Benjamin Tilghman has been a leading commentator on analytic philosophy for many years. This book brings together his most significant and influential work on aesthetics. Spanning a period of thirty years and covering topics in aesthetics from literature to painting, the collection traces the development of Tilghman's two principal themes; a rejection of philosophical theory as a way of resolving problems about our understanding and appreciation of art and the importance of the representation and presentation of the human and human (...) concerns in art. Tilghman is profoundly influenced by the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and his work is informed throughout by his conception and practice of philosophy. Written with exceptional clarity and with many references to original work in both painting and literature, this collection will be an invaluable resource not only for professional philosophers but for those working in the arts generally, art historians, critics and literary theorists. (shrink)

It has always been a matter of curiosity what kind of information art, which is far from ordinary and untouchable, provides people. Confronting a person with an art object means looking at the window of a world different from the world of daily routines, with his head stuck out. We can describe this world as magical in a romantic way. This magic arises from the difference in the functioning of perception, interpretation and judgment processes, which the person confronted with (...) an art object has difficulty in explaining to himself from time to time. Because the acquisition of perception in the world of routines and the acquisition of perception from the art object are different in terms of the functioning of mental processes... (shrink)

Analytic aesthetics has been obsessed with mature, art historically well-informed aesthetic judgment. But the vast majority of our engagement with art fails to take the form of this kind of judgment. Crucially, there seems to be a disconnect between taking pleasure in art and forming mature, well-informed judgments about it. My aim is to shift the emphasis away from aesthetic judgments to ways of engaging with works of art that are more enjoyable, more rewarding (...) and happen to us more often. (shrink)

Two dominant interpretations of Kant's notion of adherent beauty, the conjunctive view and the incorporation view, provide an account of how to form informed aesthetic assessments concerning artworks. According to both accounts, judgments of perfection play a crucial role in making informed, although impure, judgments of taste. These accounts only examine aesthetic responses to objects that meet or fail to meet the expectations we have regarding what they ought to be. I demonstrate that Kant's works of (...) genius do not fall within either of these categories. The distinguishing features of these works, namely, originality and exemplarity, become unrecognizable on these interpretations because originality and exemplarity lie in the work's ability to exceed one's expectations concerning its form and content. They contribute to artistic beauty through alternative transformation methods distinct from that of abstraction, namely, concept expansion and repudiation. These additional accounts of transformation lead to a rather surprising outcome: works of genius turn out to be paradigm cases where one can and indeed ought to form informed pure judgments of taste. (shrink)

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

What rational foundation underlies argument-critical judgements? What are the canons of argument criticism and how are they to be "justified"? This paper explores an analogy between art- and argument-criticism and argues that the analogy promises not only to illuminate the nature of argument criticism and capture the central goals of instruction in informal logic, but also to resolve fundamental problems at the foundations of normative theory of argument concerning the "justification" of standards of reasoning.

