Aesthetic Experience

This essay presents a multifold argument on Oakeshott's aesthetics. First, his famous essay "The Voice of Poetry" deals more explicitly and thoroughly with art than is often acknowledged. Second, aesthetic experience is a competitor to philosophic insight in so far as it discloses the coherence of a world of ideas through its uniting form and content; yet "art" remains a mode. Third, the essay points out that the absence of history from any major role in Oakeshott's most important treatment of (...) art is a puzzle worthy of consideration. It is argued that Oakeshott's exclusion of history is intimately related to his interest in art's non-temporality, specifically, the ability of art to create a fictive "world of the text" which includes representations of human action in time which are set apart from both history and practical human conduct. (shrink)

Spoilers provide advance knowledge of crucial facts about how a work of fiction unfolds or ends. This is often the reason given for our dislike of spoilers. I begin by showing that on generally-accepted philosophical accounts of fiction and imagination, the phenomenon of spoilers is puzzling, and the lay explanation of our dislike of spoilers is inadequate. To resolve the puzzle, I first argue that imaginings are inherently constrained, or norm-governed. In imagining, we take on a (fictional) doxastic role: our (...) aim is to imagine that which a work of fiction presents as true at each stage of its unfolding. Then, distinguishing between two ways in which we can follow norms or rules, I show that although spoilers do not completely thwart our experience of fiction, they can significantly diminish the degree to which we are engrossed in fiction, hence we dislike them. (shrink)

Aesthetic communities offer us opportunities for collective, communal, and value-disclosing shared aesthetic experiences. This paper develops an account of shared aesthetic experiences and provides an answer to the question of their significance: when they occur within aesthetic communities, their distinctive phenomenology is a powerful resource for creating a sense that our lives are aesthetically meaningful.

This article integrates John Dewey’s _Art as Experience_, Mikel Dufrenne’s _Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience_, and phenomenological interviews with museum visitors to answer what it means to be ‘moved by art’. The interviews point to intense affective and existential experiences, in which encounters with art can be genuinely transformative. We focus on Dufrenne’s notion of ‘adherent reflection’ and Dewey’s notions of ‘doing and undergoing’ to understand the intentional structure and dynamics of such experiences, concluding that being moved contains two merged forms (...) of intentionality: one overt aspect of perceptual intentionality directed at the work, and a covert affective intentionality directed back at oneself in one’s situated existence. These are operational simultaneously but can work in loops, one leading to an intensification of the other and vice versa. As such, these analyses emphasize the value of phenomenological interviews and advance the integration of phenomenological and pragmatist thinking in the context of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Perfume has not received much philosophical attention. I discuss a feature of perfume that partly contributes to this neglect: the pervasive changes that perfumes undergo. These changes are much more comprehensive than the changes that characterize other aesthetic objects, and we might think that perfume is, as a result, impossibly subjective and private an aesthetic object. I identify two categories of change that raise this worry: changes that happen to a scented liquid itself and changes that happen to perfumes (...) on bodies. In both cases, the appreciative practices for perfume take a collaborative approach to change and thereby help establish a public, shared aesthetic object. Change remains distinctive of perfume and becomes central to appreciation, but without becoming an obstacle to aesthetic experience. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to characterize aesthetic introspection as a starting point for further substantial exploration of its nature. I distinguish three types of aesthetic introspection based on their roles. Type-1 aesthetic introspection contributes to the formation of aesthetic judgement based on aesthetic perception. Type-2 aesthetic introspection provides a second-order aesthetic experience representing a conscious experience as having aesthetic properties. Type-3 aesthetic introspection produces an aesthetic judgment about aesthetic experiences. In arguing for the importance of every type of (...) aesthetic introspection, I present two new concepts of aesthetics: consciousness aesthetics and the art of consciousness. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that aesthetic testimony can provide aesthetic knowledge. This leaves us with the question: why does getting aesthetic knowledge by experience – by seeing a painting up close, or witnessing a performance first-hand – nevertheless seem superior to aesthetic testimony? I argue that it is due to differences in their epistemic value; in the diversity of epistemic goods each one provides. Aesthetic experience, or the experience of art or other aesthetic objects, affords multiple, distinctive epistemic goods whereas aesthetic (...) testimony affords less. In particular, it provides aesthetic knowledge of truths, a kind of propositional knowledge, as well as aesthetic knowledge of things, a kind of non-propositional knowledge. Although aesthetic experience is superior because it has more epistemic value, this doesn’t mean that aesthetic testimony provides weaker justification for aesthetic belief than aesthetic experience; the difference is evaluative, not normative. In this way, we can explain a key pessimistic intuition about aesthetic testimony – that it is inferior to aesthetic experience – whilst preserving the optimistic view that aesthetic testimony makes aesthetic knowledge available to others. The superior epistemic value of first-hand aesthetic experience is compatible with a number of important observations about aesthetic testimony, including the importance of aesthetic trust. (shrink)

