesthetic likings. The first essay, “Aesthetic Autonomy: Acquaintance, Competence and Authenticity”, addresses the nature of aesthetic autonomy. What it means to be autonomous and its normative significance is generally considered to be ambiguous in the aesthetic domain. In this essay, I propose a way to disambiguate this elusive concept by distinguishing three varieties of autonomy: experiential autonomy, competency-based autonomy, and personal autonomy. Some important issues concerning the nature of aesthetic agency and appreciation are discussed in the course of this critical discussion. The second essay, “Non-Standard Emotions and Aesthetic Understanding”, discusses the role of our emotional responses in the context of aesthetic appreciation. My main argument will reveal that the non-standard or ‘intellectual’ emotions, the emotions which are in fact most important to appreciation, can play a significant epistemic role in our reason-giving aesthetic practices. The third essay, “The Aesthetic Enkratic Principe”, examines what it means to be aesthetically rational. Although some philosophers claim that aesthetics falls within the scope of rationality, a non-akrasia constraint prohibiting certain akratic combinations of attitudes is yet to be developed in this domain. This essay is concerned with the question of whether or not such a requirement is plausible and, if so, whether it is a true requirement of aesthetic rationality. The fourth essay, “Aesthetic Self-Transformation: A Guide for Aesthetic Aspirants”, investigates the nature of aesthetic self-transformation. Two problems arise in this context. First, aesthetic transformative experiences can lead to cases of local irrationality in the form of a mismatch between what is aesthetically judged and what is aesthetically liked. Second, in attempting to resolve this conflict, we encounter two opposing principles that appear to guide aesthetic appreciation with equal force: self-cultivation and aesthetic improvement. I explain the first issue by invoking a coherence requirement (as defended in the previous essay) and resolve the second by outlining a hybrid view of what constitutes good aesthetic reasoning. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aesthetic Experience and Education:Themes and QuestionsDeborah Kerdeman"Being with" music. Attentive responsiveness in teaching. Scholarly learning as engagement with beauty. Three evocative images of aesthetic experience come to light in the essays by Custodero, Hansen, and Neumann. From the musical play of children conducting imaginary orchestras to the vocational aspirations of adults who gaze through telescopes or study paintings at Chicago's Art Institute, aesthetic experience spans a range (...) of activities and ages. No matter the setting or moment, aesthetic experience vitalizes our lives with meaning and joy. Why this is so and what difference this makes for education emerge as overarching concerns in this set of papers. Addressing these issues, the authors articulate a number of commonthemes and reach similar conclusions about the nature and value of aesthetic experience.I want to identify and analyze key ideas that run throughout these essays. Doing so deepens our appreciation of the authors' insights and underscores the importance of the project they undertake. I also want to examine three questions that the essays suggest but do not develop. Exploring these questions, I hope to further enrich our understanding of aesthetic experience and its place in education.First and foremost, aesthetic experience for all three authors integrates multiple ways of knowing and enables individuals to perceive connections that they might otherwise overlook. According to Custodero, aesthetic experience harmonizes imagination, physicality, and "thinking-in-action." [End Page 88] Thinking-in-action, Custodero says, while "critical and consequential," is nonverbal and nonjudgmental — unifying rather than analytic. Synthesizing bodily movement, imagination, and thought, aesthetic experience reveals "surprise relationships between seemingly disparate phenomena." The theme of integration is echoed in Neumann's description of scholarly learning as aesthetic experience. Scholarly learning does not shun feeling or lived experience, Neumann writes. This way of knowing instead is "deeply emotional and personal." Insight fuses with emotion, enabling scholars to "feel the whole picture," as David the astronomer puts it in his interview with Neumann. For Hansen, aesthetic experience connotes heightened perception, a way of being that attends to nuances of gesture that would otherwise remain invisible. "The aesthetic highlights aspects of wonder and of beauty that emerge, spontaneously and unrehearsed," Hansen explains. A form of creativity, aesthetic perception combines with moral and intellectual understanding to fully embrace "the living dynamic gestalt" of teaching and learning.Aesthetic experience thus integrates mind, body, and emotion. Hansen links aesthetic experience to moral judgment as well. Integrating various ways of knowing, aesthetic experience enables individuals to perceive and understand relationships that pulse throughout the social and natural world. Such understanding is pleasurable, the authors agree.Aesthetic experience not only is integrative. It also is interactive. Custodero's musicians interact with instruments, musical scores, and other individuals. Neumann's scholars interact with ideas and scholarly materials. Hansen's preservice teachers interact with works of art, subject matter, students, and one another. Interacting with people and things, individuals become absorbed in what they are doing. "Being with" music is howCustodero puts it. Carmen, the professor of music in Neumann's essay, says that playing music well "is like a complete focus of oneness."Being absorbed in aesthetic interaction does not discount or dissolve the ability to make decisions or direct action. Aesthetic experience rather presumes and promotes "aesthetic agency," to borrow a phrase from Custodero. "To 'be in the moment,'" Custodero writes, "is to encounter the aesthetic — fully engaged in an activity for which one's individual contributions are perceived as vital." Hansen's description of aesthetic perception combines attentiveness and responsiveness in a "dynamic combination of patience, listening, and initiative." Neumann states that scholarly learning is an experience of "deep engrossment." Such engrossment does not extinguish the self, however. In the words of David the astronomer, feeling "the whole picture... is a combination of both what you see, sort of an instinctive or primal thing, and also your knowledge of what, you know, you put together." [End Page 89]The interactive nature of aesthetic experience thus signifies a kind of "agency-in-situ." Aesthetic experience is shaped or directed by the contribution and initiative of individuals. But individuals cannot act in advance of experience or know what to do, unless they are... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aesthetic Experience and Education:Themes and QuestionsDeborah Kerdeman"Being with" music. Attentive responsiveness in teaching. Scholarly learning as engagement with beauty. Three evocative images of aesthetic experience come to light in the essays by Custodero, Hansen, and Neumann. From the musical play of children conducting imaginary orchestras to the vocational aspirations of adults who gaze through telescopes or study paintings at Chicago's Art Institute, aesthetic experience spans a range (...) of activities and ages. No matter the setting or moment, aesthetic experience vitalizes our lives with meaning and joy. Why this is so and what difference this makes for education emerge as overarching concerns in this set of papers. Addressing these issues, the authors articulate a number of commonthemes and reach similar conclusions about the nature and value of aesthetic experience.I want to identify and analyze key ideas that run throughout these essays. Doing so deepens our appreciation of the authors' insights and underscores the importance of the project they undertake. I also want to examine three questions that the essays suggest but do not develop. Exploring these questions, I hope to further enrich our understanding of aesthetic experience and its place in education.First and foremost, aesthetic experience for all three authors integrates multiple ways of knowing and enables individuals to perceive connections that they might otherwise overlook. According to Custodero, aesthetic experience harmonizes imagination, physicality, and "thinking-in-action." [End Page 88] Thinking-in-action, Custodero says, while "critical and consequential," is nonverbal and nonjudgmental — unifying rather than analytic. Synthesizing bodily movement, imagination, and thought, aesthetic experience reveals "surprise relationships between seemingly disparate phenomena." The theme of integration is echoed in Neumann's description of scholarly learning as aesthetic experience. Scholarly learning does not shun feeling or lived experience, Neumann writes. This way of knowing instead is "deeply emotional and personal." Insight fuses with emotion, enabling scholars to "feel the whole picture," as David the astronomer puts it in his interview with Neumann. For Hansen, aesthetic experience connotes heightened perception, a way of being that attends to nuances of gesture that would otherwise remain invisible. "The aesthetic highlights aspects of wonder and of beauty that emerge, spontaneously and unrehearsed," Hansen explains. A form of creativity, aesthetic perception combines with moral and intellectual understanding to fully embrace "the living dynamic gestalt" of teaching and learning.Aesthetic experience thus integrates mind, body, and emotion. Hansen links aesthetic experience to moral judgment as well. Integrating various ways of knowing, aesthetic experience enables individuals to perceive and understand relationships that pulse throughout the social and natural world. Such understanding is pleasurable, the authors agree.Aesthetic experience not only is integrative. It also is interactive. Custodero's musicians interact with instruments, musical scores, and other individuals. Neumann's scholars interact with ideas and scholarly materials. Hansen's preservice teachers interact with works of art, subject matter, students, and one another. Interacting with people and things, individuals become absorbed in what they are doing. "Being with" music is howCustodero puts it. Carmen, the professor of music in Neumann's essay, says that playing music well "is like a complete focus of oneness."Being absorbed in aesthetic interaction does not discount or dissolve the ability to make decisions or direct action. Aesthetic experience rather presumes and promotes "aesthetic agency," to borrow a phrase from Custodero. "To 'be in the moment,'" Custodero writes, "is to encounter the aesthetic — fully engaged in an activity for which one's individual contributions are perceived as vital." Hansen's description of aesthetic perception combines attentiveness and responsiveness in a "dynamic combination of patience, listening, and initiative." Neumann states that scholarly learning is an experience of "deep engrossment." Such engrossment does not extinguish the self, however. In the words of David the astronomer, feeling "the whole picture... is a combination of both what you see, sort of an instinctive or primal thing, and also your knowledge of what, you know, you put together." [End Page 89]The interactive nature of aesthetic experience thus signifies a kind of "agency-in-situ." Aesthetic experience is shaped or directed by the contribution and initiative of individuals. But individuals cannot act in advance of experience or know what to do, unless they are... (shrink)

