A series of recent experimental studies have cast doubt on the existence of a traditional tension that aestheticians have noted in our aesthetic judgments and practices, viz. the problem of taste. The existence of the problem has been acknowledged since Hume and Kant, though not enough has been done to analyse it in depth. In this paper, we remedy this by proposing six possible conceptualizations of it. Drawing on our analysis of the problem of taste, (...) we argue that the experimental results in question are not a real challenge to its existence. By contrast, they provide empirical evidence in its support. (shrink)

Kant holds that when we judge a thing beautiful, we do so from no other basis than our pleasure in the contemplation of the object, while at the same time, we presume to judge with validity for everyone. To explain how this is possible is the task of what he calls the critique of taste. I distinguish among three kinds of explanation that Kant offers. One is a theoretical account of the mental state from which judgments of taste (...) supposedly arise--what Kant describes as a harmonious free play of the cognitive faculties. Another kind of explanation, made on the basis of the first, is an attempted "deduction" or proof of our right to make judgments of taste. I argue that Kant's theory of harmonious free play has little in the way of either content or plausibility, rendering his attempt to derive the universal validity of judgments of taste from it otiose. The main interest of his critical effort, I find, lies in the descriptive and analytical part of his account of judgments of taste, specifically in his attempt to comprehend both their subjective character and their claim to universal validity. The first of these he understands as consisting in the judgment's being based in feeling; the universality-claim he understands as a normative requirement. I argue that no interpretation can be faithful to these basic tenets of Kant's analysis without also accepting his curious conclusion that the act of judging in some sense "precedes" the very feeling of pleasure on which it is said to be based. I attempt to make sense of this conclusion in terms of the peculiar kind of consciousness of pleasure involved in such a judgment. (shrink)

Can subjective, individual taste be reconciled with an objective, universal standard? In _Homo Aestheticus,_ Luc Ferry argues that this central problem of aesthetic theory is fundamentally related to the political problem of democratic individualism. Ferry's treatise begins in the mid-1600s with the simultaneous invention of the notions of taste and modern democracy. He explores the differences between subjectivity and individuality by examining aesthetic theory as developed first by Kant's predecessors and then by Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and (...) proponents of the avant-garde. Ferry discerns two "moments" of the avant-garde aesthetic: the hyperindividualistic iconoclasm of creating something entirely new, and the hyperrealistic striving to achieve an extraordinary truth. The tension between these two, Ferry argues, preserves an essential element of the Enlightenment concern for reconciling the subjective and the objective—a problem that is at once aesthetic, ethical, and political. Rejecting postmodern proposals for either a radical break with or return to tradition, Ferry embraces a postmodernism that recasts Enlightenment notions of value as a new intersubjectivity. His original analysis of the growth and decline of the twentieth-century avant-garde movement sheds new light on the connections between aesthetics, ethics, and political theory. (shrink)

An early version of "Kant on the Normativity of Taste" above. Original abstract: In moving away from the objective, property-based theories of earlier periods to a subject-based aesthetic, Kant did not intend to give up the idea that judgments of beauty are universalizable. Accordingly, the “Deduction of Judgments of Taste” aims to show how reflective aesthetic judgments can be “imputed” a priori to all human subjects. The Deduction is not successful: Kant manages only to justify the imputation of (...) the same form of aesthetic experience to everyone; he does not show that this experience will universally occur in response to the same objects. This is what I call Kant’s problem of particularity. After critiquing Anthony Savile’s attempt to overcome this problem by linking Kant’s aesthetics to the theory of rational ideas, I elucidate the concept of aesthetic attributes in a way that suggests a possible resolution to the problem of particularity. -/- . (shrink)

Problem of truth and reality is age old in the field of philosophy as well as in the field of science. People very often confuse between ‘Truth’ and ‘Reality’ Most people think them to be one and the same, but there are differences. Whatever exist is real, reality and existence are interchangeable words. We can say truth, which is unchangeable and reality, which exist but change. False, which is not exist at all. People have suggested various taste to (...) decide the truth falsity of our description of reality. Some suggested Pragmatic theory and some other have suggested Coherence as a test of truth. Realism is also an ontological theory and has been probably the most ancient one. According to ancient man, real is that which perceived. Latter on, due to religious impact the knower became more important then the knowing object. Barkeley developed an extreme position that the objective material world does not exist at all. Dewey has developed the position called Instrumentalism. Halt, Perry, Marvin, Pitkin are the chief advocates of this position. Philosophers such as Darke, Lovejoy, Cellars, and Santayana held a position of Critical Realism. These people hold that mind does not see the object directly as they are but only through their representatives, as regards the object of knowledge is concerned, the Neo Realist are monist while Critical Realist are dualist. Indian rationalist philosopher Dr. D.D. Bandiste introduces a new concept of reality Radical Realism. He proved that knowledge change the knower not the object. to him every new knowledge make some change or other inthe knowing person. Epistemological position of john Dewey called instrumentalism. According to him knowledge is an instrument of action and a meaningful action is always of a problem-solving type. Every knowledge is an instrument to serve some need or other, neither is any knowledge final, nor is any truth final. Not only everything in the world is changing, their mutual relations also change. Knowledge is not a goal, but only a instrument to achieve this or that goal. In my paper I haves discussed various theories regarding whether knowledge change the object known. In this contest I have discussed varieties of realism, Idealismand so on, but importantly I have also discussed a new theory Radical Realism. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with what I believe is the epistemological mission of Kant’s doctrine of taste. The third Critique inherits two problems from the first. The evident one is that the categorial constitution of nature must be complemented with the notion of purposiveness. The less evident one is that the transcendental theory of experience needs a common sense in order to secure a common objectivity. The judgment of taste, conceived of by Kant as a ‘cognition in general’ (...) not restricted to either the particular subject or the particular object, offers a solution. It turns out to be a judgment that cannot be made without assuming the purposiveness of nature and the uniformity of the cognizing subjects. (shrink)

