Despite a prevalence of articles exploring links between sport and art in the 1970s and 1980s, philosophers in the new millennium pay relatively little explicit attention to issues related to aesthetics generally. After providing a synopsis of earlier debates over the questions ‘is sport art?’ and ‘are aesthetics implicit to sport?’, a pragmatically informed conception of aesthetic experience will be developed. Aesthetic experience, it will be argued, vitally informs sport ethics, game logic, and participant meaning. Finally, (...) I will argue that embodying pragmatic conceptions of art as its ideal metaphor re-opens space to best realize the deep potential of sport as a meaningful human practice. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to examine the possible relationships between the different dimensions of aesthetics on the one hand, and medical practice and medical ethics on the other hand. Firstly, I consider whether the aesthetic perception of the human body is relevant for medical practice. Secondly, a possible analogy between the artistic process and medical action is examined. The third section concerns the comparison between medical ethical judgements and aesthetic judgement of taste. It is concluded that (...) the mutual relevance between the aesthetic sphere, moral judgement and medical practice can be understood only if we recognize these spheres as distinct. (shrink)

The French phenomenologist Michel Henry sees a similarity between the primordial experience of what he calls ‘Life’ and the aesthetic experience occasioned by Wassily Kandinsky’s abstract art. The triple aim of this essay is to explain and assess how Henry interprets Kandinsky’s abstract art and theory; what the consequences of his interpretation mean for the theory of the experience of abstract art; and what doubts and questions emerge from Henry’s interpretations of Kandinsky’s theory and practice. Despite (...) its containing many interesting ideas, Henry’s phenomenological approach is insufficient to describe the aesthetic experience of Kandinsky’s abstract art. For Henry, aesthetic experience is corporeal, primordial, non-intentional, and independent of knowledge and culture.By contrast, I believe that it is possible and more suitable to connect the direct, corporeal, and affective character of the aesthetic experience of abstract art with intentionality and embeddedness in culture and knowledge. (shrink)

Richard Shusterman; Aesthetic Experience: From Analysis to Eros, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 64, Issue 2, 18 April 2005, Pages 217–229.

Some of our aesthetic experiences are of artworks. Some others are of everyday scenes. The question I examine in this paper is about the relation between these two different kinds of aesthetic experience. I argue that the experience of artworks can dispose us to experience everyday scenes in an aesthetic manner both short-term and long-term. Finally, I examine what constraints this phenomenon puts on different accounts of aesthetic experience.

"George Hagman looks anew at psychoanalytic ideas about art and beauty through the lens of current developmental psychology that recognizes the importance of attachment and affiliative motivational systems. In dialogue with theorists such as Freud, Ehrenzweig, Kris, Rank, Winnicott, Kohut, and many others, Hagman brings the psychoanalytic understanding of aesthetic experience into the 21st century. He amends and extends old concepts and offers a wealth of stimulating new ideas regarding the creative process, the ideal, beauty, ugliness, and -perhaps (...) his most original contribution-the sublime. Especially welcome is his grounding of aesthetic experience in intersubjectivity and health rather than individualism and pathology. His emphasis on form rather than the content of an individual's aesthetic experience is a stimulating new direction for psychoanalytic theory of art. With this work Hagman stands in the company of his predecessors with this deeply-learned, sensitively conceived, and provocative general theory of human aesthetic experience." Ellen Dissanayake, author of "Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began" and "Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why.". (shrink)

What is beautiful or ugly vary from one person another, from time to time and from culture to culture. However, at the same time, people are certain that there are aesthetic properties in the nature, artworks and other persons and, furthermore, they can be perceived by the naked eye. This article argues that experience does not reveal the aesthetic properties of the objects.

The aim of this article is to argue that what is distinctive about aesthetic experiences has to do with what we do -- not with our perception or evaluation, but with our action and, more precisely, with our interaction with whatever we are aesthetically engaging with. This view goes against the mainstream inasmuch as aesthetic engagement is widely held to be special precisely because it is detached from the sphere of the practical. I argue that taking the interactive (...) nature of aesthetic experiences seriously can help us to understand some of the most important features of aesthetic experiences and the role they play in our life: their normativity, their crucial role in the ways in which the aesthetic domain looms large in our self-image and in the social dimension of aesthetic engagement. (shrink)