This book is a first attempt to cover the whole area of aesthetics from the point of view of critical rationalism. It takes up and expands upon the more narrowly focused work of E. H. Gombrich, Sheldon Richmond, and Raphael Sassower and Louis Ciccotello. The authors integrate the arts into the scientific world view and acknowledge that there is an aesthetic aspect to anything whatsoever. They pay close attention to the social situatedness of the arts. Their aesthetics treats art (...) as emerging from craft in the form of luxurious and playful challenge to the audience. In developing it they place emphasis on the number of questions and claims that can be settled by appeal to empirical facts; on the historical character of aesthetic judgements; and on the connection of aesthetic truth to true love and true friendship, i.e. fidelity and integrity, not to informative truth. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Aesthetic Classroom and the Beautiful GameBradley Baurain (bio)IntroductionSoccer fans will not be surprised that understanding "the beautiful game" can contribute to understandings of teaching and learning. After all, at least one theorist sees "the nature of all social life" to be reflected in soccer: "The unfolding match between team-mates and opponents [illustrates] … the interdependency of human beings, and the 'flexible lattice-work of tensions' generated through their (...) social bonds. Power flows fluidly between players, jockeying for possession and moving between attack and defence."1 Another finds striking parallels between cultural history and tactics of play in soccer, including a "modernist" period emphasizing cautious ball control and defense-oriented player formations, and the current "postmodern" style emphasizing creativity and fluidity; he even identifies the history of the free kick as a microcosm of the whole.2The idea I explore in this essay is in a sense simply an extended analogy: A well-played soccer game has much in common with a well-taught lesson or course. Features of the one are set for comparison and discussion alongside features of the other. Yet, as with any good analogy, matters are not really so simple. One makes the comparison so that the juxtaposed items inform and illuminate one another—that is, one looks at a thing in order to see a different thing more clearly. So while I contend that soccer has much in common with teaching, the reverse is also true; I am not using soccer only as a "way through" to teaching. Neither of my terms of comparison are merely means to an end; instead both are ends in themselves. Reading the soccer parts of this essay will, I trust, inform and illuminate teaching and [End Page 50] curriculum, but at the same time my goal is for any soccer player who might read the teaching parts also to learn something about "the beautiful game."Soccer, "the beautiful game," is an apt comparison for the aesthetic classroom. My thoughts on what characterizes aesthetic teaching will emerge and take on flesh as this essay develops, but let me begin by describing it as "concerned for acts of mind as opposed to end products, fluidity and imagination rather than fixed sequence, judgment within learning experiences in contrast to deciding everything in advance, and dwelling with subject matter rather than merely covering subject matter."3 As Wanda May comments: "I suggest that when teaching is done well … it is a work of art because we reconfigure and decorate our spaces, make our marks, elevate ourselves and others above confinement, routine, and the mundane. We expand our capacity to see, hear, love, critique, and act on our possibilities in the world."4 I could as easily have applied both of these quotations to soccer. It is no accident that John Dewey links sports with the aesthetic: "Dance and sport are activities in which acts once performed spontaneously in separation are assembled and converted from raw, crude material into works of expressive art."5I anchor my discussion in four concepts foundational to the aesthetic classroom: play, relationality, process, and flow. My analysis of each of these key ideas moves back and forth among soccer, aesthetic and pedagogical theory, and classroom research and narratives. Examples, including those from my own experience, are drawn primarily from the related fields of language education and English as a Second Language (ESL). If soccer and the classroom can have much in common, another way of introducing this essay is to say that I spend it trying to see what takes place in the gaps, in the "muchness" that lies between the two terms of the analogy. I hope that readers will "make much" of this, too, for without them the seeing remains incomplete.The Concept of Play, Playing with ConceptsThough it has become a multibillion-dollar global business, at its best soccer is play: "We play sport, we don't work sport."6 Play means having fun and inspiring joy, but this sense of freedom does not mean play is unstructured. Games have rules, skills, procedures, and boundaries, and these features enable rather than constrain. From Dewey's point of view, they are... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.1 (2003) 40-53 [Access article in PDF] Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Analysis David E. W. Fenner The "raw data" that aesthetics is meant to explain is the aesthetic experience. People have experiences that they class off from other experiences and label, as a class, the aesthetic ones. Aesthetic experience is basic, and allother things aesthetic — (...) class='Hi'>aesthetic properties, aesthetic objects, aesthetic attitudes — are secondary in their importance to aesthetic experiences. 1Considering aesthetic experience as the raw data that philosophical aesthetics seeks to explain is a relatively recent phenomenon. This was certainly not the focus in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Aesthetic judgment was the focus of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and Kant: "How do we make meaningful judgments (hopefully real ones) about the aesthetic quality of (certain) objects and events?" But with George Santayana, John Dewey, and Jerome Stolnitz, the focus changes. Now the interest is in the aesthetic experience: what makes those experiences we label "aesthetic" special? Why do we separate those experiences from others?The movement from the Taste Theories to those focused on aesthetic experience is not a movement that is over and done with — far from it. There is still (and I think there will always be) a tension between these two very basic aspects of philosophical aesthetics. And, although I claim that aesthetic experience is the most basic thing that aesthetics studies, I recognize that this is challengeable and only true from a certain temporal viewpoint.I recently taught the most rewarding undergraduate course in aesthetics. The reason that it was so rewarding was that the students carried the class with deep and insightful discussions, and they were not shy about challenging what was coming out of my mouth. One of the challenges that informed our entire semester focused on the tension between experience and judgment. I lectured comfortably about aesthetic experience as our "raw data," and I lectured equally comfortably about how taking an aesthetic view of an object or event meant focusing primarily, if not exclusively, on [End Page 40] what is available to us through simple sensory acquaintanceship with the object. "Aesthetics," I said, "is about the sensuous aspects of our experiences." And so we could, for instance, take an aesthetic view of a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph which precluded our experiences being mired in the themes that the more famous Mapplethorpe photos take as their content. "Mapplethorpe is a great photographer," I argued, "and one can see this if one is willing to focus strictly on what meets your eye when you look at the picture." In short, I held the position that the aesthetic view is the formal one.Without saying more, what I did was conflate two different things. On the one hand, I argued that aesthetic experience is a natural part of life that aesthetics seeks to explore. On the other, I argued that appreciating something aesthetically was to appreciate its formal qualities, those qualities that one could access simply through looking, hearing, touching, for example. But these really are two different things.Aesthetic experiences, if we are to treat them as "raw data," must be explored without pre-conception, prejudice, or limitation. And, truly enough, the vast majority of aesthetic experiences are not focused exclusively, in terms of their contents, on formal or simple-sensory matters. Aesthetic experiences are, first, experiences. They are complex things, having to do with things as tidy as the formal qualities of the object under consideration and with things as messy as whether one had enough sleep the night before, whether one just had a fight with his roommate, whether one is carrying psychological baggage that is brought to consciousness by this particular aesthetic object. Later in this essay, I want to explore some of this complexity.The other side of what was happening in my class, the formal focus on the sensory as the basis for an aesthetic viewing, is not the substance of "aesthetic experience" per se. It is rather the basis of what we might call "aesthetic analysis." Aesthetic analysis has to do with separating out from our... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.1 (2003) 40-53 [Access article in PDF] Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Analysis David E. W. Fenner The "raw data" that aesthetics is meant to explain is the aesthetic experience. People have experiences that they class off from other experiences and label, as a class, the aesthetic ones. Aesthetic experience is basic, and allother things aesthetic — (...) class='Hi'>aesthetic properties, aesthetic objects, aesthetic attitudes — are secondary in their importance to aesthetic experiences. 1Considering aesthetic experience as the raw data that philosophical aesthetics seeks to explain is a relatively recent phenomenon. This was certainly not the focus in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Aesthetic judgment was the focus of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and Kant: "How do we make meaningful judgments (hopefully real ones) about the aesthetic quality of (certain) objects and events?" But with George Santayana, John Dewey, and Jerome Stolnitz, the focus changes. Now the interest is in the aesthetic experience: what makes those experiences we label "aesthetic" special? Why do we separate those experiences from others?The movement from the Taste Theories to those focused on aesthetic experience is not a movement that is over and done with — far from it. There is still (and I think there will always be) a tension between these two very basic aspects of philosophical aesthetics. And, although I claim that aesthetic experience is the most basic thing that aesthetics studies, I recognize that this is challengeable and only true from a certain temporal viewpoint.I recently taught the most rewarding undergraduate course in aesthetics. The reason that it was so rewarding was that the students carried the class with deep and insightful discussions, and they were not shy about challenging what was coming out of my mouth. One of the challenges that informed our entire semester focused on the tension between experience and judgment. I lectured comfortably about aesthetic experience as our "raw data," and I lectured equally comfortably about how taking an aesthetic view of an object or event meant focusing primarily, if not exclusively, on [End Page 40] what is available to us through simple sensory acquaintanceship with the object. "Aesthetics," I said, "is about the sensuous aspects of our experiences." And so we could, for instance, take an aesthetic view of a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph which precluded our experiences being mired in the themes that the more famous Mapplethorpe photos take as their content. "Mapplethorpe is a great photographer," I argued, "and one can see this if one is willing to focus strictly on what meets your eye when you look at the picture." In short, I held the position that the aesthetic view is the formal one.Without saying more, what I did was conflate two different things. On the one hand, I argued that aesthetic experience is a natural part of life that aesthetics seeks to explore. On the other, I argued that appreciating something aesthetically was to appreciate its formal qualities, those qualities that one could access simply through looking, hearing, touching, for example. But these really are two different things.Aesthetic experiences, if we are to treat them as "raw data," must be explored without pre-conception, prejudice, or limitation. And, truly enough, the vast majority of aesthetic experiences are not focused exclusively, in terms of their contents, on formal or simple-sensory matters. Aesthetic experiences are, first, experiences. They are complex things, having to do with things as tidy as the formal qualities of the object under consideration and with things as messy as whether one had enough sleep the night before, whether one just had a fight with his roommate, whether one is carrying psychological baggage that is brought to consciousness by this particular aesthetic object. Later in this essay, I want to explore some of this complexity.The other side of what was happening in my class, the formal focus on the sensory as the basis for an aesthetic viewing, is not the substance of "aesthetic experience" per se. It is rather the basis of what we might call "aesthetic analysis." Aesthetic analysis has to do with separating out from our... (shrink)