Traditional aesthetic theories emphasize pleasure, while recent non-hedonistic approaches prioritize “getting it right” in aesthetic engagement. This paper critiques Dominic McIver Lopes’s and C. Thi Nguyen’s theories by arguing that correctness is neither the necessary guiding norm nor the constitutive or right motivator. Instead, I propose bias reduction—minimizing the improper influence of prior outlooks. This shift from correctness to minimizing distortion better captures aesthetic agency and allows for pluralism and radical disagreement.

In Essays on Beauty & the Arts (2023) (‘Essays’), Dominic McIver Lopes has unearthed something of a champion for his ongoing mission to rejuvenate analytic aesthetics. ‘The history of analytic aesthetics’, Lopes declares, ‘is dominated by writing on Kant and, to a lesser extent, David Hume. … We badly need to excavate alternatives to the tradition of Hume and Kant’ (p. xvi). As tall of an order this already is, the height of Lopes’s hopes for Bolzano appears to reach further (...) still—‘Perhaps Bolzano can do for aesthetics what Mill and Kant do for ethics’ (p. xxv). While the jury is still out on whether Bolzano can fill those shoes, what is clear is that Lopes succeeds at making a tantalizing case on Bolzano’s behalf. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue that certain figurative paintings – namely, paintings that depict atmospheres, such as Camille Pissarro’s Snowscape in Louveciennes (1872), can elicit multisensory experiences in their viewers. Viewing such pictures under appropriate circumstances will activate the viewers’ sensory imagination in such a way that they enjoy a genuine multisensory experience. Such an experience does not just involve different sensible qualities. Rather, the different sensible qualities are fused together into a new sensible quality that cannot be experienced (...) through a single sense modality or through the mere co-consciousness of multiple sense modalities. (shrink)

A classic and fraught question in the philosophy of film is this: when you watch a film, do you experience yourself in the world of the film, observing the scenes? In this paper, we argue that this subject of film experience is sometimes a mere impersonal viewpoint, sometimes a first-personal but unindexed subject, and sometimes a particular, indexed subject such as the viewer herself or a character in the film. We first argue for subject pluralism: there is no single answer (...) to the question of what kind of subjectivity, if any, is mandated across film sequences. Then, we defend unindexed subjectivity: at least sometimes, films mandate an experience that is first-personal but not tied to any particular person, not even to the viewer. Taken together, these two theses allow us to see film experience as more varied than previously appreciated and to bridge in a novel way the cognition of film with the exercise of other imaginative capacities, such as mindreading and episodic recollecting. (shrink)

The aesthetics of video games has as much to do with the player as it has to do with the game itself. The aesthetic values that players find in video games depends on the kind of attitude that the player takes toward playing the game. There are three distinct attitudes that players take when they play video games. I call these the goal-seeking attitude, the narrative attitude, and the dollhouse attitude. Each of these attitudes has a distinctive impact on the (...) player’s aesthetic experience. There are certain qualities of games that appeal to one attitude or another, while there are other qualities that can be aesthetically transformed when players take different attitudes toward their play. The aesthetics of video games must account for how the game is crafted alongside the player’s attitude toward their play (2024: 3-4). (shrink)

