This paper introduces the Italian thinker Gillo Dorfles (1910-2018) as an early formulator of “la estetica del quotidiano” (Everyday Aesthetics) from the 1960s onwards. Throughout his extensive body of work, Dorfles gradually combined analyses of very different forms of aesthetic production and behavior while at the same time developing a line of aesthetic thought that offered an alternative to idealistic approaches. His approach centers on the interplay between the mythopoetic and the mythagogic, or between the synchronic and the diachronic.

In this aricle, I argue that Descartes can be seen as a occupying a distinct middle ground between ancient music theory, which was being revived in the Renaissance, and eighteenth-century aestheticians. Descartes’ approach to music had its roots in humanist thought but, even from the start, it wasn’t simply another humanist theory of music. The views Descartes begins to develop in his early years, in the Compendium musicae (1618), is continuous with the views he articulates near the end of (...) his life in the Passions of the Soul (1649). And the position on the effects of music is an interesting and important one, bridging humanist thought with the new philosophy. Unlike the humanists, Descartes will be unwilling to identify particular musical proportions as intrinsically connected with pleasure or other affects, but he will nevertheless develop an objective account of aesthetic value. (shrink)

E. V. Il'enkov proceeded from the classical philosophical notion of Beauty considered in organic unity with Truth and Good. Following Marx, he regarded the sense of Beauty, the supreme mental feeling, as a product of history. Il'enkov insisted on the universal character of this feeling, for its basis is an activity of imagination which also lies at the root of any creative work. His criticism of modern art rested on analysis of the process of disintegration of personality, its capabilities within (...) industrial civilisation to break the natural tie between Truth, Good and Beauty. (shrink)

In the case of Jean-Marie Guyau, declared humanist and sociologist, there is the debt of a French thinker to English thought, ...

In his earlier essay in aesthetics--after lengthily disposing of a number of Aristotelian-Thomist distinctions between the speculative order and the practical order, between the "useful" arts and the "fine" arts, and so on--M. Maritain, in the most interesting passages of Art and Scholasticism, concerned himself with this astonishing "growth of self-consciousness" in the modern artist. And what chiefly occupied him was the thought that, in submitting to the idea of making art out of the idea of art, the artist might (...) become so fascinated with technique and so estranged from the existential world of nature and the universe of man that he should forget that, unlike God, he cannot create ex nihilo. He wanted, then, to confront him with the futility of claiming any kind of aseity for his art, for pure art, he said, "involves nothing, the subject being completely whittled away. I call that a sin of idealism in relation to the matter of art: pushed to the extreme, a perfect building, with nothing to build." The idea of making poetry out of the idea of poetry or painting out of the idea of painting can, in other words, never yield anything but sterility, since the kind of "metaphysical vastness" that characterizes greatness in the arts has always been a result of vital transactions between the creative Self and the universes of Being. And for the poet or the painter to seek to allay the kind of "eucharistic passion" that arises at the very center of the artistic process is for him to run the risk of suicide, since it is for him to isolate his art from everything that is not "its own peculiar rules of operation." There is one long and wonderful sentence in which the lesson is summed up, as M. Maritain says that he would remind modern art that. (shrink)

Maria Gołaszewska (1926–2015), a Polish philosopher, was associated throughout her life with Poland’s oldest academic institution, the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. She was a student of the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden, himself a student of Edmund Husserl. During the postwar and communist years in Poland, Gołaszewska conducted research focusing on issues related to art and aesthetics. She created her own conception of empirically and anthropologically oriented aesthetics, which I believe is a prime example of a theory that accounts for the perspective (...) of gender, and in this sense should be acknowledged as an important contribution to contemporary gender-sensitive/feminist philosophy. In the article, I present Gołaszewska’s life, academic career, and philosophy as a cognitively valuable response to feminist philosophy’s search for a suitable description of women’s experiences related to art and aesthetic perception. (shrink)

