Abstract

Philosophers, throughout the modern era, have treated the aesthetic judgment as a judgment of taste. But this makes it difficult to see how such judgments can be taken as normative; for if the aesthetic judgment is just an assertion of what one likes or finds beautiful, how can one validly claim that someone else ought to like it or find it beautiful too? This is important because critics offer justifications for the aesthetic judgments that they make, and they attempt to persuade others to agree on the grounds that their judgments are true. The failure to demonstrate that aesthetic judgments can have a genuine normative component thus destroys any possibility for a serious art criticism. ;Both David Hume and Immanuel Kant attempted to solve this "antinomy": that the aesthetic judgment is thoroughly subjective, a judgment of taste, and yet is also a judgment that has normative force. In Hume's case, the solution is achieved in the context of his "comprehensive science of human nature"; with Kant, it is a part of his larger critical philosophy. I argue that both of these projects fail to reconcile subjectivity and normativity in aesthetics, and thus, either our aesthetic judgments can be subjective but we lose normativity, or we can have our normativity, but then our aesthetic judgments must be rendered non-subjective. The choice that most have made in contemporary philosophy is the former; the choice I have made is the latter. ;I conceive of artobjects as artifacts that convey the religious, social, political, philosophical, and aesthetic interests of a civilization through aesthetic means and construe artistic value as being a variety of success; specifically, success with regard to the expression of these interests and purposes. ;This account of artistic value makes possible the treatment of aesthetic judgments as objective, for virtues are objective properties of natural objects and artifacts. And the objective treatment of aesthetic judgments opens up the way for their straightforward confirmation. I argue that the artistic teleologies that artobjects embody figure into artistic laws and that these make a nomological-deductive model of the justification of aesthetic judgments possible. In the final chapter of the dissertation, I provide a sketch of just what such a nomological-deductive model of justification might look like