This paper examines Allen Carlson's influential view that knowledge from natural science offers the best (and perhaps only) framework for aesthetically appreciating nature for what it is in itself. Carlson argues that knowledge from the natural sciences can play a role analogous to the role of art-historical knowledge in our experience of art by supplying categories for properly 'calibrating' one's sensory experience and rendering more informed aesthetic judgments. Yet, while art history indeed functions this way, Carlson's formulation leaves out (...) a second (and often more important) role played by art-historical knowledge over the last century - namely, providing the context needed for interpretations of meaning. This paper explores whether natural science can also inform our aesthetic experience of nature in this second sense. I argue that a robust sense of meaning from our aesthetic experience of nature is indeed made possible by coupling our aesthetic experience of animals with knowledge from the natural science of animal ethology. By extending the scope of Carlson's analogy to include interpretations of meaning, my argument shows that the cognitive, scientific model can accommodate a wider range of aesthetic engagement with nature than previously recognised. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 9, Issue 2, pp 220 - 239 Art has been crucial for Western philosophy roughly since Kant – that is, for what is becoming known as “correlationist” philosophy – because it has so often had assigned to it a singular ontological status. The artwork, in this view, is material being that has been transfigured and shot through with subjectivity. The work of art, what art does and how it works have all been understood as mediating between the (...) otherwise irreconcilable opposites of historical spirit and the mute material world, between communicative thought and the unresponsiveness otherness of nature. I revisit this aesthetic tradition from the perspective of the Anthropocene, the proposed name of the new geological epoch of the present, distinguished by the fact that collective human action has now acquired the scale of a world-shaping natural force. The Anthropocene is at once a geological epoch and a historical period. What forms of narrative might possibly relate these two temporal orders together? What other aesthetic categories might help us think through the conceptual impasse of the Anthropocene present? How might aesthetic experience illuminate the history of Anthropocene? What natural histories might artworks tell today? My speculative endpoint: the Anthropocene globe is the universal artwork of the contemporary moment. (shrink)

Beginning with Ronald Hepburn’s path-breaking essay, “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” which helped establish the modern discipline of environmental aesthetics, philosophers have provided sketches of what, after Hegel, might be called “philosophical histories of the aesthetics of nature.” These histories are remarkably similar and can easily be blended together to create a “received history” of the discipline. This history has subtly influenced work in the field. Unfortunately, it is not completely accurate and, as (...) a result, has had a misleading effect. A more accurate and expanded alternative history calls into question the received history’s view both on the origins of the field in arts-based aesthetic theories and on the nature and value of the aesthetic categories, “the picturesque” and “the sublime.” These categories were not borrowed from philosophy of art and inappropriately applied to nature, but instead were developed to appraise landscapes, which unlike natural objects could only rarely be judged beautiful since they are almost never symmetrical or ordered. (shrink)

[from the publisher's website] Questions about the existence and attributes of God form the subject matter of natural theology, which seeks to gain knowledge of the divine by relying on reason and experience of the world. Arguments in natural theology rely largely on intuitions and inferences that seem natural to us, occurring spontaneously—at the sight of a beautiful landscape, perhaps, or in wonderment at the complexity of the cosmos—even to a nonphilosopher. In this book, Helen De Cruz and Johan De (...) Smedt examine the cognitive origins of arguments in natural theology. They find that although natural theological arguments can be very sophisticated, they are rooted in everyday intuitions about purpose, causation, agency, and morality. Using evidence and theories from disciplines including the cognitive science of religion, evolutionary ethics, evolutionary aesthetics, and the cognitive science of testimony, they show that these intuitions emerge early in development and are a stable part of human cognition. -/- De Cruz and De Smedt analyze the cognitive underpinnings of five well-known arguments for the existence of God: the argument from design, the cosmological argument, the moral argument, the argument from beauty, and the argument from miracles. Finally, they consider whether the cognitive origins of these natural theological arguments should affect their rationality. (shrink)

Applying Aesthetics to Everyday Life surveys current debates in the field of everyday aesthetics, examining its history, methodology and intersections with cognate research areas. Lisa Giombini and Adrián Kvokacka bring together an international team of renowned scholars who are shaping the present and future of the discipline. They demonstrate how the historical origins of everyday aesthetics emerges across the history of Western aesthetic thought, from Renaissance thinkers to the modern German philosophers Baumgarten, Kant and Heidegger. Chapters shed (...) light on the field's methodological underpinnings, tracing its theoretical foundations back to epistemology and ethics and assess the potential of everyday aesthetics as a theoretical tool. They reveal its interdisciplinary nature and how it assists various fields of inquiry, including environmental and urban aesthetics, conservation ethics and the philosophy of art. Through fresh explorations of its origins, background and contemporary developments, this collection advances a new definition of everyday aesthetics and provides a cutting edge reflection on the world we inhabit today. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Aesthetic Appreciating Nature Skepticism Regarding Aesthetic Nature Aesthetics and the Concept of Nature.

My purpose is to examine Kant's views on interpreting nature and history and to attempt to see them as coherent by relating them to his theory of reflective judgment. With this reconstruction of a kantian conception of interpretation it is possible to shed new light on kant's approach to political history. I propose that reflective judgments as defined in the "critique of judgment" be conceived primarily as interpretive and only derivatively as either aesthetic or teleological. This approach to reflective (...) judgments creates a spectrum of them ranging from the noncognitive to the cognitive and from the aesthetic to the practical. (shrink)

If artworks and their aesthetic properties stand in constitutive relationships to historical context and circumstances, so that some understanding of relevant facts is involved in responding to a work, what becomes of the intuitive view that we see artworks and at least some of their aesthetic properties? This question is raised by arguments in both aesthetics and art history for the historical nature of works of art. The paper argues that the answer needs to take philosophy of perception (...) into account. The principal development that has shaped philosophy of perception in the last thirty years—explaining perceptual experience in terms of contents that represent that such-and-such is the case—is directly relevant to key arguments for the historical nature of art because contents can represent complex kinds and properties. Conceptual realism is especially well-suited for explaining perception of artworks and aesthetic properties because it emphasizes that forms of understanding—in the sense of capacities, abilities and techniques—are involved in perceptual engagement with individual objects and instances of properties. To make this case, the paper examines influential arguments for the historical nature of art and aesthetic properties by Arthur C. Danto and Kendall L. Walton; and examines art-historical discussions by Michael Baxandall, Linda Nochlin and T. J. Clark. The paper argues that the aesthetic properties of an artwork depend on human intentional uses of properties, colours and contours among them, and such uses may themselves be aesthetic. The Wittgensteinian notion of use is contextual and historical, and uses are perceptible. (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)