Adrian Stokes , long admired by a small, highly distinguished, mostly English circle, was the natural successor to Pater and Ruskin. But though his place in cultural history is important, what is of particular interest now to art historians is his theory of the presentness of painting, a theory which offers a challenging critique of the practice of artwriting. From Vasari to the present, the most familiar rhetorical strategy of the art historian is the narrative of “the form, prophet-saviour-apostles,” in (...) which the first artist poses some problem that his successors develop and their successors solve.1 Such very different books as Art and Illusion and Art and Culture deploy that plan. The three periods of naturalism in E. H. Gombrich’s narrative—antiquity, Renaissance religious narrative, nineteenth-century landscape—function like Clement Greenberg’s sequence—old master art, early French modernism, American abstract expressionism. Gombrich and Greenberg disagree about how to narrate art’s history and about which works to include in that narrative—Gombrich asserts that cubism closes the canon while for Greenberg analytical cubism anticipates Jackson Pollock—but in each case, the art historian aims, as the novelist does, to tell a satisfying story and achieve narrative closure, and so how we think of the artworks the historian discusses depends in part upon the structure of the narrative. In a certain mood, we may find this fact intolerable. Why should a mere text tell us how to see the painting we may stand before?Stokes’ attempt to respond to this mood belongs to a tradition of early twentieth-century antihistorical thinking. For Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin’s sculpture aimed to “refer to nothing that lay beyond it.” For Ezra Pound, an image “is real because we know it directly”; Henri Gaudier-Brzeska could read Chinese ideograms without knowing that language because those ideograms are transparently meaningful images. For Wyndham Lewis, a musical piece is inferior to a statue, “always there in its entirety before you.”2 Such an artwork need not be interpreted because it contains “within itself all that is relevant to itself.”3 All art is accessible to the gifted observer, and time is, in an interesting double sense, irrelevant. We see directly the meaning of works even from distant cultures; the visual artwork is experienced all at once, outside of time. If these claims are correct, what is the artwriter to do? Speaking of the Tempio Malatestiana, Hugh Kenner points to this issue:There is no description of the Tempio in accordance with good Vorticist logic: one art does not attempt what another can do better, and the meaning of the Tempio has been fully explicated on the spot by Agostino di Duccio with his chisel.4 1. Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350-1450 , p. 75.2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin, trans. Jessie Lemont and Hans Trausil , p. 19; Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir , p. 86; Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man , p. 174.3. Frank Kermode, Romantic Image , p. 107.4. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era , p. 428. David Carrier, associate professor of philosophy at Carnegie-Mellon University, is coauthor, with Mark Roskill, of Truth and Falsehood in Visual Images and author of the forthcoming Artwriting, a study of recent American art criticism. He is working on a history of art history. (shrink)

While aestheticians have devoted substantial attention to the possibility of acquiring knowledge from fiction, little of this attention has been directed at the acquisition of factual information. The neglect traces, I believe, to the assumption that the task of aesthetics is to explain the special cognitive value of fiction. While the value of many works of nonfiction may be measured, in part, by their ability to transmit information, most works of fiction do not have this aim, and so many (...) conclude that the transmission of information is irrelevant to their value. I am skeptical of these claims. I doubt that there is any value, cognitive or otherwise, special to all and only works of fiction. Thus I see no reason to neglect the capacity to convey factual information—specifically, propositional knowledge about real individuals and events—when assessing the value of particular works. In this paper I consider the value of learning about history from a particular work of fiction, Gore Vidal’s Lincoln: A Novel. Drawing on recent work in cognitive psychology, I argue that narrative devices used by Vidal can enhance our ability to learn and retain factual information, despite also increasing the possibility that we will form false beliefs, and that acquiring propositional knowledge from fiction, far from being a process we can take for granted, constitutes a difficult achievement. (shrink)

