In this chapter, I argue against empiricist positions which claim that empirical evidence can be sufficient to defeasibly justify aesthetic judgements, or judgements about the adequacy of aesthetic judgements, or sceptical judgements about someone's capacity to form adequate aesthetic judgements. First, empirical evidence provides neither inferential, nor non-inferential justification for aesthetic opinions. Second, while empirical evidence may tell us how we do respond aesthetically to artworks, it cannot tell us how we should respond to them. And, (...) third, empirical insights into the irrationality of many of our aesthetic judgements do not warrant the sceptical conclusion that we ought to refrain from forming aesthetic opinions. As a consequence of these limitations to aesthetic empiricism, we should endorse the rationalist position that aesthetic criticism is largely a matter of reasoning and, moreover, a collective undertaking. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Aesthetic Empiricism Indirect Arguments Against Aesthetic Empiricism Direct Arguments Against Aesthetic Empiricism Drawing Ontological Conclusions from the Counter‐Empiricist Arguments.

Aesthetic hedonism is the default theory of aesthetic value. Some of its critics share with it a pair of unquestioned assumptions, namely, that any theory of aesthetic value should make special appeal to its being the case that the canonical form of aesthetic evaluation is a state of pleasure and to its being the case that the canonical purpose of aesthetic acts is to access pleasure. This paper argues that there is reason to doubt both (...) assumptions. Doubting both assumptions suggests a wider range of alternatives to aesthetic hedonism and primitivist inversions of aesthetic hedonism. (shrink)

Value empiricists in aesthetics claim that we can explain the value of artworks by appeal to the value of the experiences they afford. I raise the question of the value of those experiences. I argue that while there are many values that such experiences might have, none is adequate to explaining the value of the works that afford the experiences. I then turn to defending the alternative to value empiricism, which I dub the object theory . I argue that (...) if there is some problem attending the object theory, commensurate with the problems attending empiricism, no one seems to have any idea what it is. I close by urging that the object theory be granted a fresh hearing. (shrink)

Taste and Experience in Eighteenth Century Aesthetics acknowledges theories of taste, beauty, the fine arts, genius, expression, the sublime and the picturesque in their own right, distinct from later theories of an exclusively aesthetic kind of experience. By drawing on a wealth of thinkers, including several marginalised philosophers, Dabney Townsend presents a novel reading of the century to challenge our understanding of art and move towards a unique way of thinking about aesthetics. Speaking of a proto-aesthetic, Townsend surveys (...) theories of taste and beauty arising from the empiricist shift in philosophy. A proto-aesthetic was shaped by the philosophers who followed Locke and accepted that theories of taste and beauty must be products of experience alone. Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Alexander Gerard and Thomas Reid were among the most important advocates, joined by others who re-thought traditional topics. Featuring chapters tracing its philosophical principles, issues raised by the subjectivity of the empiricist approach and the more academic proto-aesthetic formed toward the end of the century, Townsend argues that Lockean empiricism laid the foundations for what we now call aesthetics. (shrink)

According to the causal theory of photography (CTP), photographs acquire their depictive content from the world, whereas handmade pictures acquire their depictive content from their makers’ intentional states about the world. CTP suffers from what I call the Problem of the Missing Agent: it seemingly leaves no room for the photographer to occupy a causal role in the production of their pictures and so is inconsistent with an aesthetics of photography. In this paper, I do three things. First, I amend (...) CTP with Fred Dretske’s distinction between triggering and structuring causes, thereby overcoming the Problem of the Missing Agent. Second, I argue that CTP so amended in fact illuminates two aesthetic interests that we may take in photographs, focussing on photographic portraiture and street photography. Third, I show how reflection on the aesthetics of photography serves to support aesthetic anti-empiricism: the view that the aesthetic value of artworks consists, at least in part, in achievement rather than sensory pleasure. (shrink)

Twenty-first-century philosophy has been drawn into a false opposition between speculation and critique. Nathan Brown shows that the key to overcoming this antinomy is a re-engagement with the relation between rationalism and empiricism. If Kant’s transcendental philosophy attempted to displace the opposing priorities of those orientations, any speculative critique of Kant will have to re-open and consider anew the conflict and complementarity of reason and experience. Rationalist Empiricism shows that the capacity of reason and experience to extend and (...) yet delimit each other has always been at the core of philosophy and science. Coordinating their discrepant powers, Brown argues, is what enables speculation to move forward in concert with critique. Sweeping across ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy, as well as political theory, science, and art, Brown engages with such major thinkers as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Bachelard, Althusser, Badiou, and Meillassoux. He also shows how the concepts he develops illuminate recent projects in the science of measurement and experimental digital photography. With conceptual originality and argumentative precision, Rationalist Empiricism reconfigures the history and the future of philosophy, politics, and aesthetics. (shrink)

A theory of aesthetic value should explain the performance of aesthetic experts, for aesthetic experts are agents who track aesthetic value. Aesthetic empiricism, the theory that an item's aesthetic value is its power to yield aesthetic pleasure, suggests that aesthetic experts are best at locating aesthetic pleasure, especially given aesthetic internalism, the view that aesthetic reasons always have motivating force. Problems with empiricism and internalism open the door (...) to an alternative. Aesthetic experts perform a range of actions not aimed at pleasure. Yet their reasons for acting are aesthetic. Since aesthetic values figure in aesthetic reasons, we can read a nonempiricist theory of aesthetic value off aesthetic experts’ reasons for acting. (shrink)