A Deweyan account of aesthetic experience countering skepticism about aesthetic experience after George Dickie, art-centered views after Arthur Danto and Noel Carroll, and disinterest theories after Kant. This account of aesthetic experience provides an integrated account of the aesthetic for both art and the everyday. Aesthetic experience is a critical, adaptive felt response, revealing value in the world. It is the live experience of value for human beings. An account of (...) aesthetic experience as revelatory of value is vital in distinguishing human from artificial intelligence (AI). (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to examine the practice of describing intellectual pursuits in aesthetic terms, and to investigate whether this practice can be accounted for in the framework of a standard conception of aesthetic experience. Following a discussion of some historical approaches, the paper proposes a way of conceiving of aesthetic experience as both epistemically motivating and epistemically inventive. It is argued that the aesthetics of intellectual pursuits should be considered as central (...) rather than marginal to our philosophical accounts of aesthetic experience, and that our views about the relation between the aesthetic and cognitive domains should be reconfigured accordingly. (shrink)

In this article, I engage with aesthetic experience as a central hermeneutic endeavour for theorising performing arts audiences in the Arab region. I argue that a critical engagement with Arab performing arts audiences’ aesthetic experiences necessitates both an archaeological manoeuver and a re-articulation of two keywords: ‘experience’ and ‘everyday’. The article advances, using evidence from research, that allowing the audiences of performing arts in the Arab region to speak may be a step towards democratising the triangular (...) meaning making process among the performer, the audience, and the art institution, and a means towards dislocating, if not liberating, the categories Arab culture, art, performance, and experience, from their teleological articulations. (shrink)

Aesthetic experience has been relativized and marginalized by recent social and cultural theory. As less attention has been paid to understanding the nature of aesthetic experience than mapping the distributed social correlates of tastes, its transformative potential and capacity to animate actors’ imaginations and actions goes unexplored. In this paper we draw upon a large number of in-depth interviews with performing arts audiences around Australia to investigate the language and discourse used to describe aesthetic experiences. (...) In particular, we begin with theorizations of the subject-object nexus within object-relations theory to consider the transformative potential of aesthetic experience. Using these literatures, and extending them to others within sociology of the arts and materiality, our focus is on the way aesthetic experience can fuse human subjects with aesthetic objects. We examine how viewers take an aesthetic object into themselves and in turn project themselves into the aesthetic object by various visual and imaginative techniques. Our theoretical and empirical analysis bears out the constructive and productive capacity of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical analysis of Robert Stecker’s account of aesthetic experience and its relation to aesthetic and artistic values. The analysis will demonstrate that Stecker’s formulation of aesthetic experience as it stands is incompatible with his arguments for nonaesthetic artistic values. Rather than multiplying the values associated with aesthetic experience, a deeper understanding of that experience will best serve to clarify problems at the core of the discipline.

This article highlights the distinction between the ‘art of nursing’ and ‘fine art’. While something in the nature of nursing can be described as ‘the art of nursing’, it is not to be misunderstood as ‘fine art’ or craft. Therefore, the term ‘aesthetic’ in relation to nursing should not be linked to the aesthetic of modern art, but instead to a broader and more general meaning of the word. The paper's main focus is the aesthetic experience, (...) which is treated in a hermeneutic way and elucidated from classical sources and the philosophy of nursing and from Art. The paper argues that the pioneers used the term ‘art of nursing’ in a metaphorical way to say something more specific on the nature of nursing. The term illustrates the nurse's ability to practise at the highest possible level of excellence. (shrink)

Is aesthetics a product of evolution? Are human aesthetic behaviors in fact evolutionary adaptations? The creation of artistic objects and experiences is an important aesthetic behavior. But so is the perception of aesthetic phenomena qua aesthetic. The question of evolutionary aesthetics is whether humans have evolved the capacity not only to make beautiful things but also to appreciate the aesthetic qualities in things. Are our near-universal love of music and cute baby animals essential to our (...) species’ evolutionary development, which took place over thousands of years? In other words, do aesthetic practice and appreciation help people to survive or reproduce? Do aesthetic behaviors help to propel natural selection? If so, what does that tell us about ourselves as human beings? What does it tell us about art, our other aesthetic practices, and aesthetic experience? (shrink)