Discussion of the relations between ethics and aesthetics has tended to focus on issues concerning judgement: for example, philosophers have often asked whether, or to what extent, ethical considerations of one sort or another should inform aesthetic verdicts. Much less discussed, however, have been the relations between these two domains in their practical aspects. In this paper, I try to defuse a cluster of reasons for believing that practical competence in the ethical domain and practical competence in the (...) class='Hi'>aesthetic domain must be understood as importantly, or structurally, distinct from one another. (shrink)

Discussion of the relations between ethics and aesthetics has tended to focus on issues concerning judgement: for example, philosophers have often asked whether, or to what extent, ethical considerations of one sort or another should inform aesthetic verdicts. Much less discussed, however, have been the relations between these two domains in their practical aspects. In this paper, I try to defuse a cluster of reasons for believing that practical competence in the ethical domain and practical competence in the (...) class='Hi'>aesthetic domain must be understood as importantly, or structurally, distinct from one another. (shrink)

This essay will inform the reader about Kant’s views on mathematics and aesthetics. It will also critically discuss these views and offer further suggestions and personal opinions from the author’s side. Kant (1724-1804) was not a mathematician, nor was he an artist. One must even admit that he had little understanding of higher mathematics and that he did not have much of a theory that could be called a “philosophy of mathematics” either. But he formulated a very influential aesthetic (...) theory that is contained in his “Critique of the Power of Aesthetic Judgment” (1790), and his views on mathematics, especially those that compare it with philosophy, are distinctive and worthy of our attention. Hence, combining mathematics and aesthetics, asking whether mathematics can be beautiful and why and how it can or cannot be so called, according to Kant’s theory, will be particularly interesting. This essay has three parts: it discusses mathematics, aesthetics, and the aesthetics of mathematics, primarily in Kantian perspectives but also in ways that critically evaluate those perspectives. (shrink)

The collaborative ‹Big Science’ approach prevalent in physics during the mid- and late-20th century is becoming more common in the life sciences. Often computationally mediated, these collaborations challenge researchers’ trust practices. Focusing on the visualisations that are often at the heart of this form of scientific practice, the paper proposes that the aesthetic aspects of these visualisations are themselves a way of securing trust. Kant’s account of aesthetic judgements in the Third Critique is drawn upon in order to (...) show that the image-building capability of imagination, and the sensus communis, both of which are integral parts of aesthetic experience, play an important role in building and sustaining community in these forms of science. Kant’s theory shows that the aesthetic appeal of scientific visualisations is not isolated from two other dimensions of the visualisations: the cognitive-epistemic, aesthetic-stylistic and interpersonal dimensions, and that in virtue of these inter-relationships, visualisations contribute to building up the intersubjectively shared framework of agreement which is basic for trust. (shrink)

The question is raised, whether there are peculiarly scientific values which can be applied in environmental assessment. The use of the expression ‘scientific interest’ is traced from its 19th century origins to modern British statutes. It is argued that attempts to replace expert judgements by objective scientific criteria can never be completely successful. In particular, ‘interest’ is an aesthetic atribute particularly valued by scientists but incapable of precise measurement. While science provides the best framework for informed judgements on (...) conservation issues, the judgements of scientists are inevitably distinct from their experimental results. Judgements rest on ethical and aesthetic values such as importance and interest, which are essential constituents of the scientific sub-culture, but which are not uniquely ‘scientific”. (shrink)

Are aesthetic judgements cognitive, belief-like states or non-cognitive, desire-like states? There have been a number of attempts in recent years to evaluate the plausibility of a non-cognitivist theory of aesthetic judgements. These attempts borrow heavily from non-cognitivism in metaethics. One argument that is used to support metaethical non-cognitivism is the argument from Motivational Judgement Internalism. It is claimed that accepting this view, together with a plausible theory of motivation, pushes us towards accepting non-cognitivism. A tempting option, then, for (...) those wishing to defend aesthetic non-cognitivism, would be to appeal to a similar argument. However, both Caj Strandberg and Walter Sinnott-Armstong have argued that Internalism is a less plausible claim to make about aesthetic judgements than about moral judgements by raising objections against aesthetic internalism. In this paper, I will argue that both of these objections can be raised against internalism about moral judgements as well. As a result, internalism is no less plausible a claim to make about aesthetic judgements than about moral judgements. I will then show how a theory of internalism about normative judgements in general is capable of avoiding both of these objections. (shrink)

Can we properly define and explain the human mind an aesthetic mind? The purpose of the paper is to answer this and the related questions that it implies. How do we understand the conceptual field of the aesthetic? What do we mean when we speak about an aesthetic experience or when we express an aesthetic judgement? The first move consists in shaping the outlines of the «aesthetic» as a cluster-concept. Having identified the conceptual core of (...) aesthetic as an expressive synthesis between the emotional and cognitive layers of the experience, I try to develop a theoretical paradigm consistent with it and, consequentially, a mental mechanism of the aesthetic. The next step consists, therefore, in replacing the causal monism involved in the adaptationist paradigm by a plurality of factors. Consequently, I claim that at the origin of the aesthetic mechanism there are four factors. These factors are: 1) the mimetic assimilation of the real; 2) the "seeking" or the pleasure of exploration; 3) the pleasure of exercising preferences as a degree of freedom and an advantage in the conduct of life; 4) the impulse to play. All these factors are dispositions rooted in the system of primary emotions and represent the preconditions for the epigenetic emergence of the aesthetic mechanism. Conclusively, this mechanism is considered a dynamic activity of the brain that integrates into a single space of mutual resonance and harmonization neocortical and subcortical neural circuits: aspects of mental life emotionally attuned and aspects that are specific of cognitive processing of information. (shrink)

