Ivan is a gifted pianist, but spends most of his time at the keyboard playing simple blues progressions over and over. Sarah is fluent in French, but avoids every opportunity to converse in that language. Greg lives in a household whose kitchen offers an assortment of tantalizing foods, yet he never eats anything except bagels and cream cheese. Melinda has many friends, with whom she would enjoy socializing, but she forgoes their company to devote all her free time to video (...) games. Clive is a champion mountain climber, but has lately taken to never venturing out of the house. Esther has a masters degree in comparative literature, but now reads nothing but Harlequin romances. And Phil is partial to the Allegros in Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti, but only as background music for dancing, not as something to listen to with attention. (shrink)

In “Artistic Worth and Personal Taste,” Jerrold Levinson develops a problem for those who think we should strive to be “ideal critics” in our aesthetic lives. He then offers several solutions to this problem. I argue that his solutions miss the mark and that the problem he characterizes may not be genuine after all.

In this article, I examine whether Jerrold Levinson's intentional-historical definition of art can successfully accommodate revolutionary art. For Levinson, an item is art if it was intended to be regarded as some prior art was regarded. But revolutionary art involves a regard that is “completely distinct” from preexisting art regards. I consider and reject Levinson's proposed solutions to the problem of accommodating revolutionary art. I then defend an alternative account of transgressive art regard. Unfortunately for the intentional-historical (...) definition, the acceptance of transgressive art regard in conjunction with some recent theories of the development of human behavioral modernity may commit the definition to including nonart, prehistoric tools. (shrink)

Aesthetic Pursuits is Jerrold Levinson’s newest collection of essays and is marketed as a complement to his 2015 volume Musical Concerns. Whereas Musical Concerns was comprised exclusively of essays on music, Aesthetic Pursuits consists of essays on a variety of topics. As the broad title suggests, these topics are relatively disparate and wide-ranging, including issues of film, humour, literature, beauty and the emotions. All the essays, with one exception, were written after 2006 and offer a view into Levinson’s (...) thinking over the last decade. As a result, the collection features a more critical engagement with contemporary aestheticians than his previous volumes. (shrink)

The topic of this paper is the role played by context in art. In this regard I examine three theories linked to the names of J. Levinson, G. Currie and D. Davies. Levinson’s arguments undermine the structural theory. He finds it objectionable because it makes the individuation of artworks independent of their histories. Secondly, such a consequence is unacceptable because it fails to recognise that works are created rather than discovered. But, if certain general features of provenance are (...) always work-constitutive, as it seems that Levinson is willing to claim, these features must always be essential properties of works. On the other hand, consideration of our modal practice suggests that whether a given general feature of provenance is essential or non-essential depends upon the particular work in question or is “work relative”. D. Davies builds his performance theory on the basis of the critical evaluation of Currie’s action-type hypotheses (ATH). Performances, says Davies, are not to be identified with “basic actions” to which their times belong essentially, but with “doings” that permit of the sorts of variation in modal properties required by the work-relativity of modality. He is also a fierce critic of the contextualist account. Contextualism is in his view unable to reflect the fact that aspects of provenance bear upon our modal judgements with variable force. In the second part of the paper I consider Davies’s “modality principle”. Davies is inclined to defend the claim that labels used for designation of works are rigid designators. Such a view offers a ground for discussion about the historicity of art. What has been meant when people claim that art is an historical concept? I argue that any historical theory implies a two-dimensional notion of “art”. At the end of the paper I suggest that Davies should embrace the theory of contingent identity and not the colocationist view about the relationship that exists between a particular artwork and its physical bearer. (shrink)

In a recent essay, Jerrold Levinson defends his version of hypothetical intentionalism, which is a theory of literary interpretation, from two criticisms. The first, argued by Stephen Davies, is that it is equivalent to the value-maximizing view. The second, argued by Robert Stecker, is that there are straightforward counterexamples to HI. We will argue that Levinson does not successfully fend off either criticism, and further, that in the process of attempting to do so, creates another dilemma for his (...) view. (shrink)

Los criterios de excelencia e innovación a la hora de valorar las tecnologías de la comunicación se ven afectados por un gran número de factores, pero al final hay uno que prima sobre todos los demás: la calidad de la imágenes utilizadas, como sucede con National Geographic y Walt Disney, dos empresas de comunicación que han sido determinantes a la hora de fijar los criterios estándar de excelencia e innovación. En este contexto se reconstruye el debate contemporáneo entre Wiesing, (...) class='Hi'>Levinson, Crowther y Seel acerca de los criterios de excelencia e innovación usados a la hora de valorar la calidad de las imágenes virtuales mediáticas por parte de las tecnologías de la comunicación, teniendo en cuenta su cuádruple dimensión genético-retroductiva, simbólica, contextual y estrictamente escénica. (shrink)