Based on the properties and mechanism of serendipity presented in former chapters, this chapter discusses how to create an environment for higher serendipity encounters and attainment possibilities. We examine four types of environments with different navigational and useful information concentration combinations. Building a pro-serendipity culture will help create environments that value and supports serendipity across fields. Additionally, we also address the notion that serendipity is a skill. Thus, it can produce either good or bad impacts on a collective (...) level, depending on the ultimate purposes behind it. (shrink)

This paper explores how the virtuous aesthetic cosmopolitan—one actively engaged in cultivating an authoritative appreciation for culturally unfamiliar works or traditions of art, in a manner informed by moral cosmopolitan principles—engages with the ‘exotic’ artwork in a manner that is both morally responsible and aesthetically discerning. After providing an overview of philosophical cosmopolitanism and the aesthetic cosmopolitan’s project, I consider in depth a particular example: the music of Mauritanian singer Noura Mint Seymali as encountered by an unaccustomed listener. (...) I explore potential problematic responses to the work, including both chauvinistic and exoticizing responses. I then consider possible strategies for alternative responses, informed by the aesthetic and hermeneutic theories of Hume, Gadamer, and Charles Taylor. Having revealed deficiencies with these alternatives, I go on to argue that the cosmopolitan’s best strategy is a mode of appreciation that is ‘conversational’ in nature, an open-ended approach modeled on an exchange between the appreciator and an other-cultural interlocutor. In proposing such a model, I draw on the work of Kwame Appiah and Maria Lugones, as well as Anthony Laden’s recent work on conversational norms. (shrink)

Aesthetics is a normative domain. We evaluate artworks as better or worse, good or bad, great or grim. I will refer to a positive appraisal of an artwork as an aesthetic appreciation of that work, and I refer to a negative appraisal as aesthetic depreciation. (I will often drop the word “aesthetic.”) There has been considerable amount of work on what makes an artwork worthy of appreciation, and less, it seems, on the nature of appreciation itself. These two topics (...) are related, of course, because they nature of appreciation may bear on what things are worthy of that response, or at least on what things are likely to elicit it. So I will have some things to say about the latter. But I want to focus in this discussion on appreciation itself. When we praise a work of art, when we say it has aesthetic value, what does our praise consist in? This is a question about aesthetic psychology. I am interested in what kind of mental state appreciation is. What kind of state are we expressing when we say a work of art is “good”? This question has parallels in other areas of value theory. In ethics, most notably, there has been much attention lavished on the question of what people express when they refer to an action as “morally good.” One popular class of theories, associated with the British moralists and their followers, posits a link between moral valuation and emotion. To call an act morally good is to express an emotion toward that act. I think this approach to morality is right on target (Prinz, 2007). Here I want to argue that an emotional account of aesthetic valuation is equally promising. There are important differences between the two domains, but both have an affective foundation. I suspect that valuing of all kinds involves the emotions. Here I will inquire into the role of emotions in aesthetic valuing. I will not claim that artworks express emotions or even that they necessarily evoke emotions.. (shrink)

Do we watch sport for pure dumb entertainment? While some people might do so, Stephen Mumford argues that it can be watched in other ways. Sport can be both a subject of high aesthetic values and a valid source for our moral education. The philosophy of sport has tended to focus on participation, but this book instead examines the philosophical issues around watching sport. Far from being a passive experience, we can all shape the way that we see sport. (...) Delving into parallels with art and theatre, this book outlines the aesthetic qualities of sport from the incidental beauty of a well-executed football pass to the enshrined artistic interpretation in performed sports such as ice-skating and gymnastics. It is argued that the purist literally sees sport in a different way from the partisan, thus the aesthetic perception of the purist can be validated. The book moves on to examine the moral lessons that are to be learned from watching sport, depicting it as a contest of virtues. The morality of sport is demonstrated to be continuous with, rather than separate from, the morality in wider life, and so each can inform the other. Watching sport is then recognised as a focus of profound emotional experiences. Collective emotion is particularly considered alongside the nature of allegiance. Finally, Mumford considers why we care about sport at all. Addressing universal themes, this book will appeal to a broad audience across philosophical disciplines and sports studies. (shrink)

A relational-self theory claims that one’s self is constituted by one’s relationships. The type of ethics that is said to arise from this concept of self is often called an ethics of care, whereby the focus of ethical deliberation is on preserving and nurturing those relationships. Some environmental philosophers advocating a relational-self theory tend to assume that the particular relationships that constitute the self will prioritize the natural world. I question this assumption by introducing the problem of artifact (...) relationships. It is unclear whether a relational-self theory recognizes relationships with the artificial world as beingmeaningful in any moral sense, and whether such relationships, if they can exist, should be accorded equal value to relationships with the natural world. The problem of artifact relationships becomes particularly apparent when the relational-self theory is linked to place-based ethics. If our ethics are to develop from our relations to place, and our place is largely an artificial world, is there not a danger that our ethical deliberations will tend to neglect the natural world? I adapt Holmes Rolston’s concept of “storied residence” to show how the inclusion of the artificial world will lead to different questions regarding one’s resident environment, and perhaps a different emphasis on what is valued. My aim in raising these questions is to challenge the optimism that writers such as Karen Warren and Jim Cheney have shown in supporting relational-self theories and place-based ethics. I conclude that the challenge to develop a relational-self/place-based ethic does not appear to have been met within Western environmental philosophy, which has perpetuated a silence on the matter of our embedment in the artificial world. (shrink)