Allen Carlson has argued that a proper aesthetics of nature must judge nature for ‘what it is’, and that such judgements must be informed by a scientific understanding of nature, in particular, one shaped by the science of ecology. Carlson uses these claims to support his theory of positive aesthetics. This paper argues that there are problems in this view. First, it misunderstands ecology, thereby adopting a view of the natural world that holds it to be much more integrated (...) than it is. Second, it ignores an even more fundamental science of nature, evolution. Thus, it misunderstands both ecology and nature. An alternative to this view would be an aesthetics based on an evolutionary understanding of nature, which holds that, although there are many functional wholes in nature, there is also significant conflict, disintegration, and incongruent scales. A proper aesthetics of nature must take these conflicts into account. The paper ends with a sketch of an aesthetic theory based on the science of evolution. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:134 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it —­Genesis 3:6 Abstract Aesthetics has emerged as an important battleground in the moral quest for a lower carbon society. Especially in the case of proposed wind farms (an environmentally benign technology in terms of low carbon emissions), (...) opponents frequently refer to the unsightly machines creating negative landscape impacts and ruining the view. This essay seeks to reflect on the particular ways in which visual aesthetics are framed and mobilized in this moral debate. Exploring the dividing lines between pictoral and more-­ than-­ representational approaches I ask if the moral dilemmas in our landscape decisions (e.g. individual rights to beauty or collective duties toward future generations) are obscured by physical or visual realms. The largely invisible nature of wind, electricity and climate change, set within the physical and tangible nature of landscapes and turbines, challenges us to experience the aesthetics of landscapes-­ with-­ machines through more creative and engaging means that are not limited to visibility, nor deaf to morality. SIN, DUTY, AND THE AESTHETICS OF NATURE As the first act of sin in the bible, Eve’s consumption of a visually aesthetic fruit led to humans being banned from the Garden of Eden. Looking at the above sentence more closely, we could even argue that “good for food” is not a positive condition (e.g. tasty, nourishing), but Justice in the Eye of the Beholder? ‘Looking’ Beyond the Visual Aesthetics of Wind Machines in a Post-­Productivist Landscape DAN VAN DER HORST Dan van der Horst / Justice in the Eye of the Beholder? 135 rather the absence of a negative (e.g. inedible), whilst “also desirable” may sound like the hunger for wisdom was only a secondary, additional attraction. The sentence thus draws attention to the key role of aesthetics in the making of a moral decision; would Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit if it was not “pleasing for the eye”? Aesthetic judgments may be informed by a range of factors, but as this bible quote illustrates, morality is key among them. Associations between right and wrong on the one side and beauty or ugliness on the other, are not exactly rare in written history, be they religious, literary or scholastic works. As a marked contribution to the latter, Immanuel Kant has paid particularly close attention to the links between aesthetics and morality, arguing amongst others that any universal agreement in judgments of the sublime must rest on an appeal to moral feelings.1 But universality is not the only logical link between aesthetic judgementandmorality.Peoplecanfeelasenseof‘duty’tofindcertainthings beautiful e.g. because that is the aesthetic judgment of the group they aspire to belong to.2 Whilst this sense of duty can refer to social conditioning and group belonging, it also has resonance for landscape aesthetics at a time of anthropogenic climate change (a universal threat) when we must “learn to love the low carbon landscape.”3 This presents a point of departure from the debate on the moral obligation of preserving aesthetically pleasing landscapes (as we tend to do through legal designations, e.g. national parks), an ethical logic which leads, to use the words of Holmes Rolston, “from beauty to duty.”4 Moreover a posi­ tive aesthetical appreciation of a landscape because it accommodates low carbon technologies, would potentially require an inverse ethical logic, i.e. from duty to beauty.5 Notwithstanding the clear conceptual links between moral and aesthetic judgment, in everyday life it may be far less clear what kind of moral issues may underpin particular expressions of aesthetic sensibility. This can be particularly problematic for the deployment of environmental technologies (i.e. technologies pursued to reduce pollution ) that have significant landscape footprints. That is where we can find universal moral claims demanding environmental action for the common good rubbing up against aesthetic landscape judgments in places where such developments are proposed. This produces an unsatisfactory situation in which the deployment of clean technologies ENVIRONMENT, SPACE, PLACE / VOLUME 10 / ISSUE 1 / 2018 136 is delayed, tensions within local communities may increase... (shrink)

This paper places Leo Tolstoy’s often dismissed aesthetic treatise, What is Art?, in the context of the philosophical debate concerning aesthetic judgment. I examine Tolstoy’s argument for the very possibility of making aesthetic judgments, and suggest that his aesthetics proceed from an attempt to reconcile the subjective and the normative aspects of our aesthetic experience. Moreover, I show that Tolstoy, like Kant, seeks to preserve the autonomy of aesthetic judgment so that it may (...) inform moral judgment. His polemics, his moralizing, and his denunciations of the greatest works of Western culture have tended to obscure this fact. (shrink)

