Pluralism about regarding art, as about other philosophical subjects, seems attractive to some. This paper (a) formulates and diagnoses one version; (b) suggests and discusses an alternative. It might be held that pluralism about F says F comes in different sub-kinds, or has different parts. One argument for this claims that the heterogeneity of the sub-kinds or parts precludes F’s definability. Such heterogeneity arguments, found also in value theory, underperform, for several reasons. (And this holds of arguments concerning aesthetic value too.) First, parallel arguments, moving from heterogeneity of parts/sub-kinds, are demonstrably unsound. Second, heterogeneity arguments, by ruling out a unifying definition, are methodologically questionable, as they threaten to block the road of inquiry. For, in science and in philosophy, inquirers are justified in hoping that every phenomenon, hence every whole, admits of explanation. The aesthetics literature also contains argument for eliminativism about art which are powered by heterogeneity considerations: the normative functions of artworks picked out by different concepts of art are said to be so different as to be un-unifiable by a single concept or definition. These arguments too rely on tendentious intuitions about degrees of heterogeneity and about the individuation of kinds and sub-kinds, and ignore the fact that the concepts in question do not constitute an arbitrary heap of conceptual atoms but rather stand in relations that render them a systematic, hence definable, whole. An alternative formulation of pluralism is put forward, drawn from the metaphysics literature, according to which pluralism is the view that parts or sub-kinds are prior to wholes (monism being the view that wholes/kinds are prior to their part/sub-kinds), and discussed.
By employing phenomenological methods and reconstructing arguments from Langer’s Feeling and Form, this essay answers a basic puzzle about sculpture: without the representational power of painting’s two-dimensional plane, how can sculpture express non-inert properties, and even generate the appearance of movement? Our experience of sculpture, I argue, is defined by an intentional structure that I call seeing-as-grasping: to perceive a sculpture is to see it, and its environing space, as tangible volume. This intentional attitude can motivate a virtual perception of movement.
Using Claudel’s Femme Accroupie and Hepworth’s Figure for Landscape as examples, I argue, following Langer, that sculpture creates a distinctive virtual spatial field in three steps: by re-constituting empty surrounding space as continuous with the artwork; by decentring subjective spatializing projects and incorporating us into its spatial field; and by transforming the distance between its internal boundaries and outer environment into a traversable and possibly occupiable space. While sculptures do not literally move, these features motivate a virtual perception of movement by lending sculpture the orienting quality of a non-inert living being that engages its environment.
This process blends visual, tactile, and imaginational skill, I argue, by motivating us to see sculpture and space as graspable volume. Sculpture makes space tangible for two reasons. First, perceiving space as virtually occupiable by three-dimensional volume requires an appeal to touch. In experiencing sculpture as a limit on our motor activity, we take it to be virtually in contact with us, and contact is a form of touch. Second, since volume is grasped via touch, then a (virtual) grasping of space is built into the perception of sculptural volume.
These results show how sculpture becomes non-inert space-creating kinetic volume, respond to criticisms of Langer’s account of how sculpture moves, and offer a new way to understand sensory multimodality in aesthetic experience.
The role of randomness has a tradition in aesthetic theory from the antiquity to contemporary times;
– Randomness and chance have different meaning that should be first briefly contextualized;
– In this talk I will focus on an interesting interpretation of randomness in connection with the ancient idea of “automaton” (αὐτόματον): for instance, in Aristotle’s Physics, this refers to chance events that occur outside the realm of human intention, encompassing natural or mechanical processes. Automaton pertains to phenomena that “happen of themselves”;
– This allows to contextualize the tension or even apparent contradiction between the idea of the “automata” and the notion of “autonomy”: both “happen of themselves” but clearly in a different way that will be specified;
– This point is interesting because autonomy (that is freedom) is a presupposition of free agency and, in more specific term, for creativity, while automata are something mechanically determined and yet showing some kind of “self-cause”;
– This becomes particularly interesting in contemporary times: first in avant-garde experimenting with chance as a way to “free” expression for the determination of the artist’s intentional action by means of automaticity or aleatory processes. Secondly in the evolution of “automated” art generation, up to today’s generative-AI;
– Interestingly, deep-learning techniques (including diffusion models for image synthesis) inherently function with random and stochastic processes in both training and generation;
– We are mostly fascinated by the quality of images/music/texts generated by AI, but without the apparent unpredictability and randomness of their output we wouldn’t get the impression of some kind of autonomy emerging from those automata;
– Ultimately, the paper tries to wrap up how to investigate the connection between chance/stochasticity with perceived autonomy, creativity and, ultimately, to agency attribution, with specific focus to artistic production and aesthetic evaluation.
The continuity debate, initiated by Gilmore (2011), addresses the normative question of how to evaluate emotions directed toward fictions—specifically, whether the criteria for the aptness (epistemic appropriateness) of fiction-directed emotions are continuous or discontinuous with those for reality-directed emotions. In this presentation I argue that framing the continuity debate as suggested by Moonyoung Song (2020) puts the discontinuity theorist at a disadvantage. Song defines aptness in terms of fittingness and justification, and in doing so, she imposes two conditions on accounts advocating discontinuity that cannot be satisfied simultaneously. I contend that her two key conditions—regarding fittingness (“a fiction-directed emotion can only be epistemically apt if it would be fitting for its object in reality, assuming the world were as the fiction describes it”) and justification (“a fiction-directed emotion can only stand in the right justificatory relation to it being fictional that the object has the emotion’s criterial quality, if this would be a proper justification for the object having the criterial quality in the reality, assuming the world were as the fiction describes it”)—should be rejected. The central issue in the continuity debate is whether the norms governing the normative assessment of fiction-directed emotions elicited by the work’s design features are genuine epistemic norms or norms of a different nature. I argue that these norms can indeed be considered epistemic norms.
In recent times evolutionary approaches to literary works have insisted on the role of storytelling in human nature and society. They emphasize that storytelling, far from being merely a form of entertainment, shows a fundamental instinct shaping human thoughts, behaviours, and social interactions, and therefore can be said playing a central role in our evolutionary history. But does this exploration of the psychological and cognitive effects of storytelling have something important to tell about literature per se? Is the storytelling hypothesis able to help us better understand what is literature and why its aesthetic appreciation is so important to us? The present paper aims at giving a negative response to both questions.
Aesthetic experiences are often seen as capable of improving our affective skills. Fictional narratives of movies and novels invite us to put ourselves in the shoes of others, typically the stories’ characters, simulating their emotions and better understanding their minds thereof. Through their expressive profiles, musical pieces can show us what certain affective states look like, thereby enhancing our emotional competences. Transformative aesthetic experiences can reconfigure our affective identities. Given the manifold nature of these experiences, it is difficult to provide a unified account of how these learning processes occur, resulting in improved affective skills. In this talk, I propose to exploit the notion of affective affordances to offer a minimal explanation. After introducing a taxonomy of affective properties featuring in aesthetic experiences, namely arousal properties, expressive properties, and affective affordances, I focus on the latter and suggest that aesthetic experiences that result in some kind of affective improvement, actually improve our capacity to detect and interact with affective affordances. Lastly, I sketch out a proposal of how these learning processes trigger a feedback loop that turn emotions into exploratory tools for aesthetic experiences.
In my paper, I advocate for a revision of contemporary theories of illusion, the theory of aesthetic illusion as famously proposed by Werner Wolf respectively. From his perspective, illusion is considered to be an overarching term designated to provide an explanation of the capability of stories to captivate its readers, to make readers care about the characters’ plights, and respond to them emotionally. As Wolf claims, „whoever has felt fear, horror, and suspense when reading a novel testifies to having been in the grip of aesthetic illusion“. This illusion consists of a feeling of being immersed in a fictional world of a story that gives a reader an opportunity to experience it as if it were „a slice of life“. I will argue, however, that there is yet a different sort of illusion to pinpoint when pondering on a captivating force stories have. In opposition to Wolf’s illusion understood as immersion, I propose – borrowing the term from Peter Brooks – an illusion construed as seduction. This modality of illusion can be described as a certain impression of coherence and enchantment by the internal logic that the story presents as unyielding and meaningful. I will show that despite being theoretically neglected by the theorists of aesthetic illusion, this sort of illusion is being tacitly presupposed by them already. The aim of this paper is to make this tacit knowledge more explicit for further research.
This paper examines the aesthetic dimensions of archery by focusing on the contrast between Olympic-style and instinctive shooting techniques. Building on recent developments in the aesthetics of sport (Edgar 2022; Holt 2019), it analyzes how different approaches to archery reveal fundamental tensions in aesthetic experience and perception. While Olympic archery emphasizes technical precision and mechanical aids, instinctive archery pursues a more immediate engagement with bow and target, reminiscent of the Renaissance aesthetic concepts of sprezzatura and prestezza.
Central to this analysis is the role of vision and perception. Drawing on Cimatti (2024), the paper argues that technological archery techniques embody a “sovereign gaze” that maintains clear subject-object boundaries. In contrast, instinctive archery strives for a different kind of aesthetic perception that challenges this dichotomy. This investigation is further developed through the lens of philosophy of language, exploring how language shapes aesthetic experience by discretizing continuous perception into manageable units. The paper suggests that instinctive archery attempts to short-circuit this linguistic mediation while paradoxically remaining dependent on language to conceptualize and transmit its practice.
Rather than representing a nostalgic return to nature, as often claimed by its practitioners, instinctive archery emerges as a thoroughly modern practice that grapples with fundamental questions about perception, embodiment, and our relationship with technology. Through the analysis of archery literature, philosophical texts, and practitioners’ accounts, this research reveals how instinctive archery serves as a valuable theoretical and experiential framework for understanding contemporary aesthetic experience in an increasingly mediated world.
The paper contributes to ongoing discussions in philosophical aesthetics about the nature of perception, the role of technique in aesthetic practice, and the possibility of immediate aesthetic engagement in contemporary culture. It suggests that instinctive archery provides a rich laboratory for exploring these fundamental questions about embodied experience and aesthetic perception.
The paper aims to verify the relevance of the notion of anti-entropy within visual arts and aesthetics. The term emerges—or is implied—to describe the artwork’s metaphorical capacity to counteract the laws of nature, suggesting a possible transcendence of the principle of entropy. Nevertheless, anti-entropy corresponds to a precise scientific definition. This research will verify the relation between the scientific and aesthetical conception through a further specification of the distinction between “anti-entropy” and “negentropy”. I will draw on the ideas of Bernard Stiegler, Georges Bataille, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, alongside recent philosophical inquiries into entropy and energy dissipation within philosophy. This argument will be developed through the analysis of the work of three visual artists active since the 1960s: Giovanni Anselmo, Gino De Dominicis, and Robert Smithson. I aim to highlight the “anti-entropic” implications of their work—specifically, the paradoxical attempt to impose a reversal or suspension of the ordinary flow of time, resisting the decay of energy and matter. The critical reading of the selected artworks highlights their potential to open significant ecological and socio-political perspectives, offering possible views on the intersections of art, energy, and temporality in addressing contemporary challenges.
In this paper, I propose a new approach to probably the oldest philosophical question in Western aesthetics, namely that of the truth-value of artworks. Whereas questions of non-propositional knowledge, aesthetic cognition and artistic research are widely discussed throughout discussion in aesthetics today, the problem of artistic truth is rather absent in contemporary debates in European philosophy today. However, since knowledge (‘justified true belief’) inevitably presuposses a notion of truth, it seems difficult, if not impossible, to develop a conception of artistic knowledge (or artistic cognition, understanding, research, education, etc.) without a conception of truth that could sustain that aesthetic kind of knowledge. As a result of this negligence, I argue, many theories of aesthetic cognition still tacitly presuppose a discursive notion of truth (such as correspondence, construction, convention or coherence), which hinder them from explaining the distinctive non-discursive nature of aesthetic knowledge. In this presentation, therefore, I propose to emancipate the ancient Greek problem of artistic truth in contemporary debates in aesthetic cognitivism.
