Secured to a table in my living room is an antique apple peeler—a cast iron 19th century mechanical contrivance that I gave my wife for her birthday some years ago. This thing is not art. At the very least, I do not believe it is art. Yet my wife and I do not use it as an apple peeler; we use it as art. Indeed, my living room is filled with things that we are using as art—some artifacts, some natural (...) objects—but my living room is not filled with art. This is not, I think, all that unusual a phenomenon. Indeed, I believe this is a widespread phenomenon occurring at the blurry line between art and non-art, especially in the home. However, exactly what it means to use a thing as art without thus believing it is art, and without it being art, is not a straightforward matter, especially given the many functions of art today, and their functional overlap with non-art. In this essay, I investigate the notion of using a thing—specifically a non-art thing, whether an artifact or otherwise—as art, and the importance of this notion both inside and outside of philosophy.. (shrink)

At the beginning of his book, Principles of Christian Theology, John Macquarrie says that theology ‘implicitly claims to have its place in the total intellectual endeavour of mankind’. The question I want to discuss is this: in what terms, if any, can that claim be justified?

Culture clashes -- Ontology, copyright, and artistic practice -- The myth of unoriginality -- Authorship, power, and responsibility -- Toward an ontology of authored works -- The rights of authors -- The rights of others -- Appropriation and transformation -- Afterword.

ABSTRACT This article investigates the moral wrongness of joke theft. Working through a trove of real-world cases, and using the sitcom The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel as a touchstone, I argue, ultimately, for a pluralist approach, contending that there are several wrongs that may be present in any case of joke theft, but which cannot be reduced to each other and which are collectively irreducible to any sort of “superwrong.”.

I want to put forward a certain view of the logical foundation of religious belief. It is, in a sentence, the view that religious belief is constituted by the concept of god. This view will be discussed under three headings. First, I shall explain as clearly as I can what I mean by it. Secondly, I shall indicate what seem to me to be interesting parallels, both with regard to universes of discourse in general and to religious belief in particular, (...) between my idea of a constitutive concept and Wittgenstein's ideas of a fundamental proposition and a religious ‘picture’. Thirdly, I shall try to substantiate the view I take of the logical foundation of religious belief by rebutting three conceivable objections to it: namely, that it rests on an illegitimate craving for generality, that it is at variance with common usage, and that it consigns religious belief to an intellectual ghetto. (shrink)

In this article, following a trajectory set out by Noël Carroll, Matt Hills, and Andrea Sauchelli, I propose a definition of horror, according to which something qualifies as a work of horror if and only if it centrally and demonstrably aims at provoking one or more of a particular set of negative affects. A catalog of characteristically negative affects is associated with horror—including terror, revulsion, the uncanny, and the abject—but which cannot be collapsed into any single affect. Further complicating matters (...) is that the set appears to be constantly, if slowly, mutating, so that the affects aimed at in the horror of the 1920s do not entirely overlap with those aimed at horror today, or which we might expect horror to aim at a century from now. As such, while we use “horror” as a blanket term across eras, whether some work is a work of horror will always be time-indexed. (shrink)

Much ink has been spilled in philosophy over the question of whether morality is an objective or subjective matter. In the world of The Good Place, the answer to the moral question seems fairly firmly determined: right and wrong are objective matters, and there is a fact about whether our actions are good or bad. The ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras believed that beauty was a quantifiable principle of nature, and that we could find the source of beauty in the harmony, (...) order, and regularity of beautiful things. In some ways, The Good Place appears to treat aesthetic goodness and badness as if they were objective matters. The Good Place is a sort of extended version of Jean‐Paul Sartre's (1905–1980) existentialist play No Exit. In The Good Place, hell is other people's tastes. (shrink)

'Place in garden, lawn, to beautify landscape.'When Don Featherstone's plastic pink flamingos were first advertised in the 1957 Sears catalogue, these were the instructions. The flamingos are placed on the cover of this book for another reason: to start us asking questions. That's where philosophy always begins.Introducing Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art is written to introduce students to a broad array of questions that have occupied philosophers since antiquity, and which continue to bother us today--questions like: - Is there (...) something special about something's being art? Can a mass-produced plastic bird have that special something? - If someone likes plastic pink flamingos, does that mean they have bad taste? Is bad taste a bad thing? - Do Featherstone's pink flamingos mean anything? If so, does that depend on what Featherstone meant in designing them?Each chapter opens using a real world example -- such as Marcel Duchamp's signed urinal, The Exorcist, and the ugliest animal in the world -- to introduce and illustrate the issues under discussion. These case studies serve as touchstones throughout the chapter, keeping the concepts grounded and relatable.With its trademark conversational style, clear explanations, and wealth of supporting features, Introducing Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art is the ideal introduction to the major problems, issues, and debates in the field. Now expanded and revised for its second edition, Introducing Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art is designed to give readers the background and the tools necessary to begin asking and answering the most intriguing questions about art and beauty, even when those questions are about pink plastic flamingos. (shrink)

Originally published in 1907, this book contains the ancient Greek text of Aristotle's De Anima, his treatise on the differing souls of living things. An English translation is provided on each facing page, and Hicks supplies a very detailed commentary on each line at the end of the book, as well as a summary of each section. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Greek philosophy and the history of classical scholarship.