This new translation is an extremely welcome addition to the continuing Cambridge Edition of Kant’s works. English-speaking readers of the third Critique have long been hampered by the lack of an adequate translation of this important and difficult work. James Creed Meredith’s much-reprinted translation has charm and elegance, but it is often too loose to be useful for scholarly purposes. Moreover it does not include the first version of Kant’s introduction, the so-called “First Introduction,” which is now recognized as indispensable (...) for an understanding of the work. Werner Pluhar’s more recent translation, which does include the First Introduction, is highly accurate when it confines itself to rendering Kant’s German. However, it is often more of a reconstruction than a translation, containing so many interpretative interpolations that it is often difficult to separate out Kant’s original text from the translator’s contributions. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews have provided a translation that compares to or exceeds Pluhar’s in its literal approach to the German, but that confines all interpretative material to footnotes and endnotes, so that the text itself, with all its unclarities and ambiguities, lies open to view. In addition, Guyer, as editor of the volume, has provided a great deal of valuable supplementary material. This includes an introduction with an outline of the work and details of the history of its composition and publication, and a wealth of endnotes offering clarifications of the text, background information, and, most strikingly, many references to related passages in Kant’s voluminous writings, particularly in connection with Kant’s earlier writings related to aesthetics. The edition also records differences among the first three editions of the work, and—of particular interest—erasures from and additions to Kant’s manuscript of the First Introduction. Although the introduction and endnotes reflect interpretative views that are sometimes disputable, this supplementary material makes the present edition into a valuable resource even for those able to read the text in German. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Criticism, Imagination, and the Subjectivization of AestheticsRoger W. H. SavageThe growing discontent with reductivist practices signals a new current in contemporary criticism's understanding of music, literature and art. George Levine's unease with critics who are unable or unwilling to account for their continuing preoccupation with literary texts they expose as "imperialist, sexist, homophobic and racist" illumines the contradiction fueling the reduction of aesthetics to ideology.1 Cultural studies that deploy (...) literature as evidence of the aesthetics' socio-historical substance mask literature's capacity to break open new perspectives on reality by assuming that literary works are politically complicit with the aesthetics' strategic "mystification of the status quo" (A&I, p. 3). Criticism's indifference to its philosophical presuppositions exacerbates the paradox of denouncing a body of works that constitute criticism's aesthetic and intellectual heritage. According to Mario Valdés, literary studies' coming of age mandates that criticism take account of a tradition nurtured by a succession of philosophers including Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur.2 For Valdés, the post-structuralist realization that literary texts are indeterminate and inexhaustible prohibits replacing the work of art with critical commentaries on it; criticism's collective and determining role belongs to a shared community of commentary whose history and thought is a record of the changing interpretations and understandings of literary texts' meanings. [End Page 164]Valdés's claim extends to the field of contemporary music criticism, where the fashion of denouncing aesthetics as socially pernicious turns against traditional musicology's institutional authority. By demystifying absolute music (instrumental music devoid of programmatic associations), a self-proclaimed critical musicology revolts against traditional musicology's perceived political and ideological agenda. Critical musicology militates against the aesthetic conceit that absolute music transcends its social construction. Yet, by overlooking the philosophical presuppositions that set music's autonomy against practical affairs, new musicology accedes to the schema it recoils against.The tradition nurtured by Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics and Ricoeur's hermeneutic phenomenology represents a critical current whose significance has been overshadowed by postmodernist investments in decoding music's social and political content. Gadamer's critique of the subjectivization of aesthetics and Ricoeur's meditations on the imagination's capacity for invention offer an alternativeto contemporary music criticism's reaction against the principle of music's aesthetic autonomy. Gadamer and Ricoeur question art's formal separation from reality, which belongs to the history of Kant's radical subjectivization of aesthetics. Gadamer's critique of art's aesthetic differentiation prepares the ground for revealing how socially informed analyses conform to the schema Kant initiates by divorcing judgments of taste from their surrounding cultural ethos. Gadamer argues that, by discrediting theoretical knowledge that does not rely on the methodology of the natural sciences, the transcendental function Kant ascribes to aesthetic judgment lays the foundation for differentiating between art's aesthetic constitution and a concept of truth that accommodates the standard of the natural sciences. Through reducing the "sensus communis to a subjective principle," Kant legitimates his critique of aesthetic judgments by denying taste any importanceas a mode of knowledge.3Ricoeur's hermeneutical reflections on imagination complement Gadamer's critique of a differentiating consciousness that abstracts art works from their cultural worlds. For Ricoeur, imagination is productive when the fictions that works create affect our understanding of ourselves and our world by re-describing reality. Aesthetics' alignment with ideology encounters a limit in the power works evince by unfolding different ways of seeing or hearing reality. Ricoeur's reflections on imagination stand in stark contrast to the idea that individual works represent a form of cultural capital in the struggle for social position [End Page 165] and power. Contemporary critical practices' failure to account for the philosophical separation of judgments of taste from knowledge of reality precipitates the impasse criticism encounters when it identifies aesthetics with ideology at the expense of a work's capacity to affect reality in productive ways. The dispersal and potential disappearance of music's aesthetic character into the recesses of cultural and political analysis keeps step with the conceptual narrowing imposed by a restrictive sociological critique. Demystifying music's ideological representations of gender, race and identity purges romantic... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Introducing AestheticsJames McRaeIntroducing Aesthetics. By David E. W. Fenner. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. Pp. 170.David E. W. Fenner's Introducing Aesthetics offers a comprehensive introduction to the major traditions of Western aesthetics. Fenner confines his study to Western aesthetics and does not address the aesthetic traditions of Asian philosophy. This is not, by any means, a limitation, as this restriction of scope makes Fenner's work more concise and (...) readily accessible to those unfamiliar with aesthetics.Fenner divides his book into four parts: "Experiences," "Objects and Events," "Meaning," and "Judgment." Part 1 discusses the meaning and scope of the term "aesthetic" and analyzes the significance of "aesthetic experiences" and "aesthetic properties." Here, Fenner also explains the notion of aesthetic attitude as it is understood from the traditional perspective of disinterest (which includes thinkers such as Kant, Schopenhauer, and Stolnitz) and from modern points of view (such as Bullough's psychical distance and Aldrich's impressionistic vision).Part 2 contains three chapters, which discuss the nature of aesthetic objects, the definition of "art," and the concept of creation and re-creation. The chapter that explores the definition of "art" provides a succinct explanation of the major traditions of aesthetics and art criticism: the Greek notions of imitation and representation (with sections on Plato and Aristotle), Romanticism (including Schopenhauer and Nietzsche), Expressionism (focusing on Tolstoy, Croce, and Collingwood), Formalism (particularly Moore and Bell), Anti-Essentialism (which includes Wittgenstein and Weitz), and a final section concerning perspectives on the art world (from theorists such as Danto and Dickie). The final chapter, on creation and re-creation, discusses the nature of creativity and the essential differences between fakes, forgeries, and reproductions.Part 3 is devoted to an exploration of the meaning of art. The first chapter of this section concerns the problem of art interpretation and discusses such issues as the educated viewer, the intentional fallacy, and the possibility of a pluralism of artistic interpretations. The second chapter deals with censorship and examines various approaches to balancing the freedom of artistic expression with the moral concerns of society.In Part 4, Fenner examines the theme of artistic judgment. The first chapter of this section analyzes three traditional approaches to defining the term "beauty": formalism, subjectivism, and naturalism. This chapter includes summaries of the aesthetic theories of thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, and Dewey, to name but a few. The final chapter is devoted to a discussion of art criticism. Here, Fenner gives a detailed description of the four aspects of critical review (description, information, interpretation, evaluation) and explores the various challenges raised against the very possibility of criticism (such as emotivism). [End Page 515]Because of the clarity of its presentation and the quality of its scholarship, this book would serve well as a text for either introductory or upper-division undergraduate philosophy classes. One of the more useful features of Fenner's book is an extensive appendix that presents the history of Western aesthetics in outline form. Here, the ideas of the most important movements and philosophers of Western aesthetics are neatly summarized and presented in a chronology that clearly illustrates the historical shift in trends of thought and patterns of influence. This appendix would be an indispensable study guide for graduate students who are preparing for comprehensive examinations in the history of aesthetics. [End Page 516]Copyright © 2006 University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)

When we judge something to be beautiful, do we identify an inherent feature of the object, or only our subjective response to it? This paper argues that, for Kant, pure aesthetic judgment occupies a middle ground. Such judgments are based upon affective responses to our own cognitive faculties. Thus, pure aesthetic judgment is subjective insofar as it concerns our feeling ourselves to be engaged in a certain task; it is objective insofar as the task we are (...) engaged in is cognition of an object, and the faculties that we are feeling to be at work are the cognitive faculties of the understanding and the imagination. This paper locates this interpretation in the text of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment in the third Critique and uses it to make sense of many otherwise opaque features of Kant’s account of pure aesthetic judgment. (shrink)