Empirical findings may be relevant for aesthetic evaluation in at least two ways. First — within criticism — they may help us to identify the aesthetic value of objects. Second— whithin philosophy — they may help us to decide which theory of aesthetic value and evaluation to prefer. In this paper, I address both kinds of relevance. My focus is thereby on empirical evidence gathered, not by means of first-personal experiences, but by means of third-personal scientific investigations (...) of individual artworks or, more generally, our interaction with art. The main thesis to be defended is that third-personal empirical findings are of limited significance for both critical and philosophical aesthetics. Indeed, they matter only to the extent to which they draw our attention to features or facts that we then iden- tify, from our first-personal perspective, as aesthetically relevant — for instance, as reasons counting for or against certain ascriptions of aesthetic value, or as factors that causally influence our actual as- sessments and thus render them partly inadequate or irrational. This limited significance of empirical findings is in line with the rationalist approach to the formation and justification of aesthetic judgements, that I have already started to defend elsewhere. -/- With respect to critical aesthetics, one problem is that empirical investigations cannot capture the normativity of the aesthetic relevance of lower-level features or facts: the respective studies can tell us what we take to be reason-giving or valuable, but not what is reason-giving or valuable. Furthermore, we cannot use empirically knowable principles to infer the presence of aesthetic values or reasons on the basis of recognising measurable lower-level features because the only available principles are too specific to allow for their actual application to more than one existing object, or even for their actual formulation. For their antecedents make reference to a large number of very determinate properties, as well as sometimes to particular events of creation. The only exception are conceptual principles (such as ‘something symmetrical is balanced’) or default principles (such as ‘something elegant is, by default, beautiful’). But knowledge of these principles is of little inferential use due to the holistic character of the justificatory power of aesthetic reasons and, moreover, does not allow for empirical acquisition. -/- With respect to philosophical aesthetics, I start with considering the limits of evolutionary accounts of aesthetic value. Even if it is true that humans originally came to value artworks because they recognised that artworks reveal certain skills or features of artists (such as imaginativeness or resourcefulness) that are desirable in sexual partners, it does not value that our reasons for valuing art have not changed, or at least not become much more complex. In addition, the answer to the question of why we value art from an evolutionary perspective has no obvious bearing on the issue of how we should appreciate art from an aesthetic perspective, or what such aesthetic appreciation would consist in. On the other hand, experimental studies showing that our actual aesthetic evaluations are influenced by factors (such as exposure e ects, or knowledge of the prices of objects), that undermine the good standing of our responses, just reveal that it is more difficult than perhaps expected to form sound aesthetic judgements; and that we need to improve our future aesthetic judgements by diminishing as much as possible the impact of those factors. (shrink)

It seems to be the case that when we look at a flower in the way that the scientist does, we see the flower in one way, but when we look at the flower in a way as to view it as a thing of beauty, charm, elegance, we see it in a different way; we see it as an aesthetic object. Viewing the flower in such a way as to see it, or any object, as an aesthetic (...) object, is to be in the aesthetic attitude. What this work means to do is to formulate necessary and sufficient conditions for adoption of the aesthetic attitude. ;Analytically and traditionally, the aesthetic attitude is an attitude or state-of-perceiving that is entered into by an agent which serves to make the agent receptive to the having of an aesthetic experience, and transform the object of the agent's attention from an object-in-the-world into an aesthetic object. ;The aesthetic attitude has figured prominently in aesthetics from the Enlightenment until the present. Its most important formulations are disinterestedness , Psychical Distance , Aldrich's Impressionistic Viewing, Scruton's Empiricistic Account, and the naturalistic work of John Dewey and Monroe Beardsley. I conclude that a naturalistic formulation of the aesthetic attitude is correct. (shrink)

Aesthetic value empiricism claims that the aesthetic value of an object is grounded in the value of a certain kind of experience of it. The most popular version of value empiricism, and a dominant view in contemporary philosophical aesthetics more generally, is aesthetic hedonism. Hedonism restricts the grounds of aesthetic value to the pleasure enjoyed in the right kind of experience. But hedonism does not enjoy any clear advantage over a more permissive alternative version (...) of value empiricism. This alternative is aesthetic liberalism. On this view, an object’s aesthetic value is fully grounded in any value—not just the hedonic value—of a correct and complete experience of its sensory features. To demonstrate the advantages of liberalism over hedonism, I apply both views to analyze the aesthetic value of the Spring Temple Buddha and Anselm Kiefer’s Seraphim. I detail four advantages of liberalism over hedonism, and I conclude by defending liberalism from two kinds of objection. (shrink)

This essay details David Hume’s complex contextualist account of aesthetic properties. Focusing mainly on the essay “Of the standard of taste”, I argue that Hume’s account of aesthetic properties anticipates many points advanced in Kendall Walton’s 1970 essay “Categories of art”, most notably the thesis that proper detection of most aesthetic properties depends on awareness of which nonaesthetic properties are standard, contra-standard, and variable for the relevant category of art. Consequently, they both reject the position we now (...) describe as aesthetic empiricism. Yet there are also distinctive aspects of Hume’s account. Most notably, Hume holds that delicacy of imagination is involved in avoiding prejudice when perceiving nonaesthetic properties. He also proposes that aesthetic terms such as “beauty” and “elegance” capture positively valenced thick concepts because aesthetic properties are necessarily (in part) value properties. (shrink)

A review of C. W. Smith's "Empiricist Devotion".

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze defines his transcendental empiricism as an “apodictic” aesthetics, by which he means a science not simply of the sensible, but of the being of the sensible. Yet, to the extent that the sensibility which is at stake in the Transcendental Aesthetics is a sensibility without sensation, Kantian aesthetics is not apodictic. Sensation is the only contact we have with the being of the sensible, namely that which is exterior with respect to the interior of (...) representation. But transcendental idealism is a subjectivism. Indeed, if one connects what Heidegger considers to be the greatest achievement of Kant’s Copernican revolution with the achievement that Kant held highest in this regard, then the two main precepts of Kant’s subjective phenomenalism fall into place. The first is that we cannot feel outside of us – this amounts to non-sensuous sensibility as transcendental idealism; the second is that we can feel inside – this amounts to non-sensuous sensibility as empirical realism. The aim of this article is to show how Kant's treatment of sensation prevented him from refuting Berkeley’s idealism. (shrink)

Many physicians assert that new cost-control mechanisms inappropriately interfere with clinical decision-making. They claim that high costs arise from poorly practiced medicine, and argue that effective utilization of resources is best promoted by advancing the scientific and ethical ideals of medicine. However, the claim is not warranted by empirical evidence. In this essay, I show how it rests upon aesthetic considerations associated with diagnostic elegance. I first consider scientific rationality generally. After a review of analytical empiricist and socio-historical approaches (...) in the philosophy of science, a form of Kant's aesthetic is used to explain how scientific discovery and justification are linked, and to show how meta-theoretical considerations associated with the goals and method of science work together with exemplars of practice. This analysis enables us to understand how the ideals of medicine as a science guide the initial patient history and physical exam in such a way that a parsimonious use of tests is indicated. Aesthetic considerations unite the basic scientific and ethical commitments of the modern medical paradigm and are central for rightly understanding clinical judgment. (shrink)

