In this paper I motivate a methodology to build a new account of the evolution of arts in general. I first describe how many major accounts of the evolution of arts have been recently criticised for the difficulty of empirically testing their hypotheses and for couching the debate of art evolution in the adaptation/by-product framework. I explain how recent research is addressing these criticisms, by providing more empirically based and plausible accounts of art-related traits like music, and by changing their framework from adaptation/by-product to evolutionary scenario building. I emphasise that although accounts of the evolution of specific arts like music using these precautions have already been provided, an explanation for the evolution of arts in general is still missing. I then suggest to use Ellen Dissanayake’s ‘artification’ hypothesis for building an account of the evolution of arts in general. I motivate her explanation of the evolution of arts from the Pleistocene ≈ 2 million years ago, and I emphasise how the empirical evidence and timeframe she provides aligns with the notion of Homo ‘behavioural modernity’, classically associated with the origin of arts, a notion I will explain has recently been reformulated as a gradual evolutionary pattern starting in the Pleistocene. Based on this alignment, I provide an updated account of the artification capacity in the light of the recent methodological and evidential advancements in theorising about the evolution of arts. I then suggest a reformulation of Dissanayake’s account of arts as ‘mosaic’ traits, a set of interrelated traits emerging following different evolutionary trajectories at different times that coevolve together. I use these suggestions to conclude that the study of the evolution of the arts will benefit from a shift to Dissanayake’s concept of artification to identify the relevant traits for reconstructing the evolution of the components relevant to art.
The paper examines the temporal dimension of atmospheres, a feature that has received less attention than their spatial and synchronic character in aesthetic theory. Building on an ontology that conceives atmospheres as relational properties, the authors argue that atmospheres emerge from the interaction between the objective characteristics of a place and the way these characteristics are sensorially experienced. They distinguish between the ordinary experience of a place and the specifically atmospheric experience of it as having a particular atmosphere.
Although atmospheric experience is primarily grounded in the “here and now,” the paper maintains that it can also be oriented toward the past or the future. Past-oriented experience involves historical associations and memories, while future-oriented experience concerns preservation, transformation, and development. By emphasising the affective dimension of atmospheres, the authors show how their temporal structure enables them to influence human action. Atmospheres, especially those characterising landscapes and environments, can thus motivate individual and collective practices related to heritage, planning, and environmental change.
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.
This paper develops a process-based account of authorship and creativity in AI-generated photo-based images by locating where creative agency sits within a hybrid human–algorithmic workflow and showing how that distribution should ground authorship attribution. Because such images can be aesthetically comparable to non-AI photographic works, the key question is not whether they look creative, but how creativity is produced across the stages of their making – and who, therefore, merits authorship credit. Bracketing (without denying) moral and legal controversies about training data, the paper focuses on practice-structure: how cultural conventions assign authorship in collaborative and technologically mediated arts, and whether AI image-making fits those conventions.
Rejecting a binary model of creative autonomy, the paper treats autonomy as scalar and often shared, drawing parallels with film, architecture, music, theatre, and conceptual art (including instruction-based and ready-made practices). AI image generation is then analysed as a composite process shaped by training data and algorithms, and interpreted through a Dawkins-inspired “memetic” lens in which cultural styles and visual regularities function as evolving resources that circulate with unevenly documented authorship.
To locate creativity more precisely, the paper adopts Boden’s account of creativity as producing artefacts that are new, surprising, and valuable, and distinguishes three loci: (1) human creativity across pre-engagement (conception, subject choice, prompt-image preparation), engagement (iterative prompting and refinement), and post-engagement (selection and postproduction); (2) algorithmic creativity, motivated by prompt-to-output variability and a “glitch-like” unpredictability that can itself be aesthetically productive; and (3) interactive human–algorithmic creativity, where iterative steering and model responses reciprocally shape intentions, co-producing novelty. The paper argues that when systems incorporate authorial intent while remaining learnably predictable, users’ organising labour can ground authorship in continuity with established composite photographic practices, and it closes by proposing an interdisciplinary agenda for specifying degrees of control and revising authorship norms accordingly.
A promising view on artwork metaphysics is: Artwork hylomorphism (AH): artworks are formally constituted by norms and materially constituted by concrete/abstract objects. Some works of contemporary art (WOCA), however, pose a challenge to AH: it is not clear what we should identify as the material constituent/s of artworks which, albeit exhibited not dissimilarly to traditional visual/plastic artworks, differ from the latter because of their performative/interactive/participatory character and/or because we have trouble identifying what, if anything, they present for appreciation. Interestingly, Sherri Irvin (2022) hints at a solution: *Irvin* contemporary artwork hylomorphism (ICAH): WOCA are materially constituted by rules and formally constituted by certain sanctioned art concepts. ICAH, however, presents two problems: (1) WOCA are, by Irvin’s (2022) own admission, significantly like works of music which, however, according to both Evnine (2009; 2016) and Passinsky (2021), are not made of rules, but rather of sound structures. Why not see WOCA along similar lines, as this would be more descriptively accurate? (2) Memes are made of rules (Evnine 2018), but they are significantly different from WOCA: this casts some doubt upon the view that WOCA are made of rules. I thus defend an alternative form of WOCA hylomorphism: Contemporary artwork hylomorphism (CAH): WOCA are materially constituted by situation structures and formally constituted by sanctioned art concepts. CAH’s great advantage is that it makes sense descriptively because it accommodates three facts: (i) the public is typically implicated by WOCA – whose instantiations are situations the public participates in; (ii) WOCA can be loosely or tightly structured, just like situations – as debate in the metaphysics of dance already suggested (see Pakes 2020); (iii) what one appreciates about WOCA are typically experienced aspects of the situations those works confront the public with, rather than rules that one retrieves from one’s encounters with the works.
In the conclusion to his 1983 book, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Czech-born philosopher Vilém Flusser argues that photographers ought to ‘play against’ the camera in order to realise their creative freedom. This is one of the most enigmatic pronouncements of the text, with little detail given as to what ‘playing against the camera’ might entail. It is for this reason, perhaps, that this concept has engendered little discussion among Flusser scholars. This paper addresses this lacuna by arguing that the idea of playing against the camera is indirectly developed by Flusser in Towards a Philosophy of Photography’s follow-up, 1985’s Into the Universe of Technical Images. I argue that, when one reads Universe as developing the concerns of Philosophy of Photography, one gains an understanding of playing against the camera as a form of dialectical creative practice. On this understanding of playing against, the photographer becomes conscious of the restrictions placed on her by the design of her equipment and sees the novelty of her work as arising through the interaction of her own creative decisions with those restrictions. In other words, she plays against the restrictions of her equipment in order to realise her own creative intentions through those restrictions. I suggest that, as well as providing insight into a somewhat mysterious part of Flusser’s philosophy, this interpretation of playing against also impacts upon the philosophy of photography more broadly. It does so by resisting accounts of the medium that construe the operation of the camera as a predominantly causal, agentless phenomenon. Instead, it shows that the restrictions imposed by the way the camera functions are precisely what the photographer uses to realise her intentions. In this way, the interpretation of Flusser offered here serves as the groundwork for a broader account of creativity in photography.
This paper seeks to explore the relationship between subjectivity and perception through an analysis of psychological time in the moving portrait. Although this genre has received relatively little critical attention, it was already explored intensively by Andy Warhol in his screen tests between 1963 and 1965. These films display a productive ambiguity: on the one hand, they emulate the stasis of pictorial and photographic portraiture; on the other, they endow it with a certain liveliness and spontaneity. Situated at this threshold, the images compel us to reflect on the relation between stasis and movement and, consequently, on the very conditions of image perception.
This line of inquiry leads back to the period of the invention of cinema and to the perceptual studies it generated, from Étienne-Jules Marey’s experiments on the perception of movement to William James’s theses on temporal perception, which fundamentally asked whether the perception of duration is based on continuity or on discrete units. The most groundbreaking and influential response to this problem was developed by Edmund Husserl between 1905 and 1925, in his investigations into the inner consciousness of time. Husserl argued that temporal perception can only be constituted through an activity in which consciousness itself is in a constant process of self-constitution.
From this perspective, Warhol’s images, when they reflect the subject’s awareness of their own temporal perception, appear to destabilize the very foundations of subjectivity. The character recedes behind a vulnerable and uncertain gaze, in which the ego seems to waver. Further examples from contemporary video art will allow us to identify nuances and variations on this idea.
