An anthology of contemporary readings in analytic aesthetics, this reference reflects the relationships among the central aesthetic concerns of recent years. Providing a new perspective on the contemporary philosophy of art, this volume examines the challenge of Postmodernism and how it may or may not affect the future of analytic aesthetics... offers a case study of the progress that has been made in handling the problem of expression in the arts... reconceptualizes the concepts of the art work, its properties, and (...) our experience and evaluation of it -- to take into account an expanding cultural, sociological contextualization, i.e., art as a culturally emergent product of social institutions and conventions... features several readings organized around clusters of writers discussing each other's ideas and proposals, including: Beardsley, Dickie, and Blizek -- Wolterstorff, Levinson, and Bender -- Stolnitz and Dickie -- Beardsley, Margolis, and Novitz -- and Sibley and Dickie. Suitable for professionals in the art industry and anyone interested in the philosophy or aesthetics of art. (shrink)

According to Keith Lehrer’s coherence theory, knowledge is true acceptance whose justification is undefeated by a falsehood. It has recently become clear that Lehrer’s handling of important Gettier-inspired problems depends upon his position that only falsehoods accepted by the subject can act as defeaters of knowledge. I argue against this and present an example in which an unreckoned truth---one neither believed nor believed to be false by the subject---defeats knowledge. I trace the negative implications of this matter for the coherence (...) theory. (shrink)

We have argued that Lehrer's definitions of coherence and justification have serious technical defects. As a result, the definition of justification is both too weak and too strong. We have suggested solutions for some of the problems, but others seem irremediable. We would also argue more generally that if coherence is anything like what Lehrer's theory says it is, then coherence is neither necessary nor sufficient for justification. While our current objections are directed at the ‘letter’ of Lehrer's theory, other (...) criticisms can be aimed at its very ‘spirit’. We would argue that coherence is unnecessary for justification because of the existence of ‘basic beliefs’, those about self-presenting states (‘I have a tingling sensation in my leg’) or self-evident truths (‘All men are men’). Such beliefs may be justified even though there are no other propositions in the subject's acceptance system that makes them more probable than competitors. Coherence is, moreover, insufficient for justification, because it ignores the inferential structure of the subject's acceptance system, and requires no justification of any kind for the subject's acceptance system itself. But we must develop these more fundamental objections on another occasion. (shrink)

Although by the middle of the book beauty has been defined as a real, though general, property of things and phenomena when they are viewed through our cognitive desire to organize the world, and although beauty is referred to throughout, with great emphasis placed on the beauty of theories, this book is not a discursus on the nature of beauty in the traditional sense established in the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century, as the book’s title might imply to some. Instead, (...) in typical Zemachean fashion, hard-headed analytic techniques from logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language are applied to an array of aesthetic issues ranging from the ontology of aesthetic properties and the nature of aesthetic judgments to the fearing of fictional entities and the place of truth in aesthetics. The books defends a pervasively realistic view on these and many other matters, and does so with clear and provocative argumentation of real metaphysical sophistication. The book is a tour de force of analytic aesthetics and a welcome and courageous antidote to the current trends of relativism and deconstruction. (shrink)