This essay is an overview of recent research aimed at establishing a link between environmental aesthetics and environmental ethics. I review the work of several prominent environmental philosophers and environmental aestheticians, spelling out some of the difficulties confronting various attempts to find such a link. While I argue that a case can be made for a connection between environmental aesthetics and environmental ethics concerning human‐created and human‐influenced environments, I find that there are a number of problems facing attempts (...) to establish a similar connection for natural or pristine environments. I examine some attempts to support such a connection, including each of two different accounts of the aesthetic appreciation of nature in contemporary Western environmental aesthetics as well as the union of these two accounts, sometimes called ecoaesthetics. I briefly discuss two Western versions of ecoaesthetics and then turn to research by Chinese aestheticians, who defend a more robust version of ecoaesthetics. I suggest that this latter work may succeed in connecting environmental aesthetics and environmental ethics, although not in exactly the way in which such a link has been pursued by Western philosophers. (shrink)

This paper addresses two recent debates in aesthetics: the ‘moralist debate’, concerning the relationship between the ethical and aesthetic evaluations of artworks, and the ‘cognitivist debate’, concerning the relationship between the cognitive and aesthetic evaluations of artworks. Although the two debates appear to concern quite different issues, I argue that the various positions in each are marked by the same types of confusions and ambiguities. In particular, they demonstrate a persistent and unjustified conflation of aesthetic and artistic (...) value, which in turn is based on a more general failure to explicitly tackle the demarcation of aesthetic value. As such, the claims of each side are rendered ambiguous in respect of the relation that is supposed to hold between all these types of value and artistic value. These issues are discussed in light of a recent argument proposed by Matthew Kieran, to undermine, to some extent, the conceptual distinction between aesthetic, cognitive-ethical, and artistic values in our appraisal of art works. In rejecting his argument, I defend the conceptual distinction and a pluralistic conception of artistic value that allows for cognitive and ethical values to count as artistic, but not aesthetic, values. (shrink)

Kant’s dualism in anthropology and morality is said to be bridged only by means of a teleology that seems to betray the historical constitution of its subjectivity. And yet the Kantianarticulation of problems of theoretical and practical reason can be explored only insofar as they help us understand the correlated issues of the unity of reason, the relation of aesthetics and ethics in the light of the three Critiques, and the teleological conception of history. In this paper, I argue (...) for a teleological reading of the systematic architectonic so as to make sense of the concept of purposiveness as the a priori principle of judgment in its logical, aesthetic, and teleological reflection and of the unifying, a priori principles of each faculty–namely, conformity to law, final purpose, and conformity to purpose or purposiveness – respectively dealt with in the three Critiques. (shrink)

In response to Jürgen Habermas’s critical assessment of the import of Theodor Adorno’s aesthetics, I revisit Adorno’s aesthetics in the context of the question of whether and to what extent there can be an aesthetics of nature, and the potential ethical and social-political significance of such an aesthetics.

Kant’s dualism in anthropology and morality is said to be bridged only by means of a teleologywhich seems to betray the historical constitution of its subjectivity. And yet the Kantianarticulation of problems of theoretical and practical reason can be explored only insofar asthey help us understand the correlated problems of the unity of reason, the relation of aestheticsand ethics in the light of the three Critiques, and the teleological conception of history.In this paper, I argue for a teleological reading (...) of the systematic architectonic so as tomake sense of the concept of purposiveness as the a priori principle of judgment in its logical,aesthetic, and teleological reflection and of the unifying, a priori principles of each faculty–namely, conformity to law, final purpose, and conformity to purpose or purposiveness(Gesetzmäßigkeit, Endzweck, Zweckmäßigkeit) – respectively dealt with in the three Critiques. (shrink)

The book explores the forbidden feelings of beauty, admiration, or satisfaction before instances of terror and human pain from eighteenth-century natural disasters to twenty-first-century terrorist destruction. It explores the fascination felt by the subject witnessing major disasters directly or in a mediated fashion. Emmanouil Aretoulakis' makes the challenging proposition that there is, paradoxically, an ethics in the aesthetic appraisal of terror.