Accidents, contingencies and unforeseen events are a structural component of filmmaking. Film production is constantly exposed to interruptions that exceed planning and authorial control, yet these elements have long been marginalised by theories of authorship and image-centred film analysis. This paper proposes to reconsider such disruptions not as marginal errors, but as manifestations of a negativity immanent in the filmmaking process.
Drawing on Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetic theory, and in particular on his concept of non-intentionality (Unwillkürlichkeit), the paper argues that cinematic form emerges through its encounter with what resists intentionality/purposefulness. Cinema appears as an art form structurally exposed to this negative dimension due to its collective, technologically mediated and materially contingent nature. In dialogue with recent calls for a “negative history of cinema”, the contribution shifts the focus from unfinished or failed projects to the active role of negativity within completed films.
To articulate this perspective, the paper introduces the notion of negative filmmaking: a critical-exploratory approach that redirects analytical attention from the finished film text to moments in which production contingencies intervene in and reorganise cinematic form. The film set is thus understood as a porous aesthetic field in which human and non-human agencies intersect and where the boundary between diegesis and production system remains unstable.
The argument is developed through a case study of Twin Peaks, focusing on the accidental appearance of the then set designer Frank Silva during the filming of the pilot episode and his subsequent transformation into the character of Killer Bob: main antagonist of the series. This episode exemplifies how a production accident can be incorporated into the diegesis, triggering a profound narrative and symbolic reconfiguration of the project.
Buck-passing theory defines art by a biconditional: an item is an artwork iff it belongs to one of the arts. The view avoids a single essence of art, but it faces a temporal pressure in pioneering cases. The problem is not merely delayed recognition. Sometimes the relevant art-kind is not yet in place, because a relatively stable normative structure for making, presenting, and criticising tokens has not yet stabilised. If artwork status depends on kind-membership, and the membership conditions are not yet in place at t, buck-passing seems forced toward illicit retroactivity or arbitrariness.
I defend a time-sensitive revision that makes stability condition on art-kinds explicit. First, I add a minimal constraint on art-kinds: a practice counts as an art-kind only if it sustains a relatively stable normative structure for making, presenting, and criticising tokens under an appreciative mode of uptake. This appeals to normative roles and competence, not institutional endorsement. Second, I distinguish two senses of “later”. In the epistemic case, the art-kind already meets the minimal constraint at time t, but classification lags because viewers lack familiarity and the right cues. In the ontological case, the practice has not yet stabilised into an art-kind at t, so strict artwork status is not yet settled.
Finally, I propose a time-sensitive membership rule with two routes to belonging: production under a practice’s constitutive norms, or competent uptake at a later time constrained by those norms once they stabilise. This yields a non-retroactive treatment of pioneers and a principled way to diagnose when borderline classifications should stabilise and when they should remain unsettled.
In contemporary performing arts, the audience increasingly acts as a moral arbiter of both authors and works. We expand the concept of fundamental audience responsibility (Czerny Urban) by analyzing its role in the “culture of cancellation” – a context where the audience ethically evaluates art and can impose sanctions. The key research question is how to clearly distinguish: (1) aesthetic evaluation of a work of art, (2) moral condemnation of an author, and (3) active sanctioning. We also examine the corresponding audience responsibility at each stage. The theoretical approach draws on an ethical framework for art criticism and the philosophy of the performing arts. Case studies of boycotts or interruptions of performances are analyzed to clarify each concept and process. The aim is to construct a philosophical proposal outlining how audiences exercise social power through condemnation while respecting the boundaries of responsibility toward artists and public discourse. The paper offers guidelines that bridge aesthetic and ethical criticism while promoting thoughtful, well-differentiated viewer participation.
In this proposal, we defend a value-based account of atmospheres, according to which atmospheres are emotional values as instantiated by environments in virtue of the interplay of the non-evaluative properties of their components (such as objects, persons, sounds, lighting, etc.). We first examine the affordance-based theory of atmospheres, which is widely regarded as the leading view of atmospheres in philosophy. On this account, atmospheres are understood as felt systems of action possibilities (that is, as felt systems of affordances). We argue that the affordance-based view fails to provide a compelling account of a crucial characteristic of them: their capacity to regulate our emotional orientation, that is, their being “tools for feeling.” We contend that the unsoundness of the affordance-based theory stems from its commitment to treating emotion regulation as a directly felt atmospheric affordance. As an alternative, we propose that atmospheres are best conceived as environmental values that are not constituted by, but are instead indirectly captured, and epistemically manifested through, our emotional responses. This framework provides a more economical account of how atmospheres regulate emotional responses and offers a promising normative basis for assessing the fittingness of affective reactions to atmospheres.
Central perspective is commonly regarded as one of the defining achievements of Renaissance visual culture and often celebrated as the most natural and rational way of representing space. Following Erwin Panofsky’s seminal analysis, however, perspective is here understood not as a neutral optical technique but as a symbolic form: a historically situated configuration of vision that produces a specific conception of both world and subject. This paper argues that perspective should be approached not merely as a method for organizing visual space, but as a transcendental framework that encodes a decisive anthropological choice: whether the subject constitutes the image, or whether the image, as an event, constitutes the subject. To articulate this claim, the paper brings Panofsky’s account of linear perspective into dialogue with Pavel Florensky’s theory of reversed perspective and Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of anamorphosis. Florensky’s critique radicalizes Panofsky’s analysis by showing that linear perspective does not correspond to the subject’s spontaneous mode of seeing, but relies on an artificial construction that stages the subject as a sovereign centre of vision. Against this model, Florensky opposes the spatial logic of the Orthodox icon, characterized by reversed perspective, in which the vanishing point is displaced outside the image and the viewer is no longer the constituting subject but the one addressed by the image itself. Interpreted through Marion’s notions of anamorphosis and saturated phenomenon, the icon appears phenomenologically as an event that imposes its own conditions of visibility and reverses intentionality. The paper concludes by suggesting that this alternative regime of visibility anticipates later attempts, in both medieval and contemporary art, to challenge the modern subject-centred models of representation.
Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment lacks explicit discussion of landscapes as objects of natural beauty, despite the prominence of landscape appreciation in 18th century aesthetic theory and debates on the picturesque. Kant’s examples of beauty involve small natural objects, while large-scale natural scenes are typically associated with the sublime. This paper addresses the resulting issue: can natural landscapes, understood as composed views of natural elements, be accommodated within a Kantian framework of aesthetic judgment?
The difficulty is twofold. First, landscapes appear to lack the determinate, bounded form that Kant takes to be central to judgments of beauty. Second, landscapes are composite entities rather than singular objects, whereas Kantian judgments of taste are singular. Despite these issues, I argue that a Kantian aesthetics of the landscape is possible. To do so, I draw on two recent interpretations of Kant’s views. The first one is the analogy between an organism and an ecosystem by means of the teleological judgment (Vereb 2025). The second one is the interpretation of natural beauty as the expression of an aesthetic idea (Reiter 2020). The first strategy appeals to the unifying function of teleological judgment. The teleological judgment allows us to conceive certain ecosystems as unified, individuated wholes eligible for aesthetic judgment. The second strategy draws on the interpretation of natural beauty as the expression of an aesthetic idea, understood as the idealised spatial forms of a natural kind. By emphasising the regulative and “as if” character of Kantian judgment, the paper shows how landscapes can appear purposive for our cognitive faculties without implying real teleology. In doing so, it develops a coherent Kantian aesthetics of the landscape that bridges Kant’s nature aesthetics with contemporary debates and expands the scope of aesthetic, and potentially moral, attention from individual objects to entire ecosystems.
Can imaginative experiences provide aesthetic pleasure? A natural hypothesis is the following: since sensory imagining is in important respects analogous to perceptual experience, and since we can have affective responses to what we imagine, imaginative pleasure should be explained primarily as pleasure in the imagined object, prompted by its represented features in a broadly perception-like way. This model faces two pressures. First, it predicts an implausibly tight link between what is pleasurable to imagine and what would be pleasurable to perceive: we often enjoy imagining what would be unpleasant, undesirable, or aesthetically unrewarding in reality, suggesting that imaginative pleasure is not merely borrowed perceptual pleasure (Feagin 1984). Second, it struggles to capture the motivational profile characteristic of perceptual aesthetic engagement driven by exploration and discovery, since imagining typically lacks the receptive conditions that make them possible (Hopkins 2024). I propose an alternative relying on the Imaginative Agency Account (Dorsch 2012, Hopkins 2024), where pleasure is not object-directed but arises in the exercise and phenomenology of imaginative agency itself. Pleasure in imagining is taken in the fluent formation and development of sensory representations. On this view, imaginative pleasure is intrinsically rewarding and motivational by disposing the agent to continue, extend, and refine an imaginative project, thereby grounding a distinctive first-personal aesthetic of agency.
