Dear Derek,
Thank you for your e-mail. Re. anecdote/Isenheim: I meant that in the good sense of the term, an individual incident that points to an intuitive perception of a wider reality. The same for your Dostoevsky-bashing Edwardian.

The beginning of semester has turned into an avalanche I expected, so I will have to keep my reply brief.

It seems that my response should be in two parts.

How can we re-unify the aesthetic sciences: in fairness, I think this should be the subject of a separate post.

Should we attempt to re-unify the aesthetic sciences? Yes; I have two reasons.

1. One reason came through with some of Bryan's posts, when he suggested, in a robustly positivist manner, that if a generally agreed upon definition of Art and/or aesthetics is not available (and perhaps never will be), then Art and the philosophy of Art are hoaxes. Although I disagree with this strongly (I edited a book once in which one of the contributors suggested that English should be mandated as the sole language of international scholarship on the grounds that universal consensus on all issues could be reached if only the inherently imprecise languages of the Continent could be excluded from the conversation), the sad fact is that we live in an age of a no-holds-barred revolution in quantitative reductionism and (neo-) materialist determinism (Dawkins, Hawking, Churchland, Dennett, Sam Harris et al). If aesthetics is to retain its status as a ''legitimate' field of study (or a 'principled' discipline), then I think that the quest to re-unify is quite timely (although perhaps ultimately futile).

I am also in very strong agreement with everything that you have said about the analytic squad. Unfortunately, the seem to hold the high ground at the moment and are hard at work to ostracize as trivial anything that does not conform strictly to their quasi-mathematical prescriptions. Even the Continental philosophers are jettisoning traditional (Humanist) modes of thought in the face of the onslaught of 'scientism' (e.g. Speculative Realism).

2. An attempt to re-unify might shore up the position and role of the 'art critic''. As I argued in an earlier post, an essential function of academic training in Art theory is to police the orthodox meta-principle of a hierarchy of values and the correct and proper delimitations of 'taste'. We have had some interesting exchanges on exactly this point: R&B versus classical music, the detective novel as high literature. I have always been skeptical of the canon but, by the same token, I am equally suspicious of the post-modern urge to nihilistically relativize everything and anything. My own preferred approach, when teaching subjects like Law and Literature or Noir crime fiction, is to apply, or 'import' the critical heuristics of High criticism and apply it systematically to a 'low' subject in order to see what kind of results I can achieve and what conclusions I can draw. Here, I feel that a re-unification, especially one based on phenomenological principles, might be fruitful--or at least interesting.