Through a re-reading of the debate on artistic truth between Plato (esp. Republic) and Aristotle (esp. Poetics), I will develop a framework that distinguishes three modalities of ‘non-discursive truth’ that could apply to the arts: epistemic correctness (ὀρθότης), aesthetic plausibility (πιθανότης) and metaphysical truth (ἀλήθεια). Each of these truth forms corresponds to a distinct modality of being – namely, respectively, (phenomenal) reality, (intelligible) possibility and (noumenal) necessity – as well as to a mode of representation – namely, a representation that is either succeeding, simultaneous with, or preceding the represented. With this differentiated account of truth, I present a systematic framework in which truth is not identical with correctness, thinking not with discursive thinking, and the intellectual value of art not with the knowledge it bears.
Many works of conceptual, installation, and participatory art make it hard to understand why we are supposed to appreciate them as art. We argue that appreciating them as art requires paying introspective attention to the series of states of mind those works are designed to arouse in us. We submit that, by manipulating the properties of the objects/events we are presented with when encountering those works, artists guide our attention towards introspection and prompt us to focus on specific properties of the series of states of mind we experience and are innerly aware of: cognitive, conative, imaginative, algedonic, perceptual, and proprioceptive states of mind. After introducing introspective art with reference to the current debate on the appreciation of contemporary artworks, as well as to Uriah Kriegel’s (2015) account and taxonomy of the phenomenology of inner awareness experiences, we illustrate our view with some examples, which map onto Kriegel’s taxonomy. Finally, we distinguish our account from Thi Nguyen’s (2020) view of the “arts of action”.
This paper presents a challenge to accounts of agency in photography which centre the concept of ‘visualisation’. This is the idea that photographers can realise their intentions by anticipating the desired appearance of their work and then adjusting the parameters of the camera’s recording process to achieve an image with the anticipated appearance. I argue that such accounts are problematised by the increasing presence of machine-learning in the production of photographs. These technologies, by making the variables involved in creating a given photograph obscure and hard to predict, minimise the possibility of executing upon a visualisation.
Defences of agency in photography which draw upon the concept of visualisation originate in the writings of the American photographer Edward Weston (Weston, 1980). More recently, such defences have entered the philosophical discourse as a way of countering scepticism about the possibility of photographic art which revolve around the alleged impossibility of exercising agency meaningfully within the medium. For example, Diarmuid Costello directly utilises Weston in this manner in his own work (Costello, 2017) and Claire Anscomb presents a defence of agency in photography (and other ‘automatic arts’) which echoes Weston’s writings (Anscomb, 2021).
I argue, however, that just as these kinds of argument are gaining currency within the philosophy of photography, they are increasingly challenged by developments in the technology of photography. Machine-learning technologies, such as those recently patented by Samsung (Lim et al., 2024), identify the kind of image the photographer is trying to produce, then use a vast and diffuse dataset of like subjects to alter the appearance of the final image. Thus, determining the appearance of the final image is outsourced to the machine-learning algorithm and the obscure dataset it draws upon, problematising the kind of deliberate anticipation on the part of the photographer that visualisation requires.
Aesthetic judgements are traditionally deemed to have a perceptual nature. We hear the sorrow of a song, see a dance movement as graceful and perceive the balance of a painting. Taste and perceptiveness are thus considered the only grounds of our aesthetic judgements, which therefore cannot be the result of responding to reasons nor conscious inferences. Accordingly, this perceptual account of aesthetic judgement seems to be at odds with reasoning. Such a tension between its perceptual and rational dimensions takes the form of a dilemma between non-inferentialism and inferentialism, respectively: either (i) our aesthetic judgements are justified inferentially by pointing to the underlying non-aesthetic properties, and therefore our non-inferential recognition of aesthetic properties requires an alternative explanation, or (ii) our aesthetic judgements are formed non-inferentially, which not only rules out the possibility of reasoning in aesthetics, but also leaves unaccounted our pointing to non-aesthetic properties as additional support for aesthetic ones. In this paper I claim that the dilemma isn’t such and both perceptual and rational dimensions of aesthetic judgement are compatible. The debate assumes that, for the non-inferentialist to preserve the perceptual character of judgement, it ought to give up reasoning. But such a thing runs counter to our basic intuitions, since if not by giving (and asking for) reasons, it’s hard to make sense of our arguing about taste, but also of the practice of art criticism, and appreciation in general. Non-inferentialism doesn’t need to commit to such strong conclusion, nor give up aesthetic rationality. Instead, I propose the revision of an agreed-upon idea of aesthetic justification, which underplays the affective component of appreciation and, in turn, endorse a perceptualist, non-inferential account of reasoning in aesthetics, neither to be dissociated from the perceptual exercise of taste, nor from evaluation itself.
This communication develops a phenomenology of interactivity in archival practices in art and analyzes its effects in relation to the conception of historical time. In contrast to theories that conceive the archive as a repository of collective memory (Huyssen 2000, Hartog 2007) or as a dispositif of power (Foucault 1990; Schwartz & Cook 2002), we argue that some contemporary forms of the archive can facilitate processes of horizontal collaboration (Vierke 2015; Zielinsky 2015). Our research is empirically grounded, in which archival artworks guide the theoretical investigation. We analyze two projects, extracting a series of theoretical categories from each case and developing the categories with recourse to theoretical sources. The first example, See You at Home (2022), is drawn from installation forms that use archival documents to create an interactive and immersive experience. This example allows us to develop a phenomenology of interactive experience based on five temporal characteristics: processuality, non-linear narrativity, duration, simultaneity, and repetition. Some of these characteristics draw on Sora (2016) and Barker (2009). The second example, A Dictionary of a Revolution (2017), is an artistic project that collects terms and objects related to the so-called Arab Spring in Egypt. This case enables us to examine how non-authoritarian, horizontally-structured archives can be constructe2, negotiating with participants about which signifiers and meanings will form part of the archive. In conclusion, we observe that interactivity in the construction of such an archive establishes processes of horizontal collaboration that articulate a conception of history as agential rather than merely testimonial (Rancière 2018, Ross 2012).
This paper aims to define the grotesque. I claim that the grotesque can be identified in light of three main features: (a) it is a category strongly embedded in the cultural horizon of its time, which marks its shape-shifting characters (b) a grotesque piece of art breaks or subverts our expectations, a norm or a rule;(c) a grotesque piece of art elicits in the spectator contrasting or opposite emotions, leaving them in a bizarre state where different emotions battle each other. This paper will be divided into three parts, and in each of them, I will try to highlight one of the definitional features I have listed. In the first part, I will propose a genealogy of the concept of the grotesque, starting from the Renaissance where the term is for the first time employed, to then explore the accounts proposed by Victor Hugo (1827), Wolfgang Kayser (1957) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1965), Julia Kristeva (1982). In the second section, drawing from Carroll (2013), I will face the second feature, the subversion of the norm, explaining how this subversion breaks our expectations regarding the natural or ontological order, as Carroll suggests, but also social and ethical rules. In the third section, I will then explore the contrasting emotions that a grotesque work of art evokes in the spectator. If Hugo defines the grotesque as a category of comedy that overcomes the border between irony and horror, I will rather divide between positive and negative emotions and claim that the grotesque elicits at the same time negative and positive emotions, and provide a grid to differentiate between grotesque, horror and irony. Ultimately, I hope that this excursus down a definitional path of the grotesque can foster further philosophical reflections towards an artistic category which has been largely neglected by philosophers.
According to Kendall Walton, the correct perception lies in perceiving a work within the right “perceptually distinguishable categories” (PDCs). A PDC is defined as a category the membership of which is determined solely by a work’s perceptual properties. The correct perception of a work, however, is determined by its historical context. Contextualists have argued that a work’s aesthetic properties depend on its historical context and proposed two challenges to Walton: the construal of PDCs fails to accommodate both an important feature of art-the artifactuality-and the aesthetic difference between forgeries and originals. Walton argues that, to address both challenges, one need not abandon the concept of PDCs.
My aim is to show that Walton’s reply fails. Only by accepting the contextualist view-recognizing the role of a work’s historical context-can we categorize and perceive a work correctly.
Good critics like bad literature. The infamous Amanda McKittrick Ros counted the likes of Aldous Huxley, Mark Twain, and CS Lewis among her admirers. D.B. Wyndam Lewis’s and Charles Lee’s anthology of bad verse remains in print, nearly a century after its original publication, and has been highly praised by authors and critics as distinguished as Harold Bloom and Vita Sackville-West. Good critics don’t like any old work of bad literature, however. The sort of bad literature good critics enjoy is well-described by Dyck and Johnson’s (2017) conception of good-bad art, whereby an artwork becomes enjoyable in virtue of the artistic flaws ensued by the artist’s failed artistic intentions. These works are enjoyed because of their artistic flaws rather than in spite of them. Their enjoyment therefore presents a prima facie contradiction to a commonsensical claim about good critics, whereby they take pleasure in artistic merits, and displeasure in artistic flaws. My present aim is to make sense of this apparent contradiction while accounting for the genuine aesthetic pleasure critics take in such works. My discussion draws from the recent philosophical debate around good-bad art and film, especially as found in Dyck and Johnson (2017), Tooming (2020), and Strohl (2023). I argue, contra Dyck and Johnson, that the value found in good-bad works of literature should be considered as literary (and therefore artistic) rather than aesthetic. In addition to this, I propose that we can shed light on the pleasure that critics take in such works of art through the examination of a parallel puzzle which arises in narrative works of art: the pleasure taken in the dark hero.
It seems intuitive that we can act wrongly by consuming certain kinds of fiction: there are books we shouldn’t read, films we shouldn’t watch, video games we shouldn’t play. Yet it has proved difficult to formulate a general account of why this should be so and what the wrong-making properties of such fictional consumption might be. Potential wrong-making features include risk of harm (to one’s character or in light of one’s future behaviour), participation in exploitative fiction creation (e.g. child pornography), participation in hate speech (e.g. pornography again). In this paper, I propose an additional account of when it is wrong to consume a work of fiction and what makes it wrong. I call it the self-repugnance account. Drawing on video game literature, and discussion of the Gamer’s Dilemma, I propose that a wrong-making feature of fictional consumption is its being a fitting occasion for moral self-repugnance. I argue that grounds for moral self-repugnance include fictionally dwelling in the violation of others and that this is repugnant when it is done for its own sake. I discuss Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Salo in the light of this account.
In this presentation, I argue that controversies surrounding the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to create music overlook a fundamental issue: the relationship between technical means and aesthetic results. This applies both to the case of AI-generated music and music created with the assistance of AI. I suggest that Adorno’s reflections on this relationship in the context of serial music during the post-war period are useful for clarifying what remains a challenge in the critique of music generated by or with AI. After introducing aspects of Adorno’s analysis that, in my view, remain relevant in the current context, I conclude that the absence of this reflection in the debate about AI and music is symptomatic of a crisis in our aesthetic categories. The use of new technologies in music is legitimized by economic and techno-scientific criteria, but this falls far short of explaining to what extent the integration of AI in music can be justified on aesthetic grounds. This scenario, which could on the one hand be described as catastrophic, also constitutes a renewed opportunity for us—public, artists, and academics alike—to seriously reevaluate the criteria that guide our judgments about music and the arts in general. After all, while we can already produce music using AI, it remains to be seen what kind of historical-social relevance this music may have.