The entry of AI-generated visual artifacts into the art world—exemplified by AICAN’s faceless-portraits exhibition and AI-DA’s recent success at Sotheby’s—raises questions about the role of aesthetic inquiry in understanding the human condition in an age of posthuman creativity. I deploy a critical angle on the kind of art criticism that has been directed at AI-DA’s portrait of Alan Turing in order to tease out an important lesson from Turing’s foundational idea that the search for genuine AI requires a “cultural search” conducted collectively by the human community. I argue that Turing’s point calls for a nuanced examination of digital technology’s aesthetic significance, considering the complete environmental transaction, including both technological capabilities and user interactions within our living spaces and activities. Alva Noë’s recent discussion of the notion of “the aesthetic work” connects with Turing’s idea that as we increasingly delegate human tasks to calculative routines, there remains a residue of end-user conversation that keeps evolving through human culture, intellectual development, and the integration of technology and biology and remains ever vital for the machine’s never-ending becoming of mind.
This paper develops, through a critical reinterpretation of Adorno’s aesthetics in light of Donna Haraway’s social epistemology, a systematic model for understanding the critical potential of art beyond the dichotomy between aesthetic autonomy and relationality that currently structures debates on the social role of art. Recent intersectional social movements have intensified demands for the politicization of the art system, prompting divergent responses within philosophical aesthetics and art criticism. While philosophical aesthetics has increasingly located art’s critical potential in relation to marginalized identities, art criticism has defended the necessity of formal analysis in order to preserve the specificity of artistic social critique. Against this background, the paper argues that the critical potential of artworks can be explained through a conceptual framework that integrates aesthetic autonomy and relationality. Drawing on Theodor W. Adorno’s account of aesthetic autonomy as structurally mediated by historical and social contexts, aesthetic form is conceived as a negative social relation. However, Adorno’s account of the critical potential of aesthetic autonomy remains detached from specific forms of oppression and concrete social identities. The paper turns then to Donna Haraway’s concept of inappropriate/d others in order to show how art’s critical potential can be understood in relation to marginalized identities without being reduced to identity-based representation. Finally, the paper argues for an objective determination of art’s critical potential by reinterpreting Adorno’s notion of the truth content of artworks through Haraway’s understanding of objectivity as situated knowledge. On this view, the truth content of an artwork expresses a normatively charged judgment on the social content conveyed by aesthetic form, which is objective insofar as it is relationally grounded in embodied social positionalities.
Much has been written on the difference between the medium of photography and other visual arts, such as painting, drawing, and woodcut—usually in the context of the debate about whether photography can be genuine art. My approach in this talk is different. Instead of comparing photography with other visual arts, I distinguish between different photographic mediums. My goal is to develop a conceptual framework that allows us to understand how specific features of different photographic technologies shape the aesthetic experience of photographs. The fact that photographic technologies matter aesthetically is often taken as obvious and plays an important role in artistic practice. My hope is that this talk helps us to better understand how photographic technologies influence aesthetic experience. The talk is organized into two parts. In the first part, which occupies the bulk of the paper, I introduce the notion of a photographic medium to explain why different photographic technologies produce photographs with a characteristic and recognizable appearance. In the second, shorter part, I discuss two examples to illustrate how this framework can be put to work in the aesthetic analysis of photographs.
In this paper I explore the aesthetic value of skill in relation to practical difficulty. Within aesthetics, difficulty has often been viewed in relation to interpretation and reception of an artwork. Practical difficulty, on the contrary, is related to the requirement of skill and competence in challenging goal-oriented practical actions, such as sports and games. I investigate how practical difficulty differs from interpretive difficulty and what characterises the aesthetic experiences it gives rise to. Appreciating the challenges of difficult practices involves embodied aesthetic experiences of one’s own skill and competence through cultivation and transformation of embodied habits. The paper begins with investigation of the differences between the concepts of difficulty, challenge, skill and competence, followed by a synthesis of literature on aesthetic experience of difficulty in games and athletic activities. Finally, the paper concludes with elaborating the nature of aesthetic experience of difficulty and skill through the notions of tacit knowledge and embodied habits.
Everyday aesthetics is a rather young, around 40 years old, subfield of aesthetics. Instead of experiences in the context of art or nature, it focuses on experiences having to do with everyday lived environments, mundane habits, and repeating encounters. Although everyday aesthetics is a recent area of research, it has already been established as one of the focal points of Finnish aesthetics and, at the same time, as the face of Finnish aesthetics abroad. It is noteworthy that scholars have omitted the fact that the most paradigmatic claim in everyday aesthetics — that “the aesthetic” should be seen as a phenomenon that may occur in almost all contexts of the human life — is not new for Finnish aesthetics. It is central for the lifework of Yrjö Hirn, who served as the professor of aesthetics in 1910–1937 at the University of Helsinki and who was known also globally in his own time. I do not claim that contemporary everyday aesthetics is based on Hirn’s ideas causally but that there is an integral correlation. Taking Hirn’s research since the year 1900 into account alters the view on Finnish aesthetics and even everyday aesthetics at large. Namely, the intellectual heritage of everyday aesthetics reaches much further in history than what has been acknowledged previously. So far, the mainstream view is to see everyday aesthetics as radically different from aesthetics before 1990s or 1980s.
A persistent tension in aesthetics concerns how judgments of beauty can be both immediate and subject to rational discussion and disagreement. On the one hand, they appear perceptual, involuntary, and non-inferential; on the other, we routinely offer reasons for them, criticize them, and treat some as better grounded than others. I trace the immediacy thesis to its origins by revisiting Francis Hutcheson’s (1725) theory of the sense of beauty. Drawing on contemporary debates about phenomenal concepts, I argue that even judgments about one’s own perceptual experience—such as judgments about color—require conceptual mediation. By parity of reasons, judgments of beauty cannot be epistemically immediate either. I then develop an inferential account of beauty grounded in recognitional theories of phenomenal concepts. On this model, judgments of beauty are not object-directed property ascriptions but self-ascriptions of a particular kind of experience. To judge something beautiful is to recognize that one is undergoing a distinctive kind of pleasure, individuated by a disinterested attitude. I further argue that mastery of the concept of beauty requires having undergone such pleasure, the ability to discriminate it from other kinds of pleasure, and a conceptual grasp of its disinterested character. This model preserves the involuntariness and apparent immediacy associated with the judgment of beauty, while reinterpreting that immediacy as temporal rather than epistemic. It also reinforces Hutcheson’s claim that displeasure does not arise from formal properties of objects themselves, but from associative, culturally conditioned, or expectation-dependent factors.
A selective exegesis of Hegel’s and Adorno’s definitions of the enigmatic nature of art reveals noteworthy parallels and differences between the two approaches. I will show that the negative presence of an Other draws an unexpected connection between Adorno’s and Hegel’s notions of the enigmaticalness of art. In Adorno, the concepts of enigma and artwork are closely related. The enigma incorporates a dialectic of conceptual inaccessibility and (aesthetic) perception that is, according to Adorno’s aesthetics, specific to ‘authentic’ artworks. In Hegel, the enigmatic nature of art seems to play a rather marginal role at first glance: as a partial aspect of symbolic art, the enigmaticalness of an artwork seems primarily to indicate a deficiency. However, it can be shown that the enigmatic aspects of symbolic art in Hegel leads to a fundamental figure of representation – for symbolic artworks are enigmatic insofar as they symbolise something other than what they themselves are. This reference to an Other connects Adorno’s and Hegel’s approaches just as much as it separates them. For, as will be shown, the Other also plays a prominent role in Adorno’s concept of the enigma. Unlike Hegel, however, in Adorno the associated negative relationship of representation is declared essential to ‘authentic’ art. Furthermore, in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory the unavailability of meaning associated with the enigmaticalness of art becomes a corrective to a way of thinking and perceiving that has lost the ability to wonder about anything beyond its habitual practices. It turns out that, in Adorno, all art is symbolic art in the Hegelian sense of the word.
