In 1987 Jerrold Levinson wrote, in a review of George Dickie's _The Art Circle_, that in reading it he felt 'caught in a kind of aesthetic time warp'. I had the same feeling, and indeed have the same feeling when I read papers published since on Dickie's theory. A recent criticism in this journal by Oswald Hanfling is a case in point. To be fair, Hanfling explicit states that he is discussing the 1974 version of the theory rather than Dickie's (...) current views. However, this weakens the paper as a contribution to the current debate. Dickie no longer advocates the 1974 theory, as opposed to the 1984 version. Hanfling also directs most of his argument against the second disjunct of that definition, largely ignoring the first. furthermore, following recent work on the theory by others, Dickie's theory has become a more protean creature than Hanfling suppose. Criticism are rarely decisive; what works against one version of the theory is ineffective against another. In this paper I will argue that the theory as standardly conceived can be broken down into two logically independent parts. Once this is done, the objections current in the literature are not decisive. I will then attempt to evaluate what I take to be the improved version. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

In this lively and accessible book, Matt Matravers considers the highly contested role of responsibility in politics, morality, and the law. He asks, what are we doing when we hold people responsible in deciding questions of distributive justice or of punishment? and considers the role of philosophy in answering this very contemporary question.

"Contexts of Justice is a study that covers and definitely exhausts the whole range of ten years of one of the most important recent philosophical discussions, that between liberals and communitarians."--Jurgen Habermas, author of Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere "Forst addresses with great insight and acuity the debates over justice between liberals and communitarians that animated the late '80s and '90s...He uses no jargon, he reasons well, his arguments are strong, clear, and accesssible, and he avoids political correctness as (...) well as its opposite."--Andrew Arato, author of Civil Society, Constitution, and Legitimacy. (shrink)

Empathy--our capacity to cognitively or affectively connect with other people's thoughts and feelings--is a concept whose definition and meaning varies widely within philosophy and other disciplines. Philosophical Perspectives on Empathy advances research on the nature and function of empathy by exploring and challenging different theoretical approaches to this phenomenon. The first section of the book explores empathy as a historiographical method, presenting a number of rich and interesting arguments that have influenced the debate from the Nineteenth Century to the present (...) day. The next group of essays broadly accepts the centrality of perspective-taking in empathy. Here the authors attempt to refine and improve this particular conception of empathy by clarifying the intentionality of the perspective taker's emotion, the perspective taker's meta-cognitive capacities, and the nature of central imagining itself. Finally, the concluding section argues for the re-evaluation, or even rejection, of empathy. These essays advance alternative theories that are relevant to current debates, such as narrative engagement and competence, attunement or the sharing of mental states, and the "second-person" model of empathy. This book features a wide range of perspectives on empathy written by experts across several different areas of philosophy. It will be of interest to researchers and upper-level students working on the philosophy of emotions across ethics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and the history of philosophy. (shrink)

The chapter concerns the relationship between the justification of criminal law and punishment and the justification of the state. It briefly surveys the debate between retributivists and consequentialists and argues that both are inappropriate when it comes to state punishment. It next turns to arguments by Vincent Chiao, Malcolm Thorburn, and Antony Duff that locate criminal law and punishment in public law. The final parts of the chapter develop an account of criminal law and punishment as best understood as constitutive (...) elements of a liberal political community necessary to ensure stability, to reinforce the commitment of the members to the rules as regulative of their plans of life, and to communicate and censure the offender for the wrong that has been done. (shrink)

In The Culture of Control Garland describes the ‘policy predicament’ of late modern society as involving the normality of high crime rates and the acknowledged limitations of the criminal justice system. This combination has triggered a contradictory range of policy responses that Garland describes as adaptive and non‐adaptive, with the non‐adaptive responses characterised as ‘denial’ and ‘acting out’. Garland’s invocation of these Freudian constructs invites a more fully developed psychoanalytic reading of the contemporary landscape of penal policy. Drawing on the (...) writings of Jung and Freud as well as more recent psychoanalytic interpretations of punishment and punitiveness, we aim in this paper to put the Culture of Control ‘on the couch’. That is, we try to draw out some of the psychoanalytic themes that Garland so tantalisingly dangles before us, and begin to flesh out the implications of a full‐fledged psychoanalytic interpretation of Garland’s argument. (shrink)