In The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, Emily Brady takes a fresh look at the sublime and shows why it endures as a meaningful concept in contemporary philosophy. In a reassessment of historical approaches, the first part of the book identifies the scope and value of the sublime in eighteenth-century philosophy, nineteenth-century philosophy and Romanticism, and early wilderness aesthetics. The second part examines the sublime's contemporary significance through its relationship to the arts; its position with respect (...) to other aesthetic categories involving mixed or negative emotions, such as tragedy; and its place in environmental aesthetics and ethics. Far from being an outmoded concept, Brady argues that the sublime is a distinctive aesthetic category which reveals an important, if sometimes challenging, aesthetic-moral relationship with the natural world. (shrink)

In the concept of place the problems of ethics and aesthetics overlap in a particularly interesting and fruitful way. When an area or site becomes a place for us, we are not indifferent to it. A place is something to which we have a strong and significant relation; in my usage of the term “place”, place is defined by our personal connections to an area. Not every environment suits everyone. Although we can visually familiarise ourselves with many milieus, “placing” (...) ourselves somewhere is something else, and requires compatibility between individual and environment. Place is a place for me – its significance arises largely, although not exclusively, from meanings and values it gains through me. This has both ethical and aesthetic consequences: our judgments are based on the personal attachment we have to a place, and these judgments are strongly determined by our interests. (shrink)

It is sometimes asked whether virtue ethics can be assimilated by Kantianism or utilitarianism, or if it is a distinct position. A look atAristotle’s ethics shows that it certanly can be distinct. In particular, Aristotle presents us with an ethics of aesthetics in contrast to themore standard ethics of cognition: A virtuous agent identifies the right actions by their aesthetic qualities. Moreover, the agent’s concernwith her own aesthetic character gives us a key to the (...) important role the emotions play for Aristotle, which further distinguishes him from the other two theories we have mentioned. (shrink)

This book investigates the interrelations between aesthetics, ethics and politics in a variety of visual media forms, ranging across art installations, film and television, interactive documentaries, painting, photography, social media and videogames. An international mix of emerging and established authors, with interdisciplinary expertise, explores how different ethical questions, political implications and aesthetic pleasures arise and shape one another in distinct visual media. Investigating themes such as the use of cinema as a medium for ethical and political thought, how (...) documentary subjects both conceal and reveal truth, the new ethical challenges arising from interactive media and the role of images in responding to political events and trauma, this is a groundbreaking work about the interrelations of aesthetic, ethical and political values in visual media. (shrink)

Do we watch sport for pure dumb entertainment? While some people might do so, Stephen Mumford argues that it can be watched in other ways. Sport can be both a subject of high aesthetic values and a valid source for our moral education. The philosophy of sport has tended to focus on participation, but this book instead examines the philosophical issues around watching sport. Far from being a passive experience, we can all shape the way that we see sport. (...) Delving into parallels with art and theatre, this book outlines the aesthetic qualities of sport from the incidental beauty of a well-executed football pass to the enshrined artistic interpretation in performed sports such as ice-skating and gymnastics. It is argued that the purist literally sees sport in a different way from the partisan, thus the aesthetic perception of the purist can be validated. The book moves on to examine the moral lessons that are to be learned from watching sport, depicting it as a contest of virtues. The morality of sport is demonstrated to be continuous with, rather than separate from, the morality in wider life, and so each can inform the other. Watching sport is then recognised as a focus of profound emotional experiences. Collective emotion is particularly considered alongside the nature of allegiance. Finally, Mumford considers why we care about sport at all. Addressing universal themes, this book will appeal to a broad audience across philosophical disciplines and sports studies. (shrink)

Truth, semblance, reconciliation -- The dialectic of modernism and postmodernism -- Art and industrial production -- Ethics and dialogue.

What is aesthetic appreciation? What values is it concerned with? This dissertation consists of three distinct papers tackling problems related to these questions. Chapter One According to what I call the Merit Principle, roughly, works of art that attempt to elicit unmerited responses fail on their own terms and are thereby aesthetically flawed. In the first chapter, I show how the principle leads to paradox when applied to an undertheorized class of artworks I call “seductive artworks”, which invite an (...) unmerited first-order response in order to invite a repudiation of that response. I consider a number of unsuccessful solutions to the paradox, before rejecting the Merit Principle as it stands. I conclude by briefly discussing what is challenging about seductive artworks and by proposing a revision to the Merit Principle. Chapter Two Generally, we cooperate imaginatively with literary fictions, however bizarre, and the things authors write into their stories become true in the fiction. But for some claims, such as moral falsehoods, this seems not to be straightforwardly the case, which raises the question: Why not? The puzzles such cases raise are sometimes grouped under the heading “imaginative resistance”. In this paper, I argue against what I take to be the best attempts to dismiss the puzzles and solve them. I also tease out subtleties not sufficiently addressed in the existing literature and end by defending a unified solution of my own. The solution’s novelty lies in its giving a normative rather than psychological or alethic explanation for the puzzling phenomena. Chapter Three The third chapter looks at the tenability of understanding our engagement with sport along the lines of our engagement with works of fiction. Specifically, it addresses an incongruity in our attitudes towards the outcomes of competitive games and asks why these outcomes frequently prompt intense reactions, while often also seeming utterly trivial. I show why the temptation to understand our engagement with sport as akin to our engagement with works of fiction—as involving games of make-believe—faces serious theoretical obstacles. I end by exploring two alternative possibilities to the proposal. (shrink)

Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, Volume 6, Issue 3, Page 401-406, August 2012.