This paper investigates the problem of imaginative resistance in fiction in the moral sphere. I distinguish between two cases of moral resistance in fiction: resistance to empathise versus resistance to sympathise with fictional evil perspectives. In the first case, we struggle aligning with the character’s emotions in imagination, when they are very distant from our own moral sensibility. In the second, we resist endorsing that emotional perspective in imagination, i.e., we resist assessing it as a morally appropriate or justifiable set of traits. The paper examines this distinction, which has been largely underestimated in the recent literature, and emphasises the different source of our resistant behaviour in the two cases.
This article begins from a marginal but persistent phenomenon: the act of rereading. In rereading, nothing in the text in fact changes, and yet the encounter with it appears strangely new. This tension provides the point of departure for an analysis of rereading understood as an autonomous phenomenon that fits well within the tradition that regards the literary text as a scheme to be phenomenologically concretised in the act of reading (Ingarden, Iser), and that conceives reading as a performance (Kivy). Each reading would therefore constitute a distinct event rather than the retrieval of a fixed content. The essay first clarifies, in methodological terms, what is meant by rereading, distinguishing motives, enabling conditions, and the specific affordances that a second encounter makes available. It then outlines a small typology of rereading, structured into compelled, transformative, and instrumental rereadings. What emerges is an attempt to understand what happens, and why, when a literary work is allowed to appear again. Rereading is presented as a singular aesthetic practice: a way of allowing the text to speak in a different key, and of recognising ourselves as slightly different readers each time we return.
This article explores the distinction between theoretical and aesthetic rationality, challenging the philosophical tradition that relegates emotions to the realm of irrationality. While emotions have historically been viewed as mere disturbances to logical thought, contemporary philosophy suggests they possess a specific rationality rooted in intentionality and a responsiveness to reasons.
Drawing on Keren Gorodeisky’s (2018) work, the essay examines the Taking Condition – the heart of theoretical rationality according to Boghossian (2014) – and reinterprets it within the aesthetic domain. Unlike theoretical reasoning, where taking a reason is an inferential process, affective taking, that we find in aesthetic judgement, is identified with the feeling itself: the act of appreciation is the very way a subject assumes a value as a reason for judgment. This constitutes a unique form of affective agency.
The study further distinguishes these two rationalities by their relationship with disagreement and reasons. In theoretical rationality, disagreement signifies an error in the inferential process; in aesthetics, following Stanley Cavell (1969), disagreement is the hallmark of rationality, requiring the articulation of subjectivity rather than objective proof. The paper thus redefines the aesthetic expert not as a possessor of empirical data, but as an agent capable of making their experience intelligible.
Recent debates in philosophical aesthetics increasingly thematize contemporary art under the heading of ‘post-autonomy’: no longer primarily constituted by discrete and self-sufficient aesthetic objects, but by socially embedded, activist, or participatory practices. While this shift promises renewed political relevance, it also generates a theoretical dilemma. If art becomes direct social intervention, it risks losing aesthetic semblance; if it retains such semblance and claims autonomy, it seems politically inert. This paper argues that Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetic theory offers conceptual resources for overcoming this dilemma.
The paper advances a twofold claim. First, it reconstructs Adorno’s epistemology of imagelessness, developed in his critique of Abbildtheorien of knowledge and culminating in his notion of an imageless materialism. Against representational models that construe concepts as identical images of reality, Adorno insists that conceptual truth can appear only through the negation of conceptual identity. A genuine cognition of the non-identical does not mirror its object but approaches it through determinate self-negation. This epistemological framework is then shown to ground Adorno’s definition of artworks as “imageless images” (bilderlose Bilder) in the “Paralipomena” to Aesthetic Theory (1997, 283).
Second, the paper argues that this concept of the artwork must be understood through what Adorno (1997, 347) calls its “enigmatic character” (Rätselcharakter). As enigmatic images, artworks are neither mirrors of social reality nor purely self-sufficient constructions. They are socially mediated configurations that internalize and subvert their own conditions of possibility by refusing any affirmative image of reconciliation. In this sense, “artworks say something and at the same time conceal it” (Adorno 1997, 120), producing a truth that exceeds any intention, message, or function. The paper concludes that Adorno’s notion of the imageless image provides a theoretically robust way of understanding how art can remain both autonomous and socially critical in a post-autonomous context.
Since Kunqu was proclaimed an Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2001, “authenticity” has become a central criterion through which its contemporary performances are evaluated and legitimized. Existing discussions often treat authenticity either as historical fidelity or as an ideological instrument imposed from outside the aesthetic domain. This paper proposes a different account: in post-2001 Kunqu, authenticity functions as a form of aesthetic governance—a normative regime that shapes how performances are created, perceived, and judged.
Kunqu is a classical Chinese theatre form characterized by the integration of classical poetic texts, stylized music, and refined embodied performance techniques transmitted through lineage-based training. It is best understood as a tradition-mediated performance art whose identity is maintained not by fixed textual reproduction but by disciplined re-enactment through embodied techniques, role-type conventions, and melodic-rhythmic systems. Within this structure, authenticity operates as an aesthetic norm that regulates the permissible range of variation and defines what counts as legitimate refinement and meaningful continuity. Rather than opposing creativity, authenticity provides the constraints through which creativity becomes aesthetically intelligible and historically situated.
The paper develops three claims. First, authenticity in Kunqu is normative rather than descriptive: it governs aesthetic judgment by organizing distinctions between legitimacy and deviation. Second, heritage reshapes spectatorship by cultivating historically oriented perception, training audiences to experience continuity, restraint, and lineage as aesthetic values. Third, re-enactment is the key aesthetic form through which authenticity operates: Kunqu persists not by repetition, but by disciplined transformation under inherited constraints.
By examining authenticity within Kunqu’s embodied techniques, cultivated perception, and performance evaluation, this study reframes heritage as an internal aesthetic force rather than an external cultural policy. It suggests that heritage regimes produce distinctive modes of aesthetic normativity that reorganize performance identity, spectatorship, and artistic creativity, thereby offering a model for understanding tradition as an active, generative aesthetic system.
The aim of this paper is to examine the possibility of texts that are both works of fiction and works of philosophy. Specifically, we here focus on two related matters. First, building on work by De Smedt and De Cruz (2015), we consider various conditions that must be satisfied for creating a φiction – i.e., work that is both a fiction and a work of philosophy. Ultimately, we advance a hypothetical intent-condition according to which a φiction is a work of fiction the hypothetical author of which has philosophical intent. This condition, we contend, allows us to properly delineate φictions from mere fictions as it rightly renders Plato’s Dialogues and the stories in De Cruz et al’s Philosophy through Science Fiction Stories (2021) φiction while excluding fictions like Meyer’s Breaking Dawn. Having shown that φictions are possible, we then pivot to consider a related but distinct matter. Phictions are typically extremely short stories “intended to make a philosophical point rather than reward genuine literary interests” (Xhignesse 2020, 677). Examples include Weatherson’s Death on A Freeway (2004, 1), Yablo’s oval maple leaf (2002, 485), and Folde & Wildman’s sample universal fictions (2017). A common response to phictions is they are “thought-experiments, or logicians puzzles, rather than fictions proper” (Xhignesse 2020, 688). Extending the above discussion, we demonstrate that phictions are best understood as a type of φiction: that is, they are both philosophy and fiction. Finally, we conclude by considering the larger impact our discussion of fiction, φiction, and phiction has on how we might go about making fiction and doing philosophy.
According to Kant, when I judge something to be beautiful, I do not merely report a private preference but assert that the object ought to please others as well. Kant then explains how a judgment grounded in subjective feeling can claim universal validity. The pleasure we take in beauty is grounded in a cognitive harmony common to all human beings. But this explains only the scope of aesthetic demands, not their force. How can a feeling (something that happens to us, rather than something we self-legislate) serve as a ground for obligation at all?
This paper argues that aesthetic normativity becomes intelligible once we recognize common sense as immediate normative perception. I first establish that Kant’s characterizations of common sense as a feeling, principle, and faculty, track three aspects of a single phenomenon. I then diagnose the “gap problem” that has troubled interpretations of §21 since the publication of Guyer’s Kant and the Claims of Taste. Interpreters often assume a two-step model in which cognitive harmony produces pleasure as a separate effect. But Kant’s account does not commit us to a two-step model for understanding this relationship. Rather, feeling is the mode in which cognitive harmony discloses itself, not a subsequent registration. With this assumption rejected, the gap between harmony and feeling dissolves.