In his book _The Corded Shell_, Peter Kivy attempts to solve the problem of the expression of emotions by music. the task he sets himself is to explain away the apparent contradiction between the following propositions, each of which seems independently plausible: Music can correctly be described in terms drawn form the human emotions and the connotations of such emotion terms preclude their application to music. Most of us would, I think, accept. Why should we accept? Kivy's argument is that (...) in the central uses of emotion terms there is an equivalence between _being_ sand and _feeling _ sad. Music is insensate; it cannot feel anything and - therefore - cannot feel sad. But, according to the above equivalence, if it cannot feel sad it cannot be sad. And if it cannot be sad, music criticism which describes apiece in this way is, at best, confused. (shrink)

The primary use of such terms as "sadness" and "joy" is to refer to the mental states of people. In such cases, the claim that someone is sad is equivalent to the claim that they feel sad. However, our use of emotion terms is broader than this; a funeral is a sad occasion, a wedding is a happy event. In such cases, a justification can be given for the use of the word. For example, it is part of what is (...) meant by "sadness" that events such as funerals are an appropriate object for such emotions and the epithet is transferred. Sometimes in criticism a similar justification can be given; it explains, for example, why the death of Little Nell is sad. On other occasions such a justification is not available. A poem can express sadness without representing a sad state of affairs. More obviously, to take a medium that is not representational, a piece of music can be sad. What we need is some way of making sense of these uses of the emotion terms. (shrink)

Matravers examines how emotions form the bridge between our experience of art and of life. We often find that a particular poem, painting, or piece of music carries an emotional charge; and we may experience emotions toward, or on behalf of, a particular fictional character. Matravers shows that what these experiences have in common, and what links them to the expression of emotion in non-artistic cases, is the role played by feeling. He carries out a critical survey of (...) various accounts of the nature of fiction, attacks contemporary cognitivist accounts of expression, and offers an uncompromising defense of a controversial view about musical expression: that music works by expressing the emotions it causes its listeners to feel. (shrink)

Do fictions depend upon imagination? Derek Matravers argues against the mainstream view that they do, and offers an original account of what it is to read, listen to, or watch a narrative. He downgrades the divide between fiction and non-fiction, largely dispenses with the imagination, and in doing so illuminates a succession of related issues.

Through the last decade of the last millennium, several influential books were published on Fiction, notably among these are Kendall Walton’s Mimesis and Make B.

The destruction of cultural heritage in war is currently attracting considerable attention. ISIS’s campaign of deliberate destruction across the Middle East was met with widespread horror and calls for some kind of international response. The United States attracted criticism for both its accidental damaging of Ancient Babylon in 2015 and its failure to protect the Mosul Museum from looters in 2003. In 2016, the International Criminal Court prosecuted its first case of the destruction of heritage as a war crime. While (...) the destruction of heritage is widely condemned, there has also been condemnation of calls to mobilize our resources for the sake of heritage protection when human beings face threats to life and limb. Such issues are both philosophically rich and personally significant to a wide range of people. And yet they have been largely neglected by academic philosophers. This book makes a substantial contribution to developing this new philosophical territory. The contributors are a mixture of internationally recognized authorities in their fields and early-career researchers working in this area. Their eleven original essays investigate a variety of philosophical and ethical issues arising from the phenomenon of heritage destruction in war, including conflicts between protecting heritage and protecting people, how we ought to respond to heritage that is damaged in war, the nature of the harm caused by such damage, and the morally appropriate treatment of sites of war and conflict that have themselves become heritage sites. (shrink)

Jerrold Levinson maintains that he is a realist about aesthetic properties. This paper considers his positive arguments for such a view. An argument from Roger Scruton, that aesthetic realism would entail the absurd claim that many aesthetic predicates were ambiguous, is also considered and it is argued that Levinson is in no worse position with respect to this argument than anyone else. However, Levinson cannot account for the phenomenon of aesthetic autonomy: namely, that we cannot be put in a position (...) to make an aesthetic judgement by testimony alone. Finally, Levinson's views on the ontology of aesthetic properties are considered and found wanting. (shrink)

