Far from an elite practice reserved for the highly educated, criticism is all around us. We turn to the Yelp reviewers to decide what restaurants are best, to Rotten Tomatoes to guide our movie choices, and to a host of voices on social media for critiques of political candidates, beach resorts, and everything in between. Yet even amid this ever-expanding sea of opinions, professional critics still hold considerable power in guiding how we make aesthetic judgements. Philosophers and lovers of art (...) continue to grapple with questions that have fascinated them for centuries: How should we engage with works of art? What might enhance such encounters? Should some people’s views be privileged? Who should count as a critic? And do critics actually help us appreciate art? In Two Thumbs Up, philosopher Stephanie Ross tackles these questions, revealing the ways that critics influence our decisions, and why that’s a good thing. Starting from David Hume’s conception of ideal critics, Ross refines his position and makes the case that review-based journalistic or consumer reporting criticism proves the best model for helping us find and appreciate quality. She addresses and critiques several other positions and, in the process, she demonstrates how aesthetic and philosophical concerns permeate our lives, choices, and culture. Ultimately, whether we’re searching for the right wine or the best concert, Ross encourages us all to find and follow critics whose taste we share. (shrink)

This examination of gardens--particulary English gardens of the eighteenth century--offers possible links between garden design and the arts.

This paper attempts a rational reconstruction of the Humean notion of an ideal critic. Claiming that the traits of practice and comparison can only arise through the gradual accumulation of experience, I argue that Humean critics are real, not ideal. After discussing the nature of perfection and the relation of delicacy to the other Human traits, I propose two supplements to Hume's list: imaginative fluency and emotional responsiveness. I close by examining a trio of challenges to my view and supporting (...) a mitigated aesthetic nonrealism. (shrink)

Five experiments investigated how people use categories to make inductions about objects whose categorisation is uncertain. Normatively, they should consider all the categories the object might be in and use a weighted combination of information from all the categories: bet-hedging. The experiments presented people with simple, artificial categories and asked them to make an induction about a new object that was most likely in one category but possibly in another. The results showed that the majority of people focused on the (...) most likely category in making inductions, although there was a group of consistently normative responders who used information from both categories (about 25% of our college population). Across experiments the overall pattern of results suggests that performance in the task is improved not by understanding the underlying principles of bet-hedging but by increasing the likelihood that multiple categories are in working memory at the time of the induction. We discuss implications for improving everyday inductions. (shrink)

Our primal ability to see one thing in terms of another shapes our landscape perception. Although modes of appreciation are tied to personal interests and situations, there are many lines of conflict and incompatibility between these modes. A religious point of view is unacceptable to those without religious beliefs. Background knowledge is similarly required for taking an arts or science-based view of landscape, although this knowledge can be acquired. How to cultivate responses grounded in imagination, emotion, and instinct is less (...) clear, but advocates are eager to spell out notions of virtuous exercise and effective schooling. Carlson’s science-based theory often gets the most attention because he has refined and defended it over many years, but there is a place in aesthetic nature appreciation for the formal or design elements he dismisses as well as for religious, imaginative, emotional, and ambient responses. To date, the normative aspects of these theories have been presented sketchily at best. Working out these details will chart a way for landscape appreciation to become politically correct. (shrink)

George Dickie's The Century of Taste is a readable and informative guide to the family of eighteenth-century aesthetic theories that sought to explain our judgments of taste. Dickie treats the five theories he discusses out of chronological order so that he can give pride of place to his favorite view, that of David Hume. Dickie's grand narrative claims Hume "all but perfected" the theory of taste, while the associationists, on the one hand, and Kant, on the other, led it down (...) a pair of blind alleys. (shrink)

This volume brings together seventeen previously published articles by Noel Carroll, exploring all aspects of Arthur Danto’s philosophy of art. They cover Danto.

That caricature succeeds at all seems paradoxical. That its dictum is “less is more” seems more puzzling still. In this paper I hope to investigate how caricature transforms exaggeration, distortion, and falsification into vehicles for succinct comment and easy identification. I shall examine and discard several views of how caricature functions, and conclude by arguing that correctly identifying a caricature is no more, and no less, paradoxical than correctly identifying any of the everyday objects that clutter our world.

I applaud and elaborate on the contextualism at the heart of Bullot & Reber's (B&R's) theory, challenge two aspects of the appreciative structure they posit (the causal reasoning that allegedly underlies the design stance and the segregation of the component stages), suggest that expert and novice appreciators operate differently, and question the degree to which B&R's final theory is open to empirical investigation.

I examine the prospects for an ideal observer theory in aesthetics modelled on Roderick Firth’s 1952 paper ‘Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer’. The first generation of philosophers to consider an Ideal Aesthetic Observer found fault with Firth’s omniscience condition; more recent writers have criticized the affective component of an IAO’s response. In the end, most discussants reject the possibility of an IAO theory. Though the IAO theory gets the model wrong for answering meta‐aesthetic questions, revisiting the debate prompts useful (...) reconsideration of the role of the critic and the nature of aesthetic appreciation. (shrink)

Ronald Moore's new book Natural Beauty: A Theory of Aesthetics Beyond the Arts seeks to offer up an account of beauty in nature rather than the beauty of nature. Moore claims his is a syncretic theory. That is, it combines the best parts of competing theories into a single comprehensive account of, in this case, our judgments of natural beauty. The syncretic impulse is a common one in philosophy. Seeing many theories, each with some strong points yet none successful overall, (...) a natural solution is to simply glom them all together. But does this work? Are we entitled to pick and choose in this manner, taking what we like but leaving behind the preconceptions to which each theory was moored? And is the resulting supertheory consistent and coherent? I will use Moore's book as a test case for some of these theoretical questions. I identify some 'syncretic sites' in Moore's theory to see whether his method passes muster. (shrink)

The study of aesthetics concerns the arts broadly conceived, as well as the nature of aesthetic experience, which includes our responses to beauty, sublimity, ugliness, and other such qualities found in works of art, nature, the built-environment and in the course of everyday life. Although the term "aesthetics" to denote this area of study goes back only to the eighteenth century with the work of Alexander Baumgarten, the field has had a long and distinguished history dating back to classical antiquity. (...) Aesthetics is currently the scene of provocative philosophical exploration, and one which has become increasingly connected to work in disciplines outside of philosophy such as art history, psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, gender studies, and critical race theory. (shrink)

We apply Carol Gilligan's distinction between a "male" mode of moral reasoning, focussed on justice, and a "female" mode, focussed on caring, to the reading of literature. Martha Nussbaum suggests that certain novels are works of moral philosophy. We argue that what Nussbaum sees as the special ethical contribution of such novels is in fact training in the stereotypically female mode of moral concern. We show this kind of training is appropriate to all readers of these novels, not just to (...) women. Finally, we explore what else is involved in distinctively feminist readings of traditional novels. (shrink)

We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our results come from the Data Release 11 sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released (...) DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance Λ cold dark matter cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the BAO feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd, which has a value of rd,fid = 149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find DV = at z = 0.32 and DV = at z = 0.57. At 1.0 per cent, this latter measure is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. Separating the clustering along and transverse to the line of sight yields measurements at z = 0.57 of DA = and H =. Our measurements of the distance scale are in good agreement with previous BAO measurements and with the predictions from cosmic microwave background data for a spatially flat CDM model with a cosmological constant. © 2014 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. (shrink)