Online research in philosophy

Kant’s approach to the nature of artworks suggests that art has a metaphysical dimension that accounts for the two major elements of aesthetic experience. Aesthetic judgements are occasioned by experiences of pleasure and have an objective aspect since they are experiences with which other persons are expected to agree. More recently, Arthur Danto has argued that an artwork must be situated in an artworld. Pragmatists see aesthetic experience instead as integral to experience and requiring no special explanation other than association with consumatory moments of experience. I want to argue that the pragmatist approach is basically correct, that contra Danto and Kant, aesthetic experience has no special implications for metaphysics. I locate this notion of aesthetic experience in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and offer speculations about the cultural relativity of concepts of aesthetic beauty.

PREFACE One of the most difficult yet sadly neglected questions in the extant spectrum of contemporary aesthetic analysis is the relationship between ...

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.

(A) Larry Shiner address some central issues about architecturein particular, he is interested in the extent to which architectural beauty is dependent on, or independent of, various functions of buildings. What role does or should our knowledge of the functions of a building play in our aesthetic appreciation of it? I would say that a building may have various functions in addition to its aesthetic functions. One crucial question is over the way that the aesthetic and nonaesthetic functions may be interwoven, so that there may be the “aesthetic expression” of nonaesthetic functions, which is also an aesthetic function of the building. I think that there are important unsolved and unresolved issues here, of great importance in aesthetics. What exactly is it to be beautiful as something with a function. What, exactly, is the aesthetic realization of a nonaesthetic function? I hoped to make a start on these matters by invoking the notion of “dependent beauty”, roughly as Kant described it, but perhaps with some recasting. I am pleased that Shiner appreciates the utility of the Kantian dependent beauty framework for thinking about certain substantive debates about architecture. A theoretical framework should have fruitful and illuminating application in particular cases. Recasting the form/function debates in architecture as debates about different kinds of function, I think, is helpful, especially because the framework allows for more or less aesthetically significant interaction between pure aesthetic and nonaesthetic functions. Shiner pursues some architectural debates in this frameworkhe is especially insightful on issues about the reuse of buildings. (B) In Aesthetic Creation, I raised a worry about how to specify exactly which functions are relevant to the aesthetic assessment of architecture. Architectural assessment is broader than aesthetic assessment; leaking roofs are an architectural defect but not (usually) an aesthetic defect of a building..

This paper examines the use of “pleasure” as the distinguishing mark of aesthetic experience in post-Kantian philosophy. It shows how the distinctive features of aesthetic experience, such as pleasure, qualify this experience as a platform for social criticism. The key argument is that the autonomy of the aesthetic experience is not “false”, rather it is paradoxical in the strong sense that the fact of its communicative efficacy, which follows from distinctive, “autonomous” aesthetic features, necessarily loads it with functions and expectations that are external to the aesthetic moment. Kant takes a complicated path to qualify aesthetic judgment as disinterested in order that it may eloquently testify for morality. He thereby sets up the cogency of the modern pattern of looking to aesthetic experience as a locus of meaningful communication for ideas that are experientially poor or remote.

What is the nature of the aesthetic experience? Is it the same for everyone? It is possible to facilitate its occurrence? This book focuses on the psychology of the aesthetic experience and on the perception and understanding of art, suggesting ways to raise levels of visual literacy and enhance artistic enjoyment. The findings will be of importance not only to museum professionals and art educators, but also to psychologists and those interested in the nature of the aesthetic experience.

Some works of architecture have remarkable aesthetic value. According to certain philosophers, part of this value derives from the appearance of such constructions to fulfil the function for which they were built. I argue that one way of understanding the connection between function and aesthetic value resides in the concept of functional beauty. I analyse a number of recent accounts of this notion, then offer a better way of understanding it. I then focus my attention on the relation between aesthetic and moral values and claim that, if the notion of functional beauty makes any sense at all, then we have a pro tanto case for holding that moral defects in works of architecture can have aesthetic merits.

These three essays are from a collection of Mieczysław Wallis’s (1895--1975) papers on aesthetics Przeżycie i wartość (Experience and value; 1968). The first is a summary of Wallis’s views on the aesthetic experience, in which, on the one hand, he distinguishes aesthetic experience from other ways of experiencing an object (such as religious or practical) and, on the other hand, he analyzes the general features that aesthetic experience shares with other experiences and considers features characteristic of aesthetic experience alone. The second essay is Wallis’s classification of aesthetic objects, which according to his theory are equivalent neither to beautiful objects nor to artworks. The last sets out his position on aesthetic values, and probably constitutes his most important and original contribution to aesthetics.

This paper joins recent attempts to defend a notion of aesthetic experience. It argues that phenomenological facts and facts about aesthetic value support the Kantian notion that aesthetic experience lies between, but differs from, pleasures of the agreeable and pleasures stemming from cognitions. It then shows that accounts by Beardsley, Levinson, and Savile fail to resolve clear tensions that surface in attempting to characterize such an experience. An account of aesthetic experience—as involving experienced cognitions that are the bearers of value—is presented. The paper ends on a sceptical note as to whether aesthetic experience can be clearly delimited.

In this article, I shall consider the nature of our aesthetic thought and experience. I will not directly discuss the issue of whether or not we should think that reality includes mind-independent aesthetic properties and thus mind-independent aesthetic states of affairs in which objects or events possesses mind-independent aesthetic properties. I shall not tackle this purely metaphysical issue about the world head on. However, thinking about the nature of our aesthetic thought and experience unavoidably involves us in thinking about the metaphysics that we are committed to in our aesthetic thought and experience. The issue is whether or not aesthetic thought and experience is ’realist’, in the sense that we represent aesthetic properties and states of affairs in such thoughts and experiences. If so, ’common-sense’ or ’folk aesthetics’ has metaphysically dirty hands, though whether or not this common-sense metaphysics is true is another matter. In contrast with realists, there are ’non-realists’, who deny that ordinary aesthetic thought and experience have such metaphysical commitments.