Utterances of simple sentences containing taste predicates (e.g. "delicious", "fun", "frightening") typically imply that the speaker has had a particular sort of first-hand experience with the object of predication. For example, an utterance of "The carrot cake is delicious" would typically imply that the speaker had actually tasted the cake in question, and is not, for example, merely basing her judgment on the testimony of others. According to one approach, this acquaintance inference is essentially an implicature, one generated by (...) the Maxim of Quality together with a certain principle concerning the epistemology of taste (Ninan 2014). We first discuss some problems for this approach that arise in connection with disjunction and generalized quantifiers. Then, after stating a conjecture concerning which operators ‘obviate’ the acquaintance inference and which do not, we build on Anand & Korotkova (2018) and Willer & Kennedy (Forthcoming) by developing a theory that treats the acquaintance requirement as a presupposition, albeit one that can be obviated by certain operators. (shrink)

Predicates of taste, such as ‘fun’ and ‘tasty’, have received considerable attention in recent debates between contextualists and relativists, with considerations involving disagreement playing a central role. Considerations involving disagreement have been taken to present a problem for contextualist treatments of predicates of taste. My goal is to argue that considerations involving disagreement do not undermine contextualism. To the extent that relativism was supposed to be motivated by contextualists being unable to deal with disagreement, this motivation is (...) lacking. The argument against contextualism rests on a too simple and narrow conception of disagreement that turns out to be problematic once we consider a wider range of cases. If we reject the assumptions about disagreement that the argument rests on, it no longer poses a threat to contextualism. (shrink)

The Significance of Taste: Kant, Aesthetic and Reflective Judgment ROBERT B. PIPPIN 1? THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION of the "Analytic of the Beautiful" in the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment" is easy enough to identify. On what basis, if any, could one claim some sort of universal a priori validity for judgments of the form, "This is beautiful"? In Kant's well-known analysis of this question, the issue is reformulated as: By what right could one claim that another person ought to feel (...) pleasure in the presence of certain objects? Let us call this the "basic question."' There is controversy enough about what Kant means by this basic question and how a deduction of the validity of such judgments is supposed to work. However, shortly after Kant began serious work on a "Critique of Taste" in ~787, the whole issue became even more complicated when the proposed work became a full-blown Critique of Judgment. The question of aesthetic judg- ment was presented within the new, larger topic of reflective judgment, was presumably thereby linked to the problem of teleological judgments, and so to the great general theme of the whole of the third Critique: the purposiveness I am grateful, for comments and criticisms, to Henry Allison, Volker Gerhardt, Rudolf Makkreel, Miles Rind, and to two anonymous referees for this journal. ' Kant's own formulation: "How is a judgment possible in which the subject, merely on the basis of his own feeling of pleasure in an object,.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:18 HUME AND THE STANDARD OF TASTE David Hume's critical theories, although fragmentary, have drawn increasingly serious attention in the twentieth century, yet even in 1976 Peter Jones, in reassessing Hume's aesthetics, can describe one of the most substantial of his critical essays, "Of the Standard of Taste," as underrated. Jones praises it as "subtle and highly complex," but while I agree with that judgment I also (...) find the essay quite puzzling. I am struck by certain features which look like structural weaknesses and by what seem to be inconsistencies, even contradictions, in Hume's argument. But perhaps the gravest difficulty facing interpretation of this essay is the irony which Hume seems to use, for this raises the question of just how seriously we are to take some of the more conventional views contained in "Of the Standard of Taste." I can begin to illustrate my uneasiness by considering Hume's use of a tall tale from Don Quixote, Part II, chapter xiii. Hume introduces this in a lighthearted way as part of his definition of delicacy of taste. It is the story of Sancho Panza's two kinsmen, who are such sensitive judges of wine that they can detect the taint of iron and leather imparted to a hogshead by the presence in it of a key on a thong. Now there are some interesting differences between Hume's version of this tale and the original. For example, where Hume has the two tasters deliberate over their wine before pronouncing it good, except for the slight taste of leather or iron, Cervantes says the first merely tried it with the tip of his tongue and the second just sniffed it, without tasting any at all. Further, Hume says "both 2 were ridiculed for their judgment," but there is no such 19 reaction mentioned in the original. Lastly, Hume calls the cause of the taint of iron "an old key," where 3 Cervantes describes it as "little." In short, while in the original interest is in the sensitivity of the taste of Sancho' s kinsmen for its own sake, Hume's emphasis is more on the relation of their taste to that of other people. He makes the procedure of tasting the wine as normal as possible and he gives prominence to the reactions of other people. Hume both tones down the more fabulous aspects of the story, making it less extraordinary and hence a better starting-point for a generalization about taste, and makes more explicit the conflict of opinion about the wine. He is using the story not just to define delicacy of taste but also to relate it to the problem of aesthetic judgment and the standard of taste. This is confirmed by the application Hume makes of his example. First, he uses the analogy between physical and aesthetic taste to claim that delicacy in both consists of the ability to detect minute effects and make fine discriminations. But the crucial question is what serves, like the key on the thong in the story, to confirm to outsiders that a man's aesthetic judgment is in fact more delicate than his neighbours'. Hume's answer is "the general rules of beauty... to produce these general rules or avowed patterns of composition is like finding the key with the leathern thong; which justified the verdict of Sancho' s kinsmen, and confounded those pretended judges who had condemned them" (273). But of course producing a general rule is not exactly like finding a physical key on a thong, and Hume's use of the word "avowed" here, which he repeats later, raises the difficulty of how the principles of art become accepted, and by whom. But, that apart, there is something odd about the discussion since the avowed principle is used, with support from examples, to 20 convince a bad critic that he is wrong, on the grounds that his judgment does not accord with the general judgment. This is the opposite of Sancho's story, in which his kinsmen were in a minority, derided, adds Hume, by the dull majority, and only vindicated by the discovery of the tainting key and thong. The aesthetic equivalent of... (shrink)