The book addresses how music (especially opera), the phonograph, and film served as cultural agents facilitating the many extraordinary social, artistic, and cultural shifts that characterized the nascent twentieth century and much of what followed long thereafter, even to the present. Three tropes are central: the tensions and traumas---cultural, social, and personal---associated with modernity; changes in human subjectivity and its engagement and representation in music and film; and the more general societal impact of modern media, sound recording (the development of (...) the phonograph in particular), and the critical role played by early-century opera recording. A principal focus of the book is the conflicted relationship in Western modernity to nature, particularly as nature is perceived in opposition to culture and articulated through music, film, and sound as agents of fundamental, sometimes shocking transformation. The book considers the sound/vision world of modernity filtered through the lens of aesthetic modernism and rapid technological change, and the impact of both, experienced with the prescient sense that there could be no turning back"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno argues that, in modernity, art and philosophy are reciprocally dependent upon each other for legitimation and critical force. This claim has puzzled scholars and provoked controversy. I argue that Adorno’s thesis may be comprehended in the following manner: art requires philosophy because, without the latter, art would lack the power to critique social and historical reality (in particular, the ideological elements that often remain invisible as second nature), and to rationally interpret the material particularity expressed (...) by such reality; and, conversely, philosophy requires art because the latter expresses historical experience to reason. Such material historical experience is necessary in order to prevent philosophy from falling into ideological convention; idle speculation; or abstract and reified instrumentality. Thus, the constellation of history, art, and philosophy is essential to Adorno’s aesthetics. (shrink)

This dissertation treats two themes crucial for the emergence of modern aesthetics. First, it considers the "aesthetic consciousness," which results from a rejection of the Aristotelian mimesis doctrine, and which seeks to establish art as independent from either morality or nature. Second, it treats the "historical consciousness," required to bring about the aesthetic consciousness, and eventually to raise it to the level of a moral ideal. Thus, the dissertation begins by considering that version of the mimetic argument rejected (...) by the moderns: it treats Lessing's moral interpretation of dramatic catharsis. Lessing's moral interpretation of catharsis, it is argued, jeopardizes the harmony between nature, morality and art on which the mimetic argument rests. Thus, the second chapter treats the first decisive challenge to the mimetic tradition: Rousseau's attack on the moral interpretation of catharsis. This attack follows two steps. First, Rousseau argues that the arts efface man's natural moral character. Second, Rousseau's developmental/historical account of man supports this opposition between art, on the one hand, and nature and morality, on the other. Rousseau, thus, is seen to be the first to introduce a historical consciousness of development into discussions of art, which revises the traditional links between art, nature and morality, and established a direction for Kant and Schiller. ;In light of Lessing and Rousseau, Kant's foundation of an aesthetic consciousness can be more clearly understood. Thus, the third chapter considers Kant's argument for aesthetic by considering three themes: first, Kant's notion of autonomy; second, Kant's analysis of the disinterestedness of the aesthetic judgement; third, his account of genius as the cause of fine art. ;Kant's argument, however, suggests that the aesthetic consciousness supercedes morality. Although Kant himself never pursues this suggestion, Schiller does. Thus, the final chapter treats Schiller's attempt to retrieve the moral and the natural without sacrificing the autonomy of the fine arts. Schiller does this by bringing Rousseau's historical consciousness of the human as a development beyond nature with Kant's aesthetic consciousness. This chapter, therefore, treats three themes. First, it considers how Schiller's distinction between naive and sentimental poetry translates into historical categories: ancient and modern. Second, it shows how the goal of the sentimental poet is a "moral unity" between art and nature, the necessity of which is unknown to the naive poet. Third, it considers how, through the search for a moral unity achieved only through a historical consciousness of progress from naive to sentimental, the nature of art becomes, for the first time, a function of human history. The dissertation concludes with a summary of these themes in terms of the distinction between the good and the beautiful. (shrink)

This collection of essays constitutes the first history of modern Japanese aesthetics in any language. It introduces readers through lucid and readable translations to works on the philosophy of art written by major Japanese thinkers from the late nineteenth century to the present. Selected from a variety of sources (monographs, journals, catalogues), the essays cover topics related to the study of beauty in art and nature. The translations are organized into four parts. The first, "The Introduction of (...) class='Hi'>Aesthetics," traces the formation of notions of "beauty," "culture," and "art" in Japan. It includes discussion of the creation of the museum in Japan and the frenetic efforts of Nishi Amane, Okakura Tenshin, Ernest Fenollosa, and Mori Ogai to introduce German, British, and French aesthetic thought to the Japanese. This is followed by three sections that examine the transformation of the aesthetic field into an academic discipline that flourished at three major Japanese universities. "Aesthetics at Waseda University" begins with an essay on the spiritualism and idealism of Onishi Hajime and continues with essays on the impact of German Lebensphilosophie ("philosophy of life") on Shimamura Hogetsu and Takayama Chogyu, and work by the major Waseda aesthetician of the twentieth century, Aizu Yaichi. Thinkers of the Tokyo School adopted a "scientific" method in the study of art theory. Part 3, "Aesthetics at the University of Tokyo," focuses on the ideas of Otsuka Yasuji (holder of the world’s first Chair of Aesthetics), Onishi Yoshinori, Watsuji Tetsuro, Abe Jiro, Takeuchi Toshio, and Imamichi Tomonobu. The section concludes with a look at the contemporary philosopher Sakabe Megumi. The last section, "Aesthetics at the University of Kyoto," includes essays on Nakagawa Shigeki and Fukada Yasukazu, pioneers in the field of aesthetics, and on the philosophy of art of the "Kyoto School," which was deeply inspired by the thought of Nishida Kitaro. Finally the work of Kuki Shuzo, an influential teacher of Western philosophy at the University of Kyoto, is examined. A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics is a companion volume to Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader (UH Press, 1999). (shrink)

