This paper is a review essay of Daniel Berthold’s The Ethics of Authorship. Therein, Berthold depicts Hegel and Kierkegaard as endorsing two postmodern principles. The first is an ethical ideal. Authors should abdicate their traditional privileged position as arbiters of their texts’ meaning. They ought to allow readers to determine this meaning for themselves. In so doing, they will help readers attain genuine selfhood. The second principle is a claim about language. To wit, language cannot express an author’s thoughts or (...) feelings. I argue that if the claim about language is true, it renders the ethical ideal superfluous. In addition, I argue that if Berthold has identified Hegel and Kierkegaard’s actual ethics of authorship, i.e. if he has discovered the views they actually believed, then either they have failed to execute their ethical project or their views about language are false. (shrink)

Paper published on author's website available at http://www.garybanham.net/PAPERS_files/Art%20and%20Symbol%20in%20Nietzsche%27s%20Aesthetics.pdf.

I examine Kant's claim that a relation of symbolization links judgments of beauty and judgments of ‘systematicity’ in nature (that is, judgments concerning the ordering of natural forms under hierarchies of laws). My aim is to show that the symbolic relation between the two is, for Kant, much closer than many commentators think: it is not only the form but also the objects of some of our judgments of taste that symbolize the systematicity of nature. -/- .

This paper explores the dialogue between Collingwood and Guido de Ruggiero on art and art criticism. The sense of identity of these two activities, it will be argued, can be understood only if one considers the criticism of living art: The art of one who also creates, who through a critical process transforms an outline into a work of art. Thus understood a work of art belongs to the life of the spirit, if considered from the dimension of becoming. Only (...) by reliving the past can it be transformed, yet this requires an understanding of the map of human experience. This is what constitutes specular phenomenology, a phenomenology reflected in the mirror of art and scientific analysis. (shrink)

Collingwood published this article the same year that he published his first book on Aesthetics: "Outlines of a Philosophy of Art". The article can be divided in two main sections. In the first one Collingwood defends the existence of a Philosophy of Art in Plato's Republic, in close relation to the theory of reality expounded by Plato in the Book. From Collingwood's point of view, Plato understood art as "an appearance of an appearance", closely related to imagination, and as a (...) symbol of truth. The second section is a critique of Plato's conception previously presented from Collingwood's own perspective. (shrink)

Since the 19th century there has been a continuous effort to explain our aesthetic responses in terms of a capacity that, nowadays, is better known for its social use: empathy. In this paper, I attempt to bring out what empathy theories of the aesthetic experience have in common and what sort of challenges they are facing.

In the Anthropology, Kant wonders whether the genius or the individual possessing perfected judgment has contributed more to the advance of culture. In the KU, Kant answers this question definitively on the side of those with perfected judgment. Nevertheless, occurring as it does in §50 of the KU, immediately after Kant’s celebration of the genius in §49, this only raises more questions. Kant rejects the genius in favour of the individual of taste as an advancer of culture, yet under what (...) conditions could the genius contribute? And, what threat does the genius really pose to this advance, other than that of penning simple nonsense? This essay attempts to answer these questions, using key texts and overlooked Reflexionen, all of which nest Kant’s concern for the genius in the associated risks of fanaticism. I conclude that, given certain conditions, the genius can contribute in a unique manner to the advance of culture. (shrink)

The notion of the ‘free harmony of the faculties’ has baffled many of Kant's readers and also attracted much criticism. In this paper I attempt to shed light on this puzzling notion. By doing so, I aim to challenge some of the criticisms that this notion has attracted, and to point to its relevance to contemporary debates in aesthetics. While most of the literature on the free harmony is characterized by what I regard as an ‘extra-aesthetic approach’, I propose ‘an (...) aesthetic approach’ to the harmony. Such an aesthetic interpretation explains why aesthetic judgement, but not cognitive judgement, is based on a free agreement of the faculties in distinctively aesthetic terms. By contrast, an extra-aesthetic approach to Kant's aesthetic theory does not explain what it is in beautiful objects as beautiful that calls for a free agreement of the faculties. I argue that this approach is limited, and suggest an alternative to it by articulating the necessary reciprocity and explanatory interdependence between the form and value of beautiful objects and the form of the mental activity that underlies judgements of taste. My proposal is not only aesthetic, but also normative in its attempt to carve up a space for a distinct form of aesthetic normativity, the one that Kant describes as ‘free lawfulness’ or ‘lawfulness without a law’. I opt for a specifically normative variant of aesthetic interpretation because I believe that Kant is committed to the view of aesthetic judgement as normatively autonomous and irreducible. (shrink)

The current essay describes aspects of C. I. Lewis’s rarely cited contributions to aesthetics, focusing primarily on the conception of aesthetic experience developed in An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation. Lewis characterized aesthetic value as a proper subset of inherent value, which he understood as the power to occasion intrinsically valued experiences. He distinguished aesthetic experiences from experiences more generally in terms of eight conditions. Roughly, he proposed that aesthetic experiences have a highly positive, preponderantly intrinsic value realized through contemplation, (...) where the experience is indicative of the object’s reliable and characteristic inherent value. Objections to this account motivate a revised, neo-Lewisian proposal. (shrink)

“Beautiful is what, without a concept, is liked universally.” Thus ends the second Moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful in Kant’s Critique of Judgment.

If one holds that an engagement with tragedy is to some extent pleasurable, then one ought to recognize two distinct problems of tragedy. First, given the grim subject matter, what is the source of the pleasure in engaging with works of this genre? Second, is there some sort of affective irrationality involved in the experience? In this paper I reconsider Schopenhauer's theory of tragedy and offer a fuller reconstruction of his complex solution to these problems than has hitherto been given (...) by commentators. Next, I draw out Schopenhauer's distinctive contribution to thinking about these problems, in contrast to contemporary, more univocal solutions. Finally, I argue that the strength of Schopenhauer's complex solution lies in its recognition that our serious engagement with tragedy is a cognitively rich oscillation between feelings of humility and pride. (shrink)

Although William James wrote no philosophical treatise on aesthetics, he can be seen as an important source for pragmatist aesthetics. This paper reconstructs James's aesthetic views from his diverse writings that demonstrate a keen regard for the arts and for the central, pervasive importance of the aesthetic dimension of experience, a dimension he saw as closely linked to the rational and practical. Special attention is given to his path-blazing The Principles of Psychology which precedes James's explicit pragmatist stage but contains (...) all the most essential themes of pragmatist aesthetics that Dewey would later formulate with much greater detail and argumentation in Art as Experience . This paper elucidates James's treatment of these themes, argues for his influence on Dewey's aesthetics, and suggests how the Jamesian approach exemplifies a promising convergence of aesthetics with philosophy of mind. (shrink)