Sense-perception—the awareness or apprehension of things by sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste—has long been a preoccupation of philosophers. One pervasive and traditional problem, sometimes called “the problem of perception”, is created by the phenomena of perceptual illusion and hallucination: if these kinds of error are possible, how can perception be what it intuitively seems to be, a direct and immediate access to reality? The present entry is about how these possibilities of error challenge the intelligibility of (...) the phenomenon of perception, and how the major theories of perception in the last century are best understood as responses to this challenge. (shrink)

In der Reihe werden herausragende monographische Untersuchungen und Sammelbände zu allen Aspekten der Philosophie Kants veröffentlicht, ebenso zum systematischen Verhältnis seiner Philosophie zu anderen philosophischen Ansätzen in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Veröffentlicht werden Studien, die einen innovativen Charakter haben und ausdrückliche Desiderate der Forschung erfüllen. Die Publikationen repräsentieren damit den aktuellsten Stand der Forschung.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume’s Sceptical Standard of Taste*Jonathan Friday1it is generally agreed that Hume’s essay “Of the Standard of Taste”1 is the most valuable of the large number of works on what we now call aesthetics to emerge from the intellectual and cultural flowering of the Scottish Enlightenment. Here, however, agreement about the essay comes to an end, to be replaced by disagreement about what Hume identifies as the standard (...) of taste. Hume’s text encourages differing interpretations by appearing to identify a number of different standards of taste while continually suggesting there is only one. At the very least, one can find Hume hinting at a rule standard, a decision standard, an ideal spectator standard, a test of time standard as well as the position that there is no standard of taste at all. None of these views is explicitly rejected and more than one receives qualified approval. A review of the literature on Hume’s essay reflects its puzzling nature. Most commentators focus upon one or another of the standards Hume discusses; others examine more than one, but devote little attention to the relation between various standards appearing in the essay.2 [End Page 545]I will suggest in what follows that a better understanding of “Of the Standard of Taste” can be achieved by beginning with the question: What is Hume trying to do in this essay? As we shall see, Hume gives relatively explicit answers to this question in the essay and elsewhere, and attention to these takes us some way towards dissolving the puzzle of why so many positions on the standard of taste are discussed without any being explicitly rejected. Moreover, an understanding of Hume’s aims will make it much easier to clearly discern his own position on the possibility of a standard of taste. Therefore, in what follows, I will offer a reading of Hume’s essay which addresses the puzzle of the multiple standards and puts us in a much better position to answer the question of what Hume’s view is and whether it survives critical scrutiny.2The opening paragraphs of “Of the Standard of Taste” set the stage for the discussion that follows. Hume begins by observing that “the great variety of taste, as well as of opinion, which prevails in the world, is too obvious not to have fallen under everyone’s observation.”3 People of similar background and culture notice the wide differences of taste within their own like-minded community, and when they turn their attention to “distant nations and remote ages”4 the phenomenon is found to be even more pronounced. Further reflection suggests this variety of taste to be even greater in reality than appearance since although we may agree in our evaluative language—e.g., that beauty is to be praised and ugliness scorned—“when critics come to particulars this seeming unanimity vanishes”5 and argument arises about what objects are properly referred to by such evaluative terms. Hume goes on to conclude the opening remarks of his essay by connecting this state of affairs with his familiar views about morality and moral language. These latter reflections are suddenly broken off and Hume turns to the main subject of his essay.He begins with a “natural” response to the phenomena he has just considered. He writes:It is natural for us to seek a Standard of Taste, a rule by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at least a decision afforded confirming one sentiment and condemning another.6It is worth emphasizing that Hume characterizes the much sought standard in two very different ways—as a rule reconciling sentiments and, more modestly, as [End Page 546] a decision confirming (or otherwise) a sentiment.7 Although this passage provides the initial characterizations of the standard of taste Hume is investigating, and ought therefore to have been accorded some attention by commentators, it has been largely ignored.8 This is unfortunate since it proves crucial to understanding what Hume is attempting to do in the essay. I will return to this point, but before doing so we need to further set out the problem as Hume conceives it... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant’s Critique of Taste: The Feeling of Life by Katalin MakkaiYoon ChoiKatalin Makkai. Kant’s Critique of Taste: The Feeling of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. viii + 209. Hardback, $99.99. Paperback, $29.99.This monograph offers a bold and original interpretation of Kant’s theory of reflective judgment, focusing on judgments of taste (hereafter “aesthetic judgments”) and the special problem that Kant takes such judgments (...) to raise. In Makkai’s preferred terms, the problem is that aesthetic judgments are normative—they demand universal agreement—but also subjective (14). How are such judgments possible? Though the problem may seem clear enough, Makkai suggests that a closer look is in order; indeed, her “main focus is on working out a proper understanding of the problem” (15). Makkai undertakes this task over the course of five relatively short chapters, introducing several interpretive theses that come together to transform the problem of aesthetic judgment in illuminating, sometimes surprising, ways. [End Page 509]Chapter 1 introduces Kant’s theory of judgment, arguing that it is primarily about what Kant calls the “power of judgment” (44). This is the power exercised in the activity of “adopting a stance,” an activity that is not only identificatory but also evaluative, that reveals something about the judging subject as well as the object judged (63). Though aesthetic judgment is one way in which the power of judgment is exercised, there is something special about it, as Kant himself flags (KU AA 5:193, quoted on 37). For aesthetic judgment “models” an “essential aspect” of the power of judgment in a way that no other kind of judgment does (38). One of Makkai’s interpretive aims is to make sense of this claim; she accordingly returns to it in her conclusion.Chapter 2, however, turns to aesthetic judgment, focusing on the Second Moment of the Analytic (KU AA 5:211–19). In this section, Kant introduces the much-discussed claim that aesthetic judgment involves the “free play” of imagination and understanding (KU AA 5:217). According to Makkai, it is significant that Kant introduces the idea of “universal communicability” along with the idea of “free play” (KU AA 5:217). Communicability, in Makkai’s view, is underwritten by the activity of “making [one’s thoughts and feelings] communicable,” an activity that is involved not just in communicating one’s thoughts and feelings, but in knowing what one is thinking and feeling in the first place, and indeed in making aesthetic judgment possible, as Makkai goes on to argue (81). For when I have an “aesthetic encounter,” I come across a beautiful object, and though I “cognize it,... there is ‘something else’ there in my experience of it that I find I want to articulate” (90). In the activity of trying to “make communicable” what this “something else” is, the imagination and understanding are brought into free play, a state “characterized,” according to Makkai, by the “exercising” of my “capacity for rendering (something) communicable” (89; emphasis in original). The profound pleasure that accompanies this state, Makkai adds, arises from being “animated” by the beautiful object to this heightened activity in which my faculties are in “attunement” with each other and with the object; it is the feeling of being “brought to life” that Makkai refers to in her title (100–101).It is a central part of this view that to experience an object as beautiful is to respond to the way the object really is. As Makkai puts it, “a condition of the possibility of performing a judgment of taste is a prior fact of the object being beautiful” (125). But in what sense, then, is aesthetic judgment subjective? Makkai addresses this question in chapter 3, arguing that whereas cognitive judgment asserts, aesthetic judgment “acknowledges” (136). And to acknowledge a beautiful object, it is not enough to identify a beautiful object correctly. It is necessary to experience the object as beautiful: to encounter it and take pleasure in it (136). Aesthetic judgment thus has an “essentially first-personal character” (127). As Makkai puts it later, in such a judgment, I represent “my experience of the object, my pleasure in it”—that is... (shrink)

