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  1. Consciousness is Sublime.Takuya Niikawa - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    Does consciousness have non-instrumental aesthetic value? This paper answers this question affirmatively by arguing that consciousness is sublime. The argument consists of three premises. (1) An awe experience of an object provides prima facie justification to believe that the object is sublime. (2) I have an awe experience about consciousness through introspecting three features of consciousness, namely the mystery of consciousness, the connection between consciousness and well-being, and the phenomenological complexity of consciousness. (3) There is no good defeater of the (...)
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  • Against the Fundamentality of GOOD.Nandi Theunissen - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.
    The argument that is in question in this article concerns the would-be dependence of one form of value on another. When something is intrinsically good for someone, which is to say, directly beneficial for them, it is so because it is good simpliciter. Proponents of the argument have so-called ‘perfectionist’ values chiefly in mind: worthwhile artworks, striking natural formations, intellectual and scientific achievements. They contend that the fact that engaging with perfectionist goods is non-instrumentally good for people depends on the (...)
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  • Categorizing Art.Kiyohiro Sen - 2024 - Dissertation, University of Tokyo
    This dissertation examines the practice of categorizing works of art and its relationship to art criticism. How a work of art is categorized influences how it is appreciated and criticized. Being frightening is a merit for horror, but a demerit for lullabies. The brushstrokes in Monet's "Impression, Sunrise" (1874) look crude when seen as a Neoclassical painting, but graceful when seen as an Impressionist painting. Many of the judgments we make about artworks are category-dependent in this way, but previous research (...)
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  • Non-Monotonic Theories of Aesthetic Value.Robbie Kubala - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    Theorists of aesthetic value since Hume have traditionally aimed to justify at least some comparative judgments of aesthetic value and to explain why we thereby have more reason to appreciate some aesthetic objects than others. I argue that three recent theories of aesthetic value—Thi Nguyen’s and Matthew Strohl’s engagement theories, Nick Riggle’s communitarian theory, and Dominic McIver Lopes’ network theory—face a challenge to carry out this explanatory task in a satisfactory way. I defend a monotonicity principle according to which the (...)
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  • The Geography of Taste.Dominic Lopes, Samantha Matherne, Mohan Matthen & Bence Nanay - 2024 - New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
    Aesthetic preferences and practices vary widely between individuals and between cultures. How should aesthetics proceed if we take this fact of aesthetic diversity, rather than the presumption of aesthetic universality, as our starting point? How should we theorize the cultural origins and cultural basis of aesthetic diversity? How should we think about the value and normativity of aesthetic diversity? In an effort to model what the turn toward diversity might look like in aesthetic inquiry, each author defends a different account (...)
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  • Response-Dependence and Aesthetic Theory.Alex King - 2023 - In Chris Howard & Rach Cosker-Rowland (eds.), Fittingness. OUP. pp. 309-326.
    Response-dependence theories have historically been very popular in aesthetics, and aesthetic response-dependence has motivated response-dependence in ethics. This chapter closely examines the prospects for such theories. It breaks this category down into dispositional and fittingness strands of response-dependence, corresponding to descriptive and normative ideal observer theories. It argues that the latter have advantages over the former but are not themselves without issue. Special attention is paid to the relationship between hedonism and response-dependence. The chapter also introduces two aesthetic properties that (...)
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  • Aesthetic Value and the Practice of Aesthetic Valuing.Nick Riggle - 2024 - The Philosophical Review 133 (2):113–149.
    A theory of aesthetic value should explain what makes aesthetic value good. Current views about what makes aesthetic value good privilege the individual’s encounter with aesthetic value—listening to music, reading a novel, writing a poem, or viewing a painting. What makes aesthetic value good is its benefit to the individual appreciator. But engagement with aesthetic value is often a social, participatory matter: sharing and discussing aesthetic goods, imitating aesthetic agents, dancing, cooking, dining, or making music together. This article argues that (...)
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  • Legislating Taste.Kenneth Walden - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (4):1256-1280.
    My aesthetic judgements seem to make claims on you. While some popular accounts of aesthetic normativity say that the force of these claims is third-personal, I argue that it is actually second-personal. This point may sound like a bland technicality, but it points to a novel idea about what aesthetic judgements ultimately are and what they do. It suggests, in particular, that aesthetic judgements are motions in the collective legislation of the nature of aesthetic activity. This conception is recommended by (...)
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  • Big Tent Aesthetics.Dominic McIver Lopes - 2023 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 81 (1):87-88.
    Theoretical work on aesthetic value has taken off in the past 5 or 10 years. Since work on artistic value dates at least as far back as the first debates about the interaction between artistic and other values, aesthetic value presumably differs from artistic value. Unlike artistic value, aesthetic value is found in art, but also in nature, design, and intellectual material, even philosophy (Lopes 2022a). Indeed, continued use of “aesthetic” as a synonym for “artistic” has held up work on (...)