The article explores Adorno's theoretical efforts to think through the relationship of art and society, treating it as a significant part of his aesthetic theory. The emphasis of the article is placed on those writings that explicitly theorize the link between art and society. The essay therefore traces Adorno's theoretical statements and arguments from his 1932 essay on the situation of modern music to his late Aesthetic Theory, focusing on his methodological and aesthetic concerns: methodologically his persistent (...) critique of empiricism and quantitative research, aesthetically his preoccupation with the concept of aesthetic autonomy as the precondition of modern art. As it turns out, with in terms of its basic concepts such as commodity and reification, even his late work ( Aesthetic Theory ) remains committed to the Marxist tradition that defined his early writings. (shrink)

The form of representation cannot be fully described, as Wittgenstein noted. This is because there is a non-linguistic component in the representation of truth that aesthetic experience shows us. It is the self-represented exemplar of conscious experience. On this basis, the author defends empiricism against the objection that all representation of experience is subject to error.

Hume's Aesthetic Theory examines the neglected area of the development of aesthetics in empiricist thinking, exploring the link between the empiricist background of aesthetics in the eighteenth century and the work of David Hume.

Aesthetics is today widely seen as the philosophy of art and/or beauty, limited to artworks and their perception. In this paper, I will argue that today's aesthetics and the original programme developed by the German Enlightenment thinker Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in the first half of the eighteenth century have only the name in common. Baumgarten did not primarily develop his aesthetics as a philosophy of art. The making and understanding of artworks had served in his original programme only as an (...) example for the application of his philosophy. What he really attempts to present is an alternative philosophy of knowledge that goes beyond the purely rationalist, empiricist, and sensualist approaches. In short, Baumgarten transcends the old opposition between rationalism and sensualism. His core theme is the improvement (perfectio) of human knowledge and cognition and the ways to reach this goal. The study of Baumgarten's foundational works on aesthetics should not be undertaken merely out of antiquarian interest. I will argue, instead, that Baumgarten's importance and contemporary relevance lies in this: that his Aesthetica may serve as a profound contribution to the philosophy of the cultural sciences and humanities. Revisiting Baumgarten's original idea of aesthetics will lead us to a more inclusive concept of that philosophical discipline. (shrink)

_Hume's Aesthetic Theory_ examines the neglected area of the development of aesthetics in empiricist thinking, exploring the link between the empiricist background of aesthetics in the eighteenth century and the work of David Hume. This is a major contribution to our understanding of Hume's general philosophy and provides fresh insights into the history of aesthetics.

Hume consistently treats all of the passions, emotions, and feelings, so called, as sentiments in the tradition of Shaftesbury. Further, for Hume, sentiment is the epistemic basis of a disciplined form of thinking, and, as such, it implies both a moral and an aesthetic epistemology (though ‘aesthetic’ is anachronistic when applied to Hume). When sentiment is understood in this way, it becomes the primary evidence for knowledge. Properly disciplined, sentiment can play the role that clear and distinct ideas (...) played for Descartes and Locke, and that internal sense played for Hutcheson. Hume thinks that sentiment allows one to escape the contradictions and skepticism that destroy other empiricist systems. The question discussed in this article, therefore, is how Hume’s use of sentiment legitimizes it as the leading form of judgment, and how that judgment is essentially aesthetic as well as moral. (shrink)

Humans have engaged in artistic and aesthetic activities since the appearance of our species. Our ancestors have decorated their bodies, tools, and utensils for over 100,000 years. The expression of meaning using color, line, sound, rhythm, or movement, among other means, constitutes a fundamental aspect of our species' biological and cultural heritage. Art and aesthetics, therefore, contribute to our species identity and distinguish it from its living and extinct relatives. Science is faced with the challenge of explaining the natural (...) foundations of such a unique trait, and the way cultural processes nurture it into magnificent expressions, historically and ethnically unique. How do the human mind and brain bring about these sorts of behaviors? What psychological and neural processes underlie the appreciation of painting, music, and dance? How does training modulate these processes? Are humans the only species capable of aesthetic appreciation, or are other species endowed with the rudiments of this capacity? Empirical examinations of such questions have a long and rich history in the discipline of psychology, the genesis of which can be traced back to the publication of Gustav Theodor Fechner's Vorschule der Aesthetik in 1876, making it the second oldest branch in experimental psychology. The Oxford Handbook of Empirical Aesthetics brings together leading experts in psychology, neuroimaging, art history, and philosophy to answer these questions. It provides the most comprehensive coverage of the domain of empirical aesthetics to date. With sections on visual art, dance, music, and many other art forms and aesthetic phenomena, the breadth of this volume's scope reflects the richness and variety of topics and methods currently used today by scientists to understand the way our mind and brain endow us with the faculty to produce and appreciate art and aesthetics. (shrink)

This paper examines the negative response to Dalton’s atomic symbols by situating them in the context of the normative eighteenth-century representational system of affinity tables. Aesthetic analysis of the affinity tables reveals them as schema embedded with a potent functionalist empiricism. In contrast, the aesthetics of Dalton's symbols is associated with hypothetico-deductivism and alchemical iconicism.

'A Differential Play of Forces' is a study of transcendental empiricism in musical contexts. It presents a reading of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophical apparatus and explores how music can be thought of as functioning in the operation Deleuze terms transcendental empiricism. Central to transcendental empiricism is the idea of an encounter with intensive difference and the consequent experience of intensive and virtual forces. The thesis sets out to explore this idea in three interwoven steps. First, (...) it develops transcendental empiricism as a philosophical framework, expounding central notions related to time and aesthetic experience. In the context of this philosophical apparatus, music is then discussed as an encounter with intensity and what this may entail for our understanding of musical experience and its potential. The third part of the thesis explores the idea of experiencing intensive forces through music in the thinking and poietic of three composers of the twentieth century: Arnold Schönberg, Olivier Messiaen and Giacinto Scelsi. The thesis develops three ‘images of thought’ corresponding, respectively, to the composers’ expressed theoretical ideas, identifying central concepts from Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. A mutual illumination of ideas about music and transcendental empiricism is thus presented, pointing towards a possible convergence between theory and practice, thinking and aesthetic experience as a differential play of intensive forces. (shrink)