De gustibus non est disputandum. This maxim reflects a fundamental problem both for the study of markets and for the concern with morals. The problem is the intractability of tastes coupled with their indispensability for both positive and normative economics. Tastes are indispensable in positive microeconomic theory because, under the label ‘preferences,’ they, together with expectations, determine choice and behavior. Tastes are equally indispensable to welfare economics' conception of morally permissible arrangements, because these arrangements must reflect compromises between (...) competing and conflicting preferences. (shrink)

George Dickie argues that Hume's principles of taste have value-laden properties as their subjects, including those properties we now refer to as ‘aesthetic’. I counter that Hume's principles have value-neutral properties as their subjects, and so exclude those properties we now refer to as ‘aesthetic’. Dickie also argues that Hume's essay on taste provides ‘the conceptual means for recognizing the problem of the interaction of aesthetic properties with other properties of artworks’. I counter that the very passages (...) Dickie takes to provide these conceptual means in fact suggest that Hume recognizes no such problem. (shrink)

It will be obvious to anyone with a slight knowledge of twentieth-century analytic philosophy that one of the central themes of this kind of philosophy is the nature of perception: the awareness of the world through the five senses of sight, touch, smell, taste, and hearing. Yet it can seem puzzling, from our twenty-first-century perspective, why there is a distinctively philosophical problem of perception at all. For when philosophers ask ‘what is the nature of perception?’, the question can (...) be confused with other, purely empirical, questions. For example: how do our sense-organs actually work? What are the mechanisms of smell and taste? How do vision and touch actually provide us with information about the world around us? There is much general agreement, in its broad outlines, about how to answer such questions empirically; but it is not clear what role, if any, philosophy has to play in answering these empirical questions. So if these were the only questions about the nature of perception, then it would not be clear exactly what the philosophy of perception is supposed to be about. (shrink)

In Homo Aestheticus, Luc Ferry argues that this central problem of aesthetic theory is fundamentally related to the political problem of democratic individualism.

This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the social practice of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu¿s sociology of taste. For the first time, this book unites sociologists and other social scientists with artists and curators, art theorists and art educators, and art, design and cultural historians who engage with the practice of taste as it relates to encounters with art, cultural institutions and the practices of everyday life, in national and transnational contexts. The volume is (...) divided into four sections. The first section on ¿Taste and art¿, shows how art practice was drawn into the sphere of ¿good taste¿, contrasting this with a post-conceptualist critique that offers a challenge to the social functions of good taste through an encounter with art. The next section on ¿Taste making and the museum¿ examines the challenges and changing social, political and organisational dynamics propelling museums beyond the terms of a supposedly universal institution and language of taste. The third section of the book, ¿Taste after Bourdieu in Japan¿ offers a case study of the challenges to the cross-cultural transmission and local reproduction of ¿good taste¿, exemplified by the complex cultural context of Japan. The final section on ¿Taste, the home and everyday life¿ juxtaposes the analysis of the reproduction of inequality and alienation through taste, with arguments on how the legacy of ideas of ¿good taste¿ have extended the possibilities of experience and sharpened our consciousness of identity. As the first book to bring together arts practitioners and theorists with sociologists and other social scientists to examine the legacy and continuing validity of Pierre Bourdieu¿s sociology of taste, this publication engages with the opportunities and problems involved in understanding the social value and the cultural dispositions of taste ¿after Bourdieu¿. It does so at a moment when the practice of taste is being radically changed by the global expansion of cultural choices, and the emergence of deploying impersonal algorithms as solutions to cultural and creative decision-making. (shrink)