One of the fundamental issues in 20th century philosophy is of the nature of individual subjective experience. I seek to show how this “nature” is revealed and hidden by a historical process outlined in History of Madness by Michel Foucault. Foucault’s philosophical and anthropological engagement with the experience of madness in The Modern Age functions as a useful tool towards this end. The psychologisation and medicalization of madness in the 19th century allowed for an endless discourse on madness. (...) This in turn permitted the language of the mad to burst open from its silence, historically present since the Great Confinement. This language of madness expressed itself poetically and artistically, thus revealing the paradoxical essence of the nature of human subjectivity as well as the particularity of its expression in the Modern Period. This particularity is elucidated from a genealogical account of the births of subjectivity and objectivity. I proceed to use this genealogy in conjunction with the language of madness to posit a prescriptive theory for aesthetic engagement. The essay seeks to show how the aesthetic experience can aid in the affirmation of the individual’s modern subjective reality. Thusly, the “goal” of the essay is to reveal affirmation, i.e., amor fati, the love of fate. (shrink)

This book provides a comprehensive view of the aesthetic realm, placing the various major artforms within the setting of nature and the built environment as they arise within the field of experience. Each chapter displays the regional ontology of the form considered: the comprehensive set of eidetic features that limn the space of the art. It draws upon artists' statements, writings of key figures in the history of philosophy--including Plato, Hegel, Dewey, and Heidegger-and writings from various commentators on art. (...) This volume is unique in its systematic and phenomenological approach, and in how it addresses aesthetics writ large. (shrink)

INTRODUCTIONFor the last two and a half decades – perhaps spurred onwards by R. W. Hepburn's seminal, wonderfully sensitive and astute essay “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty” – philosophical interest in the aesthetic appreciation of nature has been gaining momentum. One of the most coherent, powerfully argued, thorough, and philosophically compelling theories to emerge from this evolving arena of debate has been developed over a series of articles by Allen Carlson. The sophistication of Carlson's approach (...) – especially in terms of his careful style of argumentation – has raised the level of philosophical discussion concerning the aesthetic appreciation of nature immensely and it has taught us all what is at stake, logically and epistemologically, in advancing a theory of nature appreciation. Carlson has not only presented a bold theory of the aesthetic appreciation of nature; he has also refined a methodological framework and a set of constraints that every researcher in the field must address.Stated summarily, Carlson's view of the appreciation of nature is that it is a matter of scientific understanding; that is, the correct or appropriate form that the appreciation of nature – properly so called – should take is a species of natural history; appreciating nature is a matter of understanding nature under the suitable scientific categories. (shrink)

The essay attempts to offer an alternative genealogy of aesthetics from the perspective of a post-colonial history. Here a painting from the Philippines, Juan Luna's Spoliarium (1884), is reworked to offer insights into this possible operation that exceeds the typical methods of relativization and the exclusively nationalist anti-colonial critique. It focuses on both art and the discourse about it, including the oration of the National Hero Jose Rizal, and how these intersect with the end of the colony and the (...) compelling emergence of the aesthetic in eccentric grounds. (shrink)

This essay proposes a new focus for studies in the relationship between aesthetics and morality in the Enlightenment period. Recent research, especially by Paul Guyer, seems to have established that the traditional question of whether a genealogy for autonomous aesthetics can be traced attending to the concept of disinterestedness in the era can be answered with an unambiguous no. This, however, should only encourage further research into the nature of the way in which the connection between the (...) beautiful and the good was understood. It is argued here that with the gradual erosion of the humanist rhetorical understanding of history from the seventeenth century the specific content of the link between aesthetics and ethics undergoes a fundamental change, making it significantly more abstract and far less specific. (shrink)

Author of "Kubla Khan" and the epic "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Samuel Taylor Coleridge is remembered principally for his contributions as a romantic poet. This innovative reconsideration of Coleridge's thought and career not only demonstrates his importance as a philosopher but also recovers romanticism as both an aesthetic and a political movement. Pamela Edwards radically departs from classic theories of Coleridge's development and reads his writing within the framework of a constantly shifting political and social landscape. Drawing on (...) the ideology, rhetoric, and institutional theory at the turn of the late British Enlightenment, Edwards unearths the fundamental continuities in Coleridge's writing during the revolutionary period of 1794 to 1834, paying particular attention to the rhetoric of Coleridge's pamphlet and miscellaneous writings, the journalism of the Napoleonic years, his philosophical and ultimately political treatises within the contexts of his notebooks and letters, and his readings and intellectual friendships. What emerges is a clearer understanding of Coleridge's political philosophy and his contributions to the origins and ideology of British Liberalism. Coleridge's interest in history, nature, and law as inherently interconnected projects producing an ideal or scientific reading of society reveals a developed progressive social and cultural state theory anchored in individual conscience, moral autonomy, and a civic and participatory human agency. If the Statesman could understand and finally master this scientific view of the world, he would be able not only to adjust political and social institutions to comprehend the historical contingencies of the moment but to see through the problem of the moment to the dynamic of change itself. (shrink)

The discovery of fragmentary classical sculpture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries reorients the making of art toward broken bodies, changing the nature of sculpture as an aesthetic form. But this category shift in the ideal of beauty also makes an opening for the emergence of disability aesthetics: the recognition that the disabled body becomes a valuable resource for the creation and appreciation of new art forms. The idea of disability aesthetics may be traced via disability signposts (...) in which ancient works reminiscent of disability and modern works devoted to disability cross historically to create a powerful line of descent for the emergence of disability as an aesthetic value in itself. (shrink)

In this discussion I consider one aesthetic issue which arises from certain intimate relationships between art and nature. The background to these relationships can be traced to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It includes factors of considerable importance in the history of the aesthetic appreciation of nature such as the eighteenth century infatuation with landscape gardening and the continuingly influential role of landscape painting. Here, however, I concentrate on these relationships only as exemplified in a contemporary phenomenon – (...) environmental art. By environmental art I mean both the earthworks and earthmarks of artists such as Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, and Dennis Oppenheim and certain structures on the land such as those of Robert Morris, Michael Singer, and Christo. Some paradigm cases are Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Heizer's Double Negative, Singer's Lily Pond Ritual Series, and Christo's Running Fence. (shrink)

Anthropology, History, and Education contains all of Kant's major writings on human nature. Some of these works, which were published over a thirty-nine year period between 1764 and 1803, have never before been translated into English. Kant's question 'What is the human being?' is approached indirectly in his famous works on metaphysics, epistemology, moral and legal philosophy, aesthetics and the philosophy of religion, but it is approached directly in his extensive but less well-known writings on physical and cultural (...) anthropology, the philosophy of history, and education which are gathered in the present volume. Kant repeatedly claimed that the question 'What is the human being?' should be philosophy's most fundamental concern, and Anthropology, History, and Education can be seen as effectively presenting his philosophy as a whole in a popular guise. (shrink)