Aesthetic experience, as a cognitive activity is a fundamental part of the interaction process in which an agent attempts to interpret his/her environment in order to support the fundamental process of decision making. Proposing a four-level interactive model, we underline and indicate the functions that provide the operations of aesthetic experience and, by extension, of aesthetic judgment. Particularly in this paper, we suggest an integration of the fundamental Peircean semiotic parameters and their related levels of semiotic (...) organization with the proposed model. Our aim is to provide a further theoretical understanding with respect to the perception of aesthetics and to enrich our models regarding the functionality of aesthetic interpretation, using the theoretical interpretive richness provided by the semiotic perspective. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:110 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY History of Aesthetics, Vol. I. Ancient Aesthetics. By Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz. Ed. J. Harrell. Trans. Adam and Ann Czerniawski. (The Hague-Paris: Mouton and Warszawa: PWN-Polish Scientific Publishers, 1970. Pp. vii-352.) History of Aesthetics, Vol. II. Medieval Aesthetics. By WladySlaw Tatarkiewicz. Ed. C. Barrett. Trans. R. M. Montgomery. (The Hague-Paris: Mouton and Warszawa: PWN-Polish Scientific Publishers, 1970. Pp. vii-315.) These two volumes of Tatarkiewicz' monumental history of (...) aesthetics, the third volume (to 1700) of which is now being prepared for press, have been reviewed already in the major aesthetic journals in Europe and America following their publication in Polish. Since Polish is not one of my languages, I can say nothing about the adequacy of the (rather obscured) translators and their work. The editors of both volumes have done their difficult work thoroughly, though the usual inconsistencies of spelling and such creep in. British spellings of judgement, centre, and colour, for example, appear in one part of a volume, while center, color, and judgment appear in another part. These are rare and not at all irksome details. On p. 220 of volume I, Aristotle has become a Stagiryte (sic). If the editors and translators actually re-checked all of those Greek, Polish and English texts--to say nothing of the Latin--they have earned a very large debt indeed. Again, my selective ignorance eliminates me from assessment. Tatarkiewicz' historical writing is surgical and Lacon-like. His major achievement lies in refraining from philosophical animadversions and for sticking strictly to his topic, no matter how tempting the theoretic distractions. Actually one expects a history of aesthetics to find the locus of aesthetic theory in the usual systematic frameworks of outstanding philosophers, but again Tatarkiewicz knows better than to try to provide these settings. His device is to stay exactly with the texts of authors, and to provide as much evidence for his statements as a printed work will allow. His scholarship is truly prodigious, and the work will live as reference for a long time to come. But it is more than a reference. There are some remarkable novelties included that bear mention. First of all, Tatarkiewicz' opening analysis of what must be included in a history of aesthetics is penetrating and convincing. In addition to the major "dualities" of aesthetics (beauty-art, subjective-objective aesthetics, psychological-sociological aesthetics, descriptive-prescriptive aesthetics, etc.) he simply accepts the necessity to find evidence of aesthetic history among statements by artists, among the inexplicit and inarticulate art works, in the vox populi and cultural actions of people. Thus the "evidence" he adduces will often displease the theoretical purist. Next, one is impressed by the great antiquity of some key issues that are being avidly pursued today. What is impressive is not that they are being repeated now, but that modern writers so rarely recognize (or acknowledge) their historical sources---or seem to care to. A careful study of this history might do much to reduce the growing volume in aesthetics----or at least to change the direction of emphasis significantly. One is surprised to note which figures emerge as of first rate importance in the history of aesthetics, important for different reasons. These figures stand out: Democritus, Plotinus, Aristotle, Vitruvius, the Pseudo-Dionysius, Johannes Scotus Erigena, to select only a few. The first Polish philosopher, Vitelo, anticipates much modern psychologizing in advancing the work of Alhazen. Ockham, not so surprising, contributes major advances, as do Augustine and Aquinas. BOOK REVIEWS 111 One fascinating item is the author's extensive account of the most violent and extended controversy in the history of aesthetics---the veneration of images and the disputes between the Iconoclasts and the Iconophiles. This sometimes physical battle raged for over 100 years! The Byzantine society, obviously, took art seriously. Tatarkiewicz' great labor is an object lesson in historiography and bibliographic technique. At one and the same time it demonstrates how much of value remains to be discovered by careful adherence to the detail of scholarship, while it also displays how much fruitful scholarship depends upon a brilliant and profoundly informed mind. Such a work, in short, could only have descended from a fully mature... (shrink)

I offer an analysis of the role played by consideration of an item's functions when it is judged aesthetically. The account applies also to artworks, of which some serve extrinsic functions (such as the glorification of God and the communication of religious lore) and others have the function of being contemplated for their own sake alone. Along the way, I deny that aesthetic judgements fit the model of judgements either of free beauty or of dependent beauty, given how these (...) two came to be described in the early twentieth century. (shrink)

This is a collection of four essays on aesthetic, ethical, and political issues by the pre-eminent Kant scholar in Germany today, perhaps best known for rekindling interest in the great classical German tradition from Kant to Fichte.

Many of the methods commonly used to research mathematical practice, such as analyses of historical episodes or individual cases, are particularly well-suited to generating causal hypotheses, but less well-suited to testing causal hypotheses. In this paper we reflect on the contribution that the so-called hypothetico-deductive method, with a particular focus on experimental studies, can make to our understanding of mathematical practice. By way of illustration, we report an experiment that investigated how mathematicians attribute aesthetic properties to mathematical proofs. We (...) demonstrate that perceptions of the aesthetic properties of mathematical proofs are, in some cases at least, subject to social influence. Specifically, we show that mathematicians’ aesthetic judgements tend to conform to the judgements made by others. Pedagogical implications are discussed. (shrink)

I propose a unified reading of Kant's third critical work, The Critique of Judgment, as a sustained argument that "purposiveness without a purpose" is the a priori, transcendental principle of judgment, a "subjective" yet necessary condition for the practice of judging and for the possibility of experience. I argue that Kant's principle of purposiveness is a temporal-formal structure of the subject's judging activity, a structure of anticipation that unites present and past moments as "towards" the future. Such purposiveness (...) is a necessary principle of judgment, I argue, for it enables the judging subject to unify the contingent, heterogeneous information "given" in experience not only as homogeneous but also as empirically heterogeneous. For Kant, we must be able to judge purposively without a purpose, if we are to be able to form empirical concepts or understand particulars in our experience. But purposiveness is a "merely subjective" principle, according to Kant, because it guides the subject's activity but does not and cannot characterize objects or ground objective claims. The function of purposiveness as a principle by which the judging subject can unify the heterogeneous as heterogeneous is, I argue, exhibited in the unity we attribute to organisms in teleological judgment, and instantiated most purely or clearly in the act of aesthetic appreciation. Thus for Kant, in aesthetic experience the subject reveals its nature as projectively temporal, utterly distinct from objects, governed by anticipation and history, not chronology and mechanism. (shrink)