This paper addresses two key works in the eighteenth‐century debate on the problem of taste: the Abbé Du Bos's Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture and David Hume's ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ . A successful solution to the ‘paradox of taste’ should sustain the democratising impulse behind Du Bos's appeal to the judgment of the ‘public’ whilst, at the same time, acknowledging the role of learning and discovery which underpins Hume's recourse to (...) the opinion of the best qualified critics. This can be achieved, it is argued, by taking up a standpoint which is internal to our actual arguments or disputes about art, drawing upon and recommending a set of practices which allow for the development and revision of our judgments about works of art. (shrink)

This problem has already been discussed by a number of authors.[i] Typically, however, authors take one of two extreme positions: they hold that all welfare should be taken at face value, or they hold that "suspect" welfare should be completely ignored. My contribution here is the following: First, I introduce the notion of unauthorized (suspect) welfare, of which welfare from meddlesome preferences, offensive tastes, expensive tastes, etc. are special cases. Second, I formulate four conditions of adequacy, applicable to any (...) welfare-based theory, for dealing with unauthorized welfare. These conditions require that unauthorized welfare be "discounted" (play a restricted role) but not be completely ignored. Thus, I shall be exploring a position intermediate between taking "unauthorized" welfare at face value and simply ignoring it. Moreover, the four conditions jointly determine exactly how existing welfare-based theories need to be revised so as to be appropriately sensitive to unauthorized welfare. (shrink)

Aesthetics is the part of contemporary academic philosophy that is concerned with art, beauty, criticism, and taste. As such, it must address metaphysical issues, epistemic problems, and questions of value. This makes it difficult to present a coherent account of the subject matter of aesthetics. In this article, I argue that this difficulty is the result of ambiguities and contradictions that arose in disputes about the relationship between the science of aesthetics, the critique of taste, and the philosophy (...) of art in German philosophy during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. By reconstructing the history of these debates, I hope to shed new light on the origins of aesthetics as a discipline and to explain why its subject matter and status within philosophy are still so difficult to define. (shrink)

Despite appeals to Hume in debates over moralism in art criticism, we lack an adequate account of Hume’s moralist aesthetics, as presented in “Of the Standard of Taste.” I illuminate that aesthetics by pursuing a problem, the moral prejudice dilemma, that arises from a tension between the “freedom from prejudice” Hume requires of aesthetic judges and what he says about the relevance of moral considerations to art evaluation. I disarm the dilemma by investigating the taxonomy of prejudices by (...) which Hume justifies the true judge’s moralism. The result distinguishes Hume’s aesthetic and moral points of view while defending aesthetic moralism. (shrink)

In nature scent is important for man primarily as a marker of food and sexual attractiveness, it polarizes as objects of life and decay, death. Scent, just like touch and taste exists till subject and object get opposed to each other, it is the sphere where body is included into material world, and flesh of the world is incrusted into the body. Aesthetics in its anthropologic meaning is limited by a body- perceptible dimension. Development of such categories as the (...) sublime, tragic, comic are not possible here. Creation of compound aromas, including those which do not exist in nature, can not overstep the limits of the beautiful- -ugly opposition. There is no contradiction, nourishing the comic, the tragic or the sublime, in blending of body with the world by means of scent. The spectrum of the aesthetic in the sphere of aromas is expanded in the plane from the beautiful to the ugly: fragrant, heady, amber, garlic, carpic, putrid, hideous, stinking. (shrink)

Against interpretations of Kant that would assimilate the universality claim in judgments of taste either to moral demands or to theoretical assertions, I argue that it is for Kant a normative requirement shared with ordinary empirical judgments. This raises the question of why the universal agreement required by a judgment of taste should consist in the sharing of a feeling, rather than simply in the sharing of a thought. Kant’s answer is that in a judgment of taste, (...) a feeling assumes the role of predicate. Such a solution presents a problem as serious as the one it purports to solve. (shrink)

In his theory of beauty, Kant introduces the free and harmonious play of the faculties as a kind of judging. This judging should precede the pleasure in the beautiful. But being the determining ground of the judgement of taste, the pleasure should precede the judgement. Regarding this problem, two opposing models have been proposed: Paul Guyer's ‘two-acts model’ and Hannah Ginsborg's ‘one-act model’. I propose a third model that, I argue, resolves the difficulty and does not fall prey (...) to the problems of the other two resolutions: the ‘subsumption model’, according to which the pleasure is followed by a subsumption under the concept ‘beautiful’. (shrink)