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

Ruben Berrios Queen’s University Belfast Anti-realism and Aesthetic Cognition Abstract At the core of the debate between scientific realism and anti-realism is the question of the relation between scientific theory and the world. The realist possesses a mimetic conception of the relation between theory and reality. For the realist, scientific theories represent reality. The anti-realist, in contrast, seeks to understand the relations between theory and world in non-mimetic terms. We will examine Cartwright’s simulacrum account of explanation in order to (...) illuminate the anti-realist position. Science consists of phenomenological and theoretical laws. The former are concerned with appearances, or those phenomena that can be directly observed; the latter involve the unobservable reality that is alleged to underlie appearances, and are capable only of indirect confirmation. Phenomenological laws are said to be descriptive, whilst theoretical laws are understood as explanatory. Cartwright is concerned with the theoretical. She claims that the standard realist account of the explanatory efficacy of theoretical laws is faulty. The explanatory power of theoretical laws consists in their ability to provide an explanation of physical phenomena. According to Cartwright, the realist claims that laws explain phenomena by providing an abstract description of them, in terms of their micro-structural features, that is alleged to be true. On this view, explanatory power is entirely dependent on descriptive adequacy. As phenomenological laws describe appearances, so theoretical laws describe the fundamental reality that governs appearances. Cartwright rejects the preceding view and in its place proposes a simulacrum account of explanation. According to Cartwright, the explanatory power of theoretical laws is related not to descriptive adequacy, but rather to the construction of adequate models. To explain a phenomenon is to construct a model which best or most adequately accommodates the phenomenon to a theory. The model will consist of various posited objects that serve to explain the phenomena in terms that are consistent with a set of theoretical laws. Cartwright claims that theoretical laws are true of, or describe, the objects of the model. The objects of the model, however, are not descriptive of reality. They are simulacra. They have, that is, the form or appearance of things, without possessing their substance or proper qualities. In light of the foregoing account we can summarise the distinction between scientific realism and anti-realism as follows. The realist claims that theoretical laws literally represent real objects. The anti-realist claims that laws represent objects of a model that are simulacra of reality. Anti-realism has an aesthetic dimension. The movement from realism to anti-realism is also the movement from the mimetic conception of the scientist as holding a mirror to nature to the constructionist view of the scientist as engaging with nature through invention. There is a lot of the artist in the anti-realist’s view of the scientist. This is true for Cartwright as well as, for example, Van Fraassen in his doctrine of constructive empiricism. It would appear, then, that the philosophy of science has absorbed some concepts that are ordinarily housed in aesthetics. And it has done so profitably. The aim of this paper is to reverse the direction of disciplinary influence. Can art, in relation to its status as a cognitive enterprise, be illuminated by scientific anti-realism? I will argue that it can. In an unexpected reference to the Nicomachean Ethics, Cartwright draws a suggestive parallel between theoretical laws and general moral principles, on the one hand, and physical phenomena and everyday moral conduct, on the other hand. If we add to this the claim that a central component of art’s value is cognitive, then we have the basic materials with which to flesh out a broadly anti-realist view of art. In the production of art, artists can construct models that mediate between everyday ethical phenomena and general ethical tendencies. These models reveal the ways in which there are implicit consistencies or inconsistencies, conflicts or congruences and so forth, between the phenomena and the tendencies. On this basis art can contribute to the reflective understanding of ethical life. This constitutes to a large degree art’s status as a cognitive enterprise. To apprehend art cognitively as artist or critic is to engage in aesthetic cognition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 447-448 [Access article in PDF] Brigitte Sassen, translator and editor. Kant's Early Critics: The Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. ix + 331. Cloth, $54.95. Brigitte Sassen has translated and edited an extremely useful collection of texts dating from the years 1782 to 1789. Most of the texts were written by Kant's empirically minded (...) critics, but a few are the work of defenders of the Critical philosophy. Although some have been translated before—e.g., the notorious Feder/Garve review of the first Critique that prompted Kant's vitriolic response in the Prolegomena, the original Garve review that served as the basis of the Feder/Garve review, and Jacobi's critique of Kant's transcendental idealism—the entire anthology is the first ever to be devoted exclusively to English translations of some of the first reactions to and defenses of Kant's theoretical philosophy. All of this makes for an exciting event in Kant studies.Sassen identifies three major trends in Kant criticism that began in 1782. The first is the empiricist reaction to Kant's theoretical writings. Sassen considers the year 1789 the endpoint of this trend, since critical attention, she argues, shifted around that time to the rationalist reaction to Kant's writings. The initial wave of rationalist criticism, which constitutes the second trend, lasted until 1793. The third and final trend, she says, is the more forward-looking one that eventually blossomed into the systems of post-Kantian thought.Given such a wealth of material, Sassen has focused on Kant's empiricist critics, choosing the writers and topics most representative of the overall empiricist critique of the 1780s. The selections are divided into five sections. The first consists of the Feder/Garve and Garve reviews (from 1782 and 1783, respectively). Since these were the very first reviews of the Critique of Pure Reason, they helped to formulate many of the classic objections to it. For example, not only does the standard charge of Berkeleyan idealism originate in these reviews, but Feder and Garve also express concerns about Kant's ability to distinguish between reality and illusion if nothing in sensation itself determines the understanding to combine sensations in one way as opposed to another. The second section contains discussions of the Transcendental Aesthetic, including an early version of the "neglected alternative" charge more famously made by Trendelenburg in the nineteenth century. Hermann Andreas Pistorius, one of the most sophisticated of Kant's empiricist critics, argues that Kant has not ruled out the possibility that space and time are both forms of sensibility and properties of things in themselves. The third section (especially Jacobi's famous critique) explores the relationship between appearances and things in themselves, the problem of affection, and other topics touching on the very nature of Kant's idealism. The fourth section deals with various issues involving the table of categories. For example, Kant's critics had doubts about its completeness, and they were also puzzled as to how a priori concepts could be applied to ordinary experience. The fifth and final section looks at the contrast between empiricism and purism, that is, the overall adequacy of empiricist and Kantian approaches to issues in metaphysics and epistemology. Here we find Pistorius once again writing thoughtfully about the Critical philosophy, this time in response to Carl Christian [End Page 447] Erhard Schmid, the author of a dictionary for the "easier use" of Kant's writings that went through several editions in the late 1780s and 1790s.This brief sketch of Sassen's book gives only an inadequate idea of its richness and usefulness. Her introduction, which is thorough and informative, patiently sorts out the various players in the debates of the 1780s, outlines their arguments with Kant and one another, and even describes the nature of periodical publication in late eighteenth-century Germany. The editorial apparatus includes short biographies of the participants in the debates as well as the other authors mentioned throughout the book... (shrink)

