Of the three forms of reflective judgment analyzed in Kant’s third Critique, the pleasant has received the least attention because it is seen in part as purely subjective, in part as a mere foil for his theory of judgments of beauty. This paper makes a case for the philosophical consideration of this kind of judgment by focusing on its converse: the unpleasant is a form of aesthetic response that is initially negative but has great motivating power. More modest and common (...) than judgments of the purely beautiful or ugly and more rational than our visceral responses to the disgusting, the unpleasant can capture the aesthetic tenor of our daily lives and concerns. (shrink)

The Aesthetics of Design offers the first full treatment of design in the field of philosophical aesthetics, challenging the discipline to broaden its scope to include the quotidian objects and experiences of our everyday lives and concerns ...

This paper provides a critical assessment of two diverse methodological approaches in the contemporary movement of Everyday Aesthetics. The “weak formulation” asserts that ordinary objects are best understood on the model of fine art. I counter this claim with a distinction between aesthetic and artistic value. The “strong formulation” develops an ethical-existential theory of the everyday as one of belonging and familiarity which nevertheless causes us to lose what is uniquely aesthetic about our ordinary lives. I strive to find a (...) middle ground that contextualizes the aesthetic within human activities, concerns and judgements. (shrink)

Beginning with the current discontent felt by prominent aesthetic theorists over the marginalization of their field within philosophy, this paper seeks to find an explanation for the discipline's apparent neglect. A meta-aesthetic examination of approaches to the study of art and of concurrent historical trends in the art world itself reveals that a methodological emphasis on the ontology of art objects and the conditions for their perception has created a gulf between art and human life that renders it unimportant to (...) central philosophical concerns. The disenfranchisement of the field, I argue, is thus due to factors internal to the discipline itself. (shrink)

In 1984, Arthur C. Danto wrote two essays, both with enormously provocative themes. One, “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art,” chronicles aggressive strategies of philosophy to contain and control art, and calls for art's re‐enfranchisement. The second, “The End of Art,” offers a Hegelian model of art history in which art necessarily comes to an end with its own philosophical self‐consciousness. This chapter argues that “The End of Art” is an astonishing confirmation of Danto's thesis in “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art.” (...) Plato's definition of art as mere appearance, then, is less a theory of art than it is a strategy for showing art to be metaphysically defective. Each artistic movement generated a theory of art as it explored art's nature in greater and greater depth. Danto's characterization of philosophy includes an assumption that only the elements form the appropriate methodology for the task of self‐understanding. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical analysis of Robert Stecker’s account of aesthetic experience and its relation to aesthetic and artistic values. The analysis will demonstrate that Stecker’s formulation of aesthetic experience as it stands is incompatible with his arguments for nonaesthetic artistic values. Rather than multiplying the values associated with aesthetic experience, a deeper understanding of that experience will best serve to clarify problems at the core of the discipline.

This paper addresses problems in the interpretation of Chardin’s still life paintings, which are disconcerting because they are so out of step with those of his contemporaries. It is suggested that, with the application of Kantian aesthetics, Chardin can be best understood as representing things in themselves as well as the limits of language and understanding.

This volume offers an original and innovative collection of fresh approaches to the investigation of the idea of taste. It is divided into three sections: the concept of taste; taste and culture; and gustatory taste. The papers in all three parts deal with the way that aesthetics interpenetrates discussions of food, political conflict, art appreciation, aesthetic judgement, and education. These are fresh, never-before published contributions from a range of scholars, using the most recent literature in their areas of expertise. There (...) is no other book available that collects the latest research in this field, and, as such, it represents a key contribution to recent aesthetic, and more broadly philosophical, interest in matters of taste. (shrink)