Many aestheticians and ethicists are interested in the similarities and connections between aesthetics and ethics (Nussbaum 1990; Foot 2002; Gaut 2007). One way in which some have suggested the two domains are different is that in ethics there exist obligations while in aesthetics there do not (Hampshire 1954). However, Marcia Muelder Eaton has argued that there is good reason to think that aesthetic obligations do exist (Eaton 2008). We will explore the nature of these obligations by asking whether acts (...) of aesthetic supererogation (acts that go beyond the call of our aesthetic obligations) are possible. In this paper, we defend the thesis that there is good reason to think such acts exist. (shrink)

Aestheticians generally agree that the aesthetic features of an object depend upon the non-aesthetic features of an object, and that this dependence can be captured by some formulation of the supervenience relation. I argue that the aesthetic depends upon the non-aesthetic in various and importantly different ways; that these dependence relations cannot be explained by supervenience; that appeals to supervenience create puzzles that aestheticians have neither fully appreciated nor resolved; and that appealing to various realization relations avoids these (...) puzzles and allows for a richer description of how the aesthetic depends upon the non-aesthetic. (shrink)

Everyday aestheticians have had relatively little to say about literature. Inspired by Peter Kivy’s philosophy of literature as laid out in his books The Performance of Reading and Once-Told Tales, I examine reading literature as a part of everyday life. I argue that not only do Kivy’s views help explain the value that avid readers place on their daily silent engagement with a book, but that his philosophy of literature also shows how literary works can have an aesthetic presence (...) in our everyday lives even during periods in-between reading a book. In light of the paper, literary reading turns out to be an artistic routine that fills avid readers’ everyday lives in a very literal sense. (shrink)

Aestheticians should be excited by the prospects of a philosophy of antiques. It is to their merit that Curtis and Baines (2016) ignite philosophical discussion about this aesthetically and historically important category, so far overlooked by philosophers. And I agree with much they have to say on the topic. For one, I think the Adjectival Thesis they proffer is sound. That is, the term ‘antique’ does not denote a kind of object (it is not a kind sortal); rather, it (...) modifies objects—we can think of those modified objects as having “antique status.” But I do have several points of contention concerning their analysis. I hope these reservations will contribute to the project-in- progress that Curtis and Baines see their article as having sketched out. (shrink)

Aestheticians have tended to focus their attention almost exclusively on high art, on museum painting and sculpture, classical music and literature, and architecture, leaving the popular arts to their colleagues in cultural studies. That seems a big mistake, for like it or not, popular movies and television attract enormous audiences everywhere, including very many people who take little interest in high art. This mass art creates stars, actors, and musicians who are so famous that everyone recognizes them. And celebrities (...) such as Princess Diana are also stars. Because stars straddle the boundary between politics and popular art, they deserve attention from our philosophers. Even if your favorite leisure reading.. (shrink)

Aestheticians have had a great deal to say recently in praise of (aesthetic) appreciation. This enthusiastic appreciation for appreciation may seem unsurprising given the important role it plays in many of our aesthetic practices, but we maintain that some prominent aestheticians have overstated the role of appreciation (and, perhaps more importantly, understated the role of other elements we will discuss) when it comes to the exercise of aesthetic taste. This is not, of course, to deny the obvious fact (...) that appreciation often plays an important role in our aesthetic practices but merely that it is a mistake to cast it in the role of the sine qua non of aesthetics. (shrink)

Both aestheticians and social epistemologists are concerned with disagreement. However, in large part, their literature has yet to overlap substantially in terms of discussing whether there are viable conceptions of aesthetic peerhood and what the significance of aesthetic peer disagreement might be as a result. This article aims to address this gap. Taking cues from both the aesthetics and social epistemological literature, it develops several conceptions of aesthetic peerhood that are not only constituted by various forms of cognitive peerhood (...) and affective peerhood, but which are also framed by a specific model of ordinary peer disagreement. For each of these conceptions, it suggests what the significance of ordinary aesthetic peer disagreement might be and how future discussions about it might proceed for both aestheticians and social epistemologists alike. (shrink)