I draw a connection between the question, raised by Hume and Kant, of how aesthetic judgments can claim universal agreement, and the question, raised in recent discussions of nonconceptual content, of how concepts can be acquired on the basis of experience. Developing an idea suggested by Kant's linkage of aesthetic judgment with the capacity for empirical conceptualization, I propose that both questions can be resolved by appealing to the idea of "perceptual normativity". Perceptual experience, on this proposal, (...) involves the awareness of its own appropriateness with respect to the object perceived, where this appropriateness is more primitive than truth or veridicality. This means that a subject can take herself to be perceiving an object as she (and anyone else) ought to perceive it, without first recognizing the object as falling under a corresponding concept. I motivate the proposal through a criticism of Peacocke's account of concept-acquisition, which, I argue, rests on a confusion between the notion of a way something is perceived, and that of a way it is perceived as being. Whereas Peacocke's account of concept-acquisition depends on an illicit slide between these two notions, the notion of perceptual normativity allows a legitimate transition between them: if someone's perceiving something a certain way involves her taking it that she ought to perceive it that way, then she perceives the thing as being a certain way, so that the corresponding concept is available to her in perceptual experience. (shrink)

Beauty is an important part of our lives. Ugliness too. It is no surprise then that philosophers since antiquity have been interested in our experiences of and judgments about beauty and ugliness. They have tried to understand the nature of these experiences and judgments, and they have also wanted to know whether these experiences and judgments were legitimate. Both these projects took a sharpened form in the twentieth century, when this part of our lives came under a sustained attack in (...) both European and American intellectual circles. Much of the discourse about beauty since the Eighteenth century had deployed a notion of the ‘aesthetic’, and so that notion in particular came in for criticism. This disdain for the aesthetic may have roots in a broader cultural Puritanism, which fears the connection between the aesthetic and pleasure. Even to suggest, in the recent climate, that an artwork might be good because it is pleasurable, as opposed to cognitively, morally or politically beneficial, is to court derision. The twentieth century has not been kind to the notions of beauty or the aesthetic. Nevertheless, some thinkers — philosophers, as well as others in the study of particular arts — have persisted in thinking about beauty and the aesthetic in a traditional way. In the first part of this essay, I look at the particular rich account of judgments of beauty given to us by Immanuel Kant. The notion of a ‘judgment of taste’ is central to Kant's account and also to virtually everyone working in traditional aesthetics; so I begin by examining Kant's characterisation of the judgment of taste. In the second part, I look at the issues that twentieth century thinkers have raised. I end by drawing on Kant's accout of the judgement of taste to consider whether the notion of the aesthetic is viable. (shrink)

This paper calls into question the view typically attributed to Kant that aesthetic judgements are particularist, resisting all conceptual determination. Instead, it claims that Kant conceives of aesthetic judgements, particularly of art, as playing an important role in therevisionof concepts: one sense in which aesthetic judgements, as Kant defines them, ‘find a universal’ for a given particular. To understand the relation between artistic judgements and concepts requires that we consider what I call Kant’s diachronic account of (...) class='Hi'>aesthetic ideas, or how such judgements unfold in the course of communication and reflection. My reading draws Kant much closer to debates in the philosophy of art on the semantic dimension of artworks. Here, illuminating the way in which aesthetic judgements about art can play a role in conceptual revision allows us to make sense of the way in which modern artworks contest concepts rather than merely presenting or expressing them. (shrink)

Mou Zongsan incorrectly uses Kant's practical reason to interpret Confucianism. The saying that "what is it that we have in common in our minds? It is the il 理 (principles) and the yi 义 (righteousness)" reveals how Mencius explains the origin of il and yi through a theory of common sense. In "the li and the yi please our minds, just as the flesh of beef and mutton and pork please our mouths," "please" is used twice, proving aesthetic (...) class='Hi'>judgment is necessary to understanding Mencius. An analysis of Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming's ideas will show that Confucianism should be interpreted by appealing to aesthetic judgment, and a discussion of Kant's theory of judgment and Gadamer's critique of Kant's theory will support the same point. The conclusion is that Chinese moral philosophy should be interpreted through aesthetic judgment. /// 牟宗三以康德实践理性解说儒学是一错误思路。"心之所同然者何也?谓理 也，义也", 表明孟子以共通感论述理义来源, "理义之悦我心，犹当拳之悦我口" 两用 "悦" 字，证明应当以直感判断力解说孟子。分析朱子、阳明的一些言论证 明以直感判断力解说儒学则若合符节; 并引述康德关于判断力的相关学说、伽达 默尔对康德的批评支持上述论点; 从而主张，中国道德哲学宜以直感判断力来解 释。. (shrink)

All aesthetic judgements, whether descriptive, evaluative or some combination of the two, and whatever they might be about, whether works of art, artefacts of other kinds, or natural things, declare themselves to be, not mere announcements or expressions of personal responses to the objects of judgement, but claims meriting the agreement of others. Despite the frequent appeal in everyday life to the nihilistic interpretation of the saying ‘It's all a matter of taste’, the doctrine of aesthetic nihilism—the view (...) that such claims are never warranted—does not merit serious attention. What is needed is an articulation of the various kinds of content of aesthetic judgements, one that will reveal what their claim to intersubjective validity amounts to and enable an assessment of what the proper limits of the claim might be. This clarification is what I attempt to provide. After some introductory definitions and classifications, the principal focus of the first part of the paper is descriptive aesthetic judgements, and one issue that figures large is the proper understanding of those judgements of this kind which are expressed in sentences that are intended to be understood metaphorically. A short bridge passage identifies an aesthetic judgement whose content is indicative of the content of evaluative aesthetic judgements of all kinds, and in particular evaluative aesthetic judgements about works of art, which the second part of the paper focuses on. Real illumination of these requires an identification of the aim of art (as such): I offer an account of this aim, which I defend against certain objections that it is liable to attract, and I use it to throw light not just on singular but also on comparative judgements of artistic value. I conclude with some remarks about purely aesthetic value and specifically artistic value and about similarities and differences between evaluative aesthetic judgements of works of art and evaluative aesthetic judgements of works of nature. (shrink)

Despite recent breakthroughs in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) – or more specifically machine learning (ML) algorithms for object recognition and natural language processing – it seems to be the majority view that current AI approaches are still no real match for natural intelligence (NI). More importantly, philosophers have collected a long catalogue of features which imply that NI works differently from current AI not only in a gradual sense, but in a more substantial way: NI is closely related (...) to consciousness, intentionality and experiential features like qualia (the subjective contents of mental states)1 and allows for understanding (e.g., taking insight into causal relationships instead of ‘blindly’ relying on correlations), as well as aesthetical and ethical judgement beyond what we can put into (explicit or data-induced implicit) rules to program machines with. Additionally, Psychologists find NI to range from unconscious psychological processes to focused information processing, and from embodied and implicit cognition to ‘true’ agency and creativity. NI thus seems to transcend any neurobiological functionalism by operating on ‘bits of meaning’ instead of information in the sense of data, quite unlike both the ‘good old fashioned’, symbolic AI of the past, as well as the current wave of deep neural network based, ‘sub-symbolic’ AI, which both share the idea of thinking as (only) information processing: In symbolic AI, the name explicitly references to its formal system based, i.e. essentially rule-based, nature, but also sub-symbolic AI is (implicitly) rule-based, only now via globally parametrized, nested functions. In the following I propose an alternative view of NI as information processing plus ‘bundle pushing’, discuss an example which illustrates how bundle pushing can cut information processing short,and suggest first ideas for scientific experiments in neuro-biology and information theory as further investigations. (shrink)