[Richard Glauser] Shaftesbury's theory of aesthetic experience is based on his conception of a natural disposition to apprehend beauty, a real 'form' of things. I examine the implications of the disposition's naturalness. I argue that the disposition is not an extra faculty or a sixth sense, and attempt to situate Shaftesbury's position on this issue between those of Locke and Hutcheson. I argue that the natural disposition is to be perfected in many different ways in order to be (...) exercised in the perception of the different degrees of beauty within Shaftesbury's hierarchy. This leads to the conclusion that the exercise of the disposition depends, from case to case, on many different cognitive and affective conditions, that are realised by the collaborative functionings of our ordinary faculties. Essential to Shaftesbury's conception of aesthetic experience is a disinterested, contemplative love, that causes (or contains) what we may call a 'disinterested pleasure', but also an interested pleasure. I argue that, within any given aesthetic experience, the role of the disinterested pleasure is secondary to that of the disinterested love. However, an important function of the disinterested pleasure is that, in combination with the interested pleasure, it leads one to aspire to pass from the aesthetic experience of lower degrees of beauty to the experience of higher ones in the hierarchy. /// [Anthony Savile] (1) If Shaftesbury is to be seen as the doyen of modern aesthetics, his most valuable legacy to us may not so much be his viewing aesthetic response as a sui generis disinterested delight as his insistence on its turning 'wholly on [experience of] what is exterior and foreign to ourselves'. Not that we cannot experience ourselves, or what is our own, as a source of such admiration. Rather our responses, favourable or no, are improperly grounded in any essentially reflexive, or first-personal, ways of taking what engages us. The suggestion is tested against the case of Narcissus. (2) Glauser interestingly emphasizes Shaftesbury's neo-Platonic conception of a hierarchy of aesthetic experience that culminates in the joyful contemplation of God. That hierarchy must be something that is less unitary and systematic than Shaftesbury himself had supposed, even when his emphasis on the tie between aesthetic pleasure and contemplative experience is allowed to extend beyond perception and to encompass episodes of thought itself. (shrink)

The brain constructs within itself an understanding of its surround which constitutes its own world. This is described as its Double in the frame of the dissipative quantum model of brain, where the perception-action arc in the Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception finds its formal description. In the dialog with the Double, the continuous attempt to reach the equilibrium shows that the real goal pursued by the brain activity is the aesthetical experience, the most harmonious “to-be-in-the-world” reached through reciprocal actions, (...) the aesthetical dimension characterized by the “pleasure” of the perception. Aesthetical pleasure unavoidably implies disclosure, to manifest “signs”, artistic communication. An interpersonal, collective level of consciousness then arises, a larger stage where the actors are mutually dependent. The coherent structure of the brain background state manifests itself in the auto-similarity properties of fractal structures. These are observed to occur also in a large number of natural phenomena and systems. The conception of Nature divided in separated domains is replaced by the vision of Nature unified by laws of form implied by the underlying quantum dynamics of the coherent vacuum, an integrated ecological vision. (shrink)

In his attack on the notion of immediate experience, Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that aesthetic experience should be absorbed into hermeneutics because alone it cannot account for the historical nature of experience ; predicated on an ontological theory of art, the unfathomable, therefore, is the sense we have of these infinite hermeneutic depths. I argue that this account is methodologically and existentially unacceptable: methodologically because it is overly speculative, and existentially because it betrays authentic existence. I critique (...) Gadamer from the perspective of William James’ Pragmatism and argue, inverting Gadamer’s main thesis, that hermeneutics should be reduced to aesthetic experience. The meaning that emerges in aesthetic experience does not ‘rise up’ from the depths but is immanent in what James calls ‘pure experience’. The unfathomable, therefore, is not a glimpse into the metaphysical abyss but a phenomenological insight into the immanent structure of experience. (shrink)

In this article I divide theories of aesthetic experience into three sorts: the affectoriented approach, the axiologically oriented approach, and the content-oriented approach. I then go on to defend a version of the content-oriented approach.

The question of whether or not beauty exists in nature is a philosophical problem. In particular, there is the question of whether artworks, persons, or nature has aesthetic qualities. Most people say that they care about their own beauty. Moreover, they judge another person's appearance from an aesthetic point of view using aesthetic concepts. However, aesthetic judgements are not objective in the sense that the experience justifies their objectivity. By analysing Monroe C. Beardsley's theory of (...) the objectivity of aesthetic qualities, I examine whether there are really beautiful and ugly persons in the world. I will criticize the way analytic philosophers judge people and art from an aesthetic perspective. If there are no aesthetic qualities in the world, nobody can judge someone beautiful or ugly without oppression. Aesthetic judgement is exercise of power. (shrink)