The contemporary landscape, especially the artistic one, is increasingly shaped by the notion of immersivity, a term often tethered to the digital realm and its emphasis on interactivity and engagement. While immersive art is frequently equated with digital art, this paper challenges the tacit custom of conflating the two, proposing instead a broader and deeper examination of immersivity as a philosophical and artistic concept. Drawing on the symbolic studies of Ernst Cassirer, Gaston Bachelard’s rêverie, and Roger Caillois’ morphological reflections, this work aims to reveal how immersive art transcends its technological associations to engage with essential hermeneutical and socio-anthropological questions about human perception, representation, and ethos. The paper explores three main objectives: 1. To situate immersive art within a broader conceptual framework that highlights its potential to reshape how contemporary humans perceive and interpret the world. 2.To analyze a paradigmatic selection of case studies that reflect the diversity of immersive art. These include the works of Yayoi Kusama and James Turrell, the exhibition-experiences like the Van Gogh immersive shows, and the phenomenon of Instagram Museums. 3. To outline a shared conceptual framework for these experiences, identifying the intrinsic drive of immersivity to challenge and “break through” boundaries as a defining feature of what might be called the “Immersive Era.” This work also critiques the limited theoretical scope of existing scholarship, which often overlooks new mass expressions of immersive art and fails to fully engage with their symbolic and ontological dimensions. By addressing the cultural and philosophical significance of immersive art—including controversial phenomena like Insta Museums—this paper argues that these experiences are not mere byproducts of capitalist commodification but rather traces of deeper mythic-symbolic needs. Immersivity approached as a notion-image “giver of being” in the Bachelardian sense, offers new pathways for engaging with pressing ethical and epistemological questions of our time.
Contrary to the traditional picture of “Art” as an autonomous realm separate from artisanal and technical activities, a view dating back to the second part of the eighteenth century, this paper claims that artistic practices are largely scaffolded by habits, understood as more or less flexible channelings of both organic and environmental energies. More precisely, the author suggests developing Dewey’s idea of “intelligent habits” as a conceptual tool that can solve the issue of the peculiar intelligence associated with artistic practices, as well as get rid of the picture of artistic creativity as involving a radical break with one’s habits. On the one hand, assuming that habits’ intelligence consists in their sensibility to the environment, artistic habits would appear to be one entailing an enhanced sensibility to changes in the situation in which they are embedded, and to the interactions that are occurring between doing and perceiving. On the other hand, rejecting the standard view of artistic creation as radically original, innovative, and solitary and assuming a view of it as embedded in a shared form of life, supported by a common sensibility, collective practices, and norms of conduct, allows us to focus on the creative side of intelligent habits, as well as to appreciate how enhanced creativity is grounded in previously established habits and produces new or renewed ones.
Denis Diderot, a philosopher and art critic of 18th-century France, played a key role in shaping the aesthetics of nature during the Enlightenment. Through his writings, Diderot developed a multifaceted approach to nature, blending scientific observation, emotional engagement, and philosophical reflection. His art criticism, particularly in his “Salon” reviews, emphasized the importance of art truthfully imitating nature. He believed that an artist must accurately depict nature’s essence—its details, colors, and context—while maintaining emotional authenticity.
Diderot’s aesthetic philosophy also focused on the concept of “truth” in art. He argued that the artist should not merely replicate the physical appearance of nature but also evoke a deeper emotional response, creating a connection between the viewer and the depicted scene. His critique extended beyond visual accuracy, stressing that artists should understand nature deeply, as natural philosophers do, to convey its true character.
Additionally, Diderot’s interest in the sublime, beauty, and picturesque emerged as central aesthetic categories. Influenced by Edmund Burke’s theories, Diderot believed that art should provoke powerful emotional reactions, such as awe or contemplation. He admired artists who could capture both the beauty and the sublime qualities of nature, in particular valuing depictions of ruins, seeing them as symbols of nature’s timeless persistence and humanity’s fragility.
Diderot’s contributions bridged Enlightenment rationalism with emerging romantic sensibilities, encouraging a more complex, emotional, and intellectual engagement with nature in both art and philosophy. His ideas remain influential in shaping modern conceptions of art and nature
This paper will aim to show how Diderot used both a rational and an emotional approach to dissect these qualities in the visual arts and find a way to connect with nature through them
This presentation examines the aesthetics of mass-produced design objects, emphasizing the insufficient attention contemporary aesthetic theories give to the influence of material conditions and manufacturing processes on aesthetic evaluation. The author challenges the notion that the production process is irrelevant to the aesthetic appreciation of design objects, emphasizing the designer’s skill in navigating material and technological constraints and the unique aesthetic potential of both imperfections and technological precision in mass production. The author contrasts this with the traditional focus on handcrafted objects where visible craftsmanship is valued. The author uses the work of industrial designer Benjamin Hubert as a case study to support their claims, advocating for a broader appreciation of the material phenomenology of design. Finally, the author calls for further inquiry into the relationship between functionality and material realities in the inquiry on the aesthetics of design.
I propose to consider the existence of an emotion which is distinctive of our aesthetic appreciation of spaces, and which I call inhabitability-e. This is our emotional response to the aesthetic quality which we search for in the spaces we occupy: the capability of the space both to afford the realization of significant possibilities (activities) and to enhance the felt quality of the experience of realizing those activities. Inhabitability-e can be considered an emotion insofar as it shares the agreed-on structure and constitutive components of ordinary emotions: an (immediate and unreflective) evaluative perception, a distinctive phenomenology, certain dispositions to act and a function. It is a distinct emotion insofar as the combination of these components results in a distinguishable affective experience that explains a definable set of interrelated behaviors and dispositions. As to its function, inhabitability-e makes salient a good for us (i.e., inhabitability) which is not such for practical or survival purposes but rather for the quality of our life. This interested function, together with its intentional object, allows us to talk about an aesthetic emotion.
In contemporary aesthetics research, habituation is said to play a paradoxical role. On the one hand, becoming habituated to an object or action through prolonged or repeated engagement usually weakens the vividness with which we experience it and the pleasure we derive from it. On the other hand, however, becoming habituated to an object or action can also strengthen our sense of mastery over it and lead us to like it more than we initially did. This “double law of habit” has been explored by philosophers like Hume, Butler, Maine de Biran, Ravaisson, and Tedeschi among others, and has parallels in contemporary research in empirical aesthetics. In this talk, we will seek to shed light on the exact role of habituation in aesthetic appreciation by bringing together the philosophical literature on the topic and the latest relevant models and evidence in empirical aesthetics.
To do so, we will start by discussing the evidence and theories supporting a preference for stimuli to which we are habituated. We will then argue that, upon closer examination, none of these evidence or theories hold. What they instead point to is a more complex picture in which what matters for aesthetic appreciation is not the degree to which we are already habituated to the stimuli in question, but rather the degree to which these stimuli allow for new habituation. As we will show, this latter interpretation of the empirical evidence does justice to the complex role that habituation plays in our aesthetic encounters and fits perfectly with an age-old line of thought about the plastic nature of habits spanning from Aristotle to present-day cognitive science. In conclusion, we will also highlight the relevance of our proposal for other important issues in contemporary aesthetics, such as the debate on whether aesthetic value is subjective or objective.
Two decades have now passed since the Swedish artist Jonas Dalberg got the commission to create a memorial in the wake of the terrorist acts in Norway in July 2011. The memorial was never realized. As a target of heated debates, conflicts and even legal proceedings the story of Memory Wound is itself a story of wounds. There is substantial research on the importance of contemporary art in public spaces, and in particular memorials, concerning questions like controversy, participation and democratic ideals. These questions are also recurrent in philosophical and aesthetic discussions. The main claim of this paper is that the reception of art in public spaces and memorials often operate in a discursive way and in relation to power, a topic that we find is under theorized in the field of aesthetics. With this paper we aim to point out the complexity of the story of Memory Wound by showing the importance of discourse, counter-discourse, power and resistance. The arguments in favor of the claim will be outlined through a critical analysis of this response and with special focus on an open letter that was written in defense of Memory Wound and signed by an international group of art professionals. However, the story of this memorial is also a story about counter-discourse. Dahlberg´s proposal generated explicit opposition and in particular from the members of the local community. In this investigation we use Michel Foucault´s understanding of discourse and counter-discourse and we ask what words like discussion and democracy really mean when art in public spaces – and memorials in particular – is met with resistance. The question is, ultimately: Who are public spaces for, and who has the right to speak and get heard?
Some recent literature on Environmental Aesthetics has focused on the impact of Global Climate Change (GCC) on the aesthetic experience of nature. Within the general acknowledgment that GCC requires a new set of conditions for the aesthetic experience of nature, the discussion has centered on the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, with some scholars (Brady 2014, Nomikos 2018) defending the possibility
of the (autonomous) aesthetic experience in the age of GCC against some more pessimistic arguments (Auer 2019). Other significant topics include the need to account for the large-scale perspective and the temporal displacement of GCC, as well as the irreversibility of some of the predicted changes, to develop negative aesthetic categories and Future Aesthetics , and a general challenge to traditional categories of the field, such as the binary of wild versus humanly modified nature.
In this paper, I consider in particular how we should understand the impact of the awareness of anthropogenic responsibility in GCC on the aesthetic experience of current environments. Some scholars have argued that GCC has a disruptive effect on the aesthetic experience of current natural environments: I here focus, in particular, on the friction between perception and knowledge in light of the awareness of the anthropogenic nature of GCC. In the first part of the paper, I examine some traits of the aesthetic experience of natural environments that arise from the unique nature of GCC. In the second part, I show how these traits create tension between what we perceive and know. Finally, I suggest that the awareness of the anthropogenic nature of GCC calls for a different understanding of the role of perception in the aesthetics of nature.
This essay provides a philosophical-aesthetic framework for understanding generative artificial intelligence (AI) imagery, through the lens of “visualism,” a theory that links human nature to the generative and emergent qualities of the visual sphere. I propose that generative AI imagery, while often viewed as revolutionary, is deeply rooted in longstanding aesthetic debates about authenticity, artificiality, and the ontological stability of art and design. Namely, generative AI is not an entirely new phenomenon but rather a continuation of the dialectic between newness and sameness in aesthetic thought. This aligns with visualism’s emphasis that our engagement with visuality is inherently creative and dynamic, endowing visual artifacts with emergent, unpredictable properties.
Generative AI uses algorithmic models to create novel visual artifacts based on vast visual databases and user prompts. This has raised concerns about its potential to displace human creativity and alter ideas of authorship and authenticity. While critics like Manovich argue that AI represents a departure from individual artistic expression, the essay contends that such concerns overlook the inherent generative power of visuality. The paper draws comparisons to historical aesthetic debates, including critiques of mass production, the role of the creator, and the limits of human control on end-products.
By incorporating insights from theorists like Goodman, Gibson, Petroski, and Attfield, the paper critiques conceptualist views of design, which emphasize the ontological stability of objects. Generative AI, I argue, reflects the same principles of emergence, reuse, and adaptation that have long shaped human visual practices and their cultural significance. Thus, the essay reframes generative AI as a natural extension of human interaction with the visual sphere, emphasizing its continuity with aesthetic traditions and the active constructive nature of human perception.
Kant’s conception of fine art is of the greatest historical and systematic importance for philosophical aesthetics. But we may doubt he has anything of either historical interest or philosophical significance to say about music in the few passages he devotes to considering tones and music in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement. At least three reasons may be adduced for answering the question posed in the title of the paper in the negative: First, Kant seems undecided about the physical structure of tones and about our cognitive-perceptual response to them. This may suggest that he has no considered view about both tones and musical compositions. Second, Kant seems to speak about music as both beautiful and as agreeable, a pleasure Kant emphatically contrasts with beauty. This may suggest that he is not convinced that music is an artform, or at least not an art in the more laudatory sense, and as such beautiful or truly beautiful. Finally, Kant states that all beauty is an expression of aesthetic ideas. But his discussion of art states that aesthetic ideas are counterparts of ideas of reason, and music doesn’t seem to express the rich discursive content Kant associates with such ideas. Alternatively, assuming (as has recently been claimed) Kant also recognizes another kind of aesthetic idea, namely, the archetypal spatial form of natural kinds or aesthetic normal ideas of species, music surely doesn’t express these either. In this paper, I will argue that despite these considerable reasons Kant does have a theory of music as an artform that is of historical interest and philosophically worthy of our attention as well.