A relational-self theory claims that one’s self is constituted by one’s relationships. The type of ethics that is said to arise from this concept of self is often called an ethics of care, whereby the focus of ethical deliberation is on preserving and nurturing those relationships. Some environmental philosophers advocating a relational-self theory tend to assume that the particular relationships that constitute the self will prioritize the natural world. I question this assumption by introducing the problem of artifact (...) relationships. It is unclear whether a relational-self theory recognizes relationships with the artificial world as beingmeaningful in any moral sense, and whether such relationships, if they can exist, should be accorded equal value to relationships with the natural world. The problem of artifact relationships becomes particularly apparent when the relational-self theory is linked to place-based ethics. If our ethics are to develop from our relations to place, and our place is largely an artificial world, is there not a danger that our ethical deliberations will tend to neglect the natural world? I adapt Holmes Rolston’s concept of “storied residence” to show how the inclusion of the artificial world will lead to different questions regarding one’s resident environment, and perhaps a different emphasis on what is valued. My aim in raising these questions is to challenge the optimism that writers such as Karen Warren and Jim Cheney have shown in supporting relational-self theories and place-based ethics. I conclude that the challenge to develop a relational-self/place-based ethic does not appear to have been met within Western environmental philosophy, which has perpetuated a silence on the matter of our embedment in the artificial world. (shrink)

Paul Hirst’s idea of moral education is distinctive in the central role it attributes to social practices. For him, ethical principles and virtues should not be seen as abstract entities theoretically derived and then applied in education so that students learn to reason from those principles or live by those virtues. Instead, Hirst’s moral education incorporates an initiation into social practices and comes back to them by means of situated critical reflection from within those practices themselves. Embracing Hirst’s (...) proposed central role of social practices, this paper spells out the key role that emotions play in moral education so understood and their relations with social practices. As emotions materialize our deeply held values, incorporated into lived experience, their cultivation will not simply be a matter of deliberation, but rather of the practical exploration of social practices that can nurture and sustain them. (shrink)

Images of nature abound in the practice of international environmental law but their significance in law is unclear. Drawing on visual jurisprudence, and interpretative methods for visual art, this book analyses photographs for their representations of nature's aesthetic value in treaty processes that concern world heritage, whales and biodiversity. It argues that visual images should be embraced in the prosaic practice of international law, particularly for treaties that demand judgements of nature's aesthetic value. This environmental value is (...) in practice conflated with natural beauty, ethical and cultural values, and displaced by economic and scientific values. Interpretations of visual images can serve instead to critique and conceive sensory, imaginative and emotional appreciations of nature from different cultural perspectives as proposed by philosophers of environmental aesthetics. Addressing questions of value and the visual, this landmark book shows how images can be engaged by nations to better protect the environment under international law. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Education in the Virtues: Tragic Emotions and the Artistic ImaginationDerek L. Penwell (bio)IntroductionThe profoundly thoughtful—not to mention extensive—character of the scholarship historically applied to the nature of the difference between Plato and Aristotle on the issue of the tragic emotions raises the obvious question: What new is there left to say? In this article I seek to hold together two separate issues that have occupied much of the (...) scholarship on this topic but that typically have not been considered together: (1) What is the moral value of the tragic emotions? and (2) If the tragic emotions are morally significant, how can we engage tragedy without viewing it instrumentally? By approaching the tragic emotions in this way, I hope to suggest an Aristotelian analysis of tragedy that appreciates tragedy's ability to expand our resources for confronting an often chaotic world, while at the same time avoiding the notion of art as merely useful in the pursuit of larger moral projects.Plato, in Republic X, offers his seminal critique of art and the artist in relationship to the ideal republic. In particular, poetry comes under harsh criticism for encouraging emotions, which, according to Plato, ought to be kept under strict control. In the end, Plato reluctantly declares that poets must be banished as a way of preserving the order and moral integrity of the republic. Poetry, if permitted, will make "pleasure and pain the twin kings in your city in place of established custom and the thing which has always been generally accepted as best—reason."1Aristotle challenges his old teacher, Plato, in his treatise on tragedy in the Poetics. To say that Aristotle challenges Plato, however, is not say that he confronts Plato directly; rather the scope of Aristotle's argument addresses the issue of poetry, which Plato had denounced in the Republic. Specifically, Aristotle calls into question Plato's account of the value of the emotions. [End Page 9] Whereas Plato contends that emotions are a potentially disruptive force, the power of which must always be controlled by reason, Aristotle maintains, as I will argue, that the cultivation of the appropriate emotional response (that is, the correct emotional response at the correct time) is essential to the development of virtue. Moreover, according to Aristotle's view, the cultivation of appropriate emotional response has implications not only for the development of individual virtue but also for the health of the body politic.I must be careful to point out that I am not attempting to elicit Aristotle's endorsement for a view that says reason is not somehow responsible for properly informing the emotions. Aristotle's position with respect to emotions—while different from Plato's in the belief that emotions can be educated—still identifies reason both as the faculty that differentiates us as a species as well as the faculty that occupies the primary place in establishing knowledge and directing action. My goal in the first section of this article is much more modest: I only wish to argue that an Aristotelian critique of Plato on emotions suggests the beginnings of a way of viewing emotions, such that emotions have a significant role to play in moral development.2However, the nature of Aristotle's argument in his implicit response to Plato raises the important question of whether the view of art he advances (in particular, of tragedy) is purely an instrumental one—a question to which I will attend in the second section. Does Aristotle understand art as a tool in the service of some higher good, such as moral education? Art, if this is the case, loses its integrity as an end in itself. Inasmuch as Aristotle believes that art is conducive to moral education, he is in danger of being charged with inhabiting the dubious aesthetic stance that art is always the means to some higher end. That is to say, it could be argued that the theory of art that Aristotle places on offer is what R. W. Beardsmore calls moralism3 and what Berys Gaut calls ethicism.4 Moralism at its most radical is the aesthetic position that finds art as merely a useful tool in dressing... (shrink)

The debate over whether human nature is good or bad and how this is related to self-cultivation was central in the minds of traditional Chinese thinkers. This essay analyzes the interrelationship between the key concepts of xing 性 (human nature), qing 情 (human emotions/feelings), and xin 心 (heart-mind) in the Guodian text of the Xing Zi Ming Chu 性自命出 (Nature Derives from Mandate) discovered in 1993 in Hubei province. The intellectual engagements evident in this Guodian text (...) emerge as more syncretic and dynamic than those that can be found in the discourse of any single tradition, such as Gaozi, Mencius, or Xunzi. Its thesis on human nature and moral cultivation reveals the existence of a possibly more diverse intellectual discourse from which the different foci of philosophical debate represented by later thinkers developed. (shrink)