This article highlights the distinction between the ‘art of nursing’ and ‘fine art’. While something in the nature of nursing can be described as ‘the art of nursing’, it is not to be misunderstood as ‘fine art’ or craft. Therefore, the term ‘aesthetic’ in relation to nursing should not be linked to the aesthetic of modern art, but instead to a broader and more general meaning of the word. The paper's main focus is the aesthetic experience, (...) which is treated in a hermeneutic way and elucidated from classical sources and the philosophy of nursing and from Art. The paper argues that the pioneers used the term ‘art of nursing’ in a metaphorical way to say something more specific on the nature of nursing. The term illustrates the nurse's ability to practise at the highest possible level of excellence. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy of art generally assumes that aesthetic experience is constituted by a certain ontological-phenomenological structure: the apprehension by a subject of an object. This article explores an underexamined critique of this philosophical model found within the black intellectual and artistic tradition. I will specifically focus on the version of this critique proposed by the similarly underexamined black philosophers Adrian Piper and Fred Moten. This critique, which I dub the subjectivizing concern, takes issue with the notion of ontological (...) distance that I argue defines the subject-object model. I define ontological distance as the removal and alienation of the subject’s fundamental sense of self from that of so-called objects. The subjectivizing concern holds that this distance is not value neutral. Rather, the subject-object model is considered to be directly entwined with projects and practices of aesthetic and extraesthetic racism and antiblackness. After offering Piper’s own model of aesthetic experience—which she dubs catalysis—as an alternative, I propose three possible ways in which the subject-object model can be conceived as tied to antiblack racism. (shrink)

Experiencing aesthetics and aesthetic experience has, for a long time, been perceived as the purpose and goal of art. The aesthetic features of a work of art have been the only criteria used in its evaluation. However, these modernist aspects cannot be applied to the conceptual and neo-avant-garde art of the 2nd half of the 20th century that has not only brought a radical change in the artistic form, but, especially, the ontological nature of the work itself. (...) Modernist theories of art and normative rules which apply to perceptual art are no longer able to reflect the changes brought by the art of mind. The traditional history of aesthetics oriented towards the definition of art should, therefore, overlap with, for example, the history of ideas. In the text, I will thus focus on the crucial moments which stood on the border between the old, modernist traditions, and the new, which has brought radical changes into the study of aesthetics as well as the theory of art. The text is focused on three issues: ontological issues of art, the criticism of aestheticism and tautology as a possible problem in interpretation, which will be dealt with from the comparative viewpoint of the art of sense and art of mind. (shrink)

Vasily Sesemann’s aesthetics is a transcendental philosophy that seeks to answer the question of how an experience of beauty is possible. Sesemann insists that aesthetics should focus on the study of the aesthetic object itself, and through it go to the problematics of the act of perception and creativity. Sesemann states that not only the relationship between the work of art and the perceiver is important in order to understand the aesthetic object, but also the relationship between (...) the work of art and the creator. The aesthetic object in its sedimented form not only retains indications of the act of creation, but also makes demands on the perceiving subject. Aesthetic objects are sedimented passive structures that can be activated by the performative actions of the perceiver when she discovers the appropriate way of perception. Sesemann, like Moritz Geiger, claims that aesthetics is impossible without an analysis of feelings. He, like Geiger, recognizes the importance of empathy in aesthetic experience. However, Sesemann develops the concept of aesthetic empathy using Max Scheler’s arguments. Empathy is necessary, because the perceiver must be able to understand expressions. The aim of this paper is to analyse the phenomenological aspects of Vasily Sesemann’s aesthetics. Firstly, this paper analyzes the Sesemann’s phenomenology of aesthetic experience. Secondly, it shows that the analysis performed by Sesemann demonstrates why empathy plays a leading role in aesthetic experience. (shrink)

In this essay, I do not want to focus on performativity as such and understand it as an aesthetic expression; instead, I would like to illustrate how performativity takes on the role consequential to an aesthetic experience. Specifically, I want to highlight how aesthetic experience takes place in the spatial contexts of the city. In this regard, I want to define the aesthetic-practical-sensory relationship of the soma, understood as a paradigm of a living body, (...) that is, a body that moves and acts in space, by declining three historical moments that tell the story. I want to define three historical moments from the early twentieth century to the present through the soma-city relationship: 1) The first moment is inscribed in the emergence of the Baudelairian concept of the flâneur, a symbolic figure who introduces a relationship with the city characterized by a disenchanted gaze and a slow, wandering movement picked up, especially by Walter Benjamin in the Paris Passages; 2) The second moment is that of Situationism, in which Guy Debord introduces the concept of dérive, understood as an approach to the city marked by the experiential and emotional relationship; 3) The third and most recent moment concerns Richard Shusterman's embodiment of the somaesthetic exercise, in which the Avatar of the Man in Gold, enters into a relationship with the city, aspiring to reconnect urban spheres and not to a pure somaesthetic experience of the city. The last point to be made is that these three historical and aesthetic experience-based moments of the body in the city are marked by the body moving in space. In the case of the flâneur, the body wanders in an unresolved manner without a precise destination; in the case of the drift, the body is propelled by the many sensations and expressions of the city that are expressed through walking (urban Walkscapes); finally, in the case of the Man in Gold, there is a movement totally absorbed in the experience of places. (shrink)