Drawing on Korsgaard’s account of moral normativity and Sethi’s work on empirical concept formation, I argue that aesthetic judgment invokes our shared cognitive structure just as moral demands invoke shared rational autonomy. Common sense is a condition not merely of aesthetic experience, but of cognition as such. To feel cognitive harmony is to feel one’s participation in a constitutively shared structure. This feeling is itself a mode of normative awareness. The stakes differ from moral obligation, but the demand is genuine, perceived immediately in feeling.
Many contemporary artworks -especially in land art and organic art- are created to change over time, making duration and material transformation essential components of their identity. Unlike paradigm time-based arts whose manifestation typically coincides with a performance or screening, the duration of these works’ display often far exceeds the duration of any individual encounter. They transform slowly, over weeks, months, or years, so that a spectator typically experiences only one phase of an extended process. This paper clarifies the distinctive role temporality plays in such works and explains how they can nonetheless be experienced and judged as coherent unities, even though many of their phases are no longer or not yet perceptually available. I argue that adequate appreciation relies on constrained imagination: starting from what is perceptually given, and guided by material cues, background knowledge, and exhibition context, viewers reconstruct absent temporal phases that are relevant to identifying the work as the process it is. Finally, I show that recognising this temporal profile matters not only for ontology and norms of appreciation, but also for meaning: in many cases, material change functions as an expressive vehicle through which these works communicate impermanence, decay, growth, and finitude.
In The Performance of Reading, Peter Kivy (2006) argues that literature is a performing art. Just as actors perform dramas for an audience, silent readers of novels and other narrative works perform these literary pieces for themselves. The reader is a ‘silent Ion’, performing the words of the storyteller and enacting the work for herself. According to Kivy, the silent reading performance is a form of inner speech, in which the reader/performer hears the text “in her head.”
Drawing on philosophical and psychological literature on inner speech, I will argue that this approach is phenomenologically convincing. I will develop Kivy’s claim further, underlining the importance of the auditory aspect of inner speech for the understanding and appreciation of literature. Focusing on the auditory phenomenology of silent reading, I will argue that this partly explains the literature’s mimetic nature, particularly in the depiction of characters and narrators. This enables us to emphasise the cognitive value of literature in representing subjectivity, moving beyond the cognitivist stance adopted by Nussbaum (1992), Currie (2010) and others. In this sense, the mimetic representation of the mind provides readers with a sense of the characters’ presence and individuality, which goes beyond the explanatory framework of context, motivation and action.
Finally, I will conclude that the sensual and affective character of the experience of subjectivity in literature stems from the mimetic representation of inner and outer speech in literary writing and its enactment through literary reading.
The notion of immersion is used across a wide range of artistic, cultural, and social contexts, and practices described as “immersive” are highly valued in contemporary Western societies. Against an inflationary use of the term, this paper argues that immersion does not designate any fictional or merely enveloping experience, but rather a specific type of experience characterized by the perceived thickness of the medium, the bodily involvement of the subject, a pragmatic relation to space, and the experience of an alternative temporality.
First, the paper seeks to clarify what the metaphor of immersion means, in comparison with the metaphors of interiority and fusion. Immersion is shown to be characterized by a certain opacity of the medium and by a heightened awareness of one’s own corporeality. Unlike interiority, which presupposes the transparency of representation, and unlike fusion, which implies desubjectivation or loss of self, immersion involves a sustained consciousness of one’s embodied position within a mediating environment.
Second, the paper proposes a typology of so-called “immersive” aesthetic experiences. While the metaphor of immersion does not appear illuminating for describing fictional experience in general, it proves relevant for accounting for certain features of panoramic experiences and of spatial aesthetic practices. Nevertheless, technologically mediated aesthetic experience (specifically virtual reality) remains the model against which the immersiveness of other experiences is assessed.
In conclusion, the paper argues that immersive experience has become both a cultural paradigm and a philosophical obsession. It represents a contemporary way of posing the problem of skepticism and of articulating a pragmatic definition of reality. Immersion also confronts us with the social injunction to adaptability within environments that offer neither horizon nor critical distance. As long as these stakes remain unacknowledged, philosophical aesthetics risks employing the concept of immersion in an unconsciously ideological manner.
‘The Empathy Tradition’ of understanding other people holds both that there is something difficult about that task, and it can be met by imaginatively inhabiting (empathising with) another’s point of view (Gorodeisky, 2025). It is also true that imaginatively inhabiting a point of view other than one’s own is central to engaging with (certain kinds of) art. My primary aim is to explore the extent to which these starting points imply that engaging with art can help with the challenges of understanding other people; specifically, I defend the claim that imaginatively inhabiting a fictional character’s perspective can help with the challenge of understanding others. My exploration will be guided by the following remark from Iris Murdoch, as she is notably strong in her commitment to the claim that art can help with the challenge of understanding other people:
“In the case of the novel, the most important thing thus to be revealed […] is that other people exist” (Murdoch, 1997: 282, emphasis added).
I first outline the Murdochian account of the challenge to understanding other people and illustrate how imaginative inhabiting helps with that challenge. Next, I argue that it helps even when it with a fictional character’s perspective, addressing objections to the contrary. To fully defend the Murdochian view, I have two further aims. First, the connection between Murdoch’s view of moral reality and the role of the literary arts is often taken to be apparent. I both argue that it is not so obvious and provide additional defence of that connection. Second, Murdoch herself is pessimistic about the range of novels which can help with the challenge. I motivate a more optimistic Murdochian view, by motivating an alternative characterisation of the imagination involved, one on which it is a ‘lens’ rather than a ‘mirror’ (Wiltsher, 2019).
I argue for two ways in which the whole, animate body is implicated in the experience of the aesthetic features of natural environments. Firstly, the proprioceptive experience of the posture and comportment of the body as it makes contact with a terrain of slopes, angles, and textured surfaces contributes to our perceptual grasp of the drama and spectacle of a natural topography. Secondly, the embodied awareness of the flow of the wind can put us in touch with aesthetically relevant features of the condition of the environment, such as its wildness, its cleanliness, or its tranquillity. The paper thus sides with those approaches to the aesthetics of nature that emphasise embodiment, immersion, and active engagement.
In this paper, I use current theorisation in philosophy of mind to reappraise art historian Michael Baxandall’s account of the ‘period eye’. Baxandall coined this term to capture the culturally distinctive ways in which paintings were produced and perceived in fifteenth-century Renaissance Italy. Based on a critical reading of his cognitive-perceptual account of pictorial apprehension, I argue that the period eye is essentially relational and therefore irreducible to the exercise of any capacity bound solely to the mind of an individual beholder. More specifically, I re-conceptualize the period eye as a set of affordances, or a niche, which comprises the possibilities for skilled action in the beholder’s material and socio-cultural environment. I also suggest that the term ‘niche eye’ better captures the phenomenon at stake and accommodates the possible co-existence of various equally appropriate ways of apprehending pictures during any given historical period.
Lisa Katharin Schmalzried. All Sweetness and Light? Rethinking the Sweet–Sour Kitsch Distinction Through Gendered Emotions and Gender Stereotypes
The aesthetic home of sweetness appears to be kitsch. Paradigmatic kitsch examples are instances of sweet kitsch. Sweetness might even be one of kitsch’s defining features. Still, several authors refer to a second kind of kitsch, namely sour kitsch, thereby questioning the intrinsic link between kitsch and sweetness. What differentiates sweet from sour kitsch? The existing literature presents two difficulties: authors rarely define these terms explicitly, and those who do offer diverging definitions and examples. This observation motivates the present paper.
The first part approaches the issue from a historical-philosophical perspective, surveying existing definitions. The classificatory overview reveals that a systematic rationale for distinguishing between sweet and sour kitsch and for choosing these labels is missing. The subsequent parts, therefore, adopt a systematic approach guided by the question of whether, and in what sense, it is meaningful to describe kitsch as sweet and to distinguish between sweet and sour kitsch.
The second part focuses on the pleasure metaphor of sweetness: sweetness is associated with immediate, broadly accessible pleasure. In this sense, all kitsch deserves to be called sweet. An emotion-centred kitsch definition supports this claim: kitsch is an artefact, performance or practice whose dominant function is to enable easy accessible emotion-based (self-)enjoyment and (self-)assurance for broad audiences, without requiring refined taste or prior knowledge.