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  • Aesthetic Higher-Order Evidence for Subjectivists.Luis Oliveira & Chris Mag Uidhir - 2023 - British Journal of Aesthetics 63 (2):235-249.
    Aesthetic subjectivism takes the truth of aesthetic judgments to be relative to the individual making that judgment. Despite widespread suspicion, however, this does not mean that one cannot be wrong about such judgments. Accordingly, this does not mean that one cannot gain higher-order evidence of error and fallibility that bears on the rationality of the aesthetic judgment in question. In this paper, we explain and explore these issues in some detail.
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  • Reasons, normativity, and value in aesthetics.Alex King - 2021 - Philosophy Compass 17 (1):1-17.
    Discussions of aesthetic reasons and normativity are becoming increasingly popular. This piece outlines six basic questions about aesthetic reasons, normativity, and value and discusses the space of possible answers to these questions. I divide the terrain into two groups of three questions each. First are questions about the shape of aesthetic reasons: what they favour, how strong they are, and where they come from. Second are relational questions about how aesthetic reasons fit into the wider normative landscape: whether they are (...)
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  • Two Concepts of Groove: Musical Nuances, Rhythm, and Genre.Evan Malone - 2022 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 80 (3):345-354.
    Groove, as a musical quality, is an important part of jazz and pop music appreciative practices. Groove talk is widespread among musicians and audiences, and considerable importance is placed on generating and appreciating grooves in music. However, musicians, musicologists, and audiences use groove attributions in a variety of ways that do not track one consistent underlying concept. I argue that that there are at least two distinct concepts of groove. On one account, groove is ‘the feel of the music’ and, (...)
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  • The aesthetics of food.Alexandra Plakias - 2021 - Philosophy Compass 16 (11):e12781.
    Current debates in food aesthetics are moving away from a focus on whether food is art, and worries about the subjectivity and objectivity of taste, and towards questions about food's aesthetic properties, the cultural and social significance of food, our modes of aesthetic engagement with food, and issues involving cultural appropriation and the authenticity of dishes.
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  • Toward a Communitarian Theory of Aesthetic Value.Nick Riggle - 2022 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 80 (1):16-30.
    Our paradigms of aesthetic value condition the philosophical questions we pose and hope to answer about it. Theories of aesthetic value are typically individualistic, in the sense that the paradigms they are designed to capture, and the questions to which they are offered as answers, center the individual’s engagement with aesthetic value. Here I offer some considerations that suggest that such individualism is a mistake and sketch a communitarian way of posing and answering questions about the nature of aesthetic value.
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  • Aesthetic Commitments and Aesthetic Obligations.Anthony Cross - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8 (38):402-422.
    Resolving to finish reading a novel, staying true to your punk style, or dedicating your life to an artistic project: these are examples of aesthetic commitments. I develop an account of the nature of such commitments, and I argue that they are significant insofar as they help us manage the temporally extended nature of our aesthetic agency and our relationships with aesthetic objects. At the same time, focusing on aesthetic commitments can give us a better grasp on the nature of (...)
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  • Let’s be Liberal: An Alternative to Aesthetic Hedonism.Antonia Peacocke - 2021 - British Journal of Aesthetics 61 (2):163-183.
    Aesthetic value empiricism claims that the aesthetic value of an object is grounded in the value of a certain kind of experience of it. The most popular version of value empiricism, and a dominant view in contemporary philosophical aesthetics more generally, is aesthetic hedonism. Hedonism restricts the grounds of aesthetic value to the pleasure enjoyed in the right kind of experience. But hedonism does not enjoy any clear advantage over a more permissive alternative version of value empiricism. This alternative is (...)
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  • Aesthetic obligations.Robbie Kubala - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 15 (12):e12712.
    Are there aesthetic obligations, and what would account for their binding force if so? I first develop a general, domain‐neutral notion of obligation, then critically discuss six arguments offered for and against the existence of aesthetic obligations. The most serious challenge is that all aesthetic obligations are ultimately grounded in moral norms, and I survey the prospects for this challenge alongside three non‐moral views about the source of aesthetic obligations: individual practical identity, social practices, and aesthetic value primitivism. I conclude (...)
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  • Aesthetic practices and normativity.Robbie Kubala - 2021 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (2):408–425.
    What should we do, aesthetically speaking, and why? Any adequate theory of aesthetic normativity must distinguish reasons internal and external to aesthetic practices. This structural distinction is necessary in order to reconcile our interest in aesthetic correctness with our interest in aesthetic value. I consider three case studies—score compliance in musical performance, the look of a mowed lawn, and literary interpretation—to show that facts about the correct actions to perform and the correct attitudes to have are explained by norms internal (...)