It is often assumed that habits and aesthetic experiences are fundamentally and irreconcilably opposed. Typically, aesthetic experiences are considered to necessitate non-habitual behavior and to provoke unexpected mental states and extraordinary affective sensations. This article challenges this assumption. Moving beyond potential structural analogies between habitual behavior and aesthetic experience, I focus on two key aspects. Firstly, I argue that the experience of beauty and aesthetic experiences in general actually depend on certain habits, specifically those engaged in aesthetic agency and appreciation, (...) which I term «aesthetic habits». Secondly, I propose that habits have an aesthetic origin, as they virtuously evolve and adapt to their environment. This transformative capacity, along with their ability to resonate with specific situational demands, embodies an improvisational quality that should be encouraged, reflecting the inherently unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

Is it possible to conceptualize the sound image? How can we talk about the intertwined between visual image and sound? When precisely is there a sound image? In this article, I specify what is not a sound image, and I analyze three forms of what should be considered a sound image. Understood as a form of experience, the sound image is linked to a subject, but at the same time is independent from him: it is a world manifestation.

The aim of this article is to argue that what is distinctive about aesthetic experiences has to do with what we do -- not with our perception or evaluation, but with our action and, more precisely, with our interaction with whatever we are aesthetically engaging with. This view goes against the mainstream inasmuch as aesthetic engagement is widely held to be special precisely because it is detached from the sphere of the practical. I argue that taking the interactive nature of (...) aesthetic experiences seriously can help us to understand some of the most important features of aesthetic experiences and the role they play in our life: their normativity, their crucial role in the ways in which the aesthetic domain looms large in our self-image and in the social dimension of aesthetic engagement. (shrink)

The aesthetics of tea, in some practices, seems to focus on appreciating the mental effects of tea — the altered states of mind. Wine aesthetics, on the other hand, seems to actively exclude any inebriative effects. Wine experts are supposed to spit, in order to avoid inebriation when they judge wine. Why? The answer, I suggest, lies deep in several key suppositions in the traditional model of aesthetic experience: that aesthetic experience needs to be accurate of its object, and that (...) it needs to be inseparable from the particular details of its object. But, I argue, that model is not really incompatible with an aesthetics of drugs. The problematic presupposition is that the aesthetics of drugs is either an aesthetics of the world, as experienced while drugged, or an aesthetics of the physical substance itself. The aesthetics of some drugs, such as LSD, will turn out, instead, to be a self-reflective aesthetics — one in which the primary object of appreciation is the alteration of one’s own cognitive faculties. This can be valuable as a humbling aesthetic vision, of one’s own cognitive fragility. But the aesthetics of gastronomical drugs, such as wine and tea, will turn out to be even more complicated. Gastronomical drugs demand that we bridge the inwardly-focused aesthetics of inebriation and an outwardly focused gastronomical aesthetics. They open the door to the possibility of an aesthetic reconciliation between our capacity to get onto the world, and our fears about the fragility of that capacity. (shrink)

Why is destroying heritage pro tanto wrong? Why does heritage destruction require justification, unlike the destruction of rubbish? The property rights view answers: heritage belongs to people, communities and cultures. The reverence view answers: we are obliged to respect things with non-instrumental value. The moral rights view answers: our predecessors, contemporaries and successors have rights to have their cherishings respected and cultural and epistemic goods protected. The moral harm view answers: destroying heritage causes morally significant harm. I argue that these (...) views all fail to account for the basic obligation to not destroy heritage. I propose that heritage essentially gives us experiences of connections to historically significant things, and these experiences are aesthetically valuable and irreplaceable. Destroying heritage is pro tanto wrong because it leads to the premature and irreversible extinction of these precious and vulnerable experiences. My account makes sense of genuineness as an aesthetic property, vindicates the idea of purely aesthetic obligations, and entails that heritage can be of the present and future, not only the past. (shrink)