That a symbolic object or work of art participates in what it signifies, as a part within a whole, was a controversial claim discussed with particular intensity in the wake of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment. It informed the aesthetic theories of a constellation of writers in Jena and Weimar around 1800, including Moritz, Goethe, Schelling and Hegel. Yet the twin concepts of symbol and intuition were not only tools of literary and mythological criticism: they were integral (...) even to questions of epistemology and methodology in the fields of theology, metaphysics, history and natural philosophy. The international contributors to this volume further explore how both the explanatory potential and peculiar dissatisfactions of the symbol entered the Anglo-American discourse, focusing on Coleridge, Crabb Robinson and Emerson. Contemporary debates about the claims of symbolic as opposed to allegorical art are kept in view throughout. (shrink)

Paul Crowther provides interpretations of key concepts in Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, indicating (particularly in very informative footnotes) how his views compare with those of other Kant commentators such as Paul Guyer, Rachel Zuckert, Béatrice Longuenesse, Henry Allison, Donald Crawford, Robert Wicks and others. One might be inclined to ask whether yet another interpretation of Kant’s third critique was needed, yet compared to his other two critiques, Kant’s Critique of Judgment can still be regarded as the (...) neglected sibling. Its relevance to his system as a whole and in particular to his moral theory is still under appreciated. However, if one is after a study of Kant’s third critique along these lines, this is not the place to find it. Crowther has his philosopher of art hat firmly in place in the writing of this study. Even so, adopting this approach Crowther shows us that there is still work to be done. Crowther takes the core of Kant’s thesis and argues that its implications extend far beyond what Kant could have envisaged. (shrink)

Realists about aesthetic judgment believe something like the following: for an aesthetic judgment of be correct, it must respond to the intrinsic aesthetic properties possessed by the object in question (e.g., Meskin et al., 2013; Kieran 2010). However, Cutting’s (2003) empirical research on aesthetic judgment puts pressure on that position. His work indicates that unconscious considerations extrinsic to an artwork can underpin said judgements. This paper takes Cutting’s conclusion a step further: If philosophers (...) grant that it’s possible to appreciate artwork on the basis of unconscious biases, then we never can be fully confident that our aesthetic judgment is undergirded by the intrinsic aesthetic properties of an artwork. Furthermore, if judgment on the basis of unconscious, external reasons cannot be ruled out, we cannot be confident that our aesthetic judgments are ‘correct’. I argue that Cutting’s research is just the tip of the iceberg regarding the extrinsic, unconscious factors that influence aesthetic judgment. Expectation bias formed via social influence and context greatly influence aesthetic judgments and are unavoidable: we inevitably form expectations based on all kinds of contextual cues independently of any actual exposure to the item in question. Such factors make it terribly difficult to be confident in our aesthetic judgments. Even if there are objective properties that mark out some items as aesthetically superior to others, we cannot be sure that our judgments are responding to those properties. (shrink)

에서 선험적 규정은 의지와도 인식과도 관련되지 않는다. 그것은 판단 자체를 다룬다. 그것은 어떻게 무언가가 판단되어야 하는가를 확립한다. 미적 판단은 유쾌함과 불쾌함을 다룬다. 유쾌함은 단순한 감각이 아니라 감정이다. 미적 판단은 나의 본성과 관련되는 판단이지 오성이나 의지와 관련된 것이 전혀 아니다. 그것들은 나로부터 나오는 것이지 자연 자체로부터 나오는 것이 아니다. 그것들은 나로부터 나오지만 유비적인 것들이다. 나는 그것들을 구상하지만 이 일은 마치 나의 자연(본성)을 누군가가 구성하기라도 한 것처럼, 자연이 그것을 구상할 수 있었기라도 한 것처럼 일어난다. 그런 이유로 그 판단들은 반성적인 것이지 규정적인 것이 (...) 아니다. 이 글에서 나는 두 문제를 제기할 것이다. 하나는 단순한 반성으로서의 미적 판단이 어떻게 또한 규정적이고 선험적일 수 있는가? 다른 하나는 단순한 규정적 판단들이 문제가 되든, 아니면 반성적 판단들과 규정적 판단들 사이의 구분이 문제되든, ‘비판’이라는 말은 동일한 의미를 가지는가? 하는 것이다. 나는 과 사이에 칸트 철학의 구조적인 변화가 있다는 것을 보여줄 것이다. (shrink)

Are aesthetic judgements simply expressions of personal preference? If two people disagree about the beauty of a painting are both judgements valid or can someone be mistaken about the aesthetic value of an artwork? This volume brings together some of the leading philosophers of art and language to debate the status of aesthetic judgements.

The social environment influences what information individuals sample: people are often exposed to alternatives that are popular. This can systematically change an individual's evaluation of an alternative if she had previously been avoiding it due to a negative evaluation. The authors show that social exposure can have positive or negative effects on evaluation, depending on how popularity and prior evaluations interact. This theory was supported by a large‐scale analysis of data from a hotel chain.

I offer a critical reconstruction of Kant's thesis that aesthetic judgement is founded on the principle of the purposiveness of nature. This has been taken as equivalent to the claim that aesthetics is directly linked to the systematicity of nature in its empirical laws. I take issue both with Henry Allison, who seeks to marginalize this claim, and with Avner Baz, who highlights it in order to argue that Kant's aesthetics are merely instrumental for his epistemology. My solution is (...) that aesthetic judgement operates as an exemplary presentation of our general ability to schematise an intuition with a concept at the empirical level. I suggest that this counts as an empirical schematism. Although aesthetic judgement is not based on empirical systematicity, it can nevertheless offer indirect support for the latter in so far as it is a particular revelation of purposiveness in general. (shrink)

Prominent positions in the contemporary theoretical field of the humanities tend to conceptualize late modern communities in general as aesthetic communities of taste. In regard to political communities, this means reducing the political to an implication of the aesthetic discourse. This article argues for addressing the aesthetic and the political as distinct discourses that are, on the other hand, always engaged with each other in a conflictual interplay. Both discourses draw on and appeal to the ability of (...) judgement, but according to their own distinct principles, and depending on their respective weight in the conflictual interplay, this entails quite different perspectives with regards to political practice and community formation. (shrink)