Este artículo ofrece una aproximación al papel de la historia en los proyectos narrativos de Juan José Saer y Germán Espinosa. Para el caso del primer autor, se plantea un análisis crítico de la novela El entenado, debido a su particular naturaleza metaficcional, así como de algunos de los textos recogidos en su libro de ensayos El concepto de ficción (1997). En lo que respecta a Germán Espinosa, el paralelo será establecido primordialmente a partir de su ensayística, sin olvidar, desde (...) luego, las oportunas reflexiones que sobre la historia y la literatura aparecen contenidas en un notable acervo de entrevistas y en su extenso libro de memorias. This article offers an approach to the role of history in the narrative projects of Juan José Saer and Germán Espinosa. In the case of the first author, this article poses a critical analysis of the novel The Step Brother, given its particular metafictional nature, as well as some of the texts compiled in his book of essays The Concept of Fiction (1997). With regard to Germán Espinosa, a parallel will be drawn primarily with his essays, without forgetting, of course, the proper reflections upon history and literature that appear in his remarkable body of extensive interviews and memoirs. (shrink)

Nature, a topic central to art history, is concurrently a dominant concept in contemporary art, art theory and its related disciplines such as cultural theory, philosophy, aesthetic theory and environmental studies. The project Naturally Hypernatural questions lines of tradition and predetermined categories that coexist with the topic of nature. Currently, nature in art surpasses the simple depiction of art as a material or object. To clarify and analyze the interrelations between nature and art is the aim (...) of the project Naturally Hypernatural. Concepts of Nature - the first volume of this project - argues that contemporary art is predominantly concerned with concepts of nature regarding the depth of their implications in order to reveal and analyze their internal structure. (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)

Both for Kant and for Nietzsche, aesthetics must not be considered as a systematic science based merely on logical premises but rather as a set of intuitively attained artistic ideas that constitute or reconstitute the sensible perceptions and supersensible representations into a new whole. Kantian and Nietzschean aesthetics are both aiming to see beyond the forms of objects to provide explanations for the nobility and sublimity of human art and life. We can safely say that Kant and Nietzsche (...) used the dualities of the beautiful/sublime and Apollonian/Dionysian to advocate their general philosophical worldview, and that the initial formation (in Observations and The Birth of Tragedy) and final dissolution (in the Critique of Judgment and Zarathustra and other later works) of these dualities are determined by the gradually established telos of their philosophical endeavor. Therefore, by observing the evolution of these so-called dualities, Kaplama gathers important clues as to how Kant’s and Nietzsche’s aesthetics transformed into different ways to affirm human art and life. On the one hand, Kaplama argues, the Dionysian came to be the heart and soul of Nietzschean aesthetics and ethics, and the Apollonian (or the formal drive of individuation) was reduced into a mere aesthetic criterion. On the other, Kant treats the sublime (which is originally an idea-producing feeling and/or judgment) as a mere appendix to his Critique of Judgment and aesthetic theory teleologically reducing it into its possible moral consequences. This is why Schopenhauer calls the sublime “by far the most excellent thing in the Critique of Judgment” which touches on the real problem of aesthetics very closely but does not provide a real solution for it. Kant’s forced teleological move is to make his theory of aesthetic judgment stand as a ‘reaffirmation’ of the earlier ethical justification he believed to have accomplished in the first two Critiques and the Groundwork where he defends an affirmation of human life through a teleological morality centered on the principle of free-will. In contrast, Nietzsche’s aesthetics (particularly the Dionysian) guides his ethics and metaphysics again through defining an ideal human nature without which ethos would be static and meaningless, lacking the ability to move and change and represent the tragic pathos of human life. (shrink)

This paper seeks to redress the marginalization of Adorno in environmental philosophical discourse. Kate Soper describes two opposing ways of conceiving nature. There is the redemptive “nature-endorsing” paradigm that lays claim to the intrinsic value or “otherness” of nature. Conversely, the “nature-sceptical” approach denies that we can access originary, untouched nature. This paper argues that the significance of Adorno’s treatment of natural beauty lies in how he brings these approaches together. In writings that resonate with (...) the dual connotations of Sebald’s phrase “after nature”, Adorno both affirms the skeptical point that we cannot transcend a human history alienated from nature as well as retaining redemptive hope wherein art “after” nature seeks creative possibilities from out of the very ruins of history marked by nature’s destruction. (shrink)

How are contexts made and narrated? This article addresses the question of how to identify relevant contexts for understanding a work of natural history, in this case The First Natural History of Norway, published in two volumes in 1752 and 1753. In addition to offering a rich and complex description of Norwegian nature, this historical work serves as an important source for investigating the ways in which nature was perceived in the kingdom of Denmark-Norway in the middle of (...) the eighteenth century. Nature was manifold, serving as a source of aesthetic pleasure, economic gain, religious reverence, and political power. It is argued that to understand the different natures presented in this book, we need to relate them to more than one context. But how do we determine the relevant contexts? The approach explored in this article is to read the book closely in search of the specific audiences that are addressed. By focusing on the ways audiences are addressed, it is argued, we can make better historical accounts of how natures are conceived and change in relation to different contexts. (shrink)

In the tradition of African musicologists who have pioneered serious scholarly study of African music, notably J.H. Kwabena Nketia, this extended essay considers the subject of aesthetic value in African music, in particular, in the Ewe and Akan (Ghanaian) traditions. It examines African - as compared with Western - ideas about musical experience and its appeal; and music in relation to values, morality and human emotion.

