Concerned with topics at the heart of Kant's aesthetics, this provoking reading of The Critique of Judgement focuses on often misunderstood or neglected themes. Starting from the issues of the truth and justifiability of our critical assertions, Anthony Savile develops Kantian theory broadly across the arts, and shows it working with subtlety and rigour in cases as diverse as music and architecture. New light is thrown on the exemplary necessity of our aesthetic pleasures, on the Antimony of Taste, on the (...) distinction between free and dependent beauty, on the supposed idealism of taste, and on the a priori limits of fine art. Eminently subjective material is here given a place in Kant's overall idealism in a sophisticated discussion that will invite the close attention of Kant scholars and aestheticians alike. (shrink)

Reviews goodman's claims about representation, Expression and identity of works of art. Claims that the underlying nominalist logic effectively prohibits our understanding of these notions (pace goodman) and leaves everything which is of specific artistic and aesthetic interest out of account.

Anthony Savile; VIII—The Place of Intention in the Concept of Art, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 69, Issue 1, 1 June 1969, Pages 101–124, http.

This fresh orientation to Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_ presents his central theme, the development of his Transcendental Idealism, as a ground-breaking response to perceived weaknesses in his predecessors' accounts of experiential knowledge. Traces the central theme of the Critique, the development of Kant's Transcendental Idealism. Offers new and original readings of the central arguments in both the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic. Appraises the success and failure of Kant's project in the _Critique_.

Does Leibniz really worst Locke in respect of innate ideas, as is frequently supposed, or does Locke emerge more or less whole from their epistemological dispute? I shall here argue that Leibniz does far less well than we might like to believe and that his substantive proposals, where not entirely innocuous, contain little that would appeal to anyone interested in a modern form of the innateness thesis.

Book reviewed in this article:John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture.

Kant’s concern for the universal validity of aesthetic judgment turns on its providing a needed bridge between our understanding of the world as governed by mechanical laws and our ability freely to realize our true humanity. That obliges us to find beauty in nature that is expressive of our ethical and moral values. It shapes the way we should understand aesthetic judgment itself.

Beauty, Ugliness and the Free Play of Imagination Mojca Küplen Springer. 2015. pp. 152. £74.99.

One issue for theory is to account convincingly for the value of art and the significance of its specifically aesthetic character. Appeal to imagination, understood along Kantian lines as functioning to construct ‘a second nature from the material supplied by actual nature’, generates suggestive answers to both aspects of the task. The second nature that the artist inventively constructs in fine representation is one in which themes central to the inner life are revealed in ways as unestranging to us as (...) their nature permits; then, in their aesthetic realization we take them into ourselves directly in experience, with concomitant affect. Thereby the values they convey are liable either to become our own or else to modify established ones. Whether they do so stably or not may depend on our having achieved a firmly enough rooted sense of self. Imagination has traditionally been seen as contributing aesthetically to that too in the elaboration of the sublime, as much within the realm of art as in nature itself. Forms of art resisting such modes of reflection will need to look to theory to put something no less vital in their place. (shrink)

Anthony Savile; VIII*—The Heart of History, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 96, Issue 1, 1 June 1996, Pages 197–214, https://doi.org/10.1093/ari.

Nous ecartons ici deux tentatives visant a rendre compte de l’irrationalite de l’action akratique au sein du systeme de Spinoza: celle contenue dans Spinoza meme et une seconde toute recente, due a della Rocca, qui pretend parler au nom de Spinoza. Nous tracons a larges traits une troisieme voie, laquelle n’est pas manifestement en porte-a-faux avec les principes de la psychologie morale de Spinoza. Cette tentative tourne autour d’une conception du conatus integrant un element normatif et subjectif, soit le besoin (...) de former un moi structure de facon stable. Sans ce dernier, le plus grand bien que les humains soient susceptible d’atteindre, l’acquiescientia in se ipso, serait en fait irrealisable. Concevoir ainsi le conatus donne la latitude dont Spinoza a besoin pour representer le desir irresistible que concoit Medee pour Jason comme contre-conatif et celle dont Medee a besoin pour en etre elle-meme pleinement consciente. (shrink)

In his literary autobiography, Le vent Paraclet , Michel Tournier records how during his time at the Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly he and his fellow classmates found a source of great hilarity in their favourite bêtisier , a volume called Pensées de Pascal , in which one learns that painting is a frivolous exercise that consists in imperfectly reproducing objects that are themselves quite worthless. Fairness to Pascal – far from Tournier's mind in those early days – demands that that (...) offending pensée , which belongs in the sheaf of Vanités , be seen more as a summary of Saint Augustine's views than as a record of Pascal's own, and one that was rooted in a tradition stemming from Plato that deprecated all varieties of mimesis. Setting historical adjustment aside and reining back on the boys' sophisticated amusement, one may well wonder whether the view Pascal records does not contain a grain of truth. Are there not indeed kinds of painting that we prize, yet which are well chosen butts of this criticism? In particular, still life painting concerned to record the trivia of domestic life, pots and pans, fruits and meats, glasses and all sorts of everyday tableware looks to be sharply exposed to Pascalian scorn. If this Platonic or in Augustine's case, neo-Platonic, attack on painting is to be warded off in general then it had best be done here where it appears at its most pressing. And if it cannot be warded off here, then still life painting at least is moribund, probably lifeless, nature morte mort indeed. (shrink)

Recent approaches to scepticism have followed a pattern which Descartes was the first modern to outline with anything approaching clarity. He is not often given credit for the best of his insights here largely because they are obscured by misleading theological assumptions, yet once these assumptions are removed we should be impressed by the subtle ring of the underlying account of rational belief. To demonstrate these claims the first section of this essay discusses the irrelevance of Descartes’ theology to his (...) epistemology — the misère of the title — the second, devoted to the grandeur, expounds his operative theory of reasonable belief, and the remainder applies this theory to Descartes’ original sceptical problem and offers some comment both on its strength and its weakness.Descartes is less careful than he might be in formulating the exact form of the most general sceptical doubt that he aims to rebut. On some occasions he appears to be asking the question and, on others, the question. (shrink)