In this article, I use the example of the novel Micro, authored by Michael Crichton and Richard Preston, to tease out the relationships between an author and his work and with other authors of that work. The case presents a complication for a number of contemporary views on authorship and co-authorship, which suggest that Crichton is either not an author of the novel or an author but not a co-author—both, I suggest, are counterintuitive views. After working through the leading views (...) on the topic, I present my own view of authorship, co-authorship, and multiple authorship, centrally resting on issues of power, responsibility, and creation. (shrink)

The Aesthetics and Ethics of Copying responds to the rapidly changing attitudes towards the use of another's ideas, styles, and artworks. With advances in technology making the copying of artworks and other artefacts exponentially easier, questions of copying no longer focus on the problems of forgery: they now expand into aesthetic and ethical legal concerns. This volume addresses the changes and provides the first philosophical foundation for an aesthetics and ethics of copying. Scholars from philosophy of art, philosophy of technology, (...) philosophy of law, ethics, legal theory, media studies, art history, literary theory, and sociology discuss the role that copying plays in human culture, confronting the question of how-and why-copying fits into our broader system of values. Teasing out the factors and conceptual distinctions that must be accounted for in an ontology of copying, they set a groundwork for understanding the nature of copies and copying, showing how these interweave with ethical and legal concepts. Covering unique concerns for copying in the domain of artworks, from music and art to plays and literature, contributors look at work by artists including Heinrich von Kleist, Robert Rauschenberg, Courbet and Manet and conclude with the normative dimensions of copying in the twenty-first century. By bringing this topic into the philosophical domain and highlighting its philosophical relevance, The Aesthetics and Ethics of Copying establishes the complex conditions-ontological, aesthetic, ethical, cultural, and legal-that underlie and complicate the topic. The result is a timely collection that establishes the need for further discussion. (shrink)

By questions of “canon,” we mean questions of what is fictionally true of some character, story, or world. What is canon is treated as authoritative or official, usually by creators and fans alike. But disputes about canon have arisen as storytellers and publishers have sought to capitalize on the popularity of their characters, churning out more and more stories to meet public demand, and at the same time engaging with growing fan bases. As audiences have become more involved, and as (...) fictional worlds have become messier, the authoritative nature of canon—and who authorizes it—has begun to erode. In this paper, we characterize canon as an article in the evolving relation between authors and audiences. More specifically, we characterize canon as an intangible good, subject to a form of cultural negotiation, resting on a power relation between producers and consumers of fictions. In Part I, we consider the author’s evolving role, and the rights of the creator to a story, character, or world. In Part II, we discuss the emerging activities of fans, particularly as they weigh on issues of canon. In Part III, we discuss canon as being subject to cultural negotiation, highlighting the importance of power dynamics in this negotiation. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction A Pre‐Emptive Strike How Comics Mean The Unified Comic Conclusion Notes References.

W D Hudson; Learning to be Rational, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 11, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 39–56, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1977.

W D Hudson; Educating, Socialising and Indoctrination: a reply to Tasos Kazepides, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 16, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 16.

We explore the classical philosophical problem of the “paradox of tragedy”—the problem of accounting for our apparent pleasure in feeling pity and terror as audiences of staged tragedies. After outlining the history of the problem in philosophy, we suggest that Apter’s reversal theory offers great potential for resolving the paradox, while explaining some of the central intuitions motivating philosophical proposals—an ideal starting point to bridge a narrowing gap between philosophy and psychology.

Hicks' edition of the De Anima contains valuable commentary from Hicks as well as useful summaries of the views of earlier commentators.

Canon is a concept from aesthetics that has become a regular subject of commonplace discussions. The nature of canon, especially as it is used in these commonplace discussions, has not been subject to adequate philosophical scrutiny. We attempt to remedy that by placing canon in its historical and philosophical context, exploring and rejecting several common accounts, and presenting some basics of how canon works. We reject the accounts that place control with the author or the legal property holder, which appear (...) to be the most commonly held accounts. (shrink)

Although art forgery is documented throughout the history of Western art, philosophical discussion of the problems of art forgery is a relatively recent matter, beginning largely in the latter half of the twentieth century. Arising even more recently is the practice of creating ‘appropriation art’, a topic that has so far been largely ignored in aesthetics but which raises some challenging questions especially when compared with forgery. This article introduces some of the philosophical problems that arise from the practice and (...) products of art forgery and in the contemporary movement of art appropriation. Rather than involving issues on the periphery of aesthetics, I suggest, forgery and appropriation art cut to the heart of issues in the ontology of art, the intersection of aesthetics and ethics, and other central areas in the philosophy of art. (shrink)

The fact of evil has worried theists for a long time. The earliest clear statement of this worry is perhaps to be found in the book of Habbakuk: (i, 13). More precisely formulated, it comes to this: if God is good and omnipotent, why evil ? From his goodness it would follow necessarily that he does not will evil and from his omnipotence that he could prevent it; why then should it occur? Theists have attempted to escape from this dilemma (...) by means of an argument which turns on the claim that human beings are, to some degree at any rate, free to choose and act as they will. They are free to do good or evil; frequently they choose the latter and that is why evils, or at least many of them, occur. This human freedom, however, is a necessary condition of personality and, as such, a great good; so it is perfectly consistent with the goodness of God that he should will it. But what of his omnipotence? The point of the argument is that God has to allow those evils which result from men making evil choices, and this certainlylooks, at first blush, like a limitation of his power. But, we are assured,it is not really a limitation because all it amounts to is that God cannot do the logically impossible, viz., make beings who, at one and the same time, are both free to do what they will and pre-determined to do good.To deny that God can do the logically impossible, of course, is not to den his omnipotence; it is merely to point out that there are some things which it would not make sense to say that he had done. (shrink)