We may legitimately say that nature -- in the multiplicity of its objects -- has been considered in his history of aesthetics, as a central ground of aesthetical experience, and also as object of theoretical investigation on the modalities of that experience. On the other hand, a process is at present observed in which, that theme has been slowly considered of secondary importance, mainly after Hegel's aesthetics -- or rather philosophy of art. In this paper we try (...) to show how nature is being rediscovered both as the subject and as the background of aesthetical experience of art itself, mainly in the work of one of the greatest authors in contemporary aesthetical thought -- Mikel Dufrenne. It is also claimed that that rediscovery renews the metaphysical dimension of the aesthetical discourse. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:94 Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Jennifer C. Nash Black Lactation Aesthetics: Remaking the Natural in Lakisha Cohill’s Photographs In her 1992 essay “Selling Hot Pussy,” bell hooks recounts entering a “late night dessert place” with a group of colleagues who all began to laugh at a shelf of “gigantic chocolate breasts complete with nipples— huge edible tits.”1 For hooks, the chocolate (...) Black breasts are mammy imagery, a “displaced longing for a racist past when the bodies of black women were a commodity, available to anyone white who could pay the price.”2 For her white colleagues, the chocolate breasts are simply comical. Her colleagues’ response—their willingness to consume, laugh, and ignore racial, gendered, sexual violence—constitutes the racialized visual marketplace that hooks’s essay seeks to both describe and dismantle. The chocolate breasts become a rhetorical point of entry into hooks’s critical engagement with a visual marketplace where Black female bodies are delectable and disposable objects. hooks’s analysis has become part of a canon of Black feminist work exploring how Black breasts get taken up as signs of pathology, “excess flesh,” sexual deviance, hypersexuality, and alterity.3 From histories of the so-called Hottentot Venus and the preoccupation with her breasts, buttocks, and genitalia—including 1. bell hooks, “Selling Hot Pussy,” Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 61. 2. hooks, 61–62. 3. See Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Jennifer C. Nash 95 signature works by Zine Magubane, Janell Hobson, Samantha Pinto, and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting4 —to scholarship on the construction of black women’s imagined corporeality as “social dead weight” by Sabrina Strings, Black feminists have given critical attention to the construction of Black breasts as the location of Black women’s imagined racial and sexual difference.5 If Black breasts have been culturally and scientifically constructed as deviant, excessive, pornographic, and desirous, they have largely been uncoupled from an identification with nutrition—from the capacity to sustain and feed babies—except their connection with wet nursing and their conscription into maternal labor for white children. In this imaginary, Black breasts provide nutrition only when recruited as white property, with their nurturance capacity oriented toward white health and futurity. We might understand the cultural inability to interpret Black breasts as nurturing Black life as part of what Andrea Freeman describes as the “unmothering” of Black women, the unseeing of Black maternity except to elevate it as a symbol of brokenness or pathology.6 But in recent years, as I argue in my forthcoming book Birthing Black Mothers, Black breasts have entered the US cultural imagination anew. Black breasts are increasingly viewed as in need of support through seemingly benign state interventions to encourage Black breastfeeding. Indeed, Black breasts are recruited by an array of actors who often find themselves strangely aligned to champion Black breastfeeding —including NGOs, public health campaigns, and reproductive justice efforts spearheaded by Black feminists—precisely because Black breastfeeding is thought to perform urgent political, emotional, and 4. See Zine Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus,’” Gender & Society 15, no. 6 (2001): 816–834; Janell Hobson, Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2005); Samantha Pinto, Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 5. See Sabrina Strings, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (New York: NYU Press, 2019). 6. Andrea Freeman, “Unmothering Black Women: Formula Feeding as an Incident of Slavery,” Hastings Law Journal 69, no 1545 (2018): 1545–1606. 96 Jennifer C. Nash public health work. Black breastmilk is increasingly described as a crucial technology of Black life, one that supports Black infant life and inoculates it physically, psychically, and even spiritually against the array of anti-Black forces that wound and violate. The work that Black breast milk is thought to perform includes its posited... (shrink)

In this article Zoltán Somhegyi investigates the aesthetic qualities of Northern landscape representations, with a special focus on how contemporary examples are connected to classical ones. First he examines the history of the aesthetic appreciation of these sites, starting from their early modern reception and from the differentiation of “Northern” and “Mediterranean” landscapes: while the Mediterranean ones were highly valued already from the 15th–16th centuries on, the “wilder” Northern landscapes were admired mainly from Romanticism onwards. This has, among others, an (...) aesthetichistorical reason, namely the birth of the category of the sublime; and in this case the harmonious Mediterranean landscapes and the irregular yet impressive Northern ones relate to each other as the category of beautiful does to the sublime. This is why from Romanticism on Northern landscapes became not only aesthetically valuable, but even more capable than the Southern ones to move the spectator. This is especially because, from a gnoseological point of view, the landscape might be a place – and the landscape representation a means – of self-interpretation. The historical overview is then used to better understand some of the most important characteristics of contemporary Northern landscape interpretations and representations from leading artists of the region, which are analysed in the second part of the article. (shrink)

Ranke's work marks a turning point in the development of historiography: it changed from literature to science. Ranke's introduction of reason into historiography gave it a certain aesthetic quality, which modern historical studies have forgotten. Traditional rhetoric, or the use of language for strategic purposes, was discarded for its fictitious nature. In its place, Ranke advocated a synthesis of the scientific principles of research and the more artistic principles of writing history. This synthesis initiated the aesthetics of historiography, (...) and yielded a hidden rhetoric in the form of linguistic patterns of significance, or topoi, which give the facts of the past their sense and meaning for present-day life. Historiography, by its aesthetics, addresses its audience in a way that makes visible the mental forces which constitute the identity of the addressed people in the temporal course of their life. The postmodern recognition of rhetoric in historiography should not lead us back to premodern rhetoric but forward to a rhetoric of historiography which preserves the necessity of liberating reason in historiography and which reflects this reason not simply as a technique of research, but 'With a much wider and deeper approach to historical studies as a question of the aesthetics of historiography. (shrink)

It is frequently claimed that we can learn very little, if anything, about the aesthetic character of an artwork on the basis of testimony. Such disparaging assessments of the epistemic value of aesthetic testimony contrast markedly with our acceptance of testimony as an important source of knowledge in many other areas. There have, however, been a number of challenges to this orthodoxy of late; from those who seek to deny that such a contrast exists as well as attempts by those (...) who accept the distinction to provide an explanation and defence of the contrast. In Section I, I outline a little of the nature and history of the debate over aesthetic testimony. Section II, focuses on the opposing positions on aesthetic testimony, optimism and pessimism, and takes steps to clarify what exactly is at issue between them. In Section III, I survey considerations which have been adduced in favour of pessimism ranging from brute appeal to intuition to complex argumentation before turning in Section IV, to look at motivations for optimism. Finally, in Section V, I consider some alternative views which claim that, for a variety of reasons, it is a mistake to construe the debate over aesthetic testimony as concerned with the epistemic standing of aesthetic beliefs formed on the basis of testimony. (shrink)