The dissertation presents a systematic analysis of the work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze , using two interrelated themes as its guiding threads. The first is the concept of "difference," which is normally conceived as an empirical relation between two terms each of which have a prior identity of their own . In Deleuze, this primacy is inverted: identity persists, but it is now a secondary principle produced by a prior relation between differential elements. Difference here becomes a transcendental (...) principle that constitutes the sufficient reason of empirical diversity as such. The second theme thus concerns Deleuze's relation to Kant. Deleuze's philosophy, I argue, can be read as both an inversion and a completion of Kant's philosophy--a "transcendental empiricism," as Deleuze puts it. It entails a resumption of the critical project on a new basis and with an entirely new set of non-categorical concepts. Each chapter of the dissertation considers a philosophical domain that roughly parallels those laid out in the architectonic of Kant's three Critiques in order to examine the implications of the positing of a principle of difference in each of them: Dialectics, or the theory of the Idea; Aesthetics, or the theory of Sensation; Analytics, or the theory of the concept; Ethics, or the theory of affectivity; and Politics, or social theory. Taken together, the five chapters attempt to present the broad outlines of Deleuze's philosophy of difference, and to indicate the nature of its demands in each of these domains. (shrink)

It is quite standard, even banal, to describe Kant's project in the Critique of Pure Reason [KrV] as a critical reconciliation of rationalism and empiricism, most directly expressed in Kant's claim that intuitions and concepts are two distinct, yet equally necessary, and necessarily interdependent sources of cognition. Similarly, though Kant rejects both the rationalist foundation of morality in the concept of perfection and that of the empiricists in feeling or in the moral sense, one might broadly characterize Kant's moral (...) philosophy as an attempt to reconcile the apriori universality and necessity of rationalist ethics with empiricist or sentimentalist strictures concerning the distinction between the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’, between third personal knowledge of the good and first personal motivation. (shrink)

This paper describes the nature of aesthetic judgments and the justifications that underpin these, with a particular focus on the theory of aesthetics set out by Kant in the Critique of Judgment. It argues that judgments of self often take the form of aesthetic judgments, that such judgments are prevalent in the psychotherapeutic discourse, and that this has major implications for the type of dialogue that is required in therapy. Such a dialogue shares many of the characteristics of (...) art criticism, but may be supported by scientific empiricism. Recent research on the interaction between emotion and cognition is reviewed and implications for therapeutic change are discussed. The paper concludes that aesthetic philosophy provides a common ground for emotion, cognition, ethics, and a sense of the meaningfulness of life. (shrink)

Rudolf Carnap’s formative years as a philosopher were his time in Jena where he studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy, among others, with Gottlob Frege, the neo-Kantian Bruno Bauch, and Herman Nohl, a pupil of Wilhelm Dilthey.2 Whereas both the influence of Frege and of the neo-Kantians is quite well known,3 the importance of the Dilthey school for Carnap’s intellectual development was recently highlighted by scholars, such as Gottfried Gabriel and Hans-Joachim Dahms.4 Although Carnap himself was interested mainly in the problems (...) of logic and the philosophy of the natural sciences, the community in which he worked until he went to Vienna in 1926 was neither a community of neo-Kantian philosophers nor of logicians or philosophers of the natural sciences but a community of members of the Dilthey school that were interested in history of philosophy,5 pedagogic,6 aesthetics,7 and sociology.8 Carnap and his friends were all members of the so-called Seracircle, a group of young people that met frequently in Jena and, between 1919 and 1926, also in Carnap’s home in Buchenbach near Freiburg.9 The first version of the Aufbau was written in close connection with this group of young people that were interested in a reform of the whole society, including arts, politics, sciences, and everyday life. In Carnap’s Werkstatt in Buchenbach, the Aufbau and at least two more manifestos of a more or less philosophical nature were written: Franz Roh’s “Nach-Expressionismus” and Wilhelm Flitner’s “Laienbildung.”10 Given these historical facts, we must conclude that the Aufbau is the product of an intellectual enterprise that developed in close connection with the Dilthey school, but in which Frege and the neo-Kantians seem to have played only a small role. (shrink)

_A groundbreaking study of the development of form in eighteenth-century aesthetics_ In this original work, Abigail Zitin proposes a new history of the development of form as a concept in and for aesthetics. Her account substitutes women and artisans for the proverbial man of taste, asserting them as central figures in the rise of aesthetics as a field of philosophical inquiry in eighteenth-century Europe. She shows how the idea of formal abstraction so central to conceptions of beauty in this period (...) emerges from the way practitioners think about craft and skill across the domestic, industrial, and so-called high arts. Zitin elegantly maps the complex connections among aesthetics, form, and formalism, drawing out the understated presence of practice in the writings of major eighteenth-century thinkers including Locke, Addison, Burke, and Kant. This new take on an old story ultimately challenges readers to reconsider form and why it matters. (shrink)

Rudolf Carnap’s formative years as a philosopher were his time in Jena where he studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy, among others, with Gottlob Frege, the neo-Kantian Bruno Bauch, and Herman Nohl, a pupil of Wilhelm Dilthey.2 Whereas both the influence of Frege and of the neo-Kantians is quite well known,3 the importance of the Dilthey school for Carnap’s intellectual development was recently highlighted by scholars, such as Gottfried Gabriel and Hans-Joachim Dahms.4 Although Carnap himself was interested mainly in the problems (...) of logic and the philosophy of the natural sciences, the community in which he worked until he went to Vienna in 1926 was neither a community of neo-Kantian philosophers nor of logicians or philosophers of the natural sciences but a community of members of the Dilthey school that were interested in history of philosophy ,5 pedagogic ,6 aesthetics ,7 and sociology .8 Carnap and his friends were all members of the so-called Seracircle, a group of young people that met frequently in Jena and, between 1919 and 1926, also in Carnap’s home in Buchenbach near Freiburg.9 The first version of the Aufbau was written in close connection with this group of young people that were interested in a reform of the whole society, including arts, politics, sciences, and everyday life. In Carnap’s Werkstatt in Buchenbach, the Aufbau and at least two more manifestos of a more or less philosophical nature were written: Franz Roh’s “Nach-Expressionismus” and Wilhelm Flitner’s “Laienbildung.”10 Given these historical facts, we must conclude that the Aufbau is the product of an intellectual enterprise that developed in close connection with the Dilthey school, but in which Frege and the neo-Kantians seem to have played only a small role. (shrink)