A shared goal amongst most educators, we argue, is to supplant students’ raw or “naive” intuitions with more refined intuitions about a particular domain. Educators want students, and people more generally, to recognize when ideas, frameworks, and processes don’t “look right”. When we know that something does not look right, sound right, or feel right, we investigate further. We seek to fill in the gaps between our knowledge and we attempt to learn new approaches for solving problems. Lifelong learning, in (...) other words, builds from a recognition of incoherence. We hope students will be more likely to recognize flawed reasoning or rhetorical appeals, even if they have long forgotten the details of logic, statistics, and argumentation. They have acquired a refined (one might even say “aesthetic”) sense of what is likely correct or incorrect; what is likely promising or empty. This sense is “aisthesis”. -/- Aisthesis is a marker of education. Although it doesn’t refer to particular sets of knowledge or particular skills in analyzing and evaluating problems, it provides a overarching framework that binds educators in both literature and science. Consequently, aisthesis provides a novel lens for pedagogy. Insofar as we are correct that education is about the cultivation of an aesthetic discrimination between good and bad work, aisthesis could be more explicitly targeted. Educators hope to instill in students an aisthetic sense of how to recognize when statements, issues, or artifacts are problematic and require further engagmeent. (shrink)

Works of culinary expertise are not typically regarded as works of "fine" art, in the way that, say, paintings, etchings, symphonies and sculptures are. I argue, however, that any form of creativity embodied in a perceptible work reflecting it is a subject about which we might exercise "aesthetic judgments" that do not differ fundamentally from the sorts typical with regard to the usual "fine" arts. To reserve a special notion for marking off the latter simply disguises the fact that it (...) is properly a value judgment that one is making. Otherwise it might seem a simple matter of fact that certain works are not works of fine art. I deal with this issue in Chapters Three and Four, in connection with traditional attempts to distinguish art from mere "craft" and more recent efforts to account for a certain "openness" in the concept of art. In Chapter One I consider the work of art as an "aesthetic object" combining sensory qualities into a complex whole, and specific objections against the possibility of composing or constructing, according to artistic principles, complexes of tastes . In Chapter Two the notion of "function" is introduced, since it might be thought that food is too obviously functional, in the face of the apparent irrelevance of functional considerations in artistic appraisal. ;Throughout, the emphasis is on food as specifically edible. In Chapter Two I argue, however, that other aspects of food besides its taste and smell might also be considered as part of that specific emphasis. Even to consider the visual qualities of a dish, for example, does not necessarily reduce it to a case of sculpture or visual design. Rather, I argue, cooking is an art which, in some of its forms, simply happens also to be an art of sculpting or visual design. I make a related point in Chapter Five about works in which food is at most one ingredient, e.g., performances, services or ceremonies. In cases where the whole work actually utilizes potentialities of food in an essential way, I argue that it is at least not clear why we should not regard the work as one of the culinary art that also happens to take the form, say, of dramatic or pictorial art. ;The first two chapters primarily aim to remove objections to regarding food works as art. This of course does not show that any particular food creation ever does in fact reach the level demanded for proper inclusion as "art." However, my more general discussion in Chapters Three and Four are aimed at generating some sympathy for an approach that would simply undercut the feeling that there is any such "level" to be reached in the first place. At best we are dealing with degrees of artistic value. Why not simply grant, then, that creatively produced taste complexes are works of art, and reserve whatever valuations we might come to make for the judgements we make concerning how good any particular work of food art is? In Chapter Five I emphasize the extent to which food works may in fact embody artistic dimensions, specifically with respect to the creative combination of expressive and symbolic elements. This allows for a kind of "composition" involving those elements, over and above the potentialities inherent in taste and smell as such. As for whether such compositions then ever reach a level of excellence sufficiently high for genuine "art"--I try to argue that this is a question that we simply should not ask. (shrink)

It is no surprise that the phenomenal qualities of our sensory experience pose recalcitrant philosophical problems for a physical materialist metaphysics. The colors of flowers as we experience them by sight, the taste of a ripe peach, and the smell of fresh-cut grass are undeniably part of the experienced world; yet in their phenomenal mode, they do not seem well-placed in the physicist's world of particles and energy fields. It seems, prima facie, that the metaphysical programs found in earlier (...) science and philosophy were better suited to accommodate these qualities: in the hylomorphic world of the Aristotelians, colors were "real qualities" existing as such in flowers; in the dualistic world of Descartes, colors were displaced from things like flowers to the immaterial mind of the perceiver. The dissertation argues that this intuition about our philosophical heritage is both philosophically confused and historically inaccurate. It betrays a misconception about phenomenal qualities and the problems they pose which results from a failure to distinguish phenomenal qualities from a special subset of sensible qualities that we have come to call "secondary" qualities. Disentangled from the primary-secondary quality distinction, phenomenal qualities include all sensible qualities insofar as they form the experiential contents of our sensory perceptions. So considered, phenomenal qualities invite difficult questions about the representational nature and ontological status of our sensory experience even within the Aristotelian and Cartesian metaphysics. By examining Descartes' and the Aristotelians' theories of sense perception with a focus on these questions we achieve a better understanding of "the problem" of phenomenal qualities, better interpretations of these historical theories of sense perception, and suggestions for reshaping the problem space within which we think philosophically about phenomenal qualities today. (shrink)

If good taste is a virtue, then an account of good taste might be modelled on existing accounts of moral or epistemic virtue. One good reason to develop such an account is that it helps solve otherwise intractable problems in aesthetics. This paper proposes an alternative to neo-Aristotelian models of good taste. It then contrasts the neo-Aristotelian models with the proposed model, assessing them for their potential to contend with otherwise intractable problems in aesthetics.