Jerrold Levinson maintains that he is a realist about aesthetic properties. This paper considers his positive arguments for such a view. An argument from Roger Scruton, that aesthetic realism would entail the absurd claim that many aesthetic predicates were ambiguous, is also considered and it is argued that Levinson is in no worse position with respect to this argument than anyone else. However, Levinson cannot account for the phenomenon of aesthetic autonomy: namely, that we cannot be put in a position (...) to make an aesthetic judgement by testimony alone. Finally, Levinson's views on the ontology of aesthetic properties are considered and found wanting. /// [Jerrold Levinson] Being an aesthetic realist is hard work. Derek Matravers has raised a number of concerns for the brand of aesthetic realism that I have defended in the past, and that I continue to defend, albeit with modification. Much turns on the nature of aesthetic properties, and on the reasons for acknowledging their existence. I here try to provide further illumination on both scores, suggesting in particular that many aesthetic properties can be viewed as manifest higher-order ways of appearing. Toward the end of my discussion the question of whether or not aesthetic properties are response-dependent is addressed, and I offer the tentative conclusion that some are, and some are not. (shrink)

[Derek Matravers] Jerrold Levinson maintains that he is a realist about aesthetic properties. This paper considers his positive arguments for such a view. An argument from Roger Scruton, that aesthetic realism would entail the absurd claim that many aesthetic predicates were ambiguous, is also considered and it is argued that Levinson is in no worse position with respect to this argument than anyone else. However, Levinson cannot account for the phenomenon of aesthetic autonomy: namely, that we cannot be put (...) in a position to make an aesthetic judgement by testimony alone. Finally, Levinson's views on the ontology of aesthetic properties are considered and found wanting. /// [Jerrold Levinson] Being an aesthetic realist is hard work. Derek Matravers has raised a number of concerns for the brand of aesthetic realism that I have defended in the past, and that I continue to defend, albeit with modification. Much turns on the nature of aesthetic properties, and on the reasons for acknowledging their existence. I here try to provide further illumination on both scores, suggesting in particular that many aesthetic properties can be viewed as manifest higher-order ways of appearing. Toward the end of my discussion the question of whether or not aesthetic properties are response-dependent is addressed, and I offer the tentative conclusion that some are, and some are not. (shrink)

In his book _The Nature of Fiction_ Greg Currie makes the following proposal concerning the contents of works of fiction: 'Fs' is an abbreviation of 'P is true in fiction S', where P is some proposition and S is some work of fiction. 'Fs' is true iff it is reasonable for the informed reader to infer that the fictional author of S believes that P. In reading a fiction we engage in a make-believe, and the fictional author is that fictional (...) character constructed within our make-believe whom we take to be telling us the story as known fact. Currie's view applies a general account of communication to understanding fiction. This is an advantage for a number of reasons, not least that the capacities I use to understand a novel do seem to be those I use in understanding written factual information. From what the fictional author 'says', we infer what he believes; reading a book is 'an exploration of the fictional author's belief structure'. From this simple and plausible basis, Currie gives a convincing philosophical account of the nature of fiction. Convincing though the account is, it cannot be quite right. (shrink)

This explores the role of intention in interpreting designed artefacts. The relationship between how designers intend products to be interpreted and how they are subsequently interpreted has often been represented as a process of communication. However, such representations are attacked for allegedly implying that designers' intended meanings are somehow ‘contained’ in products and that those meanings are passively received by consumers. Instead, critics argue that consumers actively construct their own meanings as they engage with products, and therefore that designers' intentions (...) are not relevant to this process. In contrast, this article asserts the validity and utility of relating intention to interpretation by exploring the nature of that relationship in design practice and consumer response. Communicative perspectives on design are thereby defended and new avenues of empirical enquiry are proposed. (shrink)

This survey article looks at various arousal theories which aim to illuminate the connection between music and the emotions.

This study described the relationships between academic class and student moral sensitivity and reasoning and between curriculum design components for ethics education and student moral sensitivity and reasoning. The data were collected from freshman (n = 506) and senior students (n = 440) in eight baccalaureate nursing programs in South Korea by survey; the survey consisted of the Korean Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire and the Korean Defining Issues Test. The results showed that moral sensitivity scores in patient-oriented care and conflict were (...) higher in senior students than in freshman students. Furthermore, more hours of ethics content were associated with higher principled thinking scores of senior students. Nursing education in South Korea may have an impact on developing student moral sensitivity. Planned ethics content in nursing curricula is necessary to improve moral sensitivity and moral reasoning of students. (shrink)