“You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” These are some of the most quoted lines written by Samuel Beckett, which speak to the impulse of persevering in times of crisis and impossibility. Yet few readers of Beckett agree about what this paradoxical formula could mean, let alone what mode of engagement it would seem to indicate, be it committed, autonomous, or something else entirely. This volume of essays explores what that mode of engagement could be, all (...) the while elucidating the ethical and political stakes of the “ongoing” in both Beckett’s life and work. Across multiple disciplines in the humanities, the authors delve into questions of political subjectivity and representation, the ethics of powerlessness and refusal, the aesthetics of syncopation and destitution, multimedia experiments between genre, as well as Beckett’s wider impact on transnational itineraries of modernism and philosophy up to the contemporary. (shrink)

The _Mahabharata _is at once an archive and a living text, a sourcebook complete by itself and an open text perennially under construction. Driving home this striking contemporary relevance of the famous Indian epic, _Mahabharata Now _focuses on the issues of narration, aesthetics and ethics, as also their interlinkages. The cross-disciplinary essays in the volume imaginatively re-interpret the ‘timeless’ classic in the light of the pre-modern Indian narrative styles, poetics, aesthetic codes, and moral puzzles; the Western theories on (...) modern ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy of science; and the contemporary social, ethical and political concerns. The essays are all united in their effort to situate the _Mahabharata_ in the context of _here _and _now _without violating the sanctity of the ‘written text’ as we have it today. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of Indian and comparative philosophy, Indian and comparative literature, cultural studies, and history. (shrink)

What is wonder? What would it mean to live our lives in wonder or with wonder? Is it possible for wonder to play an integral role in our aesthetic, ethical, and pedagogical experiences? Philosophy is said to begin with wonder. For Plato, wonder is the arche that grounds all philosophical inquiry. I propose to begin my ethical and aesthetic investigation of wonder with Plato, but, unlike Plato who places the imagination’s capacity to be astonished at the bottom of (...) a hierarchy that quests for knowledge and understanding, I will argue that an ethics and aesthetics based on wonder would allow for the imagination to play an active role in all our encounters. First, I look at different philosophical treatments of wonder and then consider the role wonder plays as a virtue. Next I examine the wondrous in relation to aesthetic and ethical experiences, exploring art exhibits and a play, and conclude by drawing upon the many sides of wonder and considering its role in education. In my wanderings on wonder, I seek to value wonder as an integral part of ourselves, in all our imaginings, understandings, growth, and knowledge acquisition. (shrink)

Returning to the origins of education, Becoming Pedagogue explores its role in today's society by reuniting philosophy with pedagogy. It investigates the aesthetics, ethics and politics of childhood, education and what a teacher really does, enabling educators to define and perform their profession as per its historical and intellectual roots. Reflecting on the practice, science and knowledge-tradition of pedagogy as well as abstract and formalist discourse at all levels, Olsson's work evokes real and free aspects of educational experiences and (...) events. Through a close reading of French philosopher Henri Bergson's major works, historical and contemporary pedagogical resources as well as the pedagogy developed in the early childhood centres in Reggio Emilia, Italy, it develops a critical-cum-creative methodology that both analyses the present educational situation as well as creates new pedagogical alternatives. Using brand new perspectives as well as practical examples of what teachers do, Becoming Pedagogue will provide students, educators and researchers tools for critiquing simplified ideas of what a teacher is as well as giving them inspiration to experiment with alternative ways of teaching. (shrink)