People can be disgusted by the concrete and by the abstract -- by an object they find physically repellent or by an ideology or value system they find morally abhorrent. Different things will disgust different people, depending on individual sensibilities or cultural backgrounds. In _Yuck!_, Daniel Kelly investigates the character and evolution of disgust, with an emphasis on understanding the role this emotion has come to play in our social and moral lives. Disgust has recently been riding a (...) swell of scholarly attention, especially from those in the cognitive sciences and those in the humanities in the midst of the "affective turn." Kelly proposes a cognitive model that can accommodate what we now know about disgust. He offers a new account of the evolution of disgust that builds on the model and argues that expressions of disgust are part of a sophisticated but largely automatic signaling system that humans use to transmit information about what to avoid in the local environment. He shows that many of the puzzling features of moral repugnance tinged with disgust are by-products of the imperfect fit between a cognitive system that evolved to protect against poisons and parasites and the social and moral issues on which it has been brought to bear. Kelly's account of this emotion provides a powerful argument against invoking disgust in the service of moral justification. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconsciousness: The Vital Depths of Experience by Bethany HenningFrank X. RyanDewey and the Aesthetic Unconsciousness: The Vital Depths of Experience Bethany Henning. Lexington Books, 2022.In this important and splendidly crafted book, Bethany Henning recovers a philosophy of aesthetic wisdom distinct from the narrow epistemological lens dominant today. Unlike the psychological atomism of European Empiricism, from its outset, American philosophy embraced nature's aesthetic splendor (...) and the continuity between our thought and our world. Jonathan Edwards held that relations among ideas reflect beauty in the structure of being. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, each of us is a "transparent eyeball" where the cultivation of nature's spontaneous beauty fortifies our moral and spiritual agency. At the apex of this tradition is John Dewey, for whom Henning touts "aesthetic experience as the highest mode of human experience" (55).Although the aesthetic is generally associated with the cognitive evaluation of art, of special significance for Dewey is its non-reflective or unconscious dimension. Henning's appropriation of "unconscious"—the cradle of Freud's infantile id—is intentionally provocative. American culture, reflected in academic thought, has largely resisted appeals to subterranean urges and drives. In so doing, however, we perpetuate a myth of rational and moral exceptionalism that masks our history of colonialism, oppression, and crass commercialism. In accepting the unconscious, European thought has taken strides to acknowledge and address such ills. Despite America's disdain for psychoanalysis, Henning wonders whether it "could have accepted a dynamic unconscious, were it presented with an alternative mythology" (10).Dewey's alternative, says Henning, arises from his underappreciated notion of qualitative immediacy. In Henning's interpretation of this, meaning is embodied as a "sense of fulfillment" among accumulated habits—a "coming to terms with the world around us" through an "aesthetic (directly felt) connection between ourselves and the world." As such, to appreciate meaning, we must affirm the tacit, unconscious depth of experience; that is, we must "welcome aesthetic experience back into our philosophical lives" (5).Embodied meaning signifies that "the sensuous, lived body" is "the primary reality" (69). In this reality, qualitative immediacy is a non-reflective, aesthetic unity punctuated by "impulsions" arising from an organism's needs. Such needs are satisfied in organism-environment interactions where, says Dewey, "the epidermis is only in the most superficial way an indication of where an organism ends and its environment begins" (LW 10:61). As "a site of adaptive adjustments," Henning continues, "the body is responsive to the [End Page 114] brink of coalescence at the point of contact with the world, in which things that are 'outside of it' belong to it" (71). As such, the body-mind relation is a problem of aesthetics, not epistemology. For Dewey, as for Merleau-Ponty, the body "is the organic and dynamic condition of my thought" (75). The body is not a thing, however, but a process "always organically involved in exchanges" (86).Following the feminist thought of Susan Bordo, Henning agrees that the ascendance of the body amounts to a kind of philosophical recovery. Seventeenth-century science eviscerated the organic "female" universe of the Middle Ages. But this loss of an integrated world evoked existential fright, which Descartes tried to calm by subjugating feminine vagaries of the body to a masculine cognitive certitude bent upon controlling the whole of nature. In America today, this neurosis perpetuates our cultural alienation from our bodies, our environments, and one another (81–84). With the re-emergence of the body, however, it is possible to acknowledge and address this trauma."Feeling," in Dewey's sense, is unconsciously affective: a constant rhythm of disequilibrium and equilibrium, of need and resolution noticed only when a problem rises to the point of requiring our conscious attention. This affective "charge," this rhythm of sensed need and the desire to overcome it, is Dewey's appropriation of Plato's Erōs. Thomas Alexander casts Dewey's Erōs broadly as humanity's aesthetic investment in our world—our collective effort "to transform a biophysical environment into a world filled with meaning" (Alexander 11). But Henning turns to the more familiar sense of Erōs attuned not to the world at... (shrink)

I argue that on an understanding of imagination that relates it to an individual's environment rather than her mental contents imagination is essential to emotion, and brings together affective, cognitive, and representational aspects to emotion. My examples focus on morally important emotions, especially retrospective emotions such as shame, guilt, and remorse, which require that one imagine points of view on one's own actions. PUBLISHER'S BLURB: Recent years have seen an enormous amount of philosophical research into the emotions and the (...) imagination, but as yet little work has been done to connect the two. In his engaging and highly original new book, Adam Morton shows that all emotions require some form of imagination and goes on to fully explore the link between these two important concepts both within philosophy and in everyday life. We may take it for granted that complex emotions, such as hope and resentment, require a rich thinking and an engagement with the imagination, but Morton shows how more basic and responsive emotions such as fear and anger also require us to take account of possibilities and opportunities beyond the immediate situation. Interweaving a powerful tapestry of subtle argument with vivid detail, the book highlights that many emotions, more than we tend to suppose, require us to imagine a situation from a particular point of view and that this in itself can be the source of further emotional feeling. Morton goes on to demonstrate the important role that emotions play in our moral lives, throwing light on emotions such as self-respect, disapproval, and remorse, and the price we pay for having them. He explores the intricate nature of moral emotions and the challenges we face when integrating our thinking on morality and the emotions. This compelling and thought-provoking new book challenges many assumptions about the nature of emotion and imagination and will appeal to anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the role that these concepts play in our lives. The book also has far reaching implications that will spark debate amongst scholars and students for some time to come. (shrink)

In the following essay, I argue for an alternative anthropocentrism that, eschewing failed appeals to traditional moral principle, takes (a) as its point of departure the cognitive, perceptual, emotive, somatic, and epistemic conditions of our existence as members of Homo sapiens, and (b) one feature of our experience of/under these conditions particularly seriously as an avenue toward articulating this alternative, the capacity for aesthetic appreciation. To this end, I will explore, but ultimately reject philosopher Allen Carlson's ecological aesthetics, and (...) I will adopt with modification aspects of the work of Ronnie Hawkins, Val Plumwood, and Donna Haraway. My central claim is that, equipped with a better understanding of our interdependent relationship to/within human and nonhuman nature, an understanding made especially available to those who occupy situations imbued by subjugation, we can come to understand our human-centeredness not as a justification of entitlement, but as an opportunity for critical self-reflection upon those actions which endanger the ecological conditions of human and nonhuman being. I suggest, then, that developing criteria for an aesthetic appreciation ground in such a centeredness can make a vital contribution to a more ecologically defensible moral and political activism. (shrink)

In the following essay, I argue for an alternative anthropocentrism that, eschewing failed appeals to traditional moral principle, takes (a) as its point of departure the cognitive, perceptual, emotive, somatic, and epistemic conditions of our existence as members of Homo sapiens, and (b) one feature of our experience of/under these conditions particularly seriously as an avenue toward articulating this alternative, the capacity for aesthetic appreciation. To this end, I will explore, but ultimately reject philosopher Allen Carlson's ecological aesthetics, and (...) I will adopt with modification aspects of the work of Ronnie Hawkins, Val Plumwood, and Donna Haraway. My central claim is that, equipped with a better understanding of our interdependent relationship to/within human and nonhuman nature, an understanding made especially available to those who occupy situations imbued by subjugation, we can come to understand our human-centeredness not as a justification of entitlement, but as an opportunity for critical self-reflection upon those actions which endanger the ecological conditions of human and nonhuman being. I suggest, then, that developing criteria for an aesthetic appreciation ground in such a centeredness can make a vital contribution to a more ecologically defensible moral and political activism. (shrink)