The sublime is an aspect of experience that has attracted a great deal of scholarship, not only for scholarly reasons but because it connotes aspects of experience not exhausted by what Descartes once called clear distinct perception. That is, the sublime is an experience of the world which involves us in orientating ourselves within it, and this orientation, our human orientation, elevates us in comparison to the non-human world according to traditional accounts of the sublime. The sublime tells us something (...) about our relation to the world rather than anything about the world per se. Nonetheless there is an objective sense of the sublime in that the narratives involved are culturally endorsed rather than invented by an individual. This means that objects can be judged worthy or not of evoking experiences of the sublime. In other words, it is not an idiosyncratic matter. Immanuel Kant’s formulation of this involved explaining how such an experience is possible in terms of his system of the mind. Jane Forsey notes that Kant takes the features of the sublime as given and extrapolates from them certain features of the mind as if any concept of the sublime must implicate the mental architecture of his account (2007). Further to this she argues that in fact the concept of the sublime does implicate a particular system of the mind but neither Kant nor anyone else can successfully formulate it because the concept itself frames certain contradictions. According to Forsey, two consequences follow. First she argues that Kant’s system of the mind does not support the features of the sublime; and secondly that no system could as the very concept is incoherent. If Forsey can show that Kant was mistaken in presenting his account as coherent given his commitments, this would be of interest in its own right. However, her stronger claim is that we cannot separate any concept of the sublime out from Kant’s theoretical underpinnings. That the way the features of the mind are meant to operate in experiences of the sublime are contradictory simply points to the fatal flaws in the whole concept. Her conclusion is that there is no coherent account of the sublime available to us. I will argue that Forsey bases her reasoning on the assumption that a foundational empiricist or direct perception holds; and she interprets Kant’s notions of imagination, understanding and reason as though they are grounded in just such an account of perception. This is revealed in her interpretation of Kant’s phrase “beyond cognition”. Once this foundationalism is replaced with an account of perception more aligned with current research on perception, both philosophical and empirical, then an account of the sublime is available. Further to this however, I argue that what constitutes the narrative of the sublime is historically contingent. Before setting out my arguments, I consider Forsey’s argument in more detail. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Katharine Jane Tait, 1923–2021Andrew Bone and Sheila Turcon Click for larger view View full resolutionIt was with great sadness that the Bertrand Russell Research Centre learned of the death on 26 July 2021 of Katharine Tait, Bertrand Russell’s daughter. Dr. Tait was a founder of the Bertrand Russell Society, attended several of its annual meetings, and was always strongly supportive of, and involved in, research and (...) inquiry into the life, times and writings of her father. She attended McMaster’s Russell Centenary Celebrations in 1972. Her scholarly interests and commitments extended to the McMaster edition of Russell’s Collected Papers, of whose Advisory Editorial Board she was a longstanding member. Kate herself wrote an important and poignant memoir, My Father Bertrand Russell; she was an always charming and friendly visitor to McMaster on those occasions she undertook work in the Russell Archives, which included an annotated, as yet unpublished edition of her correspondence with her father. She contributed articles and reviews to this journal. Several members of the McMaster community cherish her personal letters, notes and greeting cards to them.— Andrew Bone; photo by Sheila Turcon [End Page 98]Copyright © 2021 McMaster University... (shrink)

In philosophical aesthetics, discussions on design objects place the notion of Functional Beauty at the fore. Such a philosophical approach can be found in Jane Forsey’s book The Aesthetics of Design that focuses on the notion of function to promote the aesthetic value of design and develops an interpretation of Kantian Dependent Beauty around it. Lucía Jiménez Sánchez has recently put forward several flaws of Functional Beauty accounts. She presented several practical cases as evidence for the narrowness of (...) Functional Beauty accounts. Two cases are presented against Jane Forsey’s theory of Dependent Beauty, holding that it excludes other properties from appreciation that are not necessarily related to functionality, i.e., expres- sive properties. The purpose of this article is to show that these criticisms leveled at Jane Forsey’s proposal for an aesthetic theory of design are unfounded and are based on a misun- derstanding of the structure of judgments of beauty in her system. Despite this, these criticisms highlight the need to clarify the purpose of the aesthetics of design. (shrink)

The notion of the sublime, used to describe a particular kind of overwhelming or exhilarating aesthetic experience, has garnered a great deal of attention by philosophers, critical theorists and literary scholars. In the midst of this growing body of literature, Professor Jane Forsey published an article asking whether an aesthetic theory of the sublime is even possible, and argued provocatively in the negative. Claiming that efforts to explain the sublime inevitably result in theories that are either contradictory or (...) incoherent, Forsey posed a challenge to anyone who takes the sublime seriously as an aesthetic category. This volume brings together an international slate of philosophers and scholars of the sublime, who have been invited to respond to, and critically engage with, Forseys article. Unlike other monographs and anthologies that deal broadly with the sublime in aesthetics, this collection examines specific conceptual problems with the very foundations of sublime theory in a manner that is tightly focused and rigorous. It represents a variety of approaches that defend the sublime, and concludes with an original response by Professor Forsey to her critics. (shrink)