The paper focuses on the concept of the sublime as presented in the chapter of Kant’s third Critique entitled: “General Remark on the Exposition of the Aesthetic Reflective Judgements”. In this, Kant relates sublimity to certain affects, with enthusiasm being the most prominent. The nature and connotations of this link have been the object of different interpretative attempts which the proposed paper aspires to cheque, attempting at the same time a new interpretation. In this context, it is argued that, while Kant’s analysis is perplexing and involves some inconsistencies with his previous arguments on the sublime, it does not introduce a separate category of the sublime (besides the mathematically and dynamically sublime). Furthermore, that this analysis allows him to revisit the cultural and mostly political connotations of the sublime and pass from sublime aesthetics to sublime politics. My second aspiration in this paper, then, is to bring out this relation between aesthetics and politics in the “General Remark”, suggesting the relevance of Kant’s analysis on enthusiasm and sublimity with the French Revolution, raging at the period he was working the third Critique.
The aim is to conceive aesthetics not primarily as a theory of art, but as a theory of sensory experience as it occurs in everyday life. It proposes moving away from the idealistic, top-down tradition (from Schelling to Adorno), which focuses on art as a privileged vehicle of truth accessible through detached contemplation, toward a pathic and atmospheric aesthetics. This alternative emphasizes openness to intense, uncontrolled experiences and conceives feelings as atmospheric forces that shape spaces, rather than as mere projections of the perceiver’s inner state.
Drawing on Hermann Schmitz’s New Phenomenology and Gernot Böhme’s Aisthetics, I argue that art should be understood as a medium for experiencing intense atmospheric feelings in a protected setting—comparable to dwelling or garden art. The paper questions whether atmospheres can be intentionally created and emphasizes that they more often emerge through specific places, people, or objects rather than being deliberately produced.
I also draw a novel comparison between aesthetics and law, showing how both domains involve being affected by powerful atmospheric emotions (such as shame or anger in justice) that are culturally “cultivated” to be experienced without overwhelming trauma. Finally, it explores how both taste (in aesthetics) and norms (in law) exert a form of atmospheric authority that aspires—though with varying success—to extend beyond their original communities, raising the question of whether aesthetic judgments can ever claim absolute validity in the way legal ones sometimes do.
“Good luck with your video game” says Mark Zuckerbeg’s (Jesse Eisenberg) ex-girlfriend Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) to him in the movie “The Social Network”. This analogy between social networks and video games might be fruitful for elaborating an aesthetic theory of social networks, which are still an underexplored field in philosophy, especially in aesthetics. Social networks, as involving the exploration of a sort of space present analogies with installation art and architecture, but video games provide a more suitable explanatory model. The latter have already been an object of aesthetic interest in the last two decades, and some philosophers have gone so far as to claim that video games can be considered works of art (Tavinor, 2009; Nguyen, 2020; Bartel, 2024). My paper aims to show that social networks can be objects of aesthetic interest. To investigate their aesthetic dimension, I will highlight analogies and differences with a subset of video games, namely online multiplayer video games. I will argue that the aesthetic dimension of social networks is tied to the phenomenology of communicative acts that they make possible.
This paper critically examines Christopher Peacocke’s metaphor-based view of musical expression, particularly focusing on his ‘exploitation criterion’ as it relates to what I term the ‘informing paradigm.’ While Peacocke’s approach distinguishes itself from standard theories in contemporary analytic philosophy of music by grounding musical expression in psychological facts rather than semantic relations, I argue that his reliance on the ‘exploitation criterion’ as a standard of correctness presents significant philosophical challenges. Through a detailed analysis, I demonstrate three key problems with Peacocke’s framework: its failure to secure a robust notion of incorrectness, the limitations of its constrained conception of musical competence, and its inability to account for musical expression on purely musical terms. Using the example of minor chord sadness, I challenge Peacocke’s assumption of psychological isomorphisms between musical features and emotional states. Furthermore, I argue that Peacocke’s approach fundamentally misunderstands the nature of aesthetic inquiry by separating characterization from experience and privileging verbal description over other forms of aesthetic engagement. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s insights, I propose an alternative understanding of musical expression that emphasizes the open-ended nature of aesthetic experience and the importance of mutual tuning-in relationships. This reorientation moves beyond the constraints of the ‘informing paradigm’ to embrace a more dynamic and interactive conception of musical expression.
While adaptation studies have moved away from the traditional focus on fidelity as a defining criterion of adaptation, some scholars in aesthetics advocate for a re-examination of fidelity with respect to film adaptation. My talk contributes to this ongoing debate, exploring fidelity not only in terms of its scope and distinctions but also its role in the ontology of film adaptation as a “bi-polar” art form. I begin by discussing two skeptical perspectives on film adaptation as art: Susanne Langer’s view against translating one art form into another and Peter Lamarque’s concept of “reading for opacity.” Langer considers hybrid art inherently less valuable, while Lamarque critiques film adaptation for promoting “transparent reading,” which he deems incompatible with art as art. Both highlight a dilemma: the very success of adaptations as faithful adaptations undermines their success as works of art. I propose avoiding this dilemma by examining appreciative practices that naturally integrate literary and cinematic perspectives. Drawing on the papers by Paisley Livingston and James Harold, I discuss their understanding and illustrations of appreciative practices surrounding film adaptation and highlight that both present them as naturally integrating both literary and cinematic perspectives. Finally, I focus on fidelity – the concept they both employ. I contrast Livingston’s treatment of it as a norm, which may sometimes be worth breaching, with Harold’s framing of it as a merit, requiring a narrower scope. My account seeks to balance these perspectives, arguing that fidelity functions as a norm in critical practices but also as a value when understanding film adaptation as a synthesis of distinct art forms.
In §16 of his Critique of Judgment Immanuel Kant famously distinguishes between ‘free’ and ‘adherent’ beauty. Adherent beauty implies (a) knowledge of the category the beautiful object belongs to, (b) the purpose of the object, and (c) even its meaning. In the mode of free beauty, on the other hand, objects “please freely and in themselves.” But how might pleasing on its own account and without a concept of the category, purpose, and meaning of the object look like? Some philosophers doubt that this is even possible and have therefore rejected the notion of ‘free beauty’ altogether (Lorand; Dutton; Cochrane), whereas others uphold its usefulness (Rueger; Costello).
In my talk I pursue three goals. First, I defend ‘free beauty’ and argue that it can be a useful concept to describe a certain mode of experiencing beauty. Second, I show that the concept of ‘free beauty’ bears strong resemblance to, but is ultimately more fitting than more recent notions: it is less hierarchical and normative than Arthur Danto’s ‘external beauty’ and less misleading than Jerrold Levinson’s ‘formal beauty.’ Third, I claim that film, although a medium rarely discussed by philosophers and cinema scholar in terms of beauty, knows a mode that seems particularly conducive to experiences of free beauty: experimental film. To illustrate, I refer to three canonical examples from the US-American avant-garde tradition: Kenneth Anger’s Eaux d’Artifice (1953), Marie Menken’s Drips in Strips (1961-63), and Stan Brakhage’s The Dante Quartet (1987). These films afford a type of free beauty which can ease our obligations to categorize, determine functions, and search for meaning.
Uncontroversially, many different objects have aesthetic value. To this it is often added, more controversially, that different objects have different kinds of aesthetic value. This is not to say that they are aesthetically valuable to different degrees, but that objects that are equally aesthetically good or bad can still differ in their aesthetic value in qualitative respects (Sibley 1985, 172). Let’s call the kind of aesthetic value an object has, differentiated both qualitatively and quantitatively, its specific aesthetic value.
The relationship between aesthetic value and the many specific aesthetic values has frequently been compared to that between colour and its shades (Lopes 2018; Shelley 2023). In established jargon, the relationship is that of a determinable to its determinates. Just as red is determinate of the determinable colour, so the specific aesthetic value of the Hagia Sophia is a determinate of the determinable property of aesthetic value.
The claim that I would like to challenge is the view that claims that aesthetic properties such as elegance, delicacy, flamboyance, garishness etc. are determinates of aesthetic value. This view, which I call the determination picture, has garnered much support (Lopes 2018; Zangwill 2013; Sibley 1985 on Lopes’s reading).
I believe that philosophers have been far to hasty in endorsing this view. I argue that the determination picture should be rejected entirely. The problem, I believe, is that the view is underarticulated. It can be understood either as a claim about overall or pro tanto aesthetic value. Both versions face different but equally insurmountable difficulties. The appeal of the determination picture, I show, comes from persistent confusion between the two.
Recently it has been suggested that climate change will have important impacts on aesthetic sensibilities, reflected in artistic output and other aesthetic responses aesthetic attitudes and sensibilities. Though this claim has a degree of prima facie plausibility, given the reactions to climate change that are already taking place in literature, films and visual arts, I suggest that it needs to be cautiously considered from within a “longue durée” historical perspective. The thesis defended in this paper is that the long-term record argues that climate change may not be directly responsible for changes in aesthetic sensibilities, even if accompanying societal developments may. The argument in defence of this thesis appeals to the fact that in the long period previous to writing, generally collapsed into the term “prehistory”, multiple, often very extreme, climatic changes took place while significant changes in aesthetic sensibilities, as reflected in the products of artistic practices, occurred very rarely. In support of this claim, I draw on the archaeological record of extant imagery on rock and portable sculpted objects spanning the Upper Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods in Europe (between the end of the Pleistocene and the early Holocene). This record shows evidence of an astonishing aesthetic continuity in styles and contents despite major climate disruptions, while significant aesthetic discontinuities, when they occur, arguably are not so much associated with large-scale changes in climate as with important changes in the way humans organised their lives with each other.
One of the central notions in Heidegger’s aesthetics, and of his later, post-Being-and-Time philosophy, is that of “dwelling” [Wohnen]. In ordinary German, it is the word used to describe residing somewhere. But Heidegger finds in this term—or attributes to this term—a more freighted and valorized meaning, which he elaborates in his essay “Building Dwelling Thinking.” One might, in the ordinary sense, reside in a specific house or in a specific town. But this is not enough to dwell in Heidegger’s special sense. In this paper, I seek to reconstruct and shed light on this important, if obscure, idea. It is of key relevance to Heidegger’s conception of the task of the arts at their best—and specifically of the role for art in a modernity where dwelling is well-nigh impossible. Art, as I suggest, does not simply give us a simplistic image of dwelling and invite us to shed our modern ways, as a simplistic reading of Heidegger’s Van Gogh example might suggest. It rather makes us aware of our *failure* to dwell, and holds out hope for a redemptive alternative, which we cannot bring about simply through our own efforts. We can’t, in short, simply retreat to a sort of Schwarzwald cosplay; art instead reminds us of the absence of the gods, and invites us to await their return. In conclusion, I consider a corollary of my argument about the fraught specter Heidegger’s nationalistic politics can seem to cast on this notion. Although Heidegger’s thinking is indeed bound up with some nasty ideas, the notion of dwelling is a philosophically-interesting, if difficult, one, and in principle separable from the political ends to which it was sometimes put.
The paper aspires to delineate the reasons, why aesthetics is absent for G.W.F. Hegel’s major work, the Science of Logic. The paper will focus on the final chapters of Hegel’s major work and especially on the concluding chapter entitled “The absolute Idea”. The overall argument consists in the position that the absence of aesthetics in Hegel’s Logic is only a seeming absence, since Hegel’s “absolute Idea” prefigures logically the structure of artistic beauty as well. The first part reconstructs the opening of Hegel’s Logic in order to show that the absence of aesthetics in the sense of Kant’s “Transcendental Aesthetic” must be understood as a consequence of Hegel’s argument that all “being” or existence is conceptually structured. The second part focuses on Hegel’s account of the “absolute Idea” and it will show that the only adequate conceptual prefiguration of Hegel’s understanding of truth is the concluding chapter of the Logic, the “absolute Idea”. The paper will further proceed to the discussion of two further and intimately arguments. First, that Hegel’s philosophical principle, the “absolute Idea” is necessarily realized and embodied in the world and, second, that this realization takes place in a threefold manner: as art, as religion and as philosophy. Thus, the paper will show, art is present in Hegel’s Science of Logic albeit only in the form of its logical prefiguration, which is shared equally by religion and philosophy. The third and final part will focus on Hegel’s specific arguments for the necessity of the realization of his “absolute Idea” in the medium of the senses, that is, as artistic beauty and on his rejection of artistic autonomy. In other words, the paper will elaborate and critically reflects on the insight that it is not artistic beauty that is absent Hegel’s system but rather artistic autonomy.