According to one strongly supported view, fiction is a functional kind that communicates imaginings. Combining this definitional thesis with a plausible principle concerning functional kinds leads to the following evaluative thesis: features that contribute to communicating imaginings constitute good-making features as fiction, and features that impede this constitute bad-making features as fiction. However, this thesis is at odds with the actual practice of fiction. Critics can show their admiration for complicated works of fiction by stating, “That’s beyond my imagination!” I (...) argue that in resolving this paradox of hard-to-imagine fiction, we should not deny the observation, but rethink the definitional thesis. Works of fiction that are puzzling, redundant, contradictory, and collapsed can have a unique value that smooth works cannot. They can have value as fiction in that they challenge our imagination or place us in an exotic state of being lost in the imagination. (shrink)

How to account for the power that art holds over us? Why do artworks touch us deeply, consoling, transforming or invigorating us in the process? In this paper, we argue that an answer to this question might emerge from a fecund framework in cognitive science known as predictive processing (a.k.a. active inference). We unpack how this approach connects sense-making and aesthetic experiences through the idea of an ‘epistemic arc’, consisting of three parts (curiosity, epistemic action and aha experiences), which we (...) cast as aspects of active inference. We then show how epistemic arcs are built and sustained by artworks to provide us with those satisfying experiences that we tend to call ‘aesthetic’. Next, we defuse two key objections to this approach; namely, that it places undue emphasis on the cognitive component of our aesthetic encounters—at the expense of affective aspects—and on closure and uncertainty minimization (order)—at the expense of openness and lingering uncertainty (change). We show that the approach offers crucial resources to account for the open-ended, free and playful behaviour inherent in aesthetic experiences. The upshot is a promising but deflationary approach, both philosophically informed and psychologically sound, that opens new empirical avenues for understanding our aesthetic encounters. -/- This article is part of the theme issue ‘Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives’. (shrink)

In his 1934 book Art as Experience John Dewey explores the relationship between human experience and art. His theory builds on the conception of experience inspired by Darwinian biology as the dyna...

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the figure of the end of the world in the final lecture of Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign seminar series (the last seminar series he gives). The author argues that Derrida uses the final line of a Paul Celan poem (“The world is gone. I must carry you.”) as a valedictory refrain in order to show the political and existential stakes of his ontological investigations. The article situates these stakes within Derrida’s fictionalism, his belief that (...) (1) ideal entities are irreal but also (2) the way in which the meanings of ideal entities work is like the way that the meaning of fictional discourse works. Using Derrida’s own example of Celan, as well as examples from Benjamin Britten and Skeeter Davis, the author argues for the importance of aesthetic experience in tying together these political, existential, and ontological themes. (shrink)

Abstract:This article examines two approaches to aesthetic experience, especially with respect to the practice of art criticism. The two approaches are (1) aesthetic experience construed as experience necessarily valued for its own sake and (2) aesthetic experience characterized in terms of its content. In this article, the content approach is defended as the one most suitable to the practice of art criticism.

Advocates of ordinary aesthetics argue that aesthetic experiences found in everyday life can have an impact on our ethical being. This raises the question of how, specifically, action arises from aesthetic experience. Although this matter affects both Aesthetics and Ethics, the current literature provides few details on potential mechanisms. Using neurophysiological evidence, this article proposes specific action profiles and associated mechanisms for aesthetic experiences. To achieve this, it is argued that aesthetic experience originates within the mind and that ordinary aesthetic (...) experiences are logically permissible. Subsequently, a proposed landscape of aesthetic experience is derived. Mechanisms for pathways from experience to action are provided for each category of aesthetic experience. In sum, this provides a tangible bridge between Aesthetics and Ethics, enabling a better understanding of how one’s ethical being is influenced by certain experiences. (shrink)