In 1773, the Scottish traveller Patrick Brydone published an account of visiting Mount Etna, in which he drew on three distinct categories of thought: the scientific, the aesthetic, and the cultural. He carried his barometer up the volcano to measure it; he was overwhelmed with awe on viewing the sunrise from its summit; and he carefully set his account in the context of different mythological and philosophical explanations of Etna, largely drawn from the writings of classical authors. In preceding (...) centuries, Thomas Burnet’s Theory of the Earth and Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus viewed mountains as laboratories for better understanding nature, for evoking a sense of eschatological awe, and as embedded in long traditions of cultural appreciation. Earlier still, Pietro Bembo in 1496 recounted his journey to the summit of Etna which wove together personal observation, classical insights, and aesthetic admiration. In an ancient example, the first-century anonymous Aetna poem urged readers to move beyond mythological explanations for volcanic activity and to instead enjoy true aesthetic pleasure in investigating the volcano and its causes for themselves. This article offers a close reading of these texts in order to demonstrate three key points. The first is that an intense aesthetic experience of volcanoes can be found in accounts predating the eighteenth-century articulation of the ‘natural sublime’. The second is that the compulsion to investigate and understand natural phenomena, as a key element of aesthetic appreciation, is also evident before the Enlightenment. Third, the article suggests that a sense of Etna as ‘classic ground’—as a feature which both intensified the viewer’s interest in its natural phenomena and produced an ‘interested’ aesthetic experience of its natural greatness—likewise extends back even to the ancient texts from which later travellers would draw their own cultural associations. (shrink)

What possesses aesthetic value? According to a broad view, it can be found almost anywhere. According to a narrower view, it is found primarily in art and is applied to other items by courtesy of sharing some of the properties that make artworks aesthetically valuable. In this paper I will defend the broad view in answering the question: how should we characterize aesthetic value and other aesthetic concepts? I will also criticize some alternative answers.

In response to the mental health crisis in science, and amid concerns about the detrimental effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientists, this study seeks to identify the role of a heretofore under-researched factor for flourishing and eudaimonia: aesthetic experiences in scientific work. The main research question that this study addresses is: To what extent is the frequency of encountering aesthetics in terms of beauty, awe, and wonder in scientific work associated with greater well-being among scientists? Based on a (...) large-scale and representative international survey of scientists in four countries, this study employs sets of nested regressions to model the associations of aesthetic experiences with flourishing while controlling for demographic factors and negative workplace and life circumstances such as burnout, job/publication pressure, mistreatment, COVID-19 impacts, other stressful life events, serious psychological distress, and chronic health conditions. The results show that the frequency of aesthetic experiences in scientific work in the disciplines of biology and physics has a very large and statistically significant association with flourishing and eudaimonia that remains robust even when controlling for demographic factors and negative workplace and life circumstances, including COVID-19 impacts. Aesthetic experiences in scientific work are even as strongly associated with flourishing as the presence of serious psychological distress and are most strongly associated with the flourishing domain of meaning in life, thus pointing to a link with eudaimonic well-being. In line with neurophysiological evidence and positive psychological models of flow, self-transcendence, and intrinsic motivation, aesthetics are a key source of flourishing for scientists in the disciplines of biology and physics. While future research needs to test the causal mechanism, the strength of the findings could encourage leaders of scientific labs and research organizations generally to remove obstacles to experiencing the aesthetic dimensions of science. Fostering cultures in which the aesthetic experiences that are intrinsic to scientific practice are fully appreciated might potentially protect or boost flourishing by reducing the impacts of burnout, job/publication pressure, and mistreatment-related experiences in science. (shrink)

My paper sets out to compare neuroaesthetics and transcendental philosophy, concerning the perception of schemes of imitation in aesthetic experience. The argument is structured in four steps: first, I will introduce the function of schemes in mirror-neuron-based processes and in general in the embodiment theory of Mark Johnson and George Lakoff; second, I will consider some analogical relations between a transcendental approach and neuroaesthetics concerning semantics; third, starting with the statement that one open question in neuroaesthetics is how (...) creativity emerges, I would like to propose a transcendental account about sensible schemes as a possible foundation of creativity. I will conclude my paper with some examples from visual arts and aesthetic practices in general. (shrink)

Indian poetics and aesthetics; comprises the part of his Abhinavabhāratī which comments on the sutra 'Vibhāvānubhāvavyabhicārisaṃyogādrasaniṣpattiḥ' from the larger work entitled Nāṭya Śāstra by Bharata; Sanskrit text in roman script with English translation.