In this paper, I will provide a Kantian account of bad art. I argue that, according to Kant, bad art is art that is expected to be beautiful and yet it is not (or is only beautiful to a lesser extent). This includes not only art that is explicitly bad, but any art that falls short of being good.
I will begin by presenting textual evidence to support the claim that Kant’s criticism of bad art is better understood in terms of expectations, rather than in terms of ends or purposes, and I will argue that the common factor across these four types of bad poetry is that we expect them to provide something they do not (or do not provide to the extent expected): beauty.
I will go on to outline and describe the four types of bad art identified in Kant: non-beautiful art is art that is expected to be beautiful and yet it is not; merely-agreeable art is art that is expected to be beautiful but is rather agreeable; less-beautiful art is art that is expected to be beautiful to a greater degree: and morally-objectionable art is art that is expected to be beautiful but it cannot or ought not be.
In the last part of my paper, I will enunciate four commonplaces about Kant’s theory of art that my account suggests should be reassessed: that there are no specific features that make art bad, that arts other than the beautiful arts might be praised as good within their own terms, that there are no degrees of geniality, and that the relation between the beautiful and the morally good is merely symbolic.
David Hume famously argued that it is perhaps possible to recreate in imagination an unperceived shade of blue. While much has been said about the recreation of perceptions and beliefs, recreative emotional imagining is less often considered. Drawing the limits of this faculty has important implications for emotional perspective-taking in fiction. In this paper, I will defend the idea that imaginatively recreating new emotions is possible. Following the Representational Account, I will argue that the representational resources that are relevant to emotional imagining do not causally depend on previous occurrences of the same emotion in the same subject. Hence, the only requirements for emotional imagining are: (i) the possession of the relevant emotion type and its distinctive phenomenology; (ii) a sufficiently discrete intentional object. I will then conclude that every other kind of difficulty in our engagement with fiction should be traced back to our unwillingness and not to an inability stricto sensu.
In the realm of auditory perception, philosophers have considered the perception of music as a distinctive case differentiating it from the perception of noises and everyday life sounds. In order to explain the uniqueness of perceiving music, Scruton (1997) has proposed what he called the acousmatic view, namely the idea that when we experience sounds in the musical context we do so divorcing them from their sources and circumstances of production. This clearly contrasts with the standard view of perception as the source of information about the external world which should characterise, in Scruton’s account, the perception of ordinary sounds. Hamilton (2007, 2009), however, has proposed that both the acousmatic and the non-acousmatic experience of music are aesthetically relevant, constructing as a consequence a two-fold theory which embraces both.
In order to argue for an account that could combine both acousmatic and non-acousmatic experience tough, Hamilton has the burden of proving how the non-acousmatic experience (the one implying thoughts and awareness of the origins of sounds) can be relevant in the musical context. In order to do that, he presents four objections to Scruton’s account which consider the acousmatic experience as the only essential way to engage with musical sounds.
In this talk, I am going to focus on Hamilton’s objection on the perception of virtuosity with the intention to support and strength is idea that a non-acousmatic experience of music is both possible and relevant for aesthetic appreciation. In order to do so, I am going to look to accounts of virtuosity present in the literature, sketch a new possible way to go and show how the nature of this aesthetic phenomenon in itself, however understood, requires a non-acousmatic experience in order to be perceived as this phenomenon.
The paper assumes, that the relationship and interconnection between aura and atmosphere is more intense and complex, than Böhme (2017) suggested. The aim of the paper is therefore to analyse, discuss and define the relation and structural connection of aura and atmosphere, and to argue, that the atmosphere is an extension of the concept of aura, and atmosphere is created by the aura of multiple objects its properties and spatial aspects at certain place.
This analysis is based on three premises. (1) Aura (of object) is a quality that we identify and feel when we interact with the object, but we need to be part of the atmosphere to be able to experience it. Nevertheless, the combination of different objects on one place, and concentration of the aura of these objects creates in special structural sense the atmosphere as a potentially sensually perceivable time and space reality. (2) One central aspect of the atmospheric approach is the nonphysical body that we feel and “whose atmospheric resonances we can describe only from our first-person perspectives” (Griffero & Tedeschini 2019, p. 2): we need to be present. The real issue is the fact of our participation on the atmosphere: we are not just perceiving it, we are shaping it. (3) The idea of atmosphere always refers to the spatial sense of the environment. Atmosphere “fills space” and “emanates from things or constellations of things” (Böhme 2017, p. 24). The aesthetics of atmospheres is concerned with “spaces and spatiality” (Böhme 2017, p. 26). Aura on the other hand is defined by space, but also by time.
Specific time of the specific place creates the ontology of the object, that later co-create the atmosphere of specific environment.
Fictional books, or pseudobiblia, are a peculiar category of fictional entities. As “fake” intentional objects, they lack essential properties of real books – most notably, being written – while introducing pseudo-authors and pseudo-readers. Yet, pseudobiblia possess a remarkable performative power that often escapes the boundaries of fiction, as exemplified by H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon.
This paper examines the ontological, epistemological, and technological dimensions of fictional books, proposing a definition that separates them from phenomena like lost or unpublished books. Drawing on aesthetics, philosophy of literature, literary studies, and narratology, I explore pseudobiblia’s varied roles in fiction: from metaphorical constructs and tools of satire to devices for worldbuilding, authorial subversion, and metafiction.
Building on recent challenges to the ontological monolithism traditionally applied to fiction, I analyse the interplay between framing and imagining in the creation of fictional books and their dependence on minimal paratextual data for existence. Furthermore, I argue that the performative impact of pseudobiblia often extends into the real world, where they paradoxically achieve a “greater reality” than conventional fiction. This phenomenon blurs the boundaries between the fictional and the real.
Focusing on the Necronomicon as a primary example, I demonstrate how pseudobiblia disrupt distinctions between fiction and reality, revealing their potential to reshape our understanding of fictional and pseudo-fictional entities.
The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive account of architectural experience – i.e., the experience elicited by engaging with architectural objects (AOs). To achieve this, in the first part of the paper I show that AOs are artifacts imbued with both a technical and an experiential function and I argue that a proper account of architectural experience must encompass both aspects. Specifically, I first contend that, as artifacts with a technical function, AOs are structures designed to host (accommodate and constrain) our activities and agency, and that there is a distinctive experience associated with the technical function of AOs: the experience of inhabiting built spaces. I then claim that, as artifacts imbued with an experiential function, AOs prescribe various forms of perceptual exploration, as well as distinctive cognitive and agential engagement. In the second part of the paper, I claim that a proper account of architectural experience must also consider the different attitudes individuals can adopt towards AOs: I identify two main attitudes – the user’s attitude and the contemplative attitude – and I argue that these attitudes shape, colour, and structure architectural experience, leading to a variety of such experiences.
In this paper I answer negatively to the question of whether artistic interpretation, properly conceived as a matter of understanding and appreciation, can take place without some kind of exercise of taste. To this end, I try to show that interpreting, understanding and appreciating a work interweave and demand taste. Firstly, I identify two ways of approaching the interpretation of artworks. On the one hand, interpretation as the base of art criticism and, therefore, as an objective process that excludes the exercise of taste. On the other hand, interpretation as an activity directed towards the understanding and, therefore, appreciation of artworks, by means of engaging with them to try and “get the point”. After endorsing the latter approach, I introduce taste as the interaction between the different mental abilities that partake in our experiences of artworks and defend its explanatory power regarding the aesthetic dimension of art appreciation and the subjectivity involved in art interpretation. On these grounds, I outline an experiential account of artistic interpretation and support it against an inferential approach as a better explanation of what understanding and appreciating artworks really entail. By developing this proposal, I turn to the notion of taste as a suitable way of accounting for the different interpretive moments that take place during the experience of artworks. Following Alan Goldman, I identify perception, cognition, emotion and imagination as mental processes that partake in artistic interpretation, to then illustrate how the exercise of taste permeates each of them and allows for their interaction. Finally, I defend an experiential account of artistic interpretation in which taste is exercised, for it successfully acknowledges what seems to be the ultimate purpose of interpretation as understanding and appreciation i.e. the maximisation of the experience of artworks; additionally, I stress its compatibility with the normativity of aesthetic appreciation.
This paper interprets the 2020 Netflix-feature I’m Thinking of Ending Things (written and directed by Charlie Kaufman) through the eyes of Adorno, showcasing a) the continued relevance of Adornian aesthetic theory as a hermeneutical tool for engaging with contemporary artworks and b) its applicability beyond the confines of so-called ‘high culture’. I’m Thinking of Ending Things first and foremost validates a central claim of Adornian aesthetics: that the truth content of an artwork is fundamentally tied to its enigmatic character. By resisting immediate interpretation and, at the same time, rewarding our best efforts to do so with an enriched aesthetic experience, Kaufman’s film epitomizes Adorno’s idea of an artwork engaging in the dialectical interplay between enigma and truth. It thus successfully solicits reflection in the viewer, forcing us to question our own predicament as consumers of cultural products. In my paper, I want to discuss three central topoi of aesthetic theory, highlighting their enactment in the film: (i) mimesis, (ii) the reification of social relations and its effects, and (iii) the corrosion of the idea of immortality into the empty eternity of being unable to die. Seen in this light, the film’s content functions as a parable, a quasi-symbol for an ‘inner life’ shaped by a culture industry, whose products turn out to be mere empty promises of fulfilled time.
Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) notoriously critiques traditional representations of the East as biased outcomes of unequal power dynamics. My Gadamerian contention is that, however compelling, his analysis risks overlooking the hermeneutic potential of certain prejudices within European Orientalist tradition. In particular, I focus on the depiction of Arab-Persian world as a “land of mysteries”, a trope rooted in classical and colonial literature that, I contend, reflects an actual aesthetic divergence between Western and Islamic paradigms.
Both in practice and in its aesthetic conceptualisations, Western art often revolves around the notion of mimesis and the idea that, by mirroring visible reality, art can contribute to the unfolding of its inherent truth. Islamic art, shaped by theological principles, seeks instead to minimise the role of images and to highlight the limits of the visible realm as such. Drawing on scholars like Titus Burckhardt and Ǧumʿa Aḥmad Qāǧa, but also directly on the speculative tradition of Islamic Andalusia (Ibn ʿArabī, Ibn Samarra), I argue that Islamic aesthetics is grounded in the dialectics between the “apparent (ẓāhir)” and “non-apparent (bāṭin)” and, specifically, in the hermeneutic process (ta’wīl) of tracing manifestations back to their unrepresentable—divine—source. Far from intensifying the inherent truth of the visible, the deliberate rarefaction of sensory forms pursued by Islamic art, as well as for instance by the prescription of the female veil, is meant to prevent its idolisation and to make space for the mystery of the non-apparent.
The Orientalist portrayal of the Arab-Persian East as “mysterious” can thus be seen not only as a colonial projection but also as a coarse intuition of genuine aesthetic alterity. In this sense, I conclude, Orientalists can paradoxically help us question the temptation to measure Islamic world on Western aesthetic parameters, bringing us to the necessity of an intercultural aesthetic dialogue.
The primary objective of our presentation is to analyze filmmaker Robert Bresson’s understanding of “authenticity” through his theory of the “model,” his alternative to traditional theatrical actors. The “theatricality” criticized in classical actors corresponds to a specific anthropological category. This category is characterized, on the one hand, by an exhibitive dimension that appeals to the need for the other’s gaze for the theatrical subject, and, on the other, by a performative dimension referring to a capacity for metamorphosis and transformation. The “authenticity” of the model, we will argue, consists in the negation of these two dimensions of theatricality, not only in the specific work with model-actors but also in their fictional representations.