Les mots nous manquent pour dire le plus banal des paysages. Vite à court de phrases, nous sommes incapables de faire le portrait d'une orée. Un pré, déjà, nous met à la peine, que grêlent l'aigremoine, le cirse et l'ancolie. Il n'en a pourtant pas toujours été ainsi. Au temps de Goethe et de Humboldt, le rêve d'une " histoire naturelle " attentive à tous les êtres, sans restriction ni distinction aucune, s'autorisait des forces combinées de la science et de (...) la littérature pour élever la " peinture de paysage " au rang d'un savoir crucial. La galaxie et le lichen, l'enfant et le papillon voisinaient alors en paix dans un même récit. Ce n'est pas que l'homme comptait peu : c'est que tout comptait infiniment. Des croquis d'Alfred Wallace aux " proêmes " de Francis Ponge, des bestiaires de William Swainson aux sonnets de Rainer Maria Rilke, ce livre donne à entendre le chant, aussi tenace que ténu, d'un très ancien savoir sur le monde - un savoir qui répertorie les êtres par concordances de teintes et de textures, compose avec leurs lueurs des dictionnaires éphémères, s'abîme et s'apaise dans le spectacle de leurs métamorphoses. (shrink)

Referred to as the "bible of American lawyers," Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England shaped the principles of law in both England and America when its first volume appeared in 1765. For the next century that law remained what Blackstone made of it. Daniel J. Boorstin examines why Commentaries became the most essential knowledge that any lawyer needed to acquire. Set against the intellectual values of the eighteenth century-and the notions of Reason, Nature, and the Sublime—Commentaries is at (...) last fitted into its social setting. Boorstin has provided a concise intellectual history of the time, illustrating all the elegance, social values, and internal contradictions of the Age of Reason. (shrink)

How can aesthetic enquiry contribute to the study of visual culture? There seems to be little doubt that aesthetic theory ought to be of interest to the study of visual culture. For one thing, aesthetic vocabulary has far from vanished from contemporary debates on the nature of our visual experiences and its various shapes, a fact especially pertinent where dissatisfaction with vulgar value relativism prevails. Besides, the very question ubiquitous in the debates on visual culture of what is natural (...) and what is acquired in our visual experiences has been a topic in aesthetics at least since the Enlightenment. And last but not least, despite attempts to study visual culture without employing the concept of art, there is no prospect of this central subject of aesthetic theory ebbing away from visual studies. The essays compiled in this volume show a variety of points of intersection and involvement between aesthetics and visual studies; some consider the future of visual art, some the conditions and characteristics of contemporary visual aesthetic experience, while others take on the difficult question of the relation between visual representation and reality. What unites them is their authors' willingness to think about contemporary visual culture in the conceptual frame of aesthetics. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophical aesthetics, art history, and cultural studies. (shrink)

The primary objective of this book is to open space for rethinking the relationship between art and politics. It seeks to combat one of the fundamental assumptions that has plagued many of the previous debates on this issue: that art and politics are distinct entities definable in terms of common properties, and that they have privileged points of intersection, which can be determined once and for all in terms of an established formula. This common sense assumption is rooted in a (...) transcendent illusion according to which there are more or less fixed characteristics that unify our terms, concepts, and practices in such a way as to guarantee their meaning. Against this substantialist approach, Radical History & the Politics of Art argues for a praxeological account that begins the other way around by analyzing specific cultural practices without presupposing a conceptual unity behind them. Such an orientation is radically historicist in the sense that it recognizes that all of our practices—be they linguistic, theoretical, aesthetic or political—are historically constituted and that they are necessarily part of a temporal dynamic. Hence the contingent nature of the labels used to classify various practices or even identify ‘practice’ as such. Radical history thereby proposes a significant departure from the extant debates on art and politics by maintaining that there is no ‘art’ or ‘politics’ in general, nor a singular relation between them. There are only historically constituted practices in various conjunctures, some of which have been labeled, through practical acts of denomination, as ‘artistic’ or ‘political.’ Instead of proposing one more response to the oft-repeated question ‘what is the relationship between Art and Politics?’ this book seeks to overcome the presuppositions that plague such a question. It thereby changes the very nature of the investigation by asking: ‘how do the diverse aspects of practices identified as ‘aesthetic’ and ‘political’ overlap, intertwine and sometimes merge in precise socio-historical force fields of action? (shrink)

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)

Wuthering Heights has proved exceptionally elusive to interpretation. By foregrounding the idea of human nature, Darwinian literary theory provides a framework within which we can assimilate previous insights about Wuthering Heights , delineate the norms Brontë shares with her projected audience, analyze her divided impulses, and explain the generic forms in which those impulses manifest themselves. Brontë herself presupposes a folk understanding of human nature in her audience. Evolutionary psychology converges with that folk understanding but provides explanations that (...) are broader and deeper. In addition to its explanatory power, a Darwinian approach has a naturalistic aesthetic dimension that is particularly important for interpreting Wuthering Heights. (shrink)

This work proposes a coevolutionary theory of aesthetics that encompasses both biotic and human arts. Anthropocentric perspectives in aesthetics prevent the recognition of the ontological complexity of the aesthetics of nature, and the aesthetic agency of many non-human organisms. The process of evaluative coevolution is shared by all biotic advertisements. I propose that art consists of a form of communication that coevolves with its own evaluation. Art and art history are population phenomena. I expand Arthur Danto’s (...) Artworld concept to any aesthetic population of producers and evaluators. Current concepts of art cannot exclusively circumscribe the human arts from many forms of non-human biotic art. Without assuming an arbitrarily anthropocentric perspective, any concept of art will need to engage with biodiversity, and either recognize many instances of biotic advertisements as art, or exclude some instances of human art. Coevolutionary aesthetic theory provides a heuristic account of aesthetic change in both human and biotic artworlds, including the coevolutionary origin of aesthetic properties and aesthetic value within artworlds. Restructuring aesthetics, art criticism, and art history without human beings at the organizing centers of these disciplines stimulate new progress in our understanding of art, and the unique human contributions to aesthetics and aesthetic diversity. (shrink)