This volume brings together an international array of scholars to reconsider the meaning and place of poststructuralism historically and demonstrate some of the ways in which it continues to be relevant, especially for debates in aesthetics, ethics, and politics. The book's chapters focus on the works of Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva, Lacan, and Lyotard-in combination with those of Agamben, Luhman, Nancy, and Nietzsche-and examine issues including biopolitics, culture, embodiment, epistemology, history, music, temporality, political resistance, psychoanalysis, revolt, and (...) the visual arts. The contributors use poststructuralism as a hermeneutical strategy that rejects the traditional affirmation of unity, totality, transparency, and representation to instead focus on the foundational importance of open-ended becoming, difference, the unknowable, and expression. This approach allows for a more expansive definition of poststructuralism and helps demonstrate how it has contributed to debates across philosophy and other disciplines. Historical Traces and Future Pathways of Poststructuralism will be of particular interest to researchers in philosophy, politics, political theory, critical theory, aesthetics, feminist theory, cultural studies, intellectual history, psychoanalysis, and sociology. (shrink)

Ethical questions normally arise in sport because its participants are human moral agents and because its practice community entails the observance of rules and responsibilities that humans generally owe one another in a social practice of voluntary competition. Since nature sports are not defined by this kind of inter-agential activity, it would appear that there are no comparable ethical constraints on their pursuit. This paper considers conflicts of preference versus right between humans, how these are resolved, and whether these rights (...) are relevant in assessment of nature sport activity vis-à-vis nonhuman creatures. Relying on a goods perspective instead of a rights framework, via Korsgaard, I argue against an assumption that human preference is sufficient to override consideration of nonhuman animals’ functional goods. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions of climate change have mainly conceived of it as a moral or ethical problem, but climate change also raises new challenges for aesthetics. In this paper I show that, in particular, climate change (1) raises difficult questions about the status of aesthetic judgments about the future, or 'future aesthetics'; and (2) puts into relief some challenging issues at the intersection of aesthetics and ethics. I maintain that we can rely on aesthetic predictions to enable us (...) to grasp, in some sense, aesthetic value in environments affected by climate change and, through a discussion of three hypothetical cases, I argue that, although moral considerations will press on aesthetic judgments, aesthetic value will not necessarily be trumped by them. (shrink)

If complexity is a necessary but not sufficient premise for the existence and expression of the living, anticipation is the distinguishing characteristic of what is alive. Anticipation is at work even at levels of existence where we cannot refer to intelligence. The prospect of artificially generating aesthetic artifacts and ethical constructs of relevance to a world in which the natural and the artificial are coexistent cannot be subsumed as yet another product of scientific and technological advancement. Beyond the artificial, (...) the synthetic conjures the understanding of aesthetics and ethics no longer from the perspective of the How? type of question, but rather the Why? Given the current infatuation with synthetic biology (i.e., making life from non-life), there is a practical consequence to such considerations. Synthetic life, as any other form of life, implies the possibility of evolution. Anticipation, which is the underlying factor of evolution, is thus expected. At the level of human existence, anticipation is expressed, for instance (but not exclusively), in aesthetic forms and ethical values. This translates, in turn, into an argument for the role aesthetics and ethics play in the process. Consequently, to qualify as life, the synthesis of the physical and the living will have to efficiently handle ambiguity. Current computational facilities, regardless of their nature or performance, operate exclusively in the semiotic domain of the well defined non-ambiguous. (shrink)

The standard discussion of the relation between aesthetics and ethics tends to avoid the fundamental question: how are those two values ranked against each other in terms of importance. This paper looks at two arguments, the ‘resource allocation argument’ and the ‘relative weight argument’. It puts forward the view that any theory of aesthetic value should characterise aesthetic value in a way that allows for the existence of these arguments. It argues that hedonism does that successfully, but (...) the more recent approaches to aesthetic value—in particular Dominic McIver Lopes’s ‘Network Theory’ have more of a struggle. (shrink)