This book offers the first full-length study of philosophical dialogue during the English Enlightenment. It explains why important philosophers - Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Berkeley and Hume - and innumerable minor translators, imitators and critics wrote in and about dialogue during the eighteenth century; and why, after Hume, philosophical dialogue either falls out of use or undergoes radical transformation. Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment describes the extended, heavily coded, and often belligerent debate about the nature and proper management of dialogue; and (...) it shows how the writing of philosophical fictions relates to the rise of the novel and the emergence of philosophical aesthetics. Novelists such as Fielding, Sterne, Johnson and Austen are placed in a philosophical context, and philosophers of the empiricist tradition in the context of English literary history. (shrink)

I argue here that Goethe's "delicate empiricism" is not an alternative approach to science, but an approach that scientists use consistently, though they usually do not label it as such. I further contend that Goethe's views are relevant to today's science, specifically to work on the structure of macromolecules such as proteins. Using the work of Agnes Arber, a botanist and philosopher of science, I will show how her writings help to relate Goethe's work to present-day issues of cognition (...) and perception. (shrink)

When used with regard to aesthetic inquiries prior to the nineteenth century, the concept of "aesthetic experience" is subjected to the criticism of those who consider its a posteriori application illegitimate. At the same time, it seems undeniable that the concept was already present and developed during the 18th century: in particular, among British empiricists. For David Hume, the concept of experience results for many reasons foundational to his aesthetic reflection, especially when analyzed from the perspective of (...) relation/contrast with the question of aesthetic judgment, alongside with the complex dialectical tension to which it gives rise between subjective aesthetic judgment and objective critical evaluation, individual appreciation and social taste, rational and sentimental reaction. (shrink)

As interest in aesthetic experience evolved in the eighteenth century, discussions of the sublime located two opposed accounts of its place and use. Ferguson traces these two positions - the Burkean empiricist account and the Kantian formalist one - to argue that they had significance of aesthetics, including recent deconstructive and New Historicist criticism.

The article investigates the peculiarities of Durer's aesthetic views in the context of Renaissance philosophy and the theory of cognition of Modern times. Its provisions are compared with fragments of texts by L.-B. Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael. The semantic interrelationships of Durer's positions with mysticism, pantheism, natural philosophy and empiricism of Modern Times are emphasized. The interrelation of the problem of knowledge with the theme of freedom and beauty is considered in detail. The authors analyze various opinions (...) and ways of comprehending the beautiful, presented in the philosophical constructions of Durer, his concept of "rational knowledge", "scientific ignorance". Special attention is paid to the boundaries of freedom in Durer's representation. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that the presented concept of the evolution of A. Durer's aesthetic views helps to comprehend those contradictory trends that existed in the Renaissance itself. Thus, Durer believed that freedom conditioned by knowledge ends where attempts to transcend nature begin. A necessary condition for freedom is the understanding that the beautiful is relative. From the understanding of the relativity of the beautiful, from the concrete utopian program of its achievement, an imperative grows, meaning denial, the completion of the aesthetics of Rebirth. According to him, the artist should not limit himself to one type, but should be knowledgeable in various ways of depicting all kinds of types. In order to make such an image as is required of him. Thus, the professionalism of the artist, his experience, knowledge, recognition of the power of knowledge and, at the same time, understanding of its relativity – all this, as an achievement of the Renaissance theory of art, loses its meaning. All this is sacrificed to the tastes of employers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Museums in Transition:Thoughts from an EmpiricistSean UlmerIn March 2005 Daniel Siedell, curator of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, approached me with an invitation to participate in a symposium for the Journal of Aesthetic Education that he was guest editing. He said that the symposium would be dedicated to curatorial and educational issues and suggested that each of the (...) contributors could use David Carrier's forthcoming book as a starting point for their essays. At that time, I did not know of Carrier's thoughts but had a number of thoughts myself on issues related to curatorial and educational strategies within the museum setting. My experience in a variety of positions in three—now four—institutions had provided me with a number of perspectives about different facets of the museum and its curatorial and educational missions.In Carrier's book, Museum Skepticism, released in May 2006, the author posits a number of thought-provoking observations regarding the birth, evolution, and decline of the museum. Tracing this development from the French Revolution and the opening of the Louvre, through the Isabel Stewart Gardner Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Albert Barnes's collection and foundation/museum, and finally the J. Paul Getty Museum, Carrier looks at specific examples to support claims he makes in his intriguing opening and concluding chapters. While there are too many worthwhile observations to explore in great detail here, I will address some of the issues that piqued my interest, coming at the question from a different point of view, that of a working museum professional.Let me begin by stating that I am no theorist. Instead, I am an unapologetic pragmatist.1 My entire career has been shaped by actual work within a museum, seeing the institution—or "organism" as I usually refer to it—from a number of different vantage points.2 These varied experiences have given me the opportunity to see the museum—at least a Kunsthalle, two university museums, and a public museum—from several different vantage points. [End Page 4]In his introductory chapter, Carrier asks his primary question: "What is it like to lead the life of a work of art?"3 This is a very interesting question, and one with which many of us rarely consider in our day-to-day work within the museum's walls. In order to answer the question fully, Carrier suggests that "we need to understand museums."4 Indeed. In actuality, museums (and there are many different types) are just one component that must be considered. For a full consideration of the life of the work of art, one must start with the artist. What were his or her motivations? What was he or she trying to accomplish with the work? How was it first shown? In a gallery? In a museum show? How did the artist intend the work to be shown? What was the role of the patron or commissioner, if there was one? We know that the Catholic Church was an important originator of a number of great works of art and many were destined for church interiors, and some still are in situ. One cannot deny, however, that many of the world's great works of art ("great" simply deemed so by consensus) have found their way into museums. Museums are much more complex beasts than Carrier—or anyone for that matter—can cover within the confines of a single, publishable book. So many factors must be considered, especially when considering today's museums, as they continue to evolve and grow: the role of the collector, the patron, the board, the director, the curator, the education staff, the guards, and the public, to name just a few individuals who require consideration when analyzing museums. Such an interesting mixture of different individuals, each with a unique perspective (and agenda), coming together in one place makes for this complexity. And while the author uses this question of the life of a work of art as a starting point, he finds in the progress of the text a number of other stimulating and thoughtful observations. There is much more contained within... (shrink)

Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West takes up the notion of artistic detachment, or psychic distance, as an intercultural motif for East-West comparative aesthetics. The work begins with an overview of aesthetic theory in the West from the eighteenth-century empiricists to contemporary aesthetics and concludes with a survey of various critiques of psychic distance. Throughout, the author takes a highly innovative approach by juxtaposing Western aesthetic theory against Eastern aesthetic theory. Weaving between cultures and time periods, (...) the author focuses on a remarkably wide range of theories: in the West, the Kantian notion of disinterested contemplation, Heidegger's Gelassenheit, semiotics, and pragmatism; in Japan, Zeami's notion of riken no ken, the Kyoto School's intepretation of nothingness, D. T. Suzuki's analysis of the function of no-mind, and the writings of Kuki Shuzo on Buddhist detachment. "Portrait of the artist" fiction by such writers as Henry James, James Joyce, Mori Ogai, and Natsume Soseki demonstrates how the main theme of detachment is expressed in literary traditions. The role of sympathy or pragmatism in relation to disinterest is examined, suggesting conflicts within or challenges to the notion of detachment. Researchers and students in Eastern and Western areas of study, including philosophers and religionists, as well as literary and cultural critics, will deem this work an invaluable contribution to cross-cultural philosophy and literary studies. (shrink)

Rethinking the relationship between eighteenth-century Pietist traditions and Enlightenment thought and practice, _The Practices of Enlightenment_ unravels the complex and often neglected religious origins of modern secular discourse. Mapping surprising routes of exchange between the religious and aesthetic writings of the period and recentering concerns of authorship and audience, this book revitalizes scholarship on the Enlightenment. By engaging with three critical categories--aesthetics, authorship, and the public sphere--_The Practices of Enlightenment_ illuminates the relationship between religious and aesthetic modes of (...) reflective contemplation, autobiography and the hermeneutics of the self, and the discursive creation of the public sphere. Focusing largely on German intellectual life, this critical engagement also extends to France through Rousseau and to England through Shaftesbury. Rereading canonical works and lesser-known texts by Goethe, Lessing, and Herder, the book challenges common narratives recounting the rise of empiricist philosophy, the idea of the "sensible" individual, and the notion of the modern author as celebrity, bringing new perspective to the Enlightenment concepts of instinct, drive, genius, and the public sphere. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wellspring or Circuit?Commentary on Dewey and the Aesthetic UnconsciousnessFrank X. RyanEditor's note: This article contains material similar to a book review by the same author previously published in The Pluralist, vol. 18, no. 2, pp 114–21. The present article represents a further critical use of this material that we deem worthy of publication.in this vital and splendidly crafted work, Bethany Henning recovers a philosophy of aesthetic wisdom (...) far richer than the narrow epistemological lens dominant today. From its start, American philosophy looked beyond Europe's atomistic empiricism toward a continuity between our thought and nature's aesthetic splendor. Jonathan Edwards found beauty in the structure of being reflected in relations among ideas. For Emerson, each of us is a "transparent eyeball" in which nature's beauty fortifies our moral and spiritual agency. At the apex of this tradition is John Dewey, for whom "aesthetic experience [is] the highest mode of human experience" (Henning 55).Although aesthetic theory is usually associated with the cognitive evaluation of art, Dewey explores a broader non-reflective or unconscious dimension. Henning's appropriation of "unconscious"—the cradle of Freud's infantile id—is intentionally provocative. American culture, reflected in academic thought, has largely resisted appeals to subterranean urges and drives. In doing so, however, we perpetuate a myth of rational and moral exceptionalism masking a history of colonialism, oppression, and crass commercialism. In accepting the unconscious, European thought has taken strides to acknowledge and address such ills. Henning wonders whether America might accept "a dynamic unconscious, were it presented with an alternative mythology" (10) and finds a viable candidate in Dewey's underappreciated notion of qualitative immediacy: an "aesthetic (directly felt) connection between ourselves and [End Page 77] the world" (Henning 5). In affirming the unconscious depth of experience, this American reconfiguration welcomes "aesthetic experience back into our philosophical lives" (Henning 5).When embodied meaning supplements cognitive reflection, we come to champion "the sensuous, lived body" as "the primary reality" of qualitative immediacy—a felt aesthetic unity punctuated by "impulsions" arising from an organism's needs (Henning 69). As "a site of adaptive adjustments," Henning continues, "the body is responsive to the brink of coalescence at the point of contact with the world, in which things that are 'outside of it' belong to it" (71). "To move adeptly into aesthetic experience means to be skilled at loosening focal consciousness" so as to cultivate "the essential porousness of the world" (130).With this, the body-mind relation becomes a problem of normative aesthetics, not epistemology. The Cartesian detachment of intellect from nature perpetuated our cultural alienation from our bodies, our environments, and one another (Henning 81–84). With the re-emergence of the body, however, we can begin to acknowledge and heal this trauma.In tapping the significance of qualitative immediacy, of "having" beyond "knowing," Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconscious strives to recover Dewey's remarkable insight into our essential situatedness in the world. This alone establishes its importance. But Henning's book is equally ambitious in suggesting how Dewey's aesthetic understanding can(1). reconfigure the shadowy daemons of Freud's id;(2). replace the myth of American exceptionalism with authentic relationships rooted in pluralist values;(3). rehabilitate the body as an authentic vehicle of expression and communication;(4). vindicate the bold claim that all unified experience is aesthetic; and(5). identify and promote connections forged in shared human experiences.These aims are of inestimable value. I pledge to do whatever I can to defend and advance them. At the outset, however, I feel we must shore up the relationship between two different approaches to thinking about our situatedness in the world: (1) of organic beings existing in a porous world they dynamically interact with, and (2) a phenomenology of experience wherein nonreflective having is an unanalyzed totality from which thought and thing, subject and object, organism and environment, functionally emerge in what Dewey calls the pattern of inquiry. [End Page 78]The general consensus that Dewey failed to reconcile these two approaches—of existence with experience—was dubbed the "deep crack" in Dewey's thought, by Richard Bernstein in 1961. Bernstein laments Dewey's being caught between (1... (shrink)