In the present paper I present the metalinguistic solutions to the ‘lost disagreement’ problem proposed Sundell and Plunkett [2013] and Barker [2012]. I argue that metalinguistic negotiations about taste, even though successful in explaining the intuition of disagreement in a vast number of cases, are not an accurate solution to the disagreement problem in contextualism when it comes to the most paradigmatic case of “tasty”. I also argue against the account of faultless disagreement explained via vagueness of (...) taste predicates [Barker, 2012]. I believe that the notion of faultlessness employed in the discussion of vagueness [Wright, 1994] is a different notion than the one employed in the discussion of taste discourse [Kölbel, 2003]. (shrink)

Offers a coherent, critical account of the theological visions that Lewis develops throughout his work, providing a unified introduction to his theology and an understanding of key social and ethical themes that have made him so influential. Works discussed include The Screwtape Letters, Surprised by Joy, and The Horse and His Boy. First published in 1978, this edition contains a new preface by the author, noting recent scholarship. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Contemporary behavioral and brain scientists consider the existence of so-called basic emotions in a similar way to the one described by Erickson for so-called basic tastes. Commenting on this analogy, I argue that similar basic problems are encountered in both perspectives, and I suggest a potential nonbasic solution that is tested in emotion research (i.e., the appraisal model of emotion).

In this series of dialogues, Derrida discusses and elaborates on some of the central themes of his work, such as the problems of genesis, justice, authorship and death. Combining autobiographical reflection with philosophical enquiry, Derrida illuminates the ideas that have characterized his thought from its beginning to the present day. If there is one feature that links these contributions, it is the theme of singularity - the uniqueness of the individual, the resistance of existence to philosophy, the temporality of the (...) singular and exceptional moment, and the problem of exemplarity. The second half of this book contains an essay by Maurizio Ferraris, in which he explores the questions of indication, time and the inscription of the transcendental in the empirical. A work of outstanding philosophy and scholarship, the essay is developed in close proximity to Derrida and in dialogue with figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Kant, Hegel and Heidegger. It thereby provides a useful introduction to the philosophy of one of Italy's most prominent philosophers as well as an excellent complement to Derrida's own ideas. A Taste for the Secret consists of material that has never before appeared in English. It will be of interest to second-year undergraduates, graduate students and academics in philosophy, modern languages, literature, literary theory and the humanities generally. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:MARITAIN AS AN INTERPRETER OF AQUINAS ON THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUATION }UDE P. DOUGHERTY The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. I T HE MEDIEVAL problem of individuation is not the contemporary problem of "individuals" or "particulars" discussed by P. F. Strawson, J. W. Meiland, and others.1 In a certain sense the problem of individuation originates with Parmenides, but it is Plato's philosophy of science that (...) bequeaths the problem to Aristotle and to his medieval commentators. Its solution in Aquinas is not that of Aristotle, nor is it that of Scotus or Suarez. Aquinas will distinguish between the problem of individuation and what we may call the problem of "individuality" or the problem of "subsistence." The solution to both will draw upon many Aristotelian distinctions but will incorporate key elements of St. Thomas's own metaphysics, including the real distinction between essence and existence and his doctrine of participation. It is Maritain's appropriation of St. Thomas's metaphysics that enables him to produce a realistic philosophy of science, one that he offers as compatible with contemporary scientific enquiry. It also enables him to develop a theory of person and personality. But the story begins with Plato. Although Plato's theory of knowledge may appear fanciful to the modern reader, his analysis of scientific knowledge contains a basic set of observations whose truth remains uncontested even 1 Cf. P.F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Methuen and Co., 1959); J.W. Meiland, Talking About Particulars (New York: Humanities Press, 1970); P. Butchvarov, Resemblance and Identity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966). 19 20 JUDE P. DOUGHERTY though his explanation be faulty. Plato saw clearly that science is of the universal. Things may be particular, but when we consider them as objects of enquiry, the intellect focuses upon the form taken as an exemplar. In Plato's explanation things belong to their various kinds by participating in incorporeal, eternal, and unchangeable archetypes. From a realist's vantage point the problem may be stated simply: Since things are singular, how is it that we intellectually apprehend them as universal? Aristotle's solution is well known and it is one adopted and amplified by St. Thomas. Universals are abstracted from singular things. No one would present Maritain as a medievalist, but, as an interpreter of Aquinas, he has wielded considerable influence in the United States and in Latin America. Many have come to St. Thomas under his tutelage. His knowledge of Aquinas is extensive and is drawn upon throughout his lifelong work, but perhaps nowhere more than in his philosophy of science and in his discussions of the person. The primary text for Thomas's doctrine of individuation is his commentary on Boethius's De Trinitate, where he discusses the division and methods of the sciences. Maritain's philosophy is indebted mainly to his reading of Thomistic texts, but he draws heavily, as well, on the works of his contemporaries, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange and Louis Geiger, and on those of the classic commentators on Thomas, Cajetan, Sylvester of Ferrara, and John of St. Thomas. Though employing St. Thomas, Maritain is always a man of the twentieth century. In books such as the Degrees of Knowledge, Science and Wisdom, Existence and the Existent, and A Preface to Metaphysics, his foe is always some contemporary exponent of a nominalist position.2 "Nominalists,'' he will say, "have a taste for the real, but no sense of being."3 Timeless 2 Degrees ofKnowledge [Les Degres du Savoir(l 932)], trans. G.B. Phelan, 4th ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1959); Science and Wisdom [Science et Sagesse (1935)], trans. B. Wall (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940); Existence and the Existent [Court Traite de L:Existence et de L:Existant (1947)], trans. L. Galantiere and G.B. Phelan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1948); A Preface to Metaphysics [Sept Le~ons sur L'Etre et les Premieres Principes de la Raison Speculative (1934)], trans. B. Wall (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1939). 3 Degrees of Knowledge, 3. AN INTERPRETER OF AQUINAS 21 metaphysics, he will lament, no longer suits the modern intellect. "Three centuries of empirico-mathematics have so warped the intellect... (shrink)