Education, gender, family or professional responsibilities, and the abrupt nature of certain lived experiences, often push people to conceal their emotions. Suppression represents a self-preservation or survival strategy. In some cases, inhibition goes as far as completely blocking the bodily expression of emotion. Over the centuries, many philosophers and wise thinkers have seen emotion as an affliction of the inner soul, troubled by excessive and irrational proclivities that lead it to wander off the path of the good life. The (...) remedies are manifold but tend to a culture of the self that exalts impassibility and perfect peace of mind. Yet emotion is what motivates us and gears us up for action. It enables us to connect with and adapt to the outside world. Inspired by a holistic vision of cognition, this book invites the reader to explore, through philosophical texts, a cultivation of the self that neither minimizes nor negates emotion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Merging Traditional Technique Vocabularies with Democratic Teaching Perspectives in Dance EducationA Consideration of Aesthetic Values and Their Sociopolitical ContextsBecky Dyer (bio)IntroductionConventional aesthetic values in dance traditionally have been wed to long-established authoritarian teaching approaches in American professional dance companies and university dance programs. Developed over time from a mixture of enduring cultural tastes, aesthetic ideals, and historical influences, aesthetic values play a significant role in teaching and learning (...) processes in the classroom, although the impact of their presence on learning is often indiscernible or paid little attention. As dance educators in higher education make efforts to move toward more democratic teaching perspectives, they often find themselves philosophically lodged between established approaches to teaching traditional, codified vocabularies and aesthetics and more contemporary, student-centered, and democratically oriented perspectives to teaching and learning dance. Attention to the sociopolitical contexts of dance training gives practitioners opportunities to consider aesthetic values of dance from differing cultural vantage points and the perspectives by which these values are taught and learned.Each learning circumstance in dance is a complex weaving of personal and social experience involving individuals, communities, movers, and viewers. Movement aesthetic values emerge from personal and communal morals and ideals as well as social mores of the body, which create contextual lenses for experiencing, interpreting, and making meaning of movement vocabularies created and perpetuated in dance communities. It is important that teachers who seek to incorporate more democratically oriented, student-centered teaching perspectives become mindful of ways social values and perceptual/contextual frameworks impact personal [End Page 108] and communal practices in dance. Approaches to learning technique that consider sociocultural factors of dance movement aesthetics—wherein teachers and learners are led to recognize and reflect upon personal, social, and aesthetic values embodied in movement and embedded in movement vocabularies—can lead teachers and learners to better understand the significance of learning in dance as it relates to personal and social worlds beyond the classroom.This article will suggest how movement analysis from a socially contextualized perspective can inform understanding about the significance of sociopolitical contexts and aesthetic values in Western dance training. Perspectives of movement analysis will provide groundwork for discussing perceivable ways to address discrepancies between democratic and authoritarian teaching viewpoints and to challenge the prominent linking of conventional aesthetic values and vocabularies, as well as codified techniques, to authoritarian practices. The discussion will address relationships between pedagogical perspectives and ideologies held by teachers concerning the place and worth of conventional aesthetic values and the nature of aesthetic experiences in the dance technique classroom, and the potential understandings and meanings their students construct.Foundations of Movement Analysis: The Ideas and Practices of Rudolf LabanRecognizing embedded personal and social aesthetic values in movement is an important initial stage in developing more critically reflective practices that promote meaning, agency, and student interest in learning. The task is challenging because the only values accessibly evident to the bystander, and often the mover, are visual ones. Yet, as Rudolf Laban (1879-1958) suggested, intangible values also inspire movement. Laban created a theoretical framework—referred to as Laban Movement Analysis—for movement exploration, description, and analysis to consider both noticeably apparent and less-tangible values of movement by investigating movement phenomena and factors that generate them.1 The praxis-oriented system involves reflecting on movement observations, considering emotional and mental facets of movement, and taking into account experiential bodily perspectives of the mover.2Although one of Laban's fundamental purposes for developing a descriptive vocabulary for movement was to facilitate the mastery of dance technique,3 his teaching emphasized the "harmonious expressiveness of the whole individual," as he aimed to facilitate dancers' ability to understand and use their bodies in order to discover individual ways of expressing themselves and communicating.4 Laban's attitudes toward training were in sharp contrast to approaches of the day, yet interestingly, they were not [End Page 109] opposed to them. For example, common dance gestures and postures were expanded into free exploration and studied from diverse points of view rather than a narrow range of perspectives, aesthetic values, and movement qualities.5Laban's theory of "Effort," which he linked to emotions as well as... (shrink)

To date, the most substantial accounts of our engagement with literature have focused on prose-fiction, in particular the novel, drawing on issues of plot, character and narrative in explaining our understanding of literary works. These accounts do not consider how the poetic features of a literary work may affect our reading experience and how this contributes to the meaning of the work. In this thesis I show the philosophical importance of the experience of reading poetry for the role it (...) can play in inquiry, in particular, how such an experience can facilitate philosophical thinking and active inquiry. Adopting a reader-response view of our engagement with poetry, I argue that the experience of reading lyric poetry can make a valuable contribution to philosophical inquiry by enriching our conceptual understanding. The reading experience helps us to forge explicit awareness of our concepts and the networks of associations and beliefs that determine our use of them. Understanding poetry necessarily requires attending to the unity of form and content, and the particular perspectives on offer in the poem. This complex whole sustains perspectives and emotions where character and narrative are lacking. I argue that the perspectival nature of our reading experience is important for philosophical inquiry into aspects of human life. Encountering the perspectives of the poem helps to activate our own perspectives through our emotional and intellectual responses, bringing into focus what we value. I apply this argument to the moral domain, arguing that poetry can facilitate moral inquiry in particular by exposing moral significance in our concepts, helping us to feel what is at stake, and by testing our moral understanding. The way in which the poetic examples discussed engage us emotionally, imaginatively and cognitively (through the reading experience) help us address moral questions from distinctive and valuable perspectives, which provide us with moral insights of value in philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

In The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, Emily Brady takes a fresh look at the sublime and shows why it endures as a meaningful concept in contemporary philosophy. In a reassessment of historical approaches, the first part of the book identifies the scope and value of the sublime in eighteenth-century philosophy, nineteenth-century philosophy and Romanticism, and early wilderness aesthetics. The second part examines the sublime's contemporary significance through its relationship to the arts; its position with (...) respect to other aesthetic categories involving mixed or negative emotions, such as tragedy; and its place in environmental aesthetics and ethics. Far from being an outmoded concept, Brady argues that the sublime is a distinctive aesthetic category which reveals an important, if sometimes challenging, aesthetic-moral relationship with the natural world. (shrink)

This short paper deals with the difficult articulation of a diverse cultural heritage within a society and the democratic forms of assuring its social cohesion. Special attention is paid to the links between immaterial culture and the environment that transforms it into a structural element of social cohesion. Culture is seen as a 'mould' which shapes a shared behaviour, and democracy can be conceived as a system made up of elements of a cultural nature that go as (...) far as implying safeguarding pluralism, respect and tolerance of all kinds of difference. This is the case with those countries where the structures of the modern state are in the process of disappearing and being redefined in new forms, whose essential feature is acceptance of cultural diversity. If we conceive democracy in terms of heritage and in terms of non-exclusion of cultures dominated by a dominant culture, then it results that Mexico has not experienced true democracy - either in the past or nowadays. (shrink)

