In the history of aesthetics, few concepts have been as powerful and as elusive as the idea of the sublime, the "enthusiastic terror" that can possess us when we behold a mountain or a miracle. In his new book, James Kirwan traces the history of the sublime from its emergence in the eighteenth century to its resurgence in contemporary aesthetics. Sublimity addresses the nature of the sublime experience itself, and the function that experience has played, and continues to play, within (...) aesthetic discourse. The book both updates and revises existing treatments of the sublime in the eighteenth century, examines its neglected role in the nineteenth century aesthetics, and analyzes the significance of the modifications the concept has undergone in order to serve the interests of contemporary aesthetics. The book thus offers the most comprehensive coverage of the history of the sublime available. With its appeal for readers in aesthetics, art history, religion, and literary theory, Sublimity will beof wide use to students and scholars. (shrink)

James Kirwan provides both a lucid and concise history of the concept of beauty as a distinct aesthetic experience (marginalized by the rise of philosophical aesthetics in the twentieth century), and offers a new and persuasive answer to the age-old question of what beauty is an answer that, placing the responsibility for beauty firmly with the eye of the beholder, explains what it is in this "eye" that gives rise to beauty.

Beauty is a particular kind of aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experience can be divided into various categories according to the kind of aesthetic property (beautiful, sublime, elegant, cool, profound, etc.) that is attributed to the object. The phenomenal bases of these different properties are the objective qualities shared by the objects to which the category is attributed. That is, objects that are, for example, perceived as sublime can be shown to have certain objective qualities in common. This holds true of all (...) nameable aesthetic properties except for beauty. Even within the same class of objects, there are no discoverable common objective qualities that are necessarily present in every attribution of beauty. This lack of content to beauty has led to the word being used informally as a blanket term for aesthetic value. However, where this use has entered aesthetics (as the philosophy of art), obfuscation has resulted. (shrink)

Sublimity addresses the nature of the sublime experience itself, and the function that experience has played, and continues to play, within aesthetic discourse. The book both updates and revises existing treatments of the sublime in the eighteenth century, examines its neglected role in the nineteenth century aesthetics, and analyzes the significance of the modifications the concept has undergone in order to serve the interests of contemporary aesthetics. The book thus offers the most comprehensive coverage of the history of the sublime (...) available. (shrink)

This paper suggests that Kant’s concept of the ‘aesthetic idea’ is a useful starting point for understanding the nature of aesthetic experience once we reject the formalist interpretation that Kant gives to the relationship between those ideas and that experience.

Aesthetic experience is an emotional response to the spontaneous interpretation of an object/situation as symbolic of either the fulfilment of an impossible but inalienable desire (positive aesthet...

The original version of this article has been corrected due to typesetting mistakes regarding Fig. 1.

This paper extends arguments about the potential for reflexive governance in agri-food sustainability by linking food ethics to the notion of ‘unintended consequences’ and ‘responsibilisation’. Analysis of sustainable consumption governance shows the way authorities and intermediaries use food waste reduction projects to ‘responsibilise’ the consumer, including recent examples of shared responsibility. This paper takes this argument further by developing a ‘strategies of responsibilisation’ framework that connects relations between food system outcomes, problematisation in public discourse and strategies of responsibilisation in agri-food (...) governance. A food and drink waste case study of strategies to introduce reusable coffee cups in UK coffee shops and food retail chains is examined to exemplify relations between problematisation and responsibilisation. We examine problematisation and responsibilisation discourses that have emerged in relation to the issue, particularly in relation to single-use plastics, together with emerging governance arrangements and their underlying rationalities. The case study shows two key things: firstly, how ethical questions about food in public discourses connect to wider environmental planetary concerns ; and secondly, how responsibility has emergent and dynamic properties, which we term ‘cycles of responsibilisation’. The paper concludes by assessing the wider value of applying a responsibility framework to examine governance responses to increasingly complex agri-food system sustainability challenges. (shrink)

On 18–19 May 2018, a symposium was held in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Ronald W. Hepburn (1927–2008). The speakers at this event discussed Hepburn’s oeuvre from several perspectives. For this book, the collection of the revised versions of their talks has been supplemented by the papers of other scholars who were unable to attend the symposium itself. Thus this volume contains contributions from (...) eighteen notable scholars of different disciplines, ranging from contemporary aesthetics and art theory through to philosophical approaches to religion, education and social anthropology. It also includes a bibliography of Hepburn’s writings. The essays were first published in two special issues of the Journal of Scottish Thought, vols. 10–11 (2018–2019). -/- Ronald William Hepburn was born in Aberdeen on 16 March 1927. He went to Aberdeen Grammar School, then he graduated with an M.A. in Philosophy (1951) and obtained his doctorate from the University of Aberdeen (1955). His tutor at Aberdeen was Donald MacKinnon (1913– 1994), a Scottish philosopher and theologian, the author of A Study in Ethical Theory (1957) and The Problem of Metaphysics (1974). Hepburn taught as Lecturer at the Department of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen (1956–60), and he was also Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at New York University (1959–60). He returned from the United States as Professor of Philosophy at Nottingham University. In 1964, he was appointed as a Chair in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and between 1965 and 1968 he was also Stanton Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge. From 1975 until his retirement in 1996, he held the Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. He died in Edinburgh on 23 December 2008. His philosophical interests ranged from theology and the philosophy of religion through moral philosophy and the philosophy of education to art theory and aesthetics. Notably, Hepburn is widely regarded as the founder of modern environmental and everyday aesthetics as a result of the influence of papers in the 1960s which pioneered a new approach to the aesthetics of the natural world. (shrink)