The third part defends the distinction between sweet and sour kitsch based on the gender-stereotype metaphor, which links sweetness to stereotypical femininity. It proposes an ameliorative account of the sweet/sour-contrast: sweet kitsch is stereotypically feminine, whereas sour kitsch is stereotypically masculine. Both variants offer gendered forms of (self-)enjoyment and (self-)assurance by addressing stereotypically feminine and masculine emotions, respectively. Thus, while sweetness in the pleasure-related sense captures the universal appeal of all kitsch, sweetness in the gender-stereotype sense captures the gender-targeted appeal of some forms of kitsch.
Karen Simecek. Oppositional Aesthetics as Artistic Resistance
This paper argues for the concept of oppositional aesthetics as an artistic strategy for resisting social injustice, inspired by bell hooks’ notion of the oppositional gaze. While recent discussions of aesthetic justice have focused on how artworks perpetuate injustice or on counter-art strategies that block oppressive messages, I propose that oppositional aesthetics offers a more transformative approach. Rather than merely neutralizing unjust perspectives, oppositional aesthetics seeks to reorganize perception by presenting radically different ways of seeing. Drawing on Vid Simoniti’s idea of “worldmaking” and Elisabeth Camp’s account of cognitive perspectives, I argue that artworks can cultivate alternative interpretive resources that challenge hegemonic assumptions embedded in dominant visual culture. Oppositional aesthetics is defined by four key features: (1) foregrounding the oppressed rather than the oppressor; (2) autonomy from the target work; (3) open-endedness rather than didacticism; and (4) support for multiple possibilities of interpretation. Through examples such as Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, Hannah Starkey’s photographic works, and Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley’s response to Titian’s Rape of Europa, I illustrate how oppositional artworks disrupt entrenched frameworks and invite audiences to confront their complicity in injustice. While this strategy carries a risk of failure—audiences may resist or misinterpret the intended perspective—I argue that such failure is productive, as it exposes oppressive attitudes rather than allowing them to remain hidden. Ultimately, oppositional aesthetics expands the role of art in political discourse beyond protest and critique, offering a vision for how things could be otherwise. By promoting diverse perspectives and fostering critical engagement, oppositional aesthetics enables art to function as a catalyst for social transformation.
This paper explores the relationship between architecture and photography, focusing on the interplay between sense and reference in the context of photographic pictures. Drawing on John Hyman’s application of Gottlob Frege’s distinction to pictures, the paper examines how photographs of architectural sites engage with these concepts, and why this distinction can prove useful.
Specifically, by considering the photographs of an architectural site as the multiple ways (analogically: the senses) in which the building (i.e. the reference) can be portrayed and visually experienced, the paper discusses how the analogy works with four cases of architectural photographs or photographic-like images: (i) the case of photographs of architectures that are physically present, counterfactually graspable and well conserved; (ii) the case of photographic rendering of spaces or architectures that do not exist yet; (iii) that of photographic deepfakes, in which any counterfactual relationship with the subject lacks; (iv) that of photographs of sites that no longer exist. Exception made for the first case, (ii), (iii) and (iv) challenge the very notion of reference in the visual domain.
Starting from the critical debate sparked by the interconnection of photography and architecture, this paper argues for the creation of a taxonomy of architectural photographs (and phenomenologically photographic-like pictures, such as deepfakes), distinguishing between those that maintain a consistent connection between sense and reference (and for which counterfactuality still plays a crucial role) and those in which that connection is lost or problematic. Ultimately, this framework allows for a deeper understanding of the role of photography in eliciting architectural visual experiences, including cases in which no form of direct interaction with the site is possible.
The paper argues that contemporary crises should be understood as a permanent and durable temporal condition that reshapes the political function of art. Climate breakdown, authoritarianism, continuous warfare, and algorithmic governance no longer appear as discrete ruptures but overlap to form a normalized state of crisis in which the present is intensified, and futurity is exhausted. Building on critical theory, the paper revisits Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetics, which historically secured art’s critical force through mediated resistance to immediacy and instrumentalization. While negativity remains indispensable, the paper contends that under conditions of permanent crisis, it risks becoming ambient: refusal and distance lose their disruptive force when crisis itself is normalized. The paper introduces urgency as a historically specific modulation of critique rather than a rejection of mediation or autonomy. In dialogue with Peter Osborne’s account of contemporaneity, urgency is understood as the temporal pressure acting on art produced within crisis-time rather than responding to crisis from a distance. Urgency names the strain placed on autonomy when delay itself becomes politically charged, reconfiguring the relation between critique, commitment, and the present without abandoning mediation or critical distance.
Sauna bathing is a common and ordinary habit in Finland also containing aspects transcending everyday life. In my presentation, I examine sauna experiences through the lenses of everyday aesthetics and everyday cultural heritage, asking: What does sauna bathing look like from these perspectives? How are these perspectives connected, and how might they enrich each other? I approach these questions particularly through the concept of care: What does care mean in the context of everyday life and sauna practices? Aesthetics scholar Lisa Giombini discusses everyday heritage in relation to everyday aesthetics, analysing how heritage sites hold together the exceptional and the ordinary and link to notions of safety addressed by Yuriko Saito and Arto Haapala. Although her focus is on tangible sites, these insights can be extended to practices such as sauna. To articulate the “everyday,” I use Eeva Jokinen’s heuristic framework including repetition, a sense of home, habit, the tendency to reproduce conventional gender norms, and the transformation of external constraints into rhythms that feel natural. Jokinen further emphasises the embodied nature of everyday life. This aligns with accounts of everyday aesthetics that foreground embodiment, sensory engagement, and the aesthetics of “doing.” Both everyday heritage and everyday aesthetics intersect with ethics of care. Building on this, I analyse how care manifests in sauna: how the sauna cares for us, how we care for others and the environment, and how we care for the sauna itself. Research participants describe the sauna as safe, familiar, egalitarian, and resilient, with a variety of rhythms and repetition and with distinctive time attuned to natural cycles. These characteristics position sauna as a meaningful site for exploring the care, and suggest productive grounds for interdisciplinary dialogue between aesthetics and heritage.
We live in an age of aesthetic abundance. Every day we are surrounded by more possibilities than we can ever take in, including films, novels, songs, clothes, interior designs, and restaurant menus. Choosing what to watch, wear, eat, or even scroll past has become a continuous task.
This paper introduces the concept of aesthetic pre-judgment, which refers to the anticipatory and selective acts through which we curate our aesthetic lives before we fully engage with aesthetic objects. We make such judgments constantly. We decide from a trailer that a film is not for us, we skip through snippets of songs, we buy a novel because The New York Times called it “hauntingly original,” or we order a dish because its description and accompanying photograph appeal to us. These seemingly minor acts of selection and refusal determine what enters our aesthetic world and what remains outside it. Although such acts are rarely theorized, they shape what we perceive, what we value, and who we become as aesthetic agents. We outline four dimensions of aesthetic pre-judgment. Its forms include predictive, modal, contextual, and expressive utterances. Its formation draws on induction, sampling, skimming, testimony, and categorical or paratextual cues. Its functions range from conserving attention and regulating mood to signaling identity and cultivating taste. Finally, its implications challenge familiar assumptions about acquaintance, autonomy, and normativity, and they reveal that aesthetic agency is distributed across social and technological mediations.
In my paper, I will take up the issue of how we ought to aesthetically evaluate human environments. Specifically, I will examine the environmental aesthetic theory of Allen Carlson and his ecological approach to human environments. While his theory is robust and thoughtful about the appreciation of nature, one part of his theory—the dependence on evaluating based on looks. This dependence hinders the full understanding and appreciation of environments. Carlson uses three criteria: functional fit, looking as it should, and positive life values, to evaluate environments. The first and last criteria are strong, ecologically motivated, and positive developments in the aesthetic theory of human environments. The second criterion is where the problem lies. “Looking as it should” creates an over-reliance on expectations and visual distance, and introduces the potential for cultural bias. This problem is especially acute in lived, multisensory environments (which is how we experience the human environmental world). I introduce, as a replacement for looking, the criterion of feeling (ambiance). This does not require a rejection of objectivity or cognition in our evaluations, but constitutes a shift in what kind of knowledge is relevant for evaluating human environments: knowledge that comes from firsthand, embodied experience. Christopher Alexander and the “pattern language”, including the important identification of the “quality without a name” provide support for the feeling-based view. Alexander offers a non-visual account of functional success in architecture, which can apply to the human environment at large. Amending the ecological approach to the human environment with this ambiance/feeling-based mode of evaluation achieves several things: a stronger account of functional fit, an improved handling of cultural or historical contingency, and a stronger grounding for judgments of aesthetic merit. Ecological objectivity is compatible with embodied experience, and in fact in the case of human environments, it must be.