The TikTok experience refers to a user’s interaction with the platform while scrolling through various videos. The user can change what they are viewing instantly on one screen much like a TV viewer, the only difference being that whatever is being watched is in the form of short videos made specifically for the platform. These videos vary in style and form and are made to be viewed within the platform itself. All the content that a user watches within the mobile (...) application, in the end, forms a longer, theoretically never-ending, video that is sometimes completely unrelated but more often similar through shared jokes, memes, and visual filters. This way of producing and viewing short-form videos as a whole is reminiscent of the way Everything Everywhere All At Once feels to the audience which is no surprise as many other forms of media and artworks are inspired by internet short-form video platforms such as TikTok. (shrink)

Somaesthetics and Sport (ed. Andrew Edgar, Brill, 2022) is a multifaceted collection of essays: Richard Shusterman’s theoretical framework is robust enough to lend unity to the volume, but it mostly functions as a springboard for the individual papers, never suffocating their theoretical explorations or making the book repetitive or a boring read. The ten essays also communicate with one another through certain recurring notions such as agency, somatic awareness, the Suitsian account of games or the interdisciplinary intertwining of philosophical arguments (...) with the results of sport psychology and physiology. Displaying the various ways Shusterman’s somaesthetics can be used to further the philosophical analysis of the aesthetic experience of watching and doing sports, the volume fills a gap in the scholarship of the aesthetics of sport as well as in the interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics. (shrink)

Book review of Dadejík, O., Kaplický, M., Ševčík, M., and Zuska, V. (2021) Process and Aesthetics: An Outline of Whiteheadian Aesthetics and Beyond. Prague: Karolinum Press. ISBN 978-80-246-4726-5.

We demonstrate that many philosophers accept the following claim: When an aesthetic object is apprehended correctly, taking pleasure in said object is a reliable sign that the object is aesthetically successful. We undermine this position by showing that what grounds our pleasurable experience is opaque: In many cases, the experienced pleasure is attributable to factors that have little to do with the aesthetic object. The evidence appealed to is a form of Higher-Order Evidence (HOE) and we consider attempts to overcome (...) said evidence. We argue they are unsuccessful. We conclude by considering what this means for our practice of making aesthetic judgements. (shrink)

Introduction. The article is focused on analyzing the aesthetic aspect of A. Kojève’s philosophy, the ability of his philosophy, from an aesthetic point of view, to clarify a number of key problems of the modern political and cultural environment. The purpose of the study is to determine the epistemological attitude of A. Kojève’s philosophy able to clarify the way in which his philosophy problematizes the current cultural and political reality. Methods. Hermeneutics, comparative analysis and deconstruction are used as research methods. (...) Comparative analysis allows us to demarcate A. Kojève’s own line of reasoning, in the context of aesthetic and epistemological theories, as well as Hegelian themes themselves. Hermeneutics is the central method in the work, since the philosophy of A. Kojeve requires interpretation as an aesthetic theory. Deconstruction, formalized to the status of a method according to P. de Man, allows us to detect inconsistencies, the principle of mutual problematization of Kojeve’s philosophy and the current political and epistemological agenda. Scientific novelty of the research. The standard way of interpreting the work of A. Kojève is to evaluate him as an interpreter of G. Hegel. The author analyzes some meaning of A. Kojève’s philosophy, separate from G. Hegel’s explanation of the text. The novelty lies not only in the fact that A. Kojève’s philosophy is defined as theorizing that goes beyond technical hermeneutics (clear presentation), but also as a specific representation of such theorizing as epistemological aesthetic theory. The latter is a rather rare interpretation of the philosophy of A. Kojeve. This allows us to expand the traditional assumption that post-Hegelian epistemesthetics is the property of an extremely limited number of authors (for example, B. Croce). Moreover, such an interpretation of A. Kojève’s theories is a new element in the emerging trend of considering political issues within the framework of epistemological aesthetics. Results. The specific mode of interpreting G. Hegel, which is carried out by A. Kojève, turns the philosophy of the former into a unique aesthetic project. In this project, the category of aesthetic experience comes to the foreground, indicating the empty, formal nature of any discourse. In this regard, any claim to knowledge of reality, to a correct idea of the subject is replaced by the idea of creating the subject of discourse. Consistent treatment of this idea is symptomatic of the philosophy of A. Kojève. This philosophy is a reflection of those historical changes that gave rise to the culture of “aesthetic rationality”: empty and formal. In A. Kojève’s philosophy, one can see how such a culture of the End of History is, contrary to Hegelian ideas, not the era of the struggle decline, but the era of its strange transformation, a symptom of increasing political violence. Conclusions. A. Kojève’s philosophy is considered not as a utopian political project, but as a problematization of the modern cultural and political sphere. The latter is understood as an indication of the inconsistency of ontological discourses of Truth, the discovery in the very essence of discursive practices of an empty, formal principle, and therefore primarily of interest to aesthetics. The modern era of the End of History and the end of the era of persuasive speech gives an idea of the main political paradox (at least for the philosophy of A. Kojève, and at most for the modern political environment). The era of disappointment in discourse should become an era of refusal to fight for discourses, but it becomes an era of maximizing violence, since it is in a situation of disappointment that discourses can only be supported by force. We move from unconvincing speech to convincing violence, but it is possible to understand the origins and specifics of this transition only by considering A. Kojève’s philosophy in the light of such a discipline as aesthetics. (shrink)