The link between authenticity and an existential automatism connects Bresson’s work to the 18th-century anti-theatrical tradition, as developed by Michael Fried, and contrasts it with the existentialist conceptions of Heidegger and Sartre. While both authors characterize authenticity as the appropriation of one’s existence in the face of the dangers of “fallenness” or “bad faith,” Bresson’s models reflect a “naïve” truth that lacks the volitional dimension found in existentialist theories.
Merleau-Ponty, by contrast, emerges as the most suitable author for conducting a phenomenological analysis of Bresson’s project and the anti-theatrical tradition to which it belongs. The French phenomenologist consistently emphasized the antepredicative element of consciousness as a privileged locus for accessing being in a “nascent state.” His description of the “impersonal” element of consciousness in Phenomenology of Perception offers invaluable tools for understanding Bresson’s “automatism.” More radically, Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Sartre in his posthumous work The Visible and the Invisible and his monistic ontological proposal concerning the intertwining of flesh provide extraordinary resources for studying the chiasmatic relationship in Bresson between “the real” and “montage.”
It has recently been argued that aesthetic properties are among the properties of which we can be perceptually aware. On this view, when visually experiencing a painting like Picasso’s Guernica, we are not merely visually aware of its low-level visual properties, such as the shapes and the colors of the picture. We might also be visually aware of some of the painting’s aesthetic properties, such as the property being dynamic. Many proponents of this view take aesthetic properties to be a kind of grouping properties, not unlike those involved in bistable figures such as the famous duck-rabbit. Thus far, the discussion on the perception of aesthetic properties has focused exclusively on unimodal cases, that is, cases in which the perception of aesthetic properties occurs in only one modality.
However, in this presentation, I will make the case that, at least on some occasions, the perception of aesthetic properties is constitutively multimodal. That is to say, our ability to perceive them is constitutively dependent upon the activity of more than one sense modality at the same time. The presentation will be divided into two parts. In the first part, I will present some recent empirical evidence of grouping properties that are constitutively multimodal. If one takes aesthetic properties to be a kind of grouping properties, this literature will provide some prima-facie motivation for the claim that some aesthetic properties might be constitutively multimodal as well. In the second part of the presentation, I will present some actual examples of constitutively multimodal aesthetic properties.
Austin (1962) claims that ‘utterance of a sentence in poetry could not be “serious”’ (de Gaynesford, 2010: 644), in the sense of binding the utterer to outward, public commitment to and responsibility for the meaning of what is uttered. I discuss what seriousness with respect to speech acts means for Austin, and propose an alternative view of seriousness for speech acts, based not on outward, public, binding commitment to the meaning of what is uttered, but rather on the weaker, non-binding, endorsive or rejective (for constatives), supportive or nullifying (for performatives) relation of inward, private experience (aesthetic experience) to the meaning of what is uttered. I argue that poetry can be serious, according to this view of seriousness for speech acts, because the aesthetic experience of poetry can provide us with reasons to endorse or reject certain propositions, and to be bound by or free from certain performatives. I give examples to show how aesthetic experience can relate to the functions of constatives and performatives.
I argue that fiction is a communicative act in which conformity to truth (a fundamental commitment of assertion) is suspended. On my account, fiction is not necessarily false, or at best accidentally true; instead, I claim that the author of fiction is released from the commitment to truth, and the audience is prevented from attributing such a responsibility to him or her. In my paper, I consider some of the objections that might be raised to this claim, that is, I consider the arguments for the claim that the suspension of the commitment to truth is neither sufficient nor necessary for fiction. I analyze different ways in which these objections might be developed and offer my counterarguments to them.
I try to explore a puzzle that emerges from reflecting on the notion of functional beauty, namely that while functional beauty is partly a matter of an object’s wellformedness for function, it seems that not all objects that are well-formed for their function are beautiful. This is because, as has been argued in the literature, some of them fail to please competent appreciators and, eo ipso, pleasure being a sine qua non for beauty, are not (found) beautiful. I argue that the solution to this puzzle emerges when we remind ourselves that our experience of pleasure is a matter of our self’s reward-oriented psychology and that, on this basis, wellformedness for function will only be experienced as with pleasure when the appreciating subject finds the object’s end(s) rewarding. I trace the philosophical-psychological mechanism underlying encounters with functionally beautiful objects as what I call instances of teleological alignment between an object and the appreciator’s internalised end(s). I then explore the notion of internalisation itself, which elucidates species of beauty that are based on biological, cultural, and personal ends. By way of concluding, I gesture towards how I think that this account can lay the foundation of a unified theory of beauty.
The central concern of this paper is Nietzsche’s aesthetic theory in his philological work from the 1860s. Rather than constituting material of strictly philological import, Nietzsche’s early Philologica offer a fascinating glimpse into Nietzsche’s early attempt at thinking together problems of physics and history, ethics and aesthetics to articulate a biting critique of contemporary culture. Taking Nietzsche’s renowned inaugural lecture at the University of Basel “Homer and Classical Philology” as an exemplary case, this paper’s aims are twofold. Scholarship on Nietzsche’s early studies on Homer and the Homeric question have traditionally focused on themes of the agon, his wider interpretation of ancient Greek culture, or his critique of philology, more recently including the question of personality and the influence of Schopenhauerian aesthetics. However, sparse attention has been directed towards Nietzsche’s attribution of Homer’s identity to an “aesthetic judgement” and his plentiful recourse to the language of Democritean atomism throughout his inaugural lecture. Firstly, this paper highlights the influence of Nietzsche’s work on the atomistic philosopher Democritus on his approach to both the Homeric question and the state of contemporary philology. Secondly, this paper unfolds the sense and method through which Nietzsche comes to identify the figure of Homer with an aesthetic judgement. Nietzsche saw in Democritus a versatile and untimely thinker, whose atomistic theory was a force of cultural critique in the ancient world. Inspired by this critical force of Democritean atomism Nietzsche, so this paper argues, not only reconfigures philological method on the atomistic model, but also articulates a new atomistic aesthetic on its basis.
Jessica Jaques Pi (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona). À l’occasion du bicentenaire de la publication de Physiologie du goût par Jean Anthèlme Brillat-Savarin: quatre raisons de l’inclure dans la liste des œuvres fondamentales de l’esthétique du XIXe siècle.
Physiologie du Goût de Jean Anthèlme Brillat-Savarin paraît en décembre 1825, sous un titre long et un auteur anonyme. Le titre complet était Physiologie du goût, ou Méditations sur la gastronomie transcendantale ; ouvrage théorique, historique et quotidien, consacré aux gastronomes parisiens, par un professeur, membre de plusieurs sociétés littéraires et scientifiques. L’auteur est décédé d’une pneumonie deux mois après sa publication, sans avoir revendiqué la responsabilité de l’œuvre et en ignorant son développement philosophique. En étant assez ignorée jusqu’à present, mon paper revendiquera l’inclusion de cette œuvre parmi les textes fondamentals de l’esthétique du XIXe siècle. J’argumentarai ma reivindication à la suite de quatre raisons.
2.1. Physiologie du Goût fonde épistémiquement le goût dans son utilisation non métaphorique
2.2. Brillat-Savarin, le premier opposant au dualisme ontologique et épistémique cartésien
2.3. Brillat-Savarin a appliqué le jugement réflexif de la Critique de la faculté de juger d’Emmanuel Kant au jugement du goût gastronomique
2.4. Brillat-Savarin a fondé l’esthétique gustatoire à partir de la physiologie, faisant progresser le positivisme philosophique
Mon intervention fera un mise au point de la consideration actuelle de la Physiologie du Goût et finira avec une reivindication de l’importance de ce texte et pour l’esthétique et pour la philosophie contemporaine.
A vexed claim in the philosophy of poetry is the form-content unity thesis, which states that the formal features of a poem (e.g., meter and rhyme) and its meaning are inseparable, that is, connected in such an intimate way that the appreciation of the poem seems to always be directed at both. In this paper I interpret this thesis as stating that form and content in poetry are experienced as indissolubly connected while reading. My view is that the unity of the experience of form and content can be explained once the role of inner speech is highlighted in the phenomenology of reading poetry. By inner speech, I mean the mental production of one’s voice in the absence of physical articulation. The content of the inner voice is heard as having two aspects: an auditory aspect and a semantic one. These two aspects are indissolubly connected in the experience: one cannot separate them, even if one tries to focus one’s attention on one of them. This unitary character of the content of the experience of reading explains form-content unity: the sonic properties and the semantic properties of the poem are experienced as inseparable aspects of the same content while reading. My view has an important advantage over accounts that have previously tried to characterize this experiential unity by relying exclusively on how attention is distributed. Such accounts are unworkable, I argue, because they do not produce explicit claims about what counts as a unitary experience, given that they are silent about the structure of the experience of reading poetry. In contrast, I define this unitary experience as one that involves inner speech, where semantic and sonic properties are indissolubly attributed to the same utterance.
This paper explores the historical, theoretical, and institutional tensions between anthropology and art in the study of Australian Aboriginal cultural production. It examines the emergence, causes, and consequences of dualistic approaches to Aboriginal art and proposes methods for reconciling these oppositional frameworks through the work of Czech painter and anthropologist Karel Kupka (1918–1993) and Czech artist and theorist Jaroslav Vančát. By analyzing the influence of modern art on the reception of Aboriginal art and investigating its dual layers—conceptual (internal) and formal (external)—the study demonstrates how anthropology and art history have both diverged and overlapped in their treatment of Aboriginal art. Ultimately, this paper identifies the challenges inherent in navigating these dualisms and highlights the opportunities for adopting a more integrated and interdisciplinary approach to future research.
Recently, the social dimension of fiction-related activities (creating and engaging with them) has received much attention from analytic philosophers, the discussion finally integrating the issue of serialized fiction, canon constitution and fanfiction. While the debate has been mostly concerned with the rules that preside the emergence of the canon in heavily serialized fictions (Cook 2013) and the impact that its evolution has on fictional truth (D’Alessandro 2016, McGonigal 2013, Tillman 2016), it has overlooked the fact that the practice of canon constitution is in need of a strong philosophical foundation. As commonly construed, the canon is a set of works of fiction, distinguished from a pool of candidates, that should be taken to tell the “true” story, regardless of what all the non canonical works might depict. The central process of canon constitution is thus the selection that takes place within some yet unspecified boundaries of possibility. The very evolution of the canon, the integration of new episodes and the rejection of others outside it, presupposes in itself a certain notion of “relatedness”. It would be absurd to say that Nabokov’s Lolita is a non-canonical episode of Gilmore Girls – they are simply a pair of unrelated fictions. Let us introduce the notion of a fictional corpus, viz. the set of fictions related to one another.
This article aims at shedding more light on the conditions of possibility for the canon – non-canon divide and thus spell out the notion of fictional corpora. I will first list some desiderata for any theoretical approach of this subject and then evaluate two promising candidates: an ontological take that links kinship between fictions to same-class membership of fictional worlds, and an aboutness-driven approach that claims that fictional corpora should be delineated in function of the identity of the native fictional characters they mobilise.
Given its relevance in artistic practice, the topic of work completion has captured the attention of recent debate in the philosophy of art. The mainstream view in this debate is that the artist’s authority to determine when her work is finished absolute. Let me call it the determination completion thesis. This is the intuitive idea that the artist’s psychological states, which encompass her beliefs, intentions, decisions or intended behavior towards the work, determine that the work is finished. This paper aims to show, first, that the accounts that assume the determination completion thesis face what I will call the paradox of work completion. In a nutshell, if work completion is determined by the artist’s decisions, and these decisions are provisional because they can be always revoked by the artist in post-completion changes, complete works are incomplete, which is absurd. As a solution to the paradox, this paper aims to rescue and elaborate a different view of work completion that has been scorned in current debate: aesthetic completion. This view was introduced by Monroe Beardsley in more hedonic terms. Here, a non-hedonic elaboration of this idea will be explored along the following lines: a work is aesthetically complete if, and only if, it constitutes a minimally organic or meaningful unity in an artistic context, understood as the common ground of artistic beliefs, norms and basic assumptions of an artistic practice. As such, the completion of an artwork will be seen as a mind independent aesthetic fact, one that can be only grasped by means of intersubjective aesthetic judgments. This account, on the one hand, will make the artist’s completion decisions artistically reasonable. On the other hand, the account will solve the paradox of work completion by means of an error theory about the artist completion decisions.
