Online research in philosophy

Hume's Aesthetic Theory examines the neglected area of the development of aesthetics in empiricist thinking, exploring the link between the empiricist background of aesthetics in the eighteenth century and the work of David Hume.

The theory of taste faces a neglected epistemological problem. The cultivation of taste is functionally dependent upon self-knowledge of aesthetic satisfaction and its causes, in other words, knowing what we like and why. However, reservations about the reliability of our knowledge of our responses, commonplace in social psychology and the philosophy of mind, pose serious obstacles to the theory of taste. I argue for a weak fallibilism with respect to introspective beliefs about aesthetic experience. I call for a naturalistic approach to the theory of taste that accounts for the unreliability of aesthetic self-knowledge.

Kant and the Claims of Taste, published here for the first time in paperback in a revised version, has become, since its initial publication in 1979, the standard commentary on Kant's aesthetic theory. The book offers a detailed account of Kant's views on judgments of taste, aesthetic pleasure, imagination and many other topics. For this new edition, Paul Guyer has provided a new foreword and has added a chapter on Kant's conception of fine art. This re-issue will complement the author's companion volume, Kant and the Experience of Freedom, which places Kant's aesthetics in its historical context and examines the fundamental connection between Kant's aesthetics and his moral theory.

Kant's use of the leading thread of his table of logical forms of judgment to analyze judgments of taste yields more results than Allison's account allows. It reveals in judgments of taste the combination of two judgments: a descriptive judgment about the object, and a normative judgment about the judging subjects. Core arguments of Kant's critique of taste receive new light from this analysis.

Beauty is an important part of our lives. Ugliness too. It is no surprise then that philosophers since antiquity have been interested in our experiences of and judgments about beauty and ugliness. They have tried to understand the nature of these experiences and judgments, and they have also wanted to know whether these experiences and judgments were legitimate. Both these projects took a sharpened form in the twentieth century, when this part of our lives came under a sustained attack in both European and American intellectual circles. Much of the discourse about beauty since the Eighteenth century had deployed a notion of the ‘aesthetic’, and so that notion in particular came in for criticism. This disdain for the aesthetic may have roots in a broader cultural Puritanism, which fears the connection between the aesthetic and pleasure. Even to suggest, in the recent climate, that an artwork might be good because it is pleasurable, as opposed to cognitively, morally or politically beneficial, is to court derision. The twentieth century has not been kind to the notions of beauty or the aesthetic. Nevertheless, some thinkers — philosophers, as well as others in the study of particular arts — have persisted in thinking about beauty and the aesthetic in a traditional way. In the first part of this essay, I look at the particular rich account of judgments of beauty given to us by Immanuel Kant. The notion of a ‘judgment of taste’ is central to Kant's account and also to virtually everyone working in traditional aesthetics; so I begin by examining Kant's characterisation of the judgment of taste. In the second part, I look at the issues that twentieth century thinkers have raised. I end by drawing on Kant's accout of the judgement of taste to consider whether the notion of the aesthetic is viable.

George Dickie argues that Hume's principles of taste have value-laden properties as their subjects, including those properties we now refer to as ‘aesthetic’. I counter that Hume's principles have value-neutral properties as their subjects, and so exclude those properties we now refer to as ‘aesthetic’. Dickie also argues that Hume's essay on taste provides ‘the conceptual means for recognizing the problem of the interaction of aesthetic properties with other properties of artworks’. I counter that the very passages Dickie takes to provide these conceptual means in fact suggest that Hume recognizes no such problem.

This book constitutes one of the most important contributions to recent Kant scholarship. In it, one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Kant, Henry Allison, offers a comprehensive, systematic, and philosophically astute account of all aspects of Kant's views on aesthetics. The first part of the book analyses Kant's conception of reflective judgment and its connections with both empirical knowledge and judgments of taste. The second and third parts treat two questions that Allison insists must be kept distinct: the normativity of pure judgments of taste, and the moral and systematic significance of taste. The fourth part considers two important topics often neglected in the study of Kant's aesthetics: his conceptions of fine art, and the sublime.

Acquired taste is an integral part of the cultivation of taste. In this essay, I identify acquired taste as a form of intentional belief acquisition or adaptive preference formation, distinguishing it from ordinary or discovered taste. This account of acquired taste allows for the role of self-deception in the development of taste. I discuss the value of acquired taste in the overall development of taste as well as the ways that an over-reliance on acquired taste can distort overall taste.

Can there be a philosophy of taste? This paper opens by raising some metaphilosophical questions about the study of taste – what it consists of and what method we should adopt in pursuing it. It is suggested that the best starting point for philosophising about taste is against the background of 18th-century epistemology and philosophy of mind, and the conceptual tools this new philosophical paradigm entails. The notion of aesthetic taste in particular, which emerges from a growing sense of dissatisfaction with an undifferentiated category of taste, comes to be set apart from gustatory taste on account of its normativity and aspirations to objectivity. The paradox of taste, as found in Hume and Kant, is examined, and shown to be highly relevant to contemporary metaphysical debate within aesthetics. Specifically, this paper argues that both Realists and Anti-Realists rely more heavily than assumed on the idea of taste.