We live in an age in which outer space has changed from a theme for flights of science fiction to the actual locus of exploration and travel.1 Space no longer has merely speculative significance for thinking about possible worlds; it has become a real factor in understanding the nature and conditions of the human world that we are constantly refashioning. Our entry into outer space brings with it changes in conditions and experience that require us to rethink the (...) concepts through which we comprehend environment and act environmentally. (shrink)

This short paper deals with the difficult articulation of a diverse cultural heritage within a society and the democratic forms of assuring its social cohesion. Special attention is paid to the links between immaterial culture and the environment that transforms it into a structural element of social cohesion. Culture is seen as a 'mould' which shapes a shared behaviour, and democracy can be conceived as a system made up of elements of a cultural nature that go as (...) far as implying safeguarding pluralism, respect and tolerance of all kinds of difference. This is the case with those countries where the structures of the modern state are in the process of disappearing and being redefined in new forms, whose essential feature is acceptance of cultural diversity. If we conceive democracy in terms of heritage and in terms of non-exclusion of cultures dominated by a dominant culture, then it results that Mexico has not experienced true democracy - either in the past or nowadays. (shrink)

Aesthetics and the Environment presents fresh and fascinating insights into our interpretation of the environment. Traditional aesthetics is often associated with the appreciation of art, but Allen Carlson shows how much of our aesthetic experience does not encompass art but nature--in our response to sunsets, mountains or horizons or more mundane surroundings, like gardens or the view from our window. Carlson argues that knowledge of what it is we are appreciating is essential to having an appropriate (...) aesthetic experience and that a scientific understanding of nature can enhance our appreciation of it, rather than denigrate it. (shrink)

Emily Brady and Arto Haapala (2003) define melancholy as a complex emotion with aspects of both pain and pleasure that draw on a range of emotions — sadness, love and longing — all of which are bound with a reflective, solitary state of mind. Melancholy, they argue, does not just play a role in our encounters with artworks and the natural environment but also invites aesthetic considerations into play in more everyday situations. As such, melancholy (...) can be considered an aesthetic emotion per se. In this paper, I critically examine the various aspects of Brady and Haapala’s account, then present an alternative analysis of melancholy and its aesthetic relevance. (shrink)

Any attention paid to the positioning of telecommunications installations in natural landscapes usually relates to the aesthetic impact. However, such paraphernalia, particularly when contrasted with “natural” surroundings, invites us to think beyond the visible. Through Heidegger’s accounts of Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit, as well as his later articulations on Nature as it is subjected to the ordering principles of Gestell, this paper aims to highlight the overlaps of the natural and the technological worlds inhabited by communications (...) structures, considering the relationship between the human and the natural realms, through the uncertain electromagnetic phenomena that envelops the two. The essay is underpinned by the extended phenomenological description of an encounter with such technology that includes, following Anthony J. Steinbock’s outline of a phenomenological approach that might begin with the facts of the everyday sciences, some reference to the basic concepts of physics involved in transmissions technology. (shrink)

The appreciation of nature and natural beauty demands our attention as environmental issues become ever more urgent. In this timely introduction, Glenn Parsons provides an overview of philosophical work on the aesthetics of nature, identifying key conceptual questions, clarifying central theories, and analyzing the ethical ramifications of our experience of natural beauty. Outlining five major approaches to understanding the aesthetic value of nature, this second edition explores the aesthetic appreciation of nature as it occurs (...) in wilderness, in gardens, and in the context of appreciating environmental art. Now updated to cover recent developments in the field, it includes: · A new chapter on the sublime, the picturesque, and the beautiful · Expanded discussion of empirical and evolutionary accounts of nature appreciation, as well as the appreciation of the environment in non-Western cultures · A new chapter on the aesthetic appreciation of animals · An in-depth analysis of the appreciation of nature through cinema and photography · Discussion of the relation between environmental appreciation and climate change __ Combining a clear and engaging style with a sophisticated treatment of a fascinating subject, _Aesthetics and Nature_ explores the aesthetic dimension of humanity's relationship with our physical surroundings. This a must-read for anyone who cares about nature and the future of our environment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Ethics of Creativity: Beauty, Morality and Nature in a Processive CosmosJohn W. LangoBrian G. Henning The Ethics of Creativity: Beauty, Morality and Nature in a Processive Cosmos University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 250 + xii pp.The aim of this interesting but flawed book by Brian Henning may be related through some remarks about the terms in its title.1 The term "creativity" stems from the most (...) basic category in Whitehead's metaphysics in Process and Reality, "The Category of the Ultimate." The term "processive cosmos" echoes the full title of Whitehead's magnum opus: Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. For Whitehead's metaphysics is both a philosophy of process and a philosophical cosmology. Thus, as the term "ethics" implies, Henning's book "presents a Whiteheadian ethic" (p. 8), an ethics grounded in Whitehead's metaphysics. This ethics is grounded particularly in Whitehead's axiology of aesthetic value (hence the term "beauty"), and it includes an environmental ethics (hence the linkage of the terms "morality" and "nature"). The inclusion of environmental ethics is central to the book's aim:If we are to have any hope of reversing the potentially catastrophic destruction and consumption of our natural environment, we must devise an ethical theory grounded in an axiology that acknowledges that every individual—from the most insignificant flicker of existence at the opposite end of the universe to complex individuals such as ourselves—has value not only for itself, but for others, and for the whole of reality.(p. 2)"The aim of this project, then, is," according to Henning's own summary, "to develop and defend a holistic, organic ethical theory grounded firmly in Whitehead's aesthetico-metaphysics of process" (p. 3).Indeed, Henning's project is worthwhile. Traditional ethical theory should be enlarged to include environmental ethics. Insofar as an ethics can be grounded on a metaphysics, it is important to explore how an ethics can be grounded on Whitehead's metaphysics. Since Whitehead's metaphysics is a philosophical cosmology, it is especially suitable as a grounding for an environmental ethics. Accordingly, in reading Henning's book, process philosophers should encounter many interesting ideas. [End Page 450]Nonetheless, the book has some significant flaws. First, there is a problem of audience. In addition to process philosophers, Henning wants his book to be accessible to philosophers who are not conversant with Whitehead's metaphysics, as the following passage evidences:Anyone seeking to develop a moral philosophy based on Whitehead's work faces many challenges. One obvious reason for the relative lack of attention given to Whitehead's work by mainstream environmental and moral philosophers is the density and abstruseness of the texts themselves. Coupled with the generally unfavorable view of metaphysical speculation among most contemporary ethicists, this has led many to admire Whitehead's work from afar. Given this, a secondary, though not unimportant, goal of this project is to show the value of Whitehead's complex process metaphysics for moral and environmental philosophy by presenting it in language that strives for clarity and seeks to do justice to the richness and nuances of his thought.(p. 8)Unfortunately, in the judgment of this reviewer, this secondary goal is not accomplished. The first chapter of Henning's book ("From Mechanism to Organism") contains an exposition of Whitehead's metaphysics (pp. 27–37). But this exposition is far too brief. Whitehead's technical terms are not explained sufficiently, and quotations from his writings are used too frequently. In subsequent chapters, an understanding of his metaphysics is presupposed. For example, the second chapter ("An Ecstatic Axiology") defends "an alternative to the classical interpretation of Whitehead's metaphysics" (p. 42), namely, "the ecstatic interpretation" (p. 51). (The classical interpretation is exemplified by Ivor Leclerc and William Christian, and the alternative interpretation by Jorge Nobo and Judith Jones.) Specialists in Whitehead should find this second chapter accessible, but nonspecialists are likely to find it unenlightening. Before attempting to read Henning's interesting book, I would encourage mainstream environmental and moral philosophers to study Whitehead's metaphysics from other sources.Acceptance of Henning's aim of developing an ethics grounded in Whitehead's metaphysics is impeded by "the... (shrink)