This paper suggests reading Goethe’s Farbenlehre as a foundational text in the philosophy of images and reclaims his work as a conceptual framework capable of informing a specific mode of aesthetic inquiry. Moreover, it is situated within the landscape of visual studies, aiming to activate its critical potential. From an aesthetics standpoint, which has maintained an ambivalent relationship with visual studies, this approach encourages a reassessment of whether aesthetics might constitute a discipline proper to the visual. It explores whether there exists, within its historical development, a moment in which the foundations of such a discipline were anticipated. The central thesis posits that Goethe’s Farbenlehre can provide a response to these questions.
This paper focuses on night-time or nightly activities and objects, such as the nightlife, night walking, nightly urban atmosphere and night sky or night landscape, exploring how these have been culturally perceived, practiced or represented in art (literature, painting, art events, installations, performances) and interpreted in philosophical discourses. In specifying some elements of an aesthetics of the night, this exploration aims to rethink night and nightness, both neglected or discredited yet significant realms and traits of sensory perception that shape our aesthetic life. In this, it will contribute towards reconceptualizing the (ordinary) aesthetic life, revealing the differences between daily and nightly, ordinary and art-driven aesthetic experiences, yet challenging the uncritical oppositions between them and the ontologically association of negative values to night and nightnessnig.
„I want you to panic!“ demanded Greta Thunberg in 2019. But despite the increasing frequency of environmental disasters, no widespread panic has broken out so far. Instead, the global North is developing a response to the ecological crisis that hints towards another concept from psychoanalysis. According to Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, no other term describes the strangeness of the ecology in our anthropocentric present more aptly than “uncanny.” But what is this ecological uncanny exactly? The lecture will describe the phenomenon and discuss its aesthetic, epistemological, ethical, and political implications.
Recently, Warren Montag has attempted to formulate a spinozist “counter-aesthetics”, based on the idea that Spinoza’s absence in the early discourse around the formation of aesthetics as a separate philosophical discipline is a telling symptom of the possibility that his philosophy can provide an alternative path for thinking about art in general, and poetry in particular (Montag 2020). It is widely acknowledged that Spinoza did not develop neither a poetics not an aesthetic theory (e.g. Morrison 1989), given his thorough relativization of the notions of beauty and ugliness: “prejudices have arisen concerning […] beauty and ugliness, and other things of this kind”, and men “had to form these notions, by which they explained natural things: good, evil, order, confusion, warm, cold, beauty, ugliness” (Ethics I Appendix). But this relativization, which forms part of Spinoza’s general critique of normative value concepts, does not entail that his system is of no value to thinking about art in general, and poetry in particular. I will be presenting an argument to the contrary, and more precisely to the effect that a number of his concepts can form a ground from which a metaphysics of poetry might evolve. The main components of my argument will be:
In this article, I revisit a discussion within Everyday Aesthetics about the lack of frame or framelessness of aesthetic appreciation in everyday life. This has to do with the apparent absence of a standard of correctness of aesthetic appreciation in everyday life. My purpose is to argue for a middle ground in the current discussion that makes proper sense of both: (a) the subjectivist intuition, expressed by Saito (2007; 2017), that we are freer when it comes to aesthetic appreciation in everyday life than in art; and (b) the objectivist concern, raised by Parsons & Carlson (2008), to preserve the normative dimension of aesthetic appreciation in everyday life. While Saito defends (a) through a full-blooded subjectivism that dismisses the normative dimension of aesthetic appreciation in everyday life, Parsons & Carlson defend (b) through a cognitivist approach which I find too narrow in accounting for the way in which aesthetic appreciation is ordinarily framed in everyday life. Thus, for my purpose, I elaborate two arguments. With the first argument, which is epistemic, I alternatively propose a practical and implicit frame, obtained through familiarity with certain practices, for aesthetic appreciation in everyday life. Here I partially expand on Forsey’s (2013) conventionalist approach beyond designed objects. With the second argument, which is aesthetic, I argue that what is crucial for the normative dimension of aesthetic appreciation in general is not so much its guiding frame, but the free exercise of the subject’s judgmental capacities. Here I rely on a comment by Leddy (2012) on this issue that has been ignored in the current discussion.
In the last decades, the ‘paradox of fiction’ has been at the center of the analytic philosophy of art. Its challenge lies in the fact that, while in ordinary lives we typically have emotions for facts, events, and people we believe to exist, when it comes to fiction we feel emotions for fictional characters and events we know do not exist. For this reason, some have argued that fiction-directed emotions are either irrational (Radford) or non-genuine, i.e., substantially different from everyday emotions (Walton). Traditionally, the paradox has been traced back to the fact that its early theorists, Radford and Walton, relied on a cognitive theory that defines emotions as evaluative judgments or beliefs. This paper argues that, on closer reading, Radford and Walton’s claims are not based on any plausible cognitive account. Instead, I contend that, while they did not explicitly endorse any specific theory of emotion, their arguments can be better understood as (unconsciously) aligning with a motivational account, according to which emotions are action tendencies. I will first show that Radford and Walton’s conclusions do not follow even from the most controversial and radical version of cognitivism. Then, I will argue that it is possible to make sense of their line of argument if we assume a motivational view, which identifies the motivational force as the primary component in defining emotions.
Throughout history, some art pieces have been labeled as ‘rule-breaking’ or ‘pioneering’. Such artworks elicited strong reactions and often rejection at first, but they ultimately broke conventional rules in art and introduced new art movements. Although revolutionary artworks play a key role in art history and society, established theories in philosophy of art have left this central topic unattended. To address the gap in the literature, this paper provides an analysis of ‘pioneering’ artworks by borrowing tools from the ontology of artifacts. I argue that the emergence of a ‘pioneering’ artwork is comparable to the emergence of prototypes in artifacts. These artworks, sometimes recognized through a phenomenon of counter-use, enable the creation of new art movements, much like prototypes provoke the emergence of new kinds. I conclude that a philosophical understanding of ‘pioneering’ artworks that takes into account their social and functional nature reveals their unique role in art history.
In my paper, I aim to develop a theory of aesthetic atmosphere. I rely on the presentation of the problem of atmospheres, which has been convincingly translated by Gernot Böhme. In my paper I do not deny the validity of Böhme’s emphasis on the atmospheric character of aesthetic experience. I suggest that aesthetic experience indeed has a holistic, enveloping character, into which diverse sensory and affective elements enter. However, I stress that an approach to the atmospheric character of aesthetic experience must respect the complexity and mutability of the atmosphere, its dynamic and heterogeneous character. In my paper, I use selected motifs from the thought of Henri Bergson and José Gil, specifically the idea of inventing a way of harmonizing diverse sensations in a work of art and the idea of diverse ways of extending the body into space through bodily movements. I want to show that these ideas can be used very productively for the benefit of the theory of atmospheres. Firstly, I discuss Bergson’s idea of atmosphere as an emotion created by the artist. I suggest that this emotion represents a dynamically evolving heterogeneous multiplicity of elements. I also point out that in Bergson’s thought this unfolding of atmosphere is not separate from bodily experience. I then discuss the corporeal nature of atmosphere in relation to Gil’s considerations of the interpenetration of the subjective and the objective in the extension of the body into space. In relation to the unfolding of the dancing body in space, I emphasize transformation of temporal and spatial relations of this extension and draw attention to the dynamic nature of the atmosphere as a multiplicity of heterogeneous elements.
This paper explores how fiction, particularly the realist novel, engages with the complexities of human agency, decision-making, and ethical responsibility. Through an analysis of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss alongside the ethical philosophy of J.L. Austin, it examines how novels illuminate the fragile intersection of intention, action, and consequence. Eliot’s portrayal of characters grappling with conflicting motivations, carelessness, and unforeseen circumstances mirrors Austin’s philosophical inquiries into the vulnerability and fallibility of human action. Austin’s concept of excuses and his metaphor of the “miner’s lamp”—illuminating only the immediate consequences of action—offer a compelling framework for understanding the ethical stakes of narrative realism.
By situating Austin’s philosophy as a form of “tragic thought,” the paper highlights his relevance to thinking about the aesthetic experience of novel reading. The realist novel tradition has long been perceived as a site where the propensity for human actions to fail is addressed not as an anomaly but as a defining feature of agency. This perspective aligns with Eliot’s commitment to representing the ethical weight of ordinary decisions within a web of social and personal contingencies. The realist novel, as argued here, does not merely reflect human fallibility but transforms it into an ethical call for attentiveness and care. Through omniscient narration and an acute awareness of characters’ limitations, Eliot’s narratives evoke a shared sense of responsibility, encouraging readers to engage with the vulnerabilities of others. Ultimately, this paper positions the realist novel as a site of ethical reflection, where literature and philosophy converge to explore the fragility and moral dimensions of human action.
Somewhat fatigued by the concepts of indexicality and transparency, photographic theory has been searching for a new direction. Challenging realist assumptions, theorists have emphasised aspects of photography beyond recording, following the hypothesis that aesthetic values are inherently human and that the aesthetics of photography should prioritise human-dependent elements. I critique this solution and propose re-articulating realist perspectives through the philosophy of technology, a largely absent framework in photographic aesthetics. This absence stems not only from anthropocentrism but also from the reduction of photography to an interiorised image or, when viewed as a technology, a deterministic, mechanically repetitive object. In contrast, the philosophy of becoming sees technical objects as organised, even “organic”. For Simondon, technical objects undergo genesis and are partly contingent, meaning that some aspects of their development and functioning are beyond the control of their inventors, engineers, or users. Moreover, contemporary theorists of technology have extended this idea, claiming that indeterminacy is also characteristic of computation, recursion, and the development of AI. This perspective renders outdated the notion of technology as mechanically deterministic and entirely opposed to aesthetic and creative aspects. It is likely for this reason that Simondon suggested every technical object could have its own aesthetic epiphany once integrated into its world. Malabou, drawing on Kant, argued that life is nothing else than something that resists and self-organises without the transcendental. On the aesthetic level, this spontaneity and independence of life is perceived precisely as natural beauty. If technical objects possess a similar auto-organisational independence, what prevents us from seeing their functioning and products as beautiful? Rethinking the aesthetics of photography through the philosophy of technology could renew photographic theory and even shift the very meaning of aesthetics itself.
Despite Kant scholarship being immensely rich on the theory of aesthetic ideas given in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, the full thrust of the Kantian notion has not been fully revealed yet. I argue that aesthetic ideas bear the name ‘idea,’ and are defined as ‘counterparts’ of rational ideas, because they share a formally analogous constitution, defined by the notion of the maximum. Starting from Kant’s statements in §49 that explicitly link imagination to the principles of reason and to the maximum, I propose two senses in which productive imagination attains to a maximum in the creation of an aesthetic idea. The first is the symbolic or analogical demonstration of the maximum in intuition, through the generation of a counter-image of a rational idea that Kant calls its aesthetic attribute. The second is found in the maximum extension an aesthetic idea, as an unbounded field of representations, bears. Taking the role of the maximum into account, the justification of why aesthetic ideas are counterparts of rational ideas comes to the fore in full force, and warrants an amendment of the so-called ‘inclusive interpretation’ of aesthetic ideas.