The article compares Fritz Kaufmann and Ernst Cassirer’s conceptions of aesthetics, focusing in particular on their characterisation of the experience of apprehension of art objects. Firstly, analysing Kaufmann’s early investigation of the experience of the reception of art images and Cassirer’s observations on art as a symbolic form, it argues that the two philosophers conceptualise the reception of art objects in a similar way, as an experience structured across different layers of meaning constitution that are based on specific functions of (...) consciousness. While these similarities seem to suggest a convergence between Kaufmann’s early phenomenological reflections and Cassirer’s revised Marburg Neo-Kantianism, an account of Kaufmann’s direct confrontation with Cassirer shows that there remain profound differences regarding their final understanding of the aims of their philosophical inquiries as well as of the epistemological premises of their approaches. These differences become clearer in Kaufmann’s later reflections where he articulates the implications of his interpretation of transcendental phenomenology, stressing in particular the role of eidetic reduction. (shrink)

This article explores the concept of sight perception from both cognitive and aesthetic perspectives, by examining the limits of visual attention. It discusses how conscious and unconscious mechanisms can influence what individuals see and may experience aesthetically. It also presents empirical research employing eye-tracking to analyze the visual behavior of visitors of an art exhibition viewing a painting of Japanese artist Isson Tanaka (1908-1977). The study demonstrates that indiscernible aspects of vision interact on the limits of perception, which gives birth (...) to new images. Specifically, the eye-tracking records and uncovers the invisible traces of people's eyes as they are observing the painting, providing opportunities for visual poetics based on sensory input and eye movements. Overall, this interdisciplinary approach contributes to a more thorough understanding of the complexities of visual perception in the arts. (shrink)

Experientialism in aesthetics is the view that the artistic merit or the aesthetic value of something is determined by the final value of certain experiences of it. These are usually specified as experiences of it with understanding and appreciation. Until recently, experientialism was the dominant view. Not anymore. Experientialists are now subject to a barrage of objections, many of which they have not answered. Here I argue that all of these objections fail. I develop a new form of experientialism that (...) is immune to them. It also has an independent rationale. It incorporates an account of the value of art appreciation that is plausible in its own right. And it endorses many of the core insights of anti-experientialists, especially concerning the final value of good art. Those of us unconvinced by experientialism need to take this form of it seriously. I conclude by identifying some genuine problems it faces. Even these aren’t clearly insoluble. (shrink)

Do epistemic and aesthetic values ever conflict? The answer might appear to be no, given that background knowledge generally enhances aesthetic experience, and aesthetic experience in turn generates new knowledge. As Keats writes, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ (Keats, 1996). Contra this line of thought, I argue that epistemic and aesthetic values can conflict when we over-rely on aesthetically enhancing background beliefs. The true and the beautiful can pull in different directions, forcing us to choose between flavours of normativity.