Our environment is changing rapidly, as is the spectrum of possible relationships we can entertain with it. Against this background, one important task emerging in contemporary philosophical discussion concerns defining the status of contemporary images and the "iconic spaces" we encounter with ever-increasing frequency in their various forms. Within this context, the dimension of perception seems to be losing its primacy over the image, making a philosophical description of the relationships between image and reality all the (...) more necessary. Among images, the classical distinction between documentary and fiction has been drastically called into question, and along with it the nature of the emotions and values we experience in these two domains. Rozzoni promotes a phenomenology of the image, that is, a return to a description of images that starts from their essential features while avoiding simplistic dichotomies. By elucidating images’ intimate relationship with phantasy and aesthetic experience and their role in shaping our experience of "reality," this book develops a perspectival notion of "truth" intended to shed light on our contemporary interactions with images and the events, emotions, and values we experience through them. (shrink)

This study explored local controls relating to trees and spacesof the local environment in Nyamaropa Communal Lands in theNyanga District of eastern Zimbabwe. Controls were consideredin a broad and inclusive framework encompassing codified rules,taboos, and, regulatory norms and emotions. Special emphasis waslaid on people‘s emotional and ethical investment in the abovecomponents of the environment – trees and spaces. The studyemployed intensive informal and group interviews. Results showthat there is tremendous emotional and ethical investment intrees and spaces of the (...) environment in Nyamaropa. Emotions comein a variety of forms: fear, shunning, love, reverence, andconfidence and security enhancement. The emotional and ethicalnorms are designed to govern behavior and the context of resourceutilization. These norms have implications on the organization ofspaces of the local environment and regimes of resource utilizationoccurring in them. Location of resources in spaces of the environmenthas implications on the management of resources within them. Thedomains of human habitation – home bases and home fields – werefound to be the most emotionally laden spaces with trees in thembeing actively planted, nurtured, conserved, eliminated, or destroyedon the basis of certain emotions and norms. The findings of the studyhave implications within the framework of decentralization and ofdemocratization of natural resource management. (shrink)

This chapter, which deals with the psychological origins of goodness in childhood, and the developmental origins of human morality, argues that the socialization model and cognitive maturation model give short shrift to the role of emotions as one of the multiple natural prerequisites for nurturing morality. The primary models of moral development in the field of developmental psychology considered moral acquisition as a derived and “nurtured” consequence of inborn tendencies to either seek knowledge or gain (...) social connection. Morality could not possibly emerge out of hierarchical socialization. Socially constructed moral codes and feelings were derivative of natural emotional appraisal tendencies built on struggles for survival. Morality and convention were psychologically bound together, unified by the syntax of moral importance. The emotional transformation of socialized conventions into underlying moral competence can be likened to the transformation of everyday language performance into the innate syntactic structures indexing linguistic competence. (shrink)

Traditional aesthetics is often associated with the appreciation of art, Allen Carlson shows how much of our aesthetic experience does not encompass art but nature. He argues that knowledge of what it is we are appreciating is essential to having an appropriate aesthetic experience and that scientific understanding of nature can enhance our appreciation of it, rather than denigrate it.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 74-92 [Access article in PDF] John Dewey's Aesthetic Ecology of Public Intelligence and the Grounding of Civic Environmentalism Herbert Reid and Betsy Taylor "[The problem is] that of recovering the continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living." John Dewey, Art as Experience "This is not a protest. Repeat. This is not a protest. This is some kind of artistic (...) expression. Over." --A call that went out on Metro Toronto police radios on May 16, 1998, the date of the first Global Street Party. Quoted from Naomi Klein, No LogoThis paper argues for the importance of John Dewey's aesthetic philosophy to recent efforts to cultivate civic environmentalism while critiquing narrowly conservationist environmentalisms. We call for a strong version of civic environmentalism oriented towards holistic integration of ecological [End Page 74] concerns into all aspects of social, political, economic, and cultural life. Such a civic environmentalism argues that it is not enough to strive to preserve enclaved 'wilderness' or 'biodiversity' (as important as that is). It argues also for fundamental changes in the political and economic status quo, because ecological havoc is understood to be integrally linked with the structural forces that are increasing inequality and weakening democratic publics. Strengthening of the civic commons is integral to protection of the environmental commons. If the environmental commons are the substantive goods in common which are the sustaining grounds of life, the civic commons are the institutions, collective memories, social networks, and skills that enable and inspire individuals to engage with each other in stewarding the common good. Such collective labor for the larger good requires some form of collective imagination which enables awareness of self and other (human or non-human) as inherently valuable. But beyond this, it requires perceptual and social infrastructures that nurture the ability to see self and other as emergent from and dependent on the supra-individual matrix that supports both life and individual. Central to such civic labor, is a non-dualistic understanding of individual/matrix. Such a non-dualistic understanding of self/other-in-matrix is central to political and ecological imaginations that are decentered from ethnic, species, class, gender, or other forms of domination and solipsism.John Dewey's work as a whole is a powerful call for such a non-dualistic understanding of individual-in-matrix, and few have better understood its connections to democracy. But, it is in his philosophy of art that Dewey describes most specifically the central importance of the aesthetic dimension of public culture to overcoming crippling dualisms of Western modernity that vitiate participatory engagement- individual/world, nature/culture, ends/means, leisure/work, art/science, aesthetic/ordinary. His writings on art have not been much utilized in the philosophical work for civic environmentalism. This paper argues for their relevance to its key goal of overcoming the segmentation of life ushered in by modernity and buttressed by these dualisms.We first give an overview of recent theories of civic environmentalism and the crises it engages of inequality, injustice, technocracy, corporatization, and the pervasive assault on place and thinning of public participation. Second, we look at the implications of Dewey'saesthetic ecology for an "environmentalism of daily life" that challenges the false dualisms of neo-liberalism and of technocratic professionalism that undermine place-based [End Page 75] forms of life and knowledge. Third, we draw on Dewey's aesthetic philosophy to suggest ways to rebuild democratic public space at the nexus of body, place, and commons. Finally, we briefly outline key philosophical questions that have emerged in our ethnographic and political study of Appalachian grassroots activisms, and that embody this sort of placed, democratic mobilization to protect the civic and environmental commons. American Environmentalism: Crisis and Challenge Toward the end of the last decade, veteran New York Times journalist and now independent writer Philip Shabecoff set out to engage "a broad spectrum of thoughtful and informed people within and without the environmental movement." His Earth Rising: American Environmentalism in the 21st Century offers a very... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 74-92 [Access article in PDF] John Dewey's Aesthetic Ecology of Public Intelligence and the Grounding of Civic Environmentalism Herbert Reid and Betsy Taylor "[The problem is] that of recovering the continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living." John Dewey, Art as Experience "This is not a protest. Repeat. This is not a protest. This is some kind of artistic (...) expression. Over." --A call that went out on Metro Toronto police radios on May 16, 1998, the date of the first Global Street Party. Quoted from Naomi Klein, No LogoThis paper argues for the importance of John Dewey's aesthetic philosophy to recent efforts to cultivate civic environmentalism while critiquing narrowly conservationist environmentalisms. We call for a strong version of civic environmentalism oriented towards holistic integration of ecological [End Page 74] concerns into all aspects of social, political, economic, and cultural life. Such a civic environmentalism argues that it is not enough to strive to preserve enclaved 'wilderness' or 'biodiversity' (as important as that is). It argues also for fundamental changes in the political and economic status quo, because ecological havoc is understood to be integrally linked with the structural forces that are increasing inequality and weakening democratic publics. Strengthening of the civic commons is integral to protection of the environmental commons. If the environmental commons are the substantive goods in common which are the sustaining grounds of life, the civic commons are the institutions, collective memories, social networks, and skills that enable and inspire individuals to engage with each other in stewarding the common good. Such collective labor for the larger good requires some form of collective imagination which enables awareness of self and other (human or non-human) as inherently valuable. But beyond this, it requires perceptual and social infrastructures that nurture the ability to see self and other as emergent from and dependent on the supra-individual matrix that supports both life and individual. Central to such civic labor, is a non-dualistic understanding of individual/matrix. Such a non-dualistic understanding of self/other-in-matrix is central to political and ecological imaginations that are decentered from ethnic, species, class, gender, or other forms of domination and solipsism.John Dewey's work as a whole is a powerful call for such a non-dualistic understanding of individual-in-matrix, and few have better understood its connections to democracy. But, it is in his philosophy of art that Dewey describes most specifically the central importance of the aesthetic dimension of public culture to overcoming crippling dualisms of Western modernity that vitiate participatory engagement- individual/world, nature/culture, ends/means, leisure/work, art/science, aesthetic/ordinary. His writings on art have not been much utilized in the philosophical work for civic environmentalism. This paper argues for their relevance to its key goal of overcoming the segmentation of life ushered in by modernity and buttressed by these dualisms.We first give an overview of recent theories of civic environmentalism and the crises it engages of inequality, injustice, technocracy, corporatization, and the pervasive assault on place and thinning of public participation. Second, we look at the implications of Dewey'saesthetic ecology for an "environmentalism of daily life" that challenges the false dualisms of neo-liberalism and of technocratic professionalism that undermine place-based [End Page 75] forms of life and knowledge. Third, we draw on Dewey's aesthetic philosophy to suggest ways to rebuild democratic public space at the nexus of body, place, and commons. Finally, we briefly outline key philosophical questions that have emerged in our ethnographic and political study of Appalachian grassroots activisms, and that embody this sort of placed, democratic mobilization to protect the civic and environmental commons. American Environmentalism: Crisis and Challenge Toward the end of the last decade, veteran New York Times journalist and now independent writer Philip Shabecoff set out to engage "a broad spectrum of thoughtful and informed people within and without the environmental movement." His Earth Rising: American Environmentalism in the 21st Century offers a very... (shrink)