Photography, due to its indexical nature, seems to struggle more in generating metaphors compared to intentional art forms like painting and drawing. However, there is a photographic technique that appears to add an intentional nuance to an art form historically associated with objective and realistic representation: this technique is multiple exposure photography. Multiple exposed photographs appear to be the best candidates for creating what I have called “photographic metaphors.” This happens thanks to the coexistence of two or more states of affairs within the same spatio-temporal framework – an outcome that is typically impossible to achieve through photography. This mechanism reminds of both linguistic and visual metaphors, but, as we will see, photographic metaphors do not have just something peculiar about them, they also differ from both.
The concept of political commitment has been at the heart of late modernism and the avant-garde. In this paper, I trace how it can be re-emphasised in the contemporary context of the Anthropocene. This is done through an Adornian thesis about the historicity of art and its dialectical character of ‘negative’ commitment – a constant resistance to being ideological and defining aesthetic modernism.
The aesthetic modernism has been supplanted by the neoliberal turn and what is called ‘neoliberal aesthetics’ in my broader project – while under complete commodification, the only form of commitment that remains, therefore, is to use its infrastructure to subvert it. However, the current economic, (geo)political and, above all, ecological challenges are making neoliberalism a source of disillusionment and a shift in political perspective, which is also immanently reflected in art.
The crisis of neoliberalism and the dissent it has generated have also allowed the use of transgressive strategies associated with avant-garde movements by alt-right groups. Against this background, the shifts towards post-humanism, hybridism and ecology reflect the ‘return of the political’, which is more than a reaction to neoliberal aesthetics, but could be seen as the possibility of a certain logic, closer to that of modernism and its interplay between art’s embeddedness in the social and political and its (alleged) autonomy, and an aesthetics that insists on art’s role as critique.
In my contribution, I would like to provide a background for investigating and understanding the Kantian origins of certain conceptual contributions by Jacques Rancière in the field of aesthetics. I will focus on Kant’s conceptualization of aesthetic ideas, about which Michel Chaouli provides the necessary intrigue: “One of the strangest conceptions in Immanuel Kant’s writing about aesthetics, which, as we have observed, is rich in strange conceptions, is that of aesthetic ideas”. Rancière reads Kant insightfully and proposes the art of aesthetic ideas as a proper ontology of art, which he enriches with some new concepts, which I will discuss in my paper. Rancière’s reading updates fundamental positions of Kant while simultaneously providing a new framework for understanding aesthetics in its connection with history of art, political theory and contemporary artistic practices.
I would like to argue that the appreciation of aesthetic value in natural environments needs to include some kind of alienation to be appropriate in times of ecological crisis.
I will explain what I mean by alienation by referring to Jaeggi’s account (2014) and trace alienation as disturbed relationship to the natural sphere phenomenologically with the following differentiation. In the aesthetic experience of Anthropocene nature it is an alienation
(a) from a nature that is no longer merely beautiful or picturesque, but partly ruined.
I’ll discuss the consequences of this differentiation. Aesthetic appreciation and alienation are, firstly, in a relationship of tension. Alienation prevents a seamless aesthetic experience of resonance, while it promotes the search for aesthetic experiences of resonance in the face of a reproduction of alienated world relations. Secondly, the consequences for ecological aesthetics are that the disturbing moment of alienation may be the best way to prevent aesthetic experience from becoming romantic escapism. Instead, the experience of aesthetically problematic nature motivates the preservation of its aesthetic values as ambivalent and complex.
In conclusion, I would like to discuss the idea that the alienation dimension in the face of ecological crisis can and perhaps should remain a dimension of an appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature even in ecological restitution.
I will attempt to revise Paul de Man’s reading of the concepts of sign and symbol in Hegel’s aesthetics (de Man 1996) from the standpoint of the current state of research on the history of the edition of Hegel’s philosophy of art. Paul de Man’s ingenious analysis is based on a concept of the symbolic that does not correspond to Hegel’s respective explanations in the transcripts of his lectures. De Man reads the symbol, according to Karl Gustav Hotho’s edition of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics, as a mediating instance between “the mind and the physical world” (ibid., 96). In fact, however, the relationship between these two poles within the symbolic is in Hegel’s lectures defined as radically asymmetrical, as shown in the relationship between form and meaning. Instead of “consist[ing] precisely in the connection, the affinity, and the concrete interpretation of meaning and form” (ibid., 93), as de Man translates Hotho’s Hegel, symbolic art is defined in Hegel’s lectures as a relation between meaning and form within which the form remains mostly completely external to the meaning. This needs to be emphasised on the basis of references to various lecture transcripts. (Hegel 2003; 2004; 2015; 2018; 2020.) It can then be considered which aspects of de Man’s interpretation can be retained and which may have to be discarded.
A notable, even seductive, yet, ultimately flawed approach to the fundamental question of what constitutes a standard aesthetic judgement was provided by David Hume (1757). His “test of time” offers a standard whereby those works of art that have lasted both physically, and in the reputation of critics, can be deemed to be of greater quality than those that have been forgotten. This paper reflects on the strengths and limitations of this common-sense idea from a new angle. Philosophers have hitherto considered the limitations of Hume’s theory from a structural and political perspective, rightly accusing it of circularity and overlooking aspects such as first mover privilege and the politics of reviewing itself. Instead, this paper considers the argument from a historical and technological perspective through a consideration of the nature of contemporary cultural artefacts, specifically pop songs. Today the pop song is no longer legible on a canonical chart in any meaningful sense, be it record sales, Spotify streams, or Rolling Stone’s greatest songs of all time. In other words, Hume’s unfair privileging of lasting treasures, at the expense of momentary pleasures, plays out differently in the current context of cultural production, distribution and consumption. In the so-called “big flat now” (Bettridge, Koch and Mascatello, 2018) cultural artefacts are no longer as fixed in place and time as they once were. Accordingly, this temporal displacement undermines the sense of a canon. While there certainly is merit in the recognition of the collective intelligence of generations of critics, this privileging of the past is not only a fallacious and biased appeal to tradition and longevity as the ultimate source of quality but is epistemologically unviable when it is increasingly impossible to even know what is popular.
It is widely acknowledged that beauty has been discredited as a philosophical notion, but on what grounds? Arguments against beauty have rarely been represented together in outline, which makes the project of beauty’s restoration troublesome. In the present paper, I adumbrate four of the principal arguments that have been raised ‘against’ beauty and indicate some of the ways in which ‘Beauty Revivalist’ philosophers have offered, or could offer, rejoinders to them. I refer to the arguments as: 1) The definition argument; 2) The political argument; 3) The moral argument; 4) The aesthetic argument. The definition argument says that beauty is difficult or impossible to define. The political argument says that the pursuit of beauty is trivial and potentially irresponsible or damaging in the face or more important concerns, and, in any case, impossible under certain social, economic, and political conditions. The moral argument says that beauty, far from being intrinsically related to ‘the good’, is in fact linked to immorality and even evil. The aesthetic argument says that beauty is not necessary for art. These repudiations make contemporary accounts of beauty inordinately problematic, and even more urgent. I argue that, when composing new accounts, Revivalists must not be deaf or blind to, or mute about, the spirited criticism, censure and condemnation which beauty, and her lovers, have sustained. We must take seriously the concerns that underlie and animate anti-beauty positions and answer those concerns in a way that might be satisfying to those who have them.
In her 2012 book Aesthetics of Installation Art, Juliane Rebentisch argues that ‘Art is not autonomous because it is constituted in this or that way, but because it allows for an experience distinct from the spheres of practical and theoretical reason, by the virtue of the specific structure of the relation between its subject and its object’ (2012, 11). This experience, occasioned by a work of installation art, is conceived not as a subjectivism that posits the subject’s aesthetic experience as its own object but rather a ‘bracketing’ that highlights the performative role of the subject. Rebentisch not only seeks to confront objectivist misrepresentations of aesthetic autonomy but accounts of contemporary art that abandon any role for autonomy; nevertheless, the process of ‘bracketing’ remains obscure in her account. One might agree that it facilitates a reflective process where the ‘subject is compelled to reflect on its own productivity in the creation of relations of meaning’ (2012, 271) while demanding a more robust account as to how the artwork orients the beholder towards its bracketed world, especially given installation art’s typical immersiveness—a being inside rather than outside the work. Elsewhere, I have drawn upon Wolfgang Iser’s reception aesthetics to suggest that imagination plays a crucial role in such bracketing, negotiating the unstable relation between the perceptive engagement of the real situation and the virtuality of the bracketed artwork. In this paper I want to develop this position further in the light of what I am calling the locative function of art. Conceived, in Gareth Evans’s terms, as an additional conceptual component involving ‘spatially extended causal processes’ (1982, 166-7), I believe that a role for sensory imagination in negotiating a work’s bracketed world facilitates an aesthetically important oscillation between the bracketed realm and that from which it has been separated.
Should I continually reread the same author over and over again, or try reading something new? It seems like there ought to be a straightforward answer to this sort of practical question about how best to behave to live a life of aesthetic flourishing. And it seems that we are able to say, of certain people, whether their aesthetic lives have gone particularly well or poorly. Whilst there is certainly intuitive appeal for the value of aesthetic exploration, I will suggest that there are also reasons to engage faithfully with those aesthetic practices that are already familiar to you. These two seemingly conflicting modes of engagement both play an important role in a flourishing aesthetic life and we ought, therefore, to mediate between the two. This sort of answer has its basis in the underlying idea that virtuous aesthetic engagement depends on recognising our personal histories. Our personal histories both facilitate and restrict our ability to engage with a given aesthetic practice. In considering this question, I make use of the notion of aesthetic communities, framing exploration and faithfulness in terms of moving between or remaining within communities. This framing serves also to bring to light two related questions that may come into tension with one another: what balance of exploration and faithfulness is good for the aesthetic life of the individual? And what balance is good for the broader community?
Writers on everyday aesthetics frequently take inspiration from one major work in the history of aesthetics: John Dewey’s Art as Experience. My aim in this paper is to show that there is a much more fruitful source of inspiration for thinking about everyday aesthetics that has been overlooked by writers in the field: R. G. Collingwood’s Principles of Art. More specifically, I aim to show that Collingwood’s theory, unlike Dewey’s, provides resources for answering two fundamental questions concerning the nature of aesthetic value in everyday life, namely, what makes it aesthetic and what makes it value. Aesthetic value, for Collingwood, is the value of expressing one’s emotions. What is distinctive about the expression of emotion is that it takes place at an imaginative level of conscious activity: by imaginatively synthesising the crude sensuous and affective building-blocks of experiences in relation to each other and oneself, one gains an understanding of one’s experiences in their individuality. Whereas Dewey narrowly restricts aesthetic experiences to those that have certain formal features, Collingwood’s way of demarcating aesthetic experiences is perfectly suited to accommodate the diversity of aesthetic experiences in everyday life. Not all experiences, on his account, are aesthetic; but anything that can be experienced can become an aesthetic experience by being expressed. Moreover, this same experiential understanding that demarcates some experiences as ‘aesthetic’ is also just what makes them valuable. Aesthetic value, on Collingwood’s account, is a distinctively experiential kind of cognitive value: the value of understanding one’s own experiences in their individuality. Unlike Dewey’s theory, Collingwood’s account of the cognitive source of aesthetic value can explain how difficult or unpleasant experiences can be aesthetically rewarding in a way that does not rely on the mysterious notion of experiences that are not pleasurable but are nevertheless valuable ‘for their own sakes’.
We argue that traditional function-based accounts of the aesthetics of artifacts –such as the Functional Beauty account and Jane Forsey’s Kantian framework– are inadequate for the appreciation of generative AI systems. This is due to both a lack of clarity as to what the proper function of such systems is, and ambiguities as to how their form relates to their functioning. We propose that Carlson’s environmental aesthetics, which emphasises understanding the natural world through scientific or common-sense knowledge, can be adapted to provide an aesthetics of Artificial Intelligence. We cast generative AI systems as environments shaped by various forces, including training data and algorithmic constraints, akin to natural environments shaped by geological and biological forces. Finally, we show how this environmental aesthetics of AI allows for three types of aesthetic appreciation: theoretical, practical, and output-based.
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