Aestheticians in the tradition of Critical Theory have claimed that the or a purpose of musical interpretation is somehow to save or salvage or rescue ("retten") the musical work. What sense, if any, can be made of this claim? The notion of salvage or rescue presupposes the concept of danger. Threats to works of art emerge from two sources: from outside and from inside. Whilst the former problem is only touched upon, the latter is discussed in some detail, using (...) the example of Brahms' Alto Rhapsody op. 53. Kathleen Ferrier's and Clemens Krauss' interpretation of 1947 deals with rather than ignores the composer's crumbly attempt at fusing art and religion. Salvage as their attitude vis-a-vis the work is distinguished from cover-up on the one hand and exposure on the other hand. (shrink)

The new concerns facing aestheticians in the twenty-first century require serious attention if the discipline is to maintain continued viability as an intellectual discipline. Just as art changes as cultures develop, so must aesthetics. In support of this view is a personal account of evolving engagement with aesthetics and the factors that led to embracing change and a plurality of practices as essential to the health of aesthetic today. A brief examination of the state of aesthetics as it has (...) evolved in the American Society for Aesthetics since its inception in the 1940s will follow. These two lines of development, one idiosyncratic and personal, and the other focusing on the aims and outcomes of one prominent national society, will perhaps offer some useful background for understanding the current state of aesthetics and the problems confronting the discipline today. Following these considerations will be a look at some of the main concerns reflected in the social and political aesthetics and the expansion of aesthetics to include the popular arts which again challenges aesthetics to move beyond its historic boundaries. (shrink)

After wondering why environmental aestheticians tend to undervalue biodiversity as an indicator of nature’s well-being, I discovered that Philosophy and Science are in a face off regarding biodiversity’s utility. For the most part, philosophers meet science’s confidence regarding biodiversity with skepticism. Rather than get bogged down in technical disagreements between scientists and philosophers over the possibility of measuring and utilizing biodiversity, this paper sidesteps that conflict by turning to the relationship between biodiversity and cultural engagement. By describing: the link (...) between spoken languages and species diversity, the significance of cultural differences, the role of cities and remote communities in encouraging and safeguarding biodiverse habitats, and the heterogeneous nature of difference itself when determining biodiversity; I effectively demonstrate how human beings who value their own culture protect nature, which reveals the most important reason to value biodiversity. Biodiversity may be impossible to track, extremely difficult to measure, and shares no correlation with stability, yet no other yardstick indicates cultural proliferation. This paper surveys three ways in which biodiversity can serve as a bio-indicator for human cultural engagement, just as lichens are bio-indicators for air pollution, ozone depletion, and metal contamination. (shrink)

Contemporary analytic aestheticians have little interest in the old paradigm of expression theory. They observe that expression theorists tend to locate the essence of art in the externalization of emotion, and they argue persuasively that this tendency is unfortunate. Then they consign expression theorists like Dewey; Collingwood, and Croce to the dustbin of history. This dismissive posture has become standard in aesthetics, for some good reasons. But at least in the case of Dewey, the reasons don't apply. The burden (...) of my dissertation is to make a case for this claim. ;While Dewey does help himself to the vocabulary of expressionism in Art as Experience, he uses it to make arguments less appropriate to a fin-de-siecle expression theorist than to a contemporary cultural critic. He never claims that art is essentially the expression of emotion; he doesn't even agree that emotion is what's expressed in art. His account of expression in art is about the production and reproduction of culture by means of individual agency. It is what Charles Taylor calls expressivism, not expressionism. ;My interpretation of Dewey's aesthetics diverges radically from the one in Alan Tormey's The Concept of Expression, which has become a kind of controlling precedent for the analytic approach to expressionism. I avoid and reject Tormey's reading by locating Dewey's musings on expression in the broader contexts of his conception of the aesthetic, his pragmatist philosophical system, and the tradition of expressivist thought that includes Hamann, Herder, Hegel and Marx. Proceeding in this way not only reveals certain motivations and themes that would otherwise remain obscure, but also highlights certain insights that point toward new, more culturally grounded modes of aesthetic theorizing. I try to recover Dewey's work as a step toward this new aesthetics, an approach that I call, following Cornel West, prophetic aesthetics. (shrink)

It is uncommon for aestheticians to co-author books with artists, and very rare for philosophers of religion or metaphysicians to do so. As the longstanding col.