Vasily Sesemann’s aesthetics is a transcendental philosophy that seeks to answer the question of how an experience of beauty is possible. Sesemann insists that aesthetics should focus on the study of the aesthetic object itself, and through it go to the problematics of the act of perception and creativity. Sesemann states that not only the relationship between the work of art and the perceiver is important in order to understand the aesthetic object, but also the relationship between the work of (...) art and the creator. The aesthetic object in its sedimented form not only retains indications of the act of creation, but also makes demands on the perceiving subject. Aesthetic objects are sedimented passive structures that can be activated by the performative actions of the perceiver when she discovers the appropriate way of perception. Sesemann, like Moritz Geiger, claims that aesthetics is impossible without an analysis of feelings. He, like Geiger, recognizes the importance of empathy in aesthetic experience. However, Sesemann develops the concept of aesthetic empathy using Max Scheler’s arguments. Empathy is necessary, because the perceiver must be able to understand expressions. The aim of this paper is to analyse the phenomenological aspects of Vasily Sesemann’s aesthetics. Firstly, this paper analyzes the Sesemann’s phenomenology of aesthetic experience. Secondly, it shows that the analysis performed by Sesemann demonstrates why empathy plays a leading role in aesthetic experience. (shrink)

It is a noteworthy disanalogy between contemporary ethics and aesthetics that the fitting-attitude account of value, so prominent in contemporary ethics, sees comparatively little play in aesthetics. The aim of this paper is to articulate what a systematic fitting-attitude-style framework for understanding aesthetic value might look like. In the bulk of the paper, I sketch possible fitting-attitude-style accounts of three central aesthetic values – the beautiful, the sublime, and the powerful – so that the general form of the framework come (...) through. (shrink)

This volume brings together essential essays by an important but neglected thinker in early twentieth-century German philosophy, Edith Landmann-Kalischer. As the first English translation of her writings, this volume represents a landmark step in the effort to restore to its rightful place her philosophy and, in particular, its methodologically unified approach to aesthetic, moral, and epistemic value. The three essays translated - “On the Cognitive Value of Aesthetic Judgments: A Comparison of Sensory Judgments and Value Judgments” (1905), “On Artistic Truth” (...) (1906), and “Philosophy of Values” (1910) - demonstrate a philosophical mind at home with the then emerging disciplines of phenomenology and psychology during one of the most fecund eras of philosophy in German-speaking lands. -/- Drawing on the ferment of this period and engaging with its leading thinkers (e.g., Brentano, Husserl), Landmann-Kalischer crafts a unique and powerful contribution to aesthetics, the philosophy of art, and value theory. And far from speaking simply to the concerns of her day, in these essays she tackles questions that remain as pressing for us today as they were in her time. Are beauty, goodness, and truth real or merely subjective? How do we experience these values? Does our experience of value lead to judgments that can be true or false? Can those experiences lead to knowledge? Is a science of value possible at all? In Landmann-Kalischer's essays, we find rigorously argued and compelling answers to these questions. (shrink)

The article suggests a conceptualization of the interrelationship between attention, affect, and aesthetic experience. It supplements classical aesthetic theory by integrating knowledge from neurophysiology, developmental psychology, and psychoanalysis. Furthermore, the article proposes a distinction between a variety of types of affect that are discussed with a view to their potential contribution to elaborating the concept of aesthetic experience in the Kantian tradition and to reflecting different qualities of attention.