Since the second half of the twentieth century, the influential concept of aesthetic experience has been strongly criticized by powerful voices both in analytic philosophy and in continental theory, sometimes to the point of rejecting its significance for art or even to denying its very existence. Nonetheless, it stubbornly reasserts itself as central to understanding art's meaning and value. Philosophical critique of aesthetic experience takes multiple forms. Theorists seeking a definition of art generally reject aesthetic (...) experience as inadequate for this task because it is both too wide and too narrow. Aesthetic experience surely occurs beyond the limits of art, as in our encounter with natural beauty, but it... (shrink)

[Richard Glauser] Shaftesbury's theory of aesthetic experience is based on his conception of a natural disposition to apprehend beauty, a real 'form' of things. I examine the implications of the disposition's naturalness. I argue that the disposition is not an extra faculty or a sixth sense, and attempt to situate Shaftesbury's position on this issue between those of Locke and Hutcheson. I argue that the natural disposition is to be perfected in many different ways in order to be (...) exercised in the perception of the different degrees of beauty within Shaftesbury's hierarchy. This leads to the conclusion that the exercise of the disposition depends, from case to case, on many different cognitive and affective conditions, that are realised by the collaborative functionings of our ordinary faculties. Essential to Shaftesbury's conception of aesthetic experience is a disinterested, contemplative love, that causes (or contains) what we may call a 'disinterested pleasure', but also an interested pleasure. I argue that, within any given aesthetic experience, the role of the disinterested pleasure is secondary to that of the disinterested love. However, an important function of the disinterested pleasure is that, in combination with the interested pleasure, it leads one to aspire to pass from the aesthetic experience of lower degrees of beauty to the experience of higher ones in the hierarchy. /// [Anthony Savile] (1) If Shaftesbury is to be seen as the doyen of modern aesthetics, his most valuable legacy to us may not so much be his viewing aesthetic response as a sui generis disinterested delight as his insistence on its turning 'wholly on [experience of] what is exterior and foreign to ourselves'. Not that we cannot experience ourselves, or what is our own, as a source of such admiration. Rather our responses, favourable or no, are improperly grounded in any essentially reflexive, or first-personal, ways of taking what engages us. The suggestion is tested against the case of Narcissus. (2) Glauser interestingly emphasizes Shaftesbury's neo-Platonic conception of a hierarchy of aesthetic experience that culminates in the joyful contemplation of God. That hierarchy must be something that is less unitary and systematic than Shaftesbury himself had supposed, even when his emphasis on the tie between aesthetic pleasure and contemplative experience is allowed to extend beyond perception and to encompass episodes of thought itself. (shrink)

On several current views, including those of Matthew Kieran, Gary Iseminger, Jerrold Levinson, and Noël Carroll, aesthetic appreciation or experience involves second-order awareness of one’s own mental processes. But what if it turns out that we don’t have introspective access to the processes by which our aesthetic responses are produced? I summarize several problems for introspective accounts that emerge from the psychological literature: aesthetic responses are affected by irrelevant conditions; they fail to be affected by relevant (...) conditions; we are ignorant of their causes and thus confabulate in explaining them; our attempts to offer explanations change our preferences; and the preferences we form after explanation are lower in quality. I suggest that by distinguishing introspective awareness of mental processes from introspective awareness of mental states, we can safeguard a worthwhile concept of aesthetic experience. In addition, we should recognize that theoretical, rather than introspective, understanding of our mental processes may play a valuable role in aesthetic appreciation. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s mature philosophy offers a therapeutic way out of some conundrums stemming from taxonomic expectations regarding philosophical description of experience in general. The paper asks if this is also true of the facts of aesthetic experience. This possibility is hinted at by examining an application of the notion of certainty to aesthetic experience. Some traits of possible uses of central concepts of the mature Wittgenstein to a philosophical aesthetics inspired by the “new method” are also (...) canvassed. (shrink)