Much current theorizing about literature involves efforts to renew our sense of aesthetic values in reading. Such is the case with new formalism as well as recent appeals to the notion of “surface reading.” While sympathetic to these efforts, Charles Altieri believes they ultimately fall short because too often they fail to account for the values that engage literary texts in the social world. In Reckoning with the Imagination, Altieri argues for a reconsideration of the Kantian tradition of Idealist (...) ethics, which he believes can restore much of the power of the arguments for the role of aesthetics in art. Altieri finds a perspective for that restoration in a reading of Wittgenstein’s later work that stresses Wittgenstein’s parallel criticisms of the spirit of empiricism. Altieri begins by offering a phenomenology of imagination, because we cannot fully honor art if we do not link it to a distinctive, socially productive force. That force emerges in two quite different but equally powerful realizations in his reading of John Ashbery’s “Instruction Manual,” which explicitly establishes a model for a postromantic view of imagination, and William Butler Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan.” He then turns to Wittgenstein with chapters on the role of display as critique of Enlightenment thinking, the honoring of qualities like sensitivity and the ability to attune to the actions of others, the role of expression in the building of models, and the contrast between ethical and confessional modes of judgment. Finally, Altieri produces his own model of aesthetic experience as participatory valuation and makes an extended argument for the social significance of appreciation as a way to escape the patterns of resentment fundamental to our current mode of politics. A masterful work by one of our foremost literary and philosophical theorists, Reckoning with the Imagination will breathe new life into ongoing debates over the value of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 447-448 [Access article in PDF] Brigitte Sassen, translator and editor. Kant's Early Critics: The Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. ix + 331. Cloth, $54.95. Brigitte Sassen has translated and edited an extremely useful collection of texts dating from the years 1782 to 1789. Most of the texts were written by Kant's empirically minded (...) critics, but a few are the work of defenders of the Critical philosophy. Although some have been translated before—e.g., the notorious Feder/Garve review of the first Critique that prompted Kant's vitriolic response in the Prolegomena, the original Garve review that served as the basis of the Feder/Garve review, and Jacobi's critique of Kant's transcendental idealism—the entire anthology is the first ever to be devoted exclusively to English translations of some of the first reactions to and defenses of Kant's theoretical philosophy. All of this makes for an exciting event in Kant studies.Sassen identifies three major trends in Kant criticism that began in 1782. The first is the empiricist reaction to Kant's theoretical writings. Sassen considers the year 1789 the endpoint of this trend, since critical attention, she argues, shifted around that time to the rationalist reaction to Kant's writings. The initial wave of rationalist criticism, which constitutes the second trend, lasted until 1793. The third and final trend, she says, is the more forward-looking one that eventually blossomed into the systems of post-Kantian thought.Given such a wealth of material, Sassen has focused on Kant's empiricist critics, choosing the writers and topics most representative of the overall empiricist critique of the 1780s. The selections are divided into five sections. The first consists of the Feder/Garve and Garve reviews (from 1782 and 1783, respectively). Since these were the very first reviews of the Critique of Pure Reason, they helped to formulate many of the classic objections to it. For example, not only does the standard charge of Berkeleyan idealism originate in these reviews, but Feder and Garve also express concerns about Kant's ability to distinguish between reality and illusion if nothing in sensation itself determines the understanding to combine sensations in one way as opposed to another. The second section contains discussions of the Transcendental Aesthetic, including an early version of the "neglected alternative" charge more famously made by Trendelenburg in the nineteenth century. Hermann Andreas Pistorius, one of the most sophisticated of Kant's empiricist critics, argues that Kant has not ruled out the possibility that space and time are both forms of sensibility and properties of things in themselves. The third section (especially Jacobi's famous critique) explores the relationship between appearances and things in themselves, the problem of affection, and other topics touching on the very nature of Kant's idealism. The fourth section deals with various issues involving the table of categories. For example, Kant's critics had doubts about its completeness, and they were also puzzled as to how a priori concepts could be applied to ordinary experience. The fifth and final section looks at the contrast between empiricism and purism, that is, the overall adequacy of empiricist and Kantian approaches to issues in metaphysics and epistemology. Here we find Pistorius once again writing thoughtfully about the Critical philosophy, this time in response to Carl Christian [End Page 447] Erhard Schmid, the author of a dictionary for the "easier use" of Kant's writings that went through several editions in the late 1780s and 1790s.This brief sketch of Sassen's book gives only an inadequate idea of its richness and usefulness. Her introduction, which is thorough and informative, patiently sorts out the various players in the debates of the 1780s, outlines their arguments with Kant and one another, and even describes the nature of periodical publication in late eighteenth-century Germany. The editorial apparatus includes short biographies of the participants in the debates as well as the other authors mentioned throughout the book... (shrink)

Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West takes up the notion of artistic detachment, or psychic distance, as an intercultural motif for East-West comparative aesthetics. The work begins with an overview of aesthetic theory in the West from the eighteenth-century empiricists to contemporary aesthetics and concludes with a survey of various critiques of psychic distance. Throughout, the author takes a highly innovative approach by juxtaposing Western aesthetic theory against Eastern aesthetic theory. Weaving between cultures and time periods, (...) the author focuses on a remarkably wide range of theories: in the West, the Kantian notion of disinterested contemplation, Heidegger's Gelassenheit, semiotics, and pragmatism; in Japan, Zeami's notion of riken no ken, the Kyoto School's intepretation of nothingness, D. T. Suzuki's analysis of the function of no-mind, and the writings of Kuki Shuzo on Buddhist detachment. "Portrait of the artist" fiction by such writers as Henry James, James Joyce, Mori Ogai, and Natsume Soseki demonstrates how the main theme of detachment is expressed in literary traditions. The role of sympathy or pragmatism in relation to disinterest is examined, suggesting conflicts within or challenges to the notion of detachment. Researchers and students in Eastern and Western areas of study, including philosophers and religionists, as well as literary and cultural critics, will deem this work an invaluable contribution to cross-cultural philosophy and literary studies. (shrink)