The majority of aestheticians have focused their attention during the past three decades on the identity, or essential nature, of art: can 'art' be defined? What makes an object a work of art? Under what conditions can we characterize in a classificatory sense an object as an art work? The debate, and at times controversy, over these questions proved to be constructive, intellectually stimulating, and in many cases suggestive of new ideas. I hope this debate continues in its momentum (...) and creative outcome. The time is, however, ripe to direct our attention to another important, yet neglected, concept - viz. , 'aesthetic experience' - which occupies a prominent place in the philosohpy of art. We do not only create art; we also enjoy, i. e. , experience, and evaluate it. How can we theorize about the nature of art in general and the art work in particular, and about what makes an object a good work of art, if we do not experience it? For example, how can we identify an object as an art work and distinguish it from other types of objects unless we first perceive it, that is in a critical, educated manner? Again, how can we judge a work as good, elegant, melodramatic, or beautiful unless we first perceive it and recognize its artistic aspect? It seems to me that experiencing art works is a necessary condition for any reasonable theory on the nature of art and artistic criticism. (shrink)

Like most aestheticians today I begin by firmly separating the concept of art from the concept of the aesthetic; unlike them, I conclude by reuniting these concepts in the thesis that the function of art is to promote the aesthetic. I understand the existence of artworks and of artists to be “institutional facts” (though the institution of art is an informal one, not to be confused with formal institutions to which it has given rise, such as museums, academies, etc.), (...) while I take “aesthetic situations,” involving appreciators and objects made, at least in part, to be appreciated, to constitute something approaching a natural kind. Rather than dealing directly with the concept of a function I argue for three theses closely related to the idea that the function of art is aesthetic: that art is better than any other institution at promoting the aesthetic; that art is better at promoting the aesthetic than it is at doing anything else; and that art was intended by its instituters to promote the aesthetic. (shrink)

Professor Zdeněk Mathauser, Czech aesthetician and literary scholar, expert on Husserl’s phenomenology and French and Czech Structuralism, author of many publications, including Básnivé nápovědi Husserlovy fenomenologie.

Throughout the twentieth century, aestheticians and art theorists declared the 'death' of beauty as a serious, meaningful concept for aesthetics and art practice. Such declarations are better understood as polemical provocations, making their obituarism premature. Careful attention to the writings of those cited testify to the persistence of beauty, albeit in new, 'difficult', 'challenging' forms. Beauty persists, taking on new forms and inflections.

Concerned with topics at the heart of Kant's aesthetics, this provoking reading of The Critique of Judgement focuses on often misunderstood or neglected themes. Starting from the issues of the truth and justifiability of our critical assertions, Anthony Savile develops Kantian theory broadly across the arts, and shows it working with subtlety and rigour in cases as diverse as music and architecture. New light is thrown on the exemplary necessity of our aesthetic pleasures, on the Antimony of Taste, on the (...) distinction between free and dependent beauty, on the supposed idealism of taste, and on the a priori limits of fine art. Eminently subjective material is here given a place in Kant's overall idealism in a sophisticated discussion that will invite the close attention of Kant scholars and aestheticians alike. (shrink)

本书介绍了中国历代美学家60余人,分别介绍了他们的生平事迹、代表作品、主要美学观点。.

A debate between two aestheticians concerning the relative influence of Scottish and German philosophers on the contemporary discipline. -/- .