As Hume remarks, the view that aesthetic evaluations are ‘subjective’ is part of common sense—one certainly meets it often enough in conversation. As philosophers, we can distinguish the one sense of the claim (‘aesthetic evaluations are mind- dependent’) from another (‘aesthetic evaluations are relative’). A plausible reading of the former claim (‘some of the grounds of some aesthetic evaluations are response- dependent’) is true. This paper concerns the latter claim. It is not unknown, or even unexpected, to find people who (...) believe that aesthetic evaluations are culturally relative, or even agent-relative. A cultural relativist would hold that there is no way to adjudicate an apparent disagreement between, say, a Japanese critic who finds Wright of Derby clunky and unsubtle, and a British critic who finds Utamaro’s flower pictures overly pretty and sentimental. (shrink)

The relation between art and morality is one of the vexed issues of aesthetics; it has a history at least from Plato and has been written about, or commented on, by most if not all the luminaries in aesthetics—it is not coincidence that one of the most influential papers on these debates is also one of the most cited papers of this journal. Also, the (im)pertinence of moral concerns for the assessment of artworks is arguably one of the most discussed (...) philosophical issues in the public opinion (albeit not always informed by philosophical insights). The prompt for this Special Issue was the publication, over a short space of time, of four books in the area: James Harold’s Dangerous Art: On Moral Criticisms of Artwork (2020), Erich Hatala Matthes’s Drawing the Line: What to Do with the Work of Immoral Artists from Museums to Movies (2022), Ted Nannicelli’s Artistic Creation and Ethical Criticism (2020), and Mary Beth Willard’s Why It’s OK to Enjoy the Art of Immoral Artists (2021). In this issue, each of these authors provides a précis of their own book, a criticism of one of the other books, and then a defence of their own work against this criticism. Although each book is, obviously, very different, there are some overlapping concerns that make for an especially productive interaction. In particular, one thread that runs through is the current vexed issue of what attitude an audience should take on a work of art in the light of facts about the moral character of its creator. With the wars over ‘cancel culture’ raging in the popular discourse, it is important to subject this issue to detailed philosophical examination. (shrink)

What place, if any, ought cultural considerations have when we blame and punish in the criminal law? Bringing together political and legal theorists Criminal Law and Cultural Diversity offers original and diverse discussions that go to the heart of both legal and political debates about multiculturalism, human agency, and responsibility.

This paper considers the argument that we have a duty to colonise other planets because we owe it to future generations. It puts forward the view that formulations of this argument in the current literature are confused. It distinguishes (at least) four versions of the argument and shows that none of them are compelling. It draws the conclusion that, should people put forward these arguments, they ought to be more precise in their formulations and more rigorous in their defence.

In this paper I want to return to some well-worn ideas; specifically, the attempt to show that there is a distinctive subject-matter of the aesthetic via consideration of the difference between aesthetic and non-aesthetic concepts. The classic exposition of this distinction is Frank Sibley's 'Aesthetic Concepts'. Sibley claimed that, given a set of relevant terms, there will be widespread non-collusive agreement as to which are aesthetic and which non-aesthetic. Non-aesthetic terms include _'red, noisy, brackish, clammy, square, docile, curved, evanescent, intelligent, (...) faithful, derelict, tardy, freakish'_. Aesthetic terms include _'unified, lifeless, serene, sombre, dynamic, powerful, vivid, delicate, moving, trite, sentimental, tragic'_. Further examples have been given by other philosophers working in the field. Given the widespread agreement, I shall assume there is a distinction of some sort whose nature is open to be discussed. (shrink)

Many of the judgements we make of particular works of art employ the vocabulary of feelings or emotions. Typically, the critic uses terms such as 'sad', 'joyful', 'optimistic', 'gloomy', 'angry', 'lusty', 'exuberant' and so forth to describe aspects of works of art. Such descriptions generate one of the most intractable problems in aesthetics: that of specifying the relation between art and the feelings and emotions thus ascribed to them.

This paper argues that the role of the negative emotions in the appreciation of art is misunderstood. Usually taken to generate the 'paradox of tragedy', in fact the negative emotions play an essential role in creativity, and hence in art appreciation.

This introduction considers recent work in toleration; the nature and definition of toleration; and the relationship between toleration and broader questions of political philosophy.

This book aims to answer the question of why, and by what right, some people punish others. With a groundbreaking new theory, Matravers argues that the justification of punishment must be embedded in a larger political and moral theory. He also uses the problem of punishment to undermine contemporary accounts of justice.