이 글은 미학, 윤리, 종교를 중심으로 비트겐슈타인과 키르케고르를 비교 연구한 논문 이다. 두 사상가에 대한 비교 연구는 이전에도 있었다. 그들은 문제를 해결하는 것이 아니 라 해소한다는 점에서, 간접전달이라는 방법론에서, 이성의 한계를 넘어서려는 인간 본성 에 대해서 그리고 자신들의 철학적 작업이 궁극적으로 올바른 삶을 지향한다는 점 등에서 일치한다. 본 논문은 이제까지 다뤄지지 않았던 미학, 윤리, 종교에 대한 두 사상가의 견 해를 비교한다. 이를 위해 2장에서는 두 사상가에 대한 이왕의 논의들을 주제별로 정리하 고, 3장에서는 키르케고르의 철학을 인간 실존 3단계를 중심으로 살펴본다. 키르케고르는 (...) 인간 실존을 심미적 단계, 윤리적 단계, 종교적 단계로 나눴으며, 인간은 가장 하위 단계 인 심미적 실존을 지나 윤리적 실존으로, 그리고 궁극적으로 종교적 실존으로 나아가야 한 다고 주장한다. 4장에서는 미학, 윤리, 종교에 대한 비트겐슈타인의 견해를 살펴본다. 주 지하듯이 비트겐슈타인의 사상은 전기와 후기로 나뉘며 그에 따라 미학, 윤리, 종교에 대 한 견해도 변화가 있다. 하지만 전후기에 걸쳐 이어지는 것도 있다. 이성적으로 접근할 수 없고, 가치에 대한 것이며 세계에 대한 태도로서 올바른 삶으로 인도한다는 점에서 비트겐 슈타인에게 미학, 윤리, 종교는 동일하다. 5장에서는 두 사상가의 미학, 윤리, 종교관을 비교한다. 비트겐슈타인은 키르케고르의 종교관에 깊이 공감했지만 미학이나 윤리에 대해 서는 견해를 달리하는데, 그 이유는 철학자의 임무에 대한 견해차에서 발견할 수 있을 것 이다. (shrink)

The essay addresses the issue of the relationships between everyday aesthetics and ethics from the point of view of tact. Tact is understood as an attitude towards behavior that guides action and thinking, and combines aesthetics with ethics. Tact and tactlessness may manifest themselves in action and speech but also in objects produced and used. I will argue that although tact is often pursued, tactful behavior will necessarily result in conflicting situations in which one is only in step (...) with certain things and in conflict with many others. However, the principle of tact tries to hide its conflictual aspects, unlike, for example, confrontation-based political thinking. Still, within the framework of tact, the contrast between pursuing harmonious behavior and yet necessarily creating conflicts cannot be avoided, which emphasizes the special tragic nature of tact. This kind of tragedy also often characterizes everyday aesthetics. I will approach the theme both through theoretical concepts and concrete examples. (shrink)

Clarifies Wittgenstein's ideas about ethics and aesthetics and illustrates how those ideas apply to art history and criticism and to an understanding of the importance of art in people's lives.

Introduction -- Ethics and aesthetics, theories of intersection -- Memory, redemption and salvation -- Disembodied tellers and delayed signification -- Orality and the ethics of telling -- Healing hands, harming hands -- "Body talk": beloved and fragmentation.

This major collection of essays stands at the border of aesthetics and ethics and deals with charged issues of practical import: art and morality, the ethics of taste, and censorship. As such its potential interest is by no means confined to professional philosophers; it should also appeal to art historians and critics, literary theorists, and students of film. Prominent philosophers in both aesthetics and ethics tackle a wide array of issues. Some of the questions explored in the (...) volume include: Can art be morally enlightening and, if so, how? If a work of art is morally better does that make it better as art? Is morally deficient art to be shunned, or even censored? Do subjects of artworks have rights as to how they are represented? Do artists have duties as artists and duties as human beings, and if so, to whom? How much tension is there between the demands of art and the demands of life? (shrink)

To "look good" and to "be good" have traditionally been considered two very different notions. Indeed, philosophers have seen aesthetic and ethical values as fundamentally separate. Now, at the crossroads of a new wave of aesthetic theory, Marcia Muelder Eaton introduces this groundbreaking work, in which a bold new concept of merit where being good and looking good are integrated into one.

Can aesthetic concepts reflect and provide answers for ethical aspects and issues? Is "more ethics, less aesthetics" applicable, according to the motto of the Venice Biennial for architecture in the year 2000? Or isn't "more aesthetics" in fact just what is required to encourage reflection about ethical responsibilities and dimensions in architecture, art, and design? This publication is a collection of reflections about the ethical and political dimensions of creations, presented from the point of view of art, architecture, (...) design, and curatorial practice. The contributions range from historical reviews to future-oriented outlooks, illustrating interdisciplinary connections. (shrink)

This paper explores the ethical dimensions of aesthetic engagement, the central theme of Arnold Berleant’s aesthetics. His recent works on social aesthetics and negative aesthetics explicitly argue for the inseparability of aesthetics from the rest of life, in particular ethical concerns. Aesthetic engagement requires overcoming the subject-object divide and adopting an attitude of open-mindedness, responsiveness, reciprocity, and collaboration, as well as the willingness and readiness to expose negative aesthetics for what it is. These requirements characterize not only the (...) nature of aesthetic experience but also, perhaps more fundamentally, our mode of being in the world and the accompanying ethical responsibility. Among the present paper’s principal aims is to show how this view of aesthetic and ethical stance is also shared by the important aspects of the Japanese worldview, aesthetics, and artistic practices. (shrink)

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

This chapter contains sections titled: Structure Aesthetics Form and Content The Quick and the Dead Good, Bad, Beautiful Goodness and Beauty A Short History Aesthetic Morality Naturalized? Beauty of Soul: A Contemporary Version Ethics, Art, and the Aesthetic Suppose I am Wrong.