Saul Fisher’s ‘Lives and afterlives of architectural objects’ is a timely contribution to an under-researched area of aesthetics. Fisher rightly notes that ‘[t]he notion of an afterlife […] is particular to architectural objects’, distinguishing them from other art objects; this has consequences for an ontology of architecture that can encompass adaptive reuse. Nevertheless, I want to challenge Fisher’s contention that an abstractist ontology is better placed to preserve the functional life of a primary architectural object being altered, in that for the abstractist it exists independently of the new functional use of the revised structure. While Fisher is right to prise the ‘architectural object’ away from an exclusive (concretist) concern with its physical manifestation—and, in the context of architectural intervention, to raise the importance of historical material external to the material object—his abstractism negates the relation between the architectural object as abstract ‘idea’ and the site-specific material conditions imposed upon its physical realisation. Pure abstractism fails to capture the dynamic between the ‘architectural score’—manifest by architectural drawings and models—and a work’s material realisation; it also diminishes the recovery of narratives associated with patterns of use and the marks of history. This has consequences for evolving an aesthetics of architectural intervention. In order to make my case, I will (1) draw upon my own theory of architecture conceived as a type of performance, and (2) the architect and theorist Ignasi de Solà Morales’s analogical approach to architectural intervention, a creative strategy dependent upon the recovery of creative processes at play in the particular system defined by the existing architectural object. I address two exemplars of such an analogical approach: David Chipperfield’s Neues Museum in Berlin, and, more controversially, Georgio Grassi’s project for the Roman theatre of Sagunto.
This paper revisits Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” in order to examine how recent developments in generative artificial intelligence challenge established ontological frameworks in the philosophy of art. Drawing on Arthur Danto’s indiscernibility argument and contemporary contextualist accounts of artworks as created types, I introduce a new thought experiment: Pierre-Yves Menard, a computer scientist who succeeds in generating an indiscernible version of Don Quixote through a purpose-built large language model (LLM) that has no access to Cervantes’ or Menard’s texts.
The central claim is that the Pierre-Yves Menard case presents a new issue in contemporary aesthetics that cannot be reduced to previous arguments about Pierre Menard’s case. In other words, introducing an LLM into the Menard thought experiment raises new questions about ontology and authorship that we should address. I present two main arguments in response to these questions. First, I argue that Pierre-Yves Menard’s Quixote is ontologically distinct from those of Menard and Cervantes, and that this distinction lies in the discernibility of the created though LLM type, even though the instances are indiscernible. Second, I maintain that questions of authorship in AI-assisted literature are best understood as derivative of ontological structure. Authorship attaches to the agent responsible for instituting and sustaining the relevant artistic type, rather than to the mere production of textual tokens. By extending contextualist ontology to generative technologies, the paper shows how existing philosophical resources can accommodate AI without abandoning core intuitions about artworks, authorship, and literary identity.
In the context of advanced forms of generative artificial intelligence, one question immediately arises: how can we distinguish artificially generated images, sounds, or texts from works and practices of artistic creation? Is there not only factual, but also a principal difference between human creativity and artificial production that no technology could ever surpass? The rise of generative artificial intelligence has thus brought renewed urgency to the old question of the ontology of creativity. Throughout contemporary analytic philosophy, there are two interrelated tendencies. First, creativity is predominantly understood empirically, as a psychological structure, in contrast to a long tradition in European philosophy and theology that conceives creativity metaphysically, as an indeterminate origin. Second, there is a growing willingness to attribute forms of creativity to generative artificial intelligence. As a result, creativity is increasingly assumed to be a calculable and formalizable process of rule-following. Although these rules may in fact be unconscious or untraceable, they are nevertheless assumed to exist in principle. I argue that these two tendencies depend on one another. Reducing creativity to an empirical structure implies its principal imitability, while attributing creativity to artificial systems presupposes such a reduction of creativity itself. In this way, the psychologization of technology ultimately leads to the technologization of the psyche. This paper proposes a different path by drawing on a metaphysical (instead of empirical) conception of creativity, that is grounded in a notion of ontological indeterminacy, as articulated in the aesthetic traditions of Plato, Kant, and Hannah Arendt.
This paper explores how aporetic aesthetic experiences—moments of perplexity in which explanation stalls—can cultivate epistemic virtues relevant to addressing epistemic injustice. Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s distinction between testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, I argue that the imaginative-affective background sustaining these injustices cannot be reformed by argument alone; it requires interventions that reshape our interpretive habits. Aporetic art—illusion, magic, autofiction, and radically pluralist works—enacts a controlled failure of sense-making, training spectators to inhabit conceptual insufficiency without collapsing into skepticism. This habituation fosters epistemic humility and primes audiences to recognize hermeneutical gaps: situations where existing concepts fail to capture lived experience.
The paper develops a four-part typology of aporetic experiences: (1) perceptual frustration (illusion), which tempers overconfidence in first impressions; (2) causal frustration (magic), which encourages tolerance for explanatory suspension; (3) ontological frustration (boundary-blurring works), which cultivates vigilance about category mistakes; and (4) hermeneutic frustration (interpretive pluralism), which promotes collaborative meaning-making. These virtues converge on a readiness to revise interpretive frameworks and to co-create new resources—precisely the stance required to counter hermeneutical injustice.
By integrating Kant’s notion of the “free play of the faculties” with Tamar Szabó Gendler’s concept of belief–discordant alief, the paper explains why aporia operates at the level of social imagination, where stereotypes and conceptual gaps persist. Far from instrumentalizing art, this account honors its distinctive power: by rehearsing the experience of conceptual failure, aporetic works expand the horizon of possible meanings and foster sensitivity to marginalized voices. Thus, aesthetic perplexity emerges not as a mere intellectual curiosity but as a civic resource for epistemic justice.
This paper examines the role of contemporary artistics practices in societies living in the aftermaths on mass violence and oppression, where collective memory exerts a lasting and ‘obsidional’ (besieging) force on subjectivity and social life in the present. Focusing on contemporary Ukrainian artists’ responses to unresolved trauma of war and famine, the paper takes Ukraine as a paradigmatic case of such difficult history. The theoretical framework of the paper centers on the conceptualization of the imprint [l’empreinte] by Georges Didi-Huberman, who in writings produced between 1990s 2010s offered its philosophical outline as both a practice and process of visualising history and as a material, plastic trace, produced through touch, pushing pressure, and bodily gesture. Drawing on phenomenological and psychoanalytic approaches to philosophy of images, the paper highlights three dimensions of the empreinte: its material and plastic reciprocity; its anachronistic temporality and its ethical implications for witnessing and remembrance. The second part of the paper applies the concept of the imprint in the analysis of two artworks by Lia Dostlieva and Andrii Dostliev. The first artwork, I Feel Sorry When I Throw Away Food—Grandma Used to Tell Me Stories About the Holodomor (2018), centers on the cultural imprint of transgenerational experience of mass famine, articulating the perserverance of affect (guilt), and mnemonic absence and erasure. The second project, Licking War Wounds (2016–2021), is a long-term performative engagement with the Russo-Ukrainian war, where, I argue, the use of the imprinting technique not only casts into relief the reciprocal view of materiality and plasticity, but also blurs the distinction between the action of working-through and acting-out. The paper concludes that artistic aesthetics of imprint forms and processes can facilitate mnemonic excavation and engagement with difficult history beyond the paradigm of mastery and historical closure.
I propose that the virtue of equanimity can be trained through reflective engagement with aesthetic objects, with equanimity understood as a gradable character trait, the possession of which in a greater degree makes it more likely that an agent will have mental states that are conducive to emotional stability and wellbeing. When an agent experiences an aesthetic object and reflects on the experience, she will typically find that she experiences the object as or as if having a unity that holds together various elements. This aesthetic unity-in-variety includes elements that express emotional states. When the agent reflects on this unity of various elements, she develops certain abilities that contribute to the growth of equanimity. I focus on two such abilities: emotional awareness and emotional moderation. Emotional awareness is the ability to notice and correctly identify emotions. Emotional awareness is trained through reflection on the experience of a unity-in-variety that includes elements that express emotions. Emotional moderation is the ability to weaken or strengthen one’s emotions. Emotional moderation is trained through reflection on the experience of a particular emotional feature of an aesthetic object as having a different emotional strength, when experienced as part of a unity-in-variety, from the strength that it has or had when experienced in a more limited context. I present “the argument for growth of equanimity through aesthetic experience” to support the view that reflection on aesthetic experience can lead to growth of the reflecting agent’s equanimity. I then consider an objection to the equanimity argument, “the exportability objection”. According to this objection, what one can learn from the emotions in aesthetic experience is not exportable to extra-aesthetic experience, due to differences between emotions in these different contexts. In response, I challenge the placement of the objector’s line between aesthetic and extra-aesthetic experience.
