Introduction -- Aesthetic judgements, aesthetic principles, and aesthetic properties -- Aesthetic essence -- The acquaintance principle -- The intersubjective validity of aesthetic judgements -- The pure judgement of taste as an aesthetic reflective judgement -- Understanding music -- The characterization of aesthetic qualities by essential metaphors and quasi-metaphors -- Musical movement and aesthetic metaphors -- Aesthetic realism and emotional qualities of music -- On looking at a picture -- The look of a picture -- Wollheim on correspondence, projective properties, and (...) expressive perception -- Wittgenstein on aesthetics. (shrink)

If you are interested in art, you engage in artistic evaluation, thinking of one work as being better than another; one artist as being better than another; some works and some artists as being great, mediocre, or poor; and, perhaps, thinking of some forms or genres of art as being superior to others in that works within the favored form or genre have achieved or can aspire to a higher artistic value than is possible for those less favored. The greatest (...) philosophical challenge to this practice—a challenge that, if successful, would have wide-ranging consequences outside philosophy, in particular in undermining the status of the practice of art criticism—would maintain that it is, all of it, taken at face value.. (shrink)

Roger Scruton appears to have been the first to argue for and articulate an anti-realist theory of aesthetic properties. In the case of emotional qualities of music, his principal argument against realism is unsound and cannot, I believe, be repaired. Nevertheless an anti-realist view of emotional qualities of music is in my view correct and I defend Scruton's insight against a rival realist conception. However, I prefer a rather different form of anti-realism to Scruton's.

Few portions of Eduard Fraenkel's commentary on Aeschylus′ Agamemnon have been so influential as the three and a half ages On the Weapon with which, according to the Oresteia, Agamemnon was murdered.1 In contrast with the controversy and disagreement stirred by his remarks on The Footprints in the Choephoroe,2 his thesis concerning Clytemnestra's murder-weapon has met with almost universal approva and the matter is widely regarded as settled. It is symptomatic that within the past twelve months two important books should (...) have appeared4 which independently assume the unquestionable Tightness of Fraenkel's conclusion: the weapon envisaged by Aeschylus was a sword, not an axe. (shrink)

One of the major problems for Critical Discourse Analysts is how to move on from their insightful critical analyses to successfully ‘acting on the world in order to transform it’. This paper discusses, with detailed exemplification, some of the areas where linguists have moved beyond description to acting on and changing the world. Examples from three murder trials show how essential it is, in order to protect the rights of witnesses and defendants, to have audio records of significant interviews with (...) police officers. The article moves on to discuss the potentially serious consequences of the many communicative problems inherent in legal/lay interaction and illustrates a few of the linguist-led improvements to important texts. Finally, the article turns to the problems of using linguistic data to try to determine the geographical origin of asylum seekers. The intention of the article is to act as a call to arms to linguists; it concludes with the observation that ‘innumerable mountains remain for those with a critical linguistic perspective who would like to try to move one’. (shrink)

Agamemnon's apology , in particular that portion which relates the story of Zeus and Ate, contains a number of oddities and peculiarities. This was recognised in antiquity, as various remarks in the Homeric scholia testify. Further inconcinnities have been unearthed by more recent scholars, who by and large belonged to the school of Homeric analysts. Although the presuppositions of this school are now generally regarded as outmoded and inappropriate, we should not underestimate the services of the scholars who drew the (...) relevant unique features to the world's attention. Ways of explaining the oddities may have changed, but the oddities themselves are still well worth considering. (shrink)

As part of his recent study of ‘Narration and allusion in Archaic Greek Art’, Professor A. M. Snodgrass has cause to treat of the famous Attic black-figure vase which depicts Circe handing a cup containing her sinister brew to one of Odysseus’ sailors. She is stirring it with her wand the while, and yet this sailor, and three companions besides, have already been transformed into various animals. Professor Snodgrass has no difficulty in explaining the apparent simultaneity of separate events here (...) and elsewhere on this vase-painting as relating to what he calls the ‘synoptic’ technique of early Greek Art, that familiar device whereby several successive episodes in a narrative are presented together within the same picture. And he is inclined towards a similar line of explanation as regards the partial transformation of Odysseus’ ἑταῖροι: the artist ‘wished to express the passage of time by indicating a half-way stage in the transformation’. (shrink)

The treatment of the goatherd Melanthius in these lines received remarkably little animadversion from earlier commentators . In contrast, the late Manuel Fernandez-Galiano devoted an extremely full note to the passage. One may wonder, however, whether he was right to base it on the automatic assumption that what we have depicted here is an act of murder. He himself admits that we are not ‘told exactly at what moment the unfortunate Melanthius dies’. :πότομος ατη κα δεινοτάτη ποιν, ξ ς εκς (...) κα θανεν τν Μελάνθιον, ε κα ποιητς κα ατ σιγι. Such lack of specificness would be most unlike Homer, and the removal of hands, feet, ears, nose and genitalia would be a remarkably laborious and uneconomical mode of instantly killing someone. Since we are not told that Melanthius dies I infer that he did not, any more than Eurytion did at Od. 21.300–2, in similarly trying circumstances: ‘they cut off his ears and nostrils with the sharp brass; but he, injured in his feelings, went about, enduring that calamity with a frantic mind’, to quote the translation by Buckley for which Housman was so grateful. (shrink)

‘More light is thrown on the poetic art of Stesichorus by the papyrus-text of his Geryoneis than by all his other fragments together.’ This verdict continues to be as true now as when it was first enunciated. But we are also in the fortunate position of being able to infer much of value about what we may term the pre-history of the legend which the poet took as the basis for his composition. And a key document within this process turns (...) out to be a text that is not preserved upon papyrus, that is not, indeed, included as part of any edition of the poet, and which has been the object of some very serious misconceptions. The relevant section consists of a phrase only three words long, but it is difficult to underestimate their importance, once they are rightly understood. (shrink)

Ronald Preston found Alasdair MacIntyre's analysis of plurality and incommensurability unconvincing, holding that, ultimately, a common rationality enabled disparate perspectives to achieve shared positions. This commitment made Preston sceptical of theologies which drew on MacIntyre to deny the possibility of meaningful dialogue with economics but he ignored the argument that shared liberal roots might constrain his own critique of market institutions. Preston's theological conversation with economics assumes a state-based capitalism, political dominance over economics and a thin plurality. Globalisation challenges such (...) foundations severely but MacIntyre's focus on communities of tradition offers only a weak challenge to global economic power. Preston's understanding of the significance of finitude in economics and MacIntyre's focus on the problems of plurality and the communitarian response are both important in any response to contemporary globalisation. This article explores whether the respective virtues of Preston's and MacIntyre's approaches can coalesce in a theology adequate to the global era. (shrink)

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)

Nietzsche remains what he wanted to be - the limit-philosopher of a modernity that never ends. This book argues that merely to reject Nietzsche is not to escape his lure. His appeals to our desire for victory, our creativity, our very humanity are seductions we cannot resist simply by disagreeing with him.