In this essay, I reconsider the constitution of democratic freedom in aesthetic terms. My interest is in articulating a conception of aesthetic freedom that can be mapped onto a conception of democratic freedom. For this purpose, I bring together Charles Sanders Peirce’s ontology, which comprises fragments of an aesthetic theory, Friedrich Schiller’s concept of aesthetic play and Stanley Cavell’s democratic perfectionism. By providing a philosophical framework for constructing an aesthetics and politics that supports the recent aesthetic turn in political theory, (...) which urges overcoming political theory’s excessive dependence on an epistemological theory of representation, and by proposing a modification to the turn’s heavy reliance on theories of affect, my reading of Peirce, Schiller and Cavell offers a new way to think about the political significance of the autonomy of aesthetic experience and affect for democratic freedom. (shrink)

Our environment is changing rapidly, as is the spectrum of possible relationships we can entertain with it. Against this background, one important task emerging in contemporary philosophical discussion concerns defining the status of contemporary images and the "iconic spaces" we encounter with ever-increasing frequency in their various forms. Within this context, the dimension of perception seems to be losing its primacy over the image, making a philosophical description of the relationships between image and reality all the more necessary. Among images, (...) the classical distinction between documentary and fiction has been drastically called into question, and along with it the nature of the emotions and values we experience in these two domains. Rozzoni promotes a phenomenology of the image, that is, a return to a description of images that starts from their essential features while avoiding simplistic dichotomies. By elucidating images’ intimate relationship with phantasy and aesthetic experience and their role in shaping our experience of "reality," this book develops a perspectival notion of "truth" intended to shed light on our contemporary interactions with images and the events, emotions, and values we experience through them. (shrink)

The notion that music’s expressive force is the spring of its affective power calls for a consideration of the language music speaks. Hermann Kretzschmar’s effort to set out a method for explicating music’s affects through discursive means falls short in this regard. Conversely, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s reflections on the language of art opens the way to a hermeneutical consideration of music’s affective significance. Gadamer’s critique of Kant’s subjectivization of aesthetics disabuses us of the romantic conceit that music is a “language beyond (...) language.” Rather, music’s power to speak inheres in the communicability of the experiences occasioned by it. The hermeneutics of music I set out draws on Gadamer’s analysis of the phenomenon of play. Martin Heidegger’s reflections on the origin of the work of art complement Gadamer’s phenomenological account of the work of art’s mode of being. The truth expressed by a work, I accordingly argue, is one that it alone exemplifies. For a phenomenological hermeneutics of music, music’s communicability of feelings and moods to which it gives voice is consequently the spring of its worlding power. (shrink)

This book gathers an interdisciplinary group of thinkers to ask if intersubjective acts of relating can be transferred to artificial beings without remainder. Using the uncanny valley model developed by Masahiro Mori, this significant contribution to performance philosophy presents a clear framework to consider aesthetic experience beyond mimesis.

In this paper, I offer a new interpretation of Margaret Cavendish’s remarks on beauty. According to it, Cavendish takes beauty to be a real, response-independent quality of objects. In this sense, Cavendish is an aesthetic realist. This position, which remains constant throughout her philosophical writings, contrasts with the non-realist views that were soon after to dominate philosophical reflections on matters of taste in the early modern period. It also, I argue, contrasts with the realism of Cavendish’s contemporary, Henry More. While (...) there are passages in Cavendish’s work that might seem to count against my reading—specifically, passages on disagreement in aesthetic judgement, on the power of beauty to elicit the passions, and on our inability to specify the nature of beauty—I show that, when situated against the background of Cavendish’s broader metaphysical and epistemological views, those passages in fact support the realist interpretation. (shrink)

In her new book Hooked, Rita Felski continues a project of criticizing literary criticism that she began in The Limits of Critique (2015).

Many hold that aesthetic appreciation is sensitive to the authenticity or genuineness of an object. In a recent body of work, Carolyn Korsmeyer has defended the claim that genuineness itself is an aesthetic property. Korsmeyer’s aim is to explain our aesthetic appreciation of objects that afford a sense of being ‘in touch with the past’. In this paper, I argue that genuineness cannot explain our appreciation of these objects. There is no aesthetic experience of the genuine.