The sublime has come under severe criticism in recent years. Jane Forsey, for instance, has argued that all theories of the sublime “rest on a mistake”. In her article, “The Pleasures of Contra-purposiveness: Kant, the Sublime, and Being Human,” Katerina Deligiorgi () provides a rejoinder to Forsey. Deligiorgi argues—with the help of Kant—that a coherent theory of the sublime is possible, and she provides a sketch for such a theory. Deligiorgi makes good progress in the debate over (...) the sublime. But here I raise two questions in relation to her account. The aim of these questions is to help clarify and augment her theory and thus extend the discussion about the tenability and relevance of the sublime. The first question is about the pleasure of the sublime. The pleasure, she claims, comes from our catching a glimpse of ourselves as agents in the world. But, I argue, Deligiorgi's conception of agency is insufficient for explaining the pleasure of sublimity, and this is because she does not take into account what I call the “ends of reason,” those ends that matter most to us as agents. The second question pertains to the phenomenology of the sublime. The worry here is that Deligiorgi overcomplicates the subject's experience and, in doing so, greatly restricts the scope of the sublime. (shrink)

Tom Hanauer's thoughtful discussion of my article “The Pleasures of Contra-purposiveness: Kant, the Sublime, and Being Human” puts pressure on two important issues concerning the affective phenomenology of the sublime. My aim in that article was to present an analysis of the sublime that does not suffer from the problems identified by Jane Forsey in “Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?”. I argued that Kant's notion of reflective judgment can help with this task, because it allows us (...) to capture the experience of failure that characterizes the sublime without committing us to ontologically transcendent items. In a significant departure from Kant, however, my account does not require references to our moral vocation to explain the pleasure we take in the sublime; the pleasure comes from getting the right measure of our agency. For Hanauer, trouble for my analysis comes both from the discursive presentation of the sublime, its focus on judgment, and from the removal of references to our moral vocation. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider how the notion of metalinguistic negotiation interacts with various theories of generics. The notion of metalinguistic negotiation we discuss stems from previous work from two of us (Plunkett and Sundell). Metalinguistic negotiations are disputes in which speakers disagree about normative issues concerning language, such as issues about what a given word should mean in the relevant context, or which of a range of related concepts a word should express. In a metalinguistic negotiation, speakers argue about (...) such issues implicitly, via competing “metalinguistic” usages of terms. Here, we argue that some disputes involving generics are best thought of as metalinguistic negotiations, and that these cases can be illuminating for our more general theorizing about generics. Specifically, we argue that the “contextualist” theory of generics that one of us (Sterken) has developed in other work is best equipped to account for these metalinguistic negotiations, relative to other leading views of generics. We thus argue for a “package deal” view of generics: a view that combines Plunkett and Sundell’s account of metalinguistic negotiation with Sterken’s contextualist view of generics. (shrink)

We have investigated the emotional profile of dreams and the relationship between dream emotion and cognition using a form that specifically asked subjects to identify emotions within their dreams. Two hundred dream reports were collected from 20 subjects, each of whom produced 10 reports. Compared to previous studies, our method yielded a 10-fold increase in the amount of emotion reported. Anxiety/fear was reported most frequently, followed, in order, by joy/elation, anger, sadness, shame/guilt, and, least frequently, affection/eroticism. Unexpectedly, there was no (...) significant difference in the profiles of emotion reported by men and women. When the reports were scored for bizarreness, a significant correlation was found between the occurrence of bizarreness and major shifts in emotion. These results support the conclusion that dreaming is a mental state whose general emotional features are widely shared across individuals and strongly linked to cognitive features within individual dreams. (shrink)

Recent years have seen renewed interest in the semantics of generics. And a relatively mainstream view in this work is that the semantics of generics must appeal to kinds. But what are kinds? Can we learn anything about their nature by looking at how semantic theories of generics appeal to them? In this article, we overview recent work on the semantics of generics and consider their consequences for our understanding of the metaphysics of kinds.

The standard view amongst philosophers of language and linguists is that the logical form of generics is quantificational and contains a covert, unpronounced quantifier expression Gen. Recently, some theorists have begun to question the standard view and rekindle the competing proposal, that generics are a species of kind-predication. These theorists offer some forceful objections to the standard view, and new strategies for dealing with the abundance of linguistic evidence in favour of the standard view. I respond to these objections and (...) show that their strategies fail. I offer a novel argument in favour of the standard view that I call the binder argument. The upshot of this argument is that if one rejects the existence of Gen, then one is committed to rejecting the existence of covert structure in general. (shrink)