My dissertation contributes to a central and ongoing debate in the philosophy of perception about the fundamental nature of perceptual states. Such states include cases like seeing, hearing, or tasting as well as cases of merely seeming to see, hear, or taste. A central question about perceptual states arises in light of misperceptual phenomena. A commonsensical view of perceptual states construes them as simply relating us to the external and mind independent objects. But some misperceptual cases suggest that these (...) states fall short of contact with the world. The result is that perceptual states are either thought to fundamentally consist in a highest common factor that falls short of perceptual contact with the world, or are thought to be disjunctive in nature, with some cases involving perceptual contact, and others receiving a different analysis. Contrary to these views, I argue that no misperceptual cases compromise perceptual contact with worldly objects, so perceptual states should be understood as relations to the external and mind-independent world. I call this view I defend Pure Relationalism, and the view of misperceptual cases that makes pure relationalism possible Illusionism. (shrink)

My dissertation contributes to a central and ongoing debate in the philosophy of perception about the fundamental nature of perceptual states. Such states include cases like seeing, hearing, and tasting, as well as cases of merely seeming to see, hear, and taste. A central question about these states arises in light of misperceptual phenomena. While a commonsensical view of perceptual states construes them as simply relating us to the external and mind independent world, some misperceptual cases suggest that these (...) states fall short of such world-contact. The result is that perceptual states are either thought to fundamentally consist in a highest common factor that falls short of perceptual contact with the world, or are thought to be disjunctive in nature, with some cases involving perceptual contact, and others receiving a different analysis. Contrary to these views, I argue that no misperceptual cases compromise perceptual contact with the world. So perceptual starts should be thought in terms of a relation to the external and mind-independent world. I call this view I defend 'pure relationalism', and the view of misperceptual cases that makes pure relationalism possible 'illusionism'. (shrink)

A predicate of personal taste occurring in a sentence in which the perspectival information is not linguistically articulated by an experiencer phrase may have two different readings. In case the speaker of a bare sentence formed with a predicate of personal taste uses the subjective predicate encoding perspectival information in one way and the hearer interprets it in another way, the agents’ acts are not coordinated. In this paper I offer an answer to the question of how a (...) hearer can strategically interact with a speaker on the intended perspectival information so that both agents can optimally solve their coordination problem. In this sense, I offer a game-theoretical account of the strategic communication with expressions referring to agents’ perspectives, communication which involves the interaction between a speaker who intends to convey some perspectival information and who chooses to utter a bare sentence formed with a predicate of personal taste, instead of a sentence in which the perspectival information is linguistically articulated by an experiencer phrase, and a hearer who has to choose between interpreting the uttered sentence in conformity with the speaker’s autocentric use of the predicate of personal taste or in conformity with the speaker’s exocentric use. (shrink)

This article argues that in order to understand the form of modern political freedom envisioned by Rousseau, we have to understand his theory of taste as refined Epicureanism. Rousseau saw the division of labour and corrupt taste as the greatest threats to modern freedom. He identified their cause in the spread of vulgar Epicureanism – the frenzied pursuit of money, vanity and sexual gratification. In its place, he advocated what he called ‘the Epicureanism of reason’, or refined Epicureanism. (...) Materially grounded on an equitable proportion of needs and faculties, this was a hedonist theory of self-command designed to cultivate the temperate enjoyment of sensual pleasure. I argue that Rousseau hoped that a shift from vulgar to refined Epicureanism would secure political freedom in modernity by grounding the politics of the general will in an economics of balanced growth and a reinvigorated appreciation of natural beauty. This perspective provides a new way of both clarifying the role of economic justice and aesthetic judgment in Rousseau's republican state theory, and of assessing the consistency of his moral and political thought. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate a certain contextualist answer to the problem raised for the view by the phenomenon of faultless disagreement: namely, that it cannot account for disagreement in ordinary exchanges involving predicates of personal taste. I argue that the answer investigated either misses the target, ignoring the relevant cases which the relativist challenge is based or that it has to appeal to semantic blindness, a move that has certain costs. In addition, I argue that the same (...) holds for a specific variant of contextualist view – the presuppositional view proposed by López de Sa. (shrink)

Echoing Beardsley's trinity of unity, complexity, and intensity, Perkins develops three interrelated criteria on which to base an evaluation of film: credibility, coherence, and significance. I assess whether Perkins criteria of credibility serves as a useful standard for film criticism. Most of the effort will be devoted to charitably reconstructing the notion of credibility by bringing together some of Perkins' particular comments. Then I will briefly examine whether Perkins has successfully achieved his goal of developing standards of judgment by holding (...) credibility up to his own criteria of successful meta-criticism: "The clarification of standards should help to develop the disciplines of criticism without seeking to lay obligations on the film-maker" (p. 59). Although I argue that Perkins fails to achieve his goal, his criterion of credibility remains a useful mechanism for evaluating artistic attempts to achieve a particular end, namely spectator immersion. A limited domain of application for his criteria might seem to leave us with little more than an idiosyncratic expression of his classicist artistic taste, but Film as Film also contains valuable insights relevant to the so called "problem of imaginative resistance.". (shrink)

In this paper we discuss a phenomenon we call perspectival plurality, which has gone largely unnoticed in the current debate between relativism and contextualism about predicates of personal taste. According to perspectival plurality, the truth value of a sentence containing more than one PPT may depend on more than one perspective. Prima facie, the phenomenon engenders a problem for relativism and can be shaped into an argument in favor of contextualism. We explore the consequences of perspectival plurality in (...) depth and assess several possible responses on behalf of advocates of relativism. (shrink)