Traditionally, analytic philosophers writing on aesthetics have given short shrift to nature. The last thirty years, however, have seen a steady growth of interest in this area. The essays and books now available cover central philosophical issues concerning the nature of the aesthetic and the existence of norms for aesthetic judgement. They also intersect with important issues in environmental philosophy. More recent contributions have opened up new topics, such as the relationship between natural sound and music, the (...) beauty of animals, and the aesthetics of gardens. Using these materials, it is now easy to include a module on the aesthetics of nature as one part of an introductory course on aesthetics, or even to design an entire upper-level undergraduate or graduate seminar around the topic. Author Recommends: Don Mannison, 'Comments Stimulated by Reinhardt's Remarks: A Prolegomenon to a Human Chauvinistic Aesthetic'. Environmental Philosophy. Eds. Don Mannison, Michael McRobbie, and Richard Routley (Canberra: Australian National University, 1980), 212–16. Readers coming fresh to contemporary debates may find the lack of attention to natural beauty in twentieth-century philosophy somewhat puzzling. This paper, which defends the view that nature cannot be aesthetically appreciated as such, presents this attitude in a particularly pure form. Ronald Hepburn, 'Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty'. British Analytical Philosophy. Eds. Bernard Williams and Alan Montefiore (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 285–310. Reprinted in The Aesthetics of Natural Environments. Eds. Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004). This seminal essay marks the beginning of contemporary discussion of the aesthetics of nature. Many of its ideas and themes continue to reverberate in contemporary debates. Allen Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment: The Appreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2000). This volume is a collection of Carlson's influential essays on environmental aesthetics. Chapters 4 and 5, 'Appreciation and the Natural Environment' and 'Nature, Aesthetic Judgment, and Objectivity', set the agenda for much subsequent discussion in the aesthetics of nature. Chapter 6, 'Nature and Positive Aesthetics', develops and defends the controversial idea that nature, unlike art, is always aesthetically good. Arnold Berleant, 'The Aesthetics of Art and Nature'. Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts. Eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 228–43. Reprinted in The Aesthetics of Natural Environments. Eds. Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004). In this paper, Berleant presents his influential idea of an 'engaged aesthetics' for nature. Yuriko Saito, 'The Aesthetics of Unscenic Nature'. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (1998): 101–11. This article develops Saito's idea that ethical considerations play a critical role in the aesthetics of nature, and presents a novel argument for Positive Aesthetics for nature. Malcolm Budd, The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature: Essays on the Aesthetics of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). This book collects Budd's papers on the aesthetics of nature, which contain important criticisms of Carlson's natural environmental model and the notion of Positive Aesthetics for nature. Noël Carroll, 'On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History'. Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts. Eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 244–66. Reprinted in The Aesthetics of Natural Environments. Eds. Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004). This paper argues for the importance of aesthetic appreciation that emphasizes emotional responses to nature. A philosophically sophisticated and influential treatment by a leading aesthetician. Ned Hettinger, 'Allen Carlson's Environmental Aesthetics and Protection of the Environment'. Environmental Ethics 27 (2005): 57–76. In this essay, an environmental philosopher gives careful and thorough consideration to the place of aesthetic considerations in environmental protection, focusing on Carlson's work. John Andrew Fisher, 'What the Hills are Alive With: In Defense of the Sounds of Nature'. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (1998): 167–79. Reprinted in The Aesthetics of Natural Environments. Eds. Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004). Most discussions of nature aesthetics focus on visual experiences; this essay is the first philosophical study of the aesthetics of natural sounds. A nuanced and original paper. Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant. 'Introduction: The Aesthetics of Nature'. The Aesthetics of Natural Environments. Eds. Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004), 11–42. A comprehensive review of the literature, this essay contains the best available bibliography on the subject. Online Materials: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/environmental-aesthetics/ Environmental Aesthetics: Allen Carlson's entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.aesthetics-online.org/articles/index.php?articles_id=17 Teaching Environmental Aesthetics: Allen Carlson's article on the American Society for Aesthetics Web site. http://www.uqtr.uquebec.ca/AE/Vol_6/ Volume 6 of AE: Canadian Aesthetics Journal /Revue canadienne d'esthetique: Papers by Thomas Heyd and Ira Newman on Allen Carlson's book Aesthetics and the Environment, along with a response from Carlson. http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=400 Paradoxes and Puzzles: Appreciating Gardens and Urban Nature: An essay by Stephanie Ross in the online journal Contemporary Aesthetics. Sample Syllabus for a three-week module in an undergraduate aesthetics course: This three week module can easily be adapted to fit shorter available class time or reduced reading expectations for students. A lighter two-week module, for instance, would drop the Hepburn reading and do either the Carroll essay or the Saito essay, but not both. Note that all readings for this module are reprinted in Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant (eds.), The Aesthetics of Natural Environments (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004). Week 1: Introduction Reading: Ronald Hepburn, 'Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty'. British Analytical Philosophy. Eds. Bernard Williams and Alan Montefiore (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 285–310. Discussion of Hepburn's essay will allow the instructor to bring out the distinctive issues and themes of the aesthetics of nature. Week 2: Objectivity or Subjectivity? Readings: Allen Carlson, 'Appreciation and the Natural Environment'. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37 (1979): 267–76. Arnold Berleant, 'The Aesthetics of Art and Nature'. Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts. Eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 228–43. This section covers two very different approaches to thinking about the aesthetic appreciation of nature. Consideration of these provides an opportunity for students to reflect on nature's relationship to art, and on the character of aesthetic experience itself. Week 3: Pluralistic Approaches Readings: Yuriko Saito, 'Appreciating Nature on its Own Terms'. Environmental Ethics 20 (1998): 135–49. Noël Carroll, 'On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History'. Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts. Eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 244–66. This section considers approaches that are motivated by perceived limitations of the two approaches mentioned above. In discussing these, students will focus on the significance, for the aesthetics of nature, of emotion and also of broader ethical considerations. Sample Syllabus for an upper-level undergraduate or graduate seminar: Books on Syllabus: Glenn Parsons, Aesthetics and Nature [AN] (London: Continuum Press, forthcoming November 2008). Allen Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment: The Appreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture [AE] (London: Routledge, 2000). Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant (eds.), The Aesthetics of Natural Environments [ANE] (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004). Week 1: Introduction Parsons, AN, ch. 1. Allen Carlson, 'Environmental Aesthetics'. The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. Eds. Berys Gaut and Dominic Lopes (London: Routledge, 2001), 423–36. Don Mannison, 'Comments Stimulated by Reinhardt's Remarks: A Prolegomenon to a Human Chauvinistic Aesthetic'. Environmental Philosophy. Eds. Don Mannison, Michael McRobbie, and Richard Routley (Canberra: Australian National University, 1980), 212–16. Ronald Hepburn, 'Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty'. British Analytical Philosophy. Eds. Bernard Williams and Alan Montefiore (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 285–310. Reprinted in ANE. Week 2: Imagination Parsons, AN, ch. 2. Thomas Heyd, 'Aesthetic Appreciation and the Many Stories About Nature'. British Journal of Aesthetics 41 (2001): 125–37. Reprinted in ANE. Emily Brady, 'Imagination and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature'. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (1998): 139–47. Reprinted in ANE. Marcia Eaton, 'Fact and Fiction in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature'. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (1998): 149–56. Reprinted in ANE. Week 3: Formalism Parsons, AN, ch. 3. Carlson, 'Formal Qualities and the Natural Environment', AE, ch. 3. Allen Carlson, 'On the Possibility of Quantifying Scenic Beauty'. Landscape Planning 4 (1977): 131–72. Ira Newman, 'Reflections on Allen Carlson's Aesthetics and the Environment'. AE: Canadian Aesthetics Journal /Revue canadienne d'esthetique 6 (2001) http://www.uqtr.uquebec.ca/AE/Vol_6/Carlson/newman.html>. Nick Zangwill, 'Formal Natural Beauty'. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 21 (2001): 209–24. Week 4: Science and Nature Aesthetics Parsons, AN, ch. 4. Aldo Leopold, 'Country'. A Sand County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1966), 177–80. Carlson, 'Appreciation and the Natural Environment', AE, ch. 4. Carlson, 'Nature, Aesthetic Judgment, and Objectivity', AE, ch. 5. Glenn Parsons, 'The Aesthetics of Nature'. Philosophy Compass 2 (2007): 358–72. Week 5: Positive Aesthetics Carlson, 'Nature and Positive Aesthetics', AE, ch. 6. Eugene Hargrove, Foundations of Environmental Ethics (Denton, TX: Environmental Ethics Books, 1996), ch. 6. Yuriko Saito, 'The Aesthetics of Unscenic Nature'. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (1998): 101–11. Malcolm Budd, 'The Aesthetics of Nature'. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (2000): 137–57. Glenn Parsons, 'Nature Appreciation, Science and Positive Aesthetics'. British Journal of Aesthetics 42 (2002): 279–95. Week 6: Animals Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968 [1757]), Pt. III, sec. VI. Holmes Rolston III, 'Beauty and the Beast: Aesthetic Experience of Wildlife'. Valuing Wildlife: Economic and Social Perspectives. Eds. Daniel J. Decker and Gary R. Goff (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987), 187–96. Glenn Parsons, 'The Aesthetic Value of Animals'. Environmental Ethics 27 (2007): 151–69. Week 7: Pluralism Parsons, AN, ch. 5. Noël Carroll, 'On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History'. Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts. Eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 244–66. Reprinted in ANE. Yuriko Saito, 'Appreciating Nature on its Own Terms'. Environmental Ethics 20 (1998): 135–49. Reprinted in ANE. Ronald Hepburn, 'Nature Humanized: Nature Respected'. Environmental Values 7 (1998): 267–79. Ronald Hepburn, 'Trivial and Serious in Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature'. Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts. Eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 65–80. Glenn Parsons and Allen Carlson, 'New Formalism and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature'. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62 (2004): 363–76. Week 8: Engagement Parsons, AN, ch. 6. Arnold Berleant, 'The Aesthetics of Art and Nature'. Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts. Eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 228–43. Reprinted in ANE. Cheryl Foster, 'The Narrative and the Ambient in Environmental Aesthetics'. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (1998): 127–37. Reprinted in ANE. Allen Carlson, 'Aesthetics and Engagement'. British Journal of Aesthetics 33 (1993): 220–27. Week 9: The Sublime Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment. Trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews (Cambridge University Press, 2000 [1790]). Excerpts from sections 23–9. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968 [1757]). Excerpts from Pt. II, sections 1–8. Ronald Hepburn, 'The Concept of the Sublime: Has it any Relevance for Philosophy Today?'. Dialectics and Humanism 15 (1988): 137–55. Stan Godlovitch, 'Icebreakers: Environmentalism and Natural Aesthetics'. Journal of Applied Philosophy 11 (1994): 15–30. Reprinted in ANE. Malcolm Budd, 'Delight in the Natural World: Kant on the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature. Part I: The Sublime in Nature'. British Journal of Aesthetics 38 (1998): 233–50. Week 10: Aesthetic Preservation Parsons, AN, ch. 7. Janna Thompson, 'Aesthetics and the Value of Nature'. Environmental Ethics 17 (1995): 291–305. Holmes Rolston III, 'From Beauty to Duty: Aesthetics of Nature and Environmental Ethics'. Environment and the Arts: Perspectives on Environmental Aesthetics. Ed. Arnold Berleant (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), 127–41. Ned Hettinger, 'Allen Carlson's Environmental Aesthetics and Protection of the Environment'. Environmental Ethics 27 (2005): 57–76. Keekok Lee, 'Beauty for Ever?'. Environmental Values 4 (1995): 213–25. Week 11: Gardens Parsons, AN, ch. 8. Mara Miller, The Garden as an Art (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), ch. 1. Mara Miller, 'Gardens as Works of Art: The Problem of Uniqueness'. British Journal of Aesthetics 26 (1986): 252–6. Stephanie Ross, What Gardens Mean (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), chs. 1, 7. Tom Leddy, 'Gardens in an Expanded Field'. British Journal of Aesthetics 28 (1988): 327–40. David Cooper, 'In Praise of Gardens'. British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (2003): 101–13. Week 12: Art in Nature Parsons, AN, ch. 9. Carlson, 'Is Environmental Art an Aesthetic Affront to Nature?', AE, ch. 10. Sheila Lintott, 'Ethically Evaluating Land Art: Is It Worth It?'. Ethics, Place & Environment 10 (2007): 263–77. Emily Brady, 'Aesthetic Regard for Nature in Environmental and Land Art'. Ethics, Place & Environment 10 (2007): 287–300. Focus Questions1. Are there any important differences between the aesthetic appreciation of art and the aesthetic appreciation of nature? If so, what are they?2. Is preserving nature for its aesthetic value a coherent idea?3. What is the ugliest natural thing or place you can think of? How might proponents of Positive Aesthetics for nature deal with your example?4. Does the concept of the sublime have any significance for our contemporary experience of nature? If it does, what relation does it bear to our aesthetic appreciation of nature?5. Watch Rivers and Tides (2001), the documentary film about the British environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy. Ethically speaking, how do you think we ought to regard his art-making? (shrink)