Introduction: Wonder and the births of philosophy -- Socrates' small difficulty -- The wound of wonder -- The death and resurrection of Thaumazein -- The Thales dilemma -- Repetition : Martin Heidegger -- Metaphysics small difficulty -- Wonder and the first beginning -- Wonder and the other beginning -- Theaetetus redux : the ghost of the Pseudes Doxa -- Once again to the cave -- Rethinking Thaumazein -- Openness : Emmanuel Levinas -- Passivity and responsibility -- The ethics of the (...) cave -- Infinity and astonishment -- Opening out : from existent to existence -- Closing down : from existence to existent -- Locking up : totality and infinity -- The phantom of the autrement -- Awakening -- Relation : Jean-Luc Nancy -- The problem of Mitsein -- Mitsein as essential inessentiality -- The myth of essentialism -- Unworking -- Interruption -- Repetition -- Decision : Jacques Derrida -- Thaumazein, the irresponsible, and the undecidable -- Hospitality -- Undecidability revisited -- Much madness is divinest sense (or, who comes after the decision?) -- How to avoid the subject (or, that's not my hedgehog!) -- Undecidability, take three : think here of Kierkegaard -- Mysterium tremendum -- Postlude: Possibility. (shrink)

Values -- Tolerance -- Tolerant people -- Being tolerant of family -- Being tolerant of friends -- Being tolerant of neighbours -- Ways to be tolerant -- Being aware of others -- Respecting different kinds of families -- Accepting other cultures -- Including others -- Learning from others -- Being patient -- Personal set of values.

Breath is invisible and yet ever present and vital for living beings. The concept of invisibility in relation to breath operates in concrete and metaphorical ways to extend ideas about breath and breathlessness across disciplines, in clinical spaces and in life experience. Using a critical medical humanities approach, I demonstrate that the poverty of narrative accounts and language for breath outside the health context have had a crucial influence enabling clinically mediated interpretations and accounts to dominate. These third-person accounts are (...) important in the articulation of the ‘lived body’, but I balance this with a consideration of the subjective sensation of interoception, which has important implications for the visibility of breathlessness in both clinical and lay contexts. This article illustrates the rich potential of the subjects of breath and breathlessness within body studies and this special issue is a key step in making breath such an emergent topic. (shrink)

There are modes of presentation of a person in thought corresponding to the first and third person pronouns. This paper proposes that there is also thought involving a second person mode of presentation of another, which might be expressed by an utterance involving ‘you’, but need not be expressed linguistically. It suggests that co-operative activity is the locus for such thought. First person thought is distinctive in how it supplies reasons for the subject to act. In co-operative action there is (...) first person plural intending and judging. So there is a way of thinking of another, when openly co-operating with him or her, which plays the distinctive role of giving reason for contribution to the co-operative activity. In slogan form, ‘you’ is ‘we minus I’. The way children learn to use second and third person pronouns is naturally explained on this view. Contrasting less sophisticated kinds of co-operative activity with more sophisticated forms, and considering some issues about common knowledge and commo.. (shrink)

In this new interpretation of the political writings of Hannah Arendt, Lisa Jane Disch focuses on an issue that remains central to today's debates in political philosophy and feminist theory: the relationship of experience to critical understanding. Discussing a range of Arendt's work including unpublished writings, Disch explores the function of storytelling as a form of critical theory beyond the limits of philosophy.

: Stich, Nichols et al. assert that the process of deriving predictions by simulation must be cognitively impenetrable. Hence, they claim, the occurrence of certain errors in prediction provides empirical evidence against simulation theory. But it is false that simulation‐derived prediction must be cognitively impenetrable. Moreover the errors they cite, which are instances of irrationality, are not evidence against the version of simulation theory that takes the central domain of simulation to be intelligible transitions between states with content.

Some see the co-cognitive view of how we arrive at judgements about others' thoughts as a version of the analogy approach, where I reason from how I find things to be with me to how they will be for others. These thinkers think it a virtue of the view that it need not accept any linkage between thought and rationality. This paper will, however, defend the view that a co-cognitive view is a natural ally of theories which link thought and (...) rationality. It will try to show that exclusive stress on analogy is unduly sceptical about our cognitive capacities and overestimates our similarity to each other. (shrink)

We thank Zohar Lederman and Benjamin Capps for engaging with our paper on One Health (OH) and ethical frameworks, however we want to take issue with them on three points. First, they appear to misunderstand the distinction we appeal to between ethical theory and ethical frameworks, and so misinterpret what we are trying to achieve in our paper. Second, in spite of what they seem to imply, we agree that an OH approach can obscure differences in values, and that to (...) progress the field there needs to be recognition of competing values and their implications for OH. Finally, we are puzzled by their interest in pursuing a deliberative process, as this seems at odds with other positions they take in their paper, and also opens up many questions that need to be addressed. (shrink)