In Ancient Greece, the figure of the hero was identified as a demigod, possessed of altruistic and virtuous deeds. When Pierre de Coubertin reinstated the Olympic Games, the athlete was personified as a modern hero. Its antithesis, the anti-hero, has more virtue that defects, no evil but he does not care on the means to achieve his goals. In the eyes of everyone involved in sports competition, these characters captivate and at the same time, create conflicts of ethics and (...) aesthetics. The purpose of this paper is to perform an ethical reflection linked to principles that contribute for the human growth and accomplishment, as well as the aesthetic on the perception of the sensitive, reverberated by sensations and feelings emerging from athletes. Connecting the ethic with the aesthetic spheres, we could have in the sports a phenomenon walking toward a common point between moral and aesthetic, between the good and the beauty. (shrink)

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

It is often suggested that aesthetic and ethical value judgements are similar in such a way that they should be analysed in analogous manners. In this paper, I argue that the two types of judgements share four important features concerning disagreement, motivation, categoricity, and argumentation. This, I maintain, helps to explain why many philosophers have thought that aesthetic and ethical value judgements can be analysed in accordance with the same dispositional scheme which corresponds to the analogy between secondary (...) qualities and values. However, I argue that aesthetic and ethical value judgements differ as regards their fundamental structures. This scheme is mistaken as regards ethical value judgements, but it is able to account for aesthetic value judgements. This implies that aesthetic value judgements are autonomous in relation to ethical value judements and that aestheticians, not moral philosophers, are the true heirs of this renowned analogy. (shrink)

David Ellison's book is an investigation into the historical origins and textual practice of European literary Modernism. Ellison's study traces the origins of Modernism to the emergence of early German Romanticism from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and emphasizes how the passage from Romanticism to Modernism can be followed in the gradual transition from the sublime to the uncanny. Arguing that what we call High Modernism cannot be reduced to a religion of beauty, an experimentation with narrative form, or even (...) a reflection on time and consciousness, Ellison demonstrates that Modernist textuality is characterized by the intersection, overlapping, and crossing of aesthetic and ethical issues. Beauty and morality relate to each other as antagonists struggling for dominance within the related fields of philosophy and theory on the one hand and imaginative literature on the other. (shrink)

The article clarifies the way in which ‘the aesthetic’ is conceptualised in relation to business ethics in order to assess its potential to inform theory building and developmental practices within the business ethics field. A systematic review of relevant literature is undertaken which identifies three ontologically based accounts of the relationship between the aesthetic and business ethics: ‘positive’ ones, ‘negative’ accounts and ‘Postmodern’ renderings. Five epistemologically based approaches are also made explicit: those in which the (...) aesthetic is thought to develop enhanced perceptual discernment, those in which the aesthetic catalyses emotional sensitivity, those in which the aesthetic contributes to imaginative capacity, those in which the aesthetic prompts integrative apprehension and those in which the aesthetic is seen to foster critical reflexivity. The review reveals two key findings: firstly, the dearth of empirically based research to substantiate claims made about the aesthetic’s ability to foster ethical capabilities, which leads to proposals for further research; secondly, the analysis indicates the significance of critical reflexivity both in resolving the apparent dichotomy between ontologically based perspectives asserting the aesthetic’s ability to lead to ethically sound or egregious behaviour, and in underpinning the capacities of perceptual discernment, emotional connectivity, imagination and integrative apprehension which epistemologically based approaches assert the aesthetic can foster. (shrink)

This book rethinks the discussion of sport as a cinematic subject. Arguing for the vitality of the sports film as distinctively 'modern' genre, the book looks at its innovative potential to capture twentieth- and twenty-first-century sport in all its complexity. Written in an accessible style and illustrated throughout, the book integrates work and ideas from film studies with thinking from sports psychology, philosophy, data theory and ecocriticism. In its detailed analyses of a wide-ranging group of films, the book shows how (...) film, from fictional works to biopics to experimental documentaries, can illuminate individual sporting experience, as well as sport's wider place in modern life. (shrink)