Introduction. The article is focused on analyzing the aesthetic aspect of A. Kojève’s philosophy, the ability of his philosophy, from an aesthetic point of view, to clarify a number of key problems of the modern political and cultural environment. The purpose of the study is to determine the epistemological attitude of A. Kojève’s philosophy able to clarify the way in which his philosophy problematizes the current cultural and political reality. Methods. Hermeneutics, comparative analysis and deconstruction are used as (...) research methods. Comparative analysis allows us to demarcate A. Kojève’s own line of reasoning, in the context of aesthetic and epistemological theories, as well as Hegelian themes themselves. Hermeneutics is the central method in the work, since the philosophy of A. Kojeve requires interpretation as an aesthetic theory. Deconstruction, formalized to the status of a method according to P. de Man, allows us to detect inconsistencies, the principle of mutual problematization of Kojeve’s philosophy and the current political and epistemological agenda. Scientific novelty of the research. The standard way of interpreting the work of A. Kojève is to evaluate him as an interpreter of G. Hegel. The author analyzes some meaning of A. Kojève’s philosophy, separate from G. Hegel’s explanation of the text. The novelty lies not only in the fact that A. Kojève’s philosophy is defined as theorizing that goes beyond technical hermeneutics (clear presentation), but also as a specific representation of such theorizing as epistemological aesthetic theory. The latter is a rather rare interpretation of the philosophy of A. Kojeve. This allows us to expand the traditional assumption that post-Hegelian epistemesthetics is the property of an extremely limited number of authors (for example, B. Croce). Moreover, such an interpretation of A. Kojève’s theories is a new element in the emerging trend of considering political issues within the framework of epistemological aesthetics. Results. The specific mode of interpreting G. Hegel, which is carried out by A. Kojève, turns the philosophy of the former into a unique aesthetic project. In this project, the category of aesthetic experience comes to the foreground, indicating the empty, formal nature of any discourse. In this regard, any claim to knowledge of reality, to a correct idea of the subject is replaced by the idea of creating the subject of discourse. Consistent treatment of this idea is symptomatic of the philosophy of A. Kojève. This philosophy is a reflection of those historical changes that gave rise to the culture of “aesthetic rationality”: empty and formal. In A. Kojève’s philosophy, one can see how such a culture of the End of History is, contrary to Hegelian ideas, not the era of the struggle decline, but the era of its strange transformation, a symptom of increasing political violence. Conclusions. A. Kojève’s philosophy is considered not as a utopian political project, but as a problematization of the modern cultural and political sphere. The latter is understood as an indication of the inconsistency of ontological discourses of Truth, the discovery in the very essence of discursive practices of an empty, formal principle, and therefore primarily of interest to aesthetics. The modern era of the End of History and the end of the era of persuasive speech gives an idea of the main political paradox (at least for the philosophy of A. Kojève, and at most for the modern political environment). The era of disappointment in discourse should become an era of refusal to fight for discourses, but it becomes an era of maximizing violence, since it is in a situation of disappointment that discourses can only be supported by force. We move from unconvincing speech to convincing violence, but it is possible to understand the origins and specifics of this transition only by considering A. Kojève’s philosophy in the light of such a discipline as aesthetics. (shrink)

The aesthetic experience, In husserl's language, Brackets or suspends the natural standpoint. Consciousness perceives the work of art not as an object of the factual world, But as a man-Made artifact to be enjoyed just for certain immediately experienced qualities. The work of art is neither a real physical entity nor a real psychical entity, But a purely intentional object, For which the physical object serves as a substratum. The critic must recreate the purely intentional object by completing (...) the schema of the work and by actualizing its merely potential elements. He must experience the ensemble of axiologically neutral qualities, Aesthetic qualities, And aesthetic values as an harmonious whole. A full concretion of the work is the aesthetic object-The object the critic describes and judges. By metaphorical or partly metaphorical language-Never completely adequate-He tries to convey to his readers the experience of its qualities and values. (shrink)

The monograph is focused on the subjectivity of aesthetic experience and the problem of rational interpretation of emotionality. The text studies why does an aesthetic experience exist, what is its content and what is its informational role and structure? Has beauty any cognitive value? Can we analyse beauty? In what sense we can think about the information content of aesthetic experience? The second topic of the book is a cognitive role of emotionality and its (...) research. Why we have emotions? What can they tell us about yourself and about the world? The methodology of the study is designed as a phenomenological research of subjective experience that is combined with the newest results in Cognitive science research. --Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This article takes as its starting point the recent work of Frank Ankersmit on subjective historical experience. Such an experience, which Ankersmit describes as a ‘sudden obliteration of the rift between present and past’ is connected strongly with the Deweyan theory of art as experiential, which contains an account of aesthetic experience as affording a similar breakdown in the polarization of the subject and object of experience. The article shows how other ideas deriving from the (...) phenomenological tradition and the philosophy of perception can fruitfully be applied to the same terrain, and an account of aesthetic experience is built up that stresses embodied, differential and virtual aspects in the perception of aesthetic objects. The disruption and/or enhancement of these aisthetic aspects of perception, coupled with the self-conscious reflection thereby occasioned, is put forward as an account of aesthetic experience that links Ankersmit’s ideas with those of others, and a critical reading is made of a section of Ankersmit’s Sublime Historical Experience that centers on his experience of a painting by Francesco Guardi. The fijinal section aims at strengthening aspects of Ankersmit’s ideas and renews his critique of the radical constructivism of Oakeshott. (shrink)