This chapter discusses key issues and questions about aesthetic experience and valuing of natural objects, processes, and phenomena. It begins by exploring the character of environmental, multisensory aesthetic appreciation and then examines the central debate between “scientific cognitivism” and “noncognitivism” in contemporary environmental aesthetics. In assessing this debate and the place of knowledge, imagination, and emotion in aesthetic valuing, it is argued that non-cognitive approaches have the advantage of supporting a critical pluralism that recognizes the variety and breadth of (...) aesthetic engagement with nature. Interactions between aesthetic and ethical values are also discussed, especially with respect to their role in philosophical positions such as “aesthetic preservationism” and the call for developing aesthetic theories that are consistent with environmentalism. (shrink)

A compelling exploration of the convergence of Jane Austen’s literary themes and characters with David Hume’s views on morality and human nature. Argues that the normative perspectives endorsed in Jane Austen's novels are best characterized in terms of a Humean approach, and that the merits of Hume's account of ethical, aesthetic and epistemic virtue are vividly illustrated by Austen's writing. Illustrates how Hume and Austen complement one another, each providing a lens that allows us to expand and elaborate (...) on the ideas of the other Proposes that literature may serve as a thought experiment, articulating hypothetical cases which allow the reader to test her moral intuitions Contributes to ongoing debates on the philosophy of literature, ethics, and emotion. (shrink)

It has been asserted that the socio-emotional challenges associated with autism spectrum disorder may be explained, in part, by the higher rates of alexithymia in individuals with autism. Alexithymia refers to difficulties in identifying one’s own emotional states and describing those states to others. Thus, one goal of the present study was to examine levels of alexithymia in relation to ASD symptomatology and trait emotion intelligence. Trait EI is a multifaceted concept that captures emotional competencies and behavioral dispositions (...) A second goal was to assess whether alexithymia, ASD symptomatology and trait EI served as significant predictors of adjustment to college, including academic, social, and personal-emotional adjustment. In addition to keeping with the spectrum nature of autism, our research strategy allowed us to capture those students who may not have received a formal diagnosis of ASD but report symptoms that can be indicative of ASD. This includes women, who are less likely to receive a diagnosis of ASD even when ASD symptomatology is present. The results of the study showed that students reporting higher levels of ASD symptomatology also reported significantly higher levels of alexithymia and lower trait emotional intelligence than those with less or no symptomatology. Alexithymia was also negatively related to trait EI, and both alexithymia and ASD symptomatology were found to be significant predictors of trait EI. However, only trait EI was a significant predictor of adjustment to college and only for social adjustment. These findings suggest that support programs that develop trait EI skills may improve the college experience for students with ASD, regardless of alexithymia or ASD symptomatology. (shrink)

The aesthetic experience may be defined as people's interactions with, and reactions to, objects, places, but also to the environment. Most psychological perspectives on the aesthetic experience argue that it results from the coordination of different mental processes such as perception, attention, memory, imagination, thought, and emotion. Physiological and neurological responses are also involved. Aesthetic experiences can take place while we observe works of art in museums and galleries as well as in other contexts such as natural (...) and built environments. Looking at a landscape, walking in a park, meeting people in a square, and walking into a building that is architecturally appealing are examples of natural and built environments where we can experience beauty, pleasure, attraction, and interest, among other aesthetic reactions.Research on aesthetic experiences has a long history, and in recent decades, the field has experienced tremendous growth in the number of empirical studies conducted. One of the areas that researchers have yet to fully address is the influence of the context (natural and built environments) on aesthetic experiences. We refer to context according to three broad categories: Context as natural environments, context as built environments, and environments for aesthetic experiences.Context as natural environments: People show a basic tendency to associate the natural environment with positive evaluations. According to an evolutionary explanation know... (shrink)

A traditional association of judgment with "reason" has drawn upon and reinforced an opposition between reason and emotion. This, in turn, has led to a restricted view of the nature of moral judgment and of the subject as moral agent. The alternative, I suggest, is to abandon the traditional categories and to develop a new theory of judgment. I argue that the theory of judgment developed by Justus Buchler constitutes a robust alternative which does not prejudice (...) the case against emotion. Drawing on this theory I then develop how to conceptualize the ways in which feeling and emotion can be (or be components of) moral judgments. (shrink)

As a 4th century BCE Confucian text, Mencius provides a rich reflection on moral emotions, such as empathy and compassion, and moral cultivation, which has drawn attention from scholars around the world. This two-part discussion dwells on the idea of natural moral motivation expressed through the analogy of the four sprouts—particularly the sprout of ceyin zhixin (the heart of feelings others' distress)—as the starting point, the focus, and the drive of moral cultivation. In (...) Part 1, I presented an integrated view of the sprouts as including cognitive, affective, and motivational aspects. In Part 2, I discuss the cultivation and application of natural moral motivation. I illustrate how the sprouts inform moral deliberation and drive moral cultivation, while also being its subject. I also demonstrate how emotional responses are managed and regulated according to the sprouts and discuss why moral cultivation is sometimes unsuccessful. (shrink)