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  • The concept of the aesthetic.James Shelley - 2017 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Introduced into the philosophical lexicon during the Eighteenth Century, the term ‘aesthetic’ has come to be used to designate, among other things, a kind of object, a kind of judgment, a kind of attitude, a kind of experience, and a kind of value. For the most part, aesthetic theories have divided over questions particular to one or another of these designations: whether artworks are necessarily aesthetic objects; how to square the allegedly perceptual basis of aesthetic judgments with the fact that (...)
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  • A Sensible Experientialism?James Grant - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (1):53–79.
    Experientialism in aesthetics is the view that the artistic merit or the aesthetic value of something is determined by the final value of certain experiences of it. These are usually specified as experiences of it with understanding and appreciation. Until recently, experientialism was the dominant view. Not anymore. Experientialists are now subject to a barrage of objections, many of which they have not answered. Here I argue that all of these objections fail. I develop a new form of experientialism that (...)
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  • Art Forms Emerging: An Approach to Evaluative Diversity in Art.Mohan Matthen - 2020 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 78 (3):303-318.
    An artwork in one culture and form, say European classical music, cannot be evaluated in the context of another, say Hindustani music. While a person educated in the traditions of European music can rationally evaluate and discuss her response to a string quartet by Beethoven, her response to music in a foreign culture is merely subjective. She might "like" the latter, but her response is merely subjective. In this paper, I discuss the role of artforms: why response can be "objectively" (...)
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  • Edith Landmann-Kalischer on Aesthetic Demarcation and Normativity.Samantha Matherne - 2020 - British Journal of Aesthetics 60 (3):315-334.
    Two perennial questions in aesthetics, among others, are the demarcation question, viz., what, if anything, distinguishes the aesthetic domain from the cognitive or moral domains, and the normative question, viz., what kind of normativity, if any, does the aesthetic domain involve. Although recent attempts to answer these questions can be found in contemporary literature, in this paper I examine the answers defended by the early phenomenologist Edith Landmann-Kalischer. I show that Landmann-Kalischer answers the demarcation question by blending together a cognitivist (...)
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  • Deweyan Experiences and the Aesthetics of Remembering.André Sant’Anna - forthcoming - International Journal of Philosophical Studies:1-21.
    My goal in this paper is to argue that some cases of autobiographical remembering can be, and sometimes are, experienced aesthetically. Building on a Deweyan approach to the nature of aesthetic experiences, I show how Dewey conceived of aesthetic experiences as having a cumulative and progressive structure—I call experiences with such structure Deweyan experiences—and how that structure is replicated in some cases of autobiographical remembering in virtue of their having narrative structure. I also discuss the relationship between remembering and other (...)
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  • Moving for Grace: Motor-Aesthetic Properties and Dance Appreciation.Ian Heckman - forthcoming - British Journal of Aesthetics.
    Bodily responses to dance have sparked recent controversy in philosophy. Some people claim that they have no place in dance appreciation. Some use evidence from cognitive science to support the view that bodily responses have an important place in dance appreciation. However, this paper focuses not on whether motor responses to dance are part of dance appreciation but on their role in dance appreciation. It argues that many aesthetic qualities important to dance appreciation, such as gracefulness, are motor-aesthetic qualities, meaning (...)
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  • Disinterested Pleasure and Beauty: Perspectives from Kantian and Contemporary Aesthetics.Larissa Berger (ed.) - 2023 - Boston: De Gruyter.
    The conception of disinterested pleasure is not only central to Kant’s theory of beauty but also highly influential in contemporary philosophical discourse about beauty. However, it remains unclear, what exactly disinterested pleasure is and what role it plays in experiences of beauty. This volume sheds new light on the conception of disinterested pleasure from the perspectives of both Kant scholarship and contemporary aesthetics. In the first part, the focus is on Kant’s theory of beauty as grounded on the conception of (...)
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  • Failure as Omission: Missed Opportunities and Retroactive Aesthetic Judgements.Elisabeth Schellekens - 2023 - Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 60 (2):131-144.
    In this paper I distinguish between different kinds of failures of aesthetic judgements with a view to exploring a form of failure that involves the outright omission of aesthetic judgement. Such omissions come to pass when an object of attention could or ought to have been experienced and judged aesthetically but where such an experience or judgement simply failed to arise, and can be traced back to at least three kinds of reason: (1) lack of aesthetic quality; (2) lack of (...)
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  • Objects of Authority: A Postformalist Aesthetics.Jakub Stejskal - 2022 - New York, USA: Routledge.
    Is the celebrated elegance of Cycladic marble figurines an effect their Early Bronze Age producers intended? Can one adequately appreciate an Assyrian regal statue described by a cuneiform inscription as beautiful? What to make of the apparent aesthetic richness of the traditional cultures of Melanesia, which, however, engage in virtually no recognizable aesthetic discourse? Questions such as these have been formulated and discussed by scholars of remote cultures against the backdrop of a general scepticism about the prospects of escaping the (...)
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