Peter Kivy and Noël Carroll advocate a narrow view of aesthetic experience according to which it consists mainly in attention to formal properties. Excluded are cognitive and moral properties. I defend the broader view that includes the latter properties. I argue first that cognition and moral assessment can be inseparable in experience from grasp of form and expressiveness. Second, Kivy and Carroll must extend the notion of form itself beyond ordinary usage to accommodate acknowledged aesthetic (...) class='Hi'>experience. Third, the broad view has a more impressive historical lineage than the narrow view. Fourth, aesthetic experience is appreciation of aesthetic value, and the latter is more plausibly analyzed in a broad way. (shrink)

In this paper I intend to present a philosophical account of what is commonly called verbal or literary art. Starting from the Hegelian conception of language and of the aesthetic experience, I shall argue that literary, and more specifically poetic, discourse can be defined as the verbal completion of an aesthetic experience, and that this distinctive feature marks off literary discourse from other types of discourse, such as scientific and philosophical discourse. In his phenomenological description of (...) the growth of a subject's identity, Hegel situates the birth of language in the transition from consciousness to self-consciousness. In his Philosophy of Fine Art, this transition also marks the locus philosophicus of the artistic experience. (shrink)

consist (in part) in our taking pleasure in the awe or wonder we feel towards them.'' But although forms of awe and wonder are feelings that at least some ...

ABSTRACTI discuss three accounts of the spiritual significance of aesthetic experience. Two of these perspectives I have taken from the recent literature in theological aesthetics, and the third I have constructed, building on Thomas Aquinas’s conception of the goods of the infused moral virtues. This broadly Thomistic approach occupies, I argue, a middle ground between the other two, on account of its distinctive understanding of the role of theological context in defining spiritually significant goods. These perspectives are not (...) mutually exclusive, but they do present rather different conceptions of the ways in which aesthetic goods can contribute to spiritual well-being, and provide a focus for religious practice. (shrink)

We can look at paintings, listen to music, dance, play instruments, and watch movies, on our own almost anytime, anywhere. That is, we have effortless, on-demand access to an abundance of private aesthetic experiences. Why, then, do we seek out aesthetic experiences together? Indeed, it is not controversial to claim that listening to music, dancing, and watching films are activities that we do together more so than we do on our own. While the significance of interpersonal aesthetic (...) experiences, and what explains that significance, is not uncharted territory, I claim that more precision regarding the kinds of relations and interactions that modulate and enable different kinds of interpersonal aesthetic experiences is warranted than is offered in extant literature. As such, an enactive approach that not only foregrounds embodiment and intersubjectivity in cognition, but duly explains how variations in them cause variations in cognition, is paramount to my explanation. Here, then, I marshal three ‘varieties’ of interpersonal aesthetic experience that I term aggregative, synchronised, and shared aesthetic experiences. In doing so, I explain what makes them particularly worthwhile, while introducing terminological and explanatory clarity to the literature as a unifying base from which future research can unfold. (shrink)

The "aesthetic attitude" is the primary concept in this aesthetic theory. I argue that it is capable of accounting for both the experiential and the axiological parts of the aesthetic. In the first Part of this dissertation I defend against past and recent criticism such concepts as "aesthetic disinterestedness" and "psychical distance." They are accurate but negative descriptions of the aesthetic attitude. I present as a positive formulation of the aesthetic attitude a theory of (...) "aesthetic attention": a mode of attention whose object is a phenomenal object grounded in the objective self. ;In Part II I explain the value in aesthetic experience as arising from the relation of a subject's immediate or intrinsic interest to an object of aesthetic attention. This theory of value is relational and therefore recognizes no absolute standard for aesthetic value judgments. Authoritative criticism is possible, however, insofar as the critic represents a tradition or community of interests. (shrink)