This paper examines what political engagement reveals about the structure and scope of aesthetic experience, particularly how imagination and feeling can be publicly organized, norm-governed, and sustained outside paradigmatic art contexts. I argue that contemporary mediated politics functions as a natural experiment for aesthetics, allowing us to observe how aesthetic mechanisms—narrative scaffolding, affective scripting, and shared imaginative uptake—operate when the object is not a canonical aesthetic artefact but a domain that nevertheless invites engaged participation structured by representational norms.
The paper makes three contributions to aesthetic theory. First, it demonstrates that political engagement exhibits the structural features of parafictional experience, where audiences adopt an imaginative stance toward actual events (Hénaff, 2019; Andina, 2019). Drawing on Hénaff’s account of modern political authority as constitutively theatrical, I show that political staging is not a corruption of authentic politics but essential to how legitimacy functions in secular modernity.
Second, using Walton’s (1990) theory of make-believe, I argue that political discourse functions as a prop system that prescribes what to imagine, how to feel, and what responses are appropriate. This reveals that aesthetic experience is not a private mental state but a publicly coordinated practice governed by shared interpretive conventions—challenging theories that treat aesthetic response as purely subjective.
Third, I address how political quasi-emotions (Stecker, 2011; Vendrell Ferran, 2018) illuminate the nature of aesthetic affect. The gap between intense feeling and limited action, often treated as political pathology, becomes evidence about how certain emotional profiles are fitting within experiences structured for uptake and expressive alignment rather than intervention. Drawing on theories of affective atmospheres (Ahmed, 2004; Osler & Szanto, 2021), I show how feeling can have a coordinating affect across dispersed audiences through “feeling rules” that govern appropriate emotional response.
The parafictional structure of contemporary politics thus illuminates fundamental conditions of aesthetic experience.
Drawing on medieval Iranian tradition – especially Suhrawardī’s philosophy and ʿAttār’s mystical poetry – this paper proposes an aesthetological reconfiguration of the East-West divide, placing it in critical dialogue with Hegel. Rather than treating East and West as geographical regions or ideological constructs, the paper approaches them as an imaginal polarity that has long structured aesthetic experience across cultures.
The paper advances two main claims. First, both Western and Eastern traditions converge in shaping East and West as irreducible poles in the aesthetic articulation of visibility, which the author conceptualizes as resp. “imaginal-making” and “image-making”. Second, the Iranian tradition’s insistence on the ineliminable reciprocity between these poles – unlike Hegel’s progressive model – offers a productive framework for rethinking Western aesthetics and for diagnosing limits of its contemporary image culture.
After clarifying that the East-West distinction cannot be grounded in physical geography but instead reflects symbolic orientations of the experience of light as a foundational aesthetic experience, the paper contrasts Hegel’s account with its Iranian counterpart. For Hegel, the West surpasses the East by objectifying the latter’s undifferentiated luminosity through images. In Suhrawardī and ʿAttār, by contrast, East and West are co-present orientations: the Orient names the ontological source of being, accessed through imaginal-making hermeneutics (ta’wīl), while the West symbolises the exile in multiplicity and forms. Crucially, however, descent into the Western realm of images and image-making is seen as a necessary condition for effective imaginal-making. This reciprocal model is then mobilized to address contemporary Western image culture. The paper argues that the West is presently undergoing a “crisis of imagination” that stems not from image scarcity but from excessive image-making severed from imaginal-making. Images proliferate, yet lack narrative, panoramic, and integrative power. Reaffirming the East-West polarity as ineliminable thus becomes a critical resource for rethinking Western aesthetics today.
In contemporary philosophical aesthetics, anticipation is frequently framed through predictive-processing models that prioritize the reduction of uncertainty and the optimization of control. While these frameworks excel at explaining temporal arts like music, they often overlook aesthetic experiences that do not aim for resolution. This paper develops a counter-model of anticipation derived from late premodern Chinese and Korean ink landscape paintings, focusing on the concept of “static force” (dynamic stillness). The central claim is that these works instantiate a distinctive form of anticipatory aesthetics characterized by “dwelling” in an open, indeterminate “not-yet”. To bridge the gap between East Asian tradition and Western theory, I propose a conceptual triad: (1) Still flow, where compositional cues suggest motion held in a latent, paused state; (2) Remnant energy, the felt presence of past movement that continues to animate the present; and (3) Visual after-effect, a perceptual resonance between dense forms and expansive voids. Together, these elements generate a “forward-leaning attention” that is deeply affective rather than merely cognitive. By reinterpreting classical East Asian notions of pictorial vitality into these structural terms, the paper challenges the dichotomy between prediction and anxiety. It argues that anticipation can be a practice of inhabiting uncertainty without rushing toward closure. Ultimately, this research offers a non-Western resource for rethinking our relation to uncertain futures—such as ecosystemic crises and algorithmically managed environments—suggesting that art helps us sustain a reflective openness where hope and fear coexist.
From the perspective of comparative aesthetics, François Jullien observes that Western painting typically adopts gazing [regarder] as its dominant visual gesture and organizes pictorial space through linear perspective, aiming at clarity and precise spatial representation. By contrast, Chinese landscape painting privileges contemplating [recueillir] as its primary visual attitude and employs strategies such as “blankness” to deliberately maintain a distance between what is painted and what is seen. This paper asks why different painting traditions develop such divergent pictorial strategies and aesthetic orientations. It proposes that these differences are not merely technical or stylistic, but are rooted in fundamentally different ways in which painters experience and articulate space and time through artistic practice.
Methodologically, the paper adopts a phenomenological approach that returns to the concrete painting practice. Rather than opposing Western and Chinese art through stylistic comparison or rigid paradigms, it examines the internal relation between pictorial techniques, aesthetic aims, and lived spatio-temporal experience. The argument unfolds in three steps. First, at the level of practice, the paper distinguishes between the gaze-cantered visual training characteristic of Western painting and the contemplation-cantered perceptual discipline central to Chinese painting. Second, it shows that this practical divergence corresponds to distinct understandings of spatial experience. Through a clarification of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological concept of depth, the paper examines how linear perspective disciplines spatial experience in practice, and compares depth with the notion of distance emphasized in Chinese landscape painting. Third, it argues that the affinity between depth and distance is not confined to spatial experience alone, but points toward a generative understanding of space-time. In the act of painting, the painter allows nature to pass through the body and responds to its rhythms, so that painting becomes an event where primordial space-time is generated.
In recent years, there has been considerable interest in musical meaning within the context of analytic philosophy of music. In his 2020 book Being True to Works of Music, Dodd argues that musical meaning is compatible with his “simple view” ontology of musical works by characterizing it as an extrinsic, relational property relativized to specific compositional acts. When two composers independently create works with identical acoustic-normative properties, they indicate the same eternal type, which then gains distinct extrinsic properties (e.g., M-as-composed-by-Shostakovich and M*-as-composed-by-Shostakovich*). Additionally, in a 2025 article with Puy, Dodd interprets musical meaning through the lens of supervenience. This thesis holds that two performances cannot differ in meaning properties without differing in acoustic properties, though two performances may manifest the same meaning while differing acoustically. I argue these two characterizations are incompatible. Using a thought experiment based solely on Dodd’s ‘Afterword’, I demonstrate the contradiction: Suppose Shostakovich and Shostakovich* independently indicate the same eternal type T in different historical contexts, yielding distinct meanings M and M*. Suppose their works are performed perfectly (performances P and P*) and these performances are acoustically indiscernible. Under Dodd’s 2020 account, P and P* are the same performance (same acoustic properties) but carry different meanings. However, the supervenience thesis requires that if M ≠ M*, then P ≠ P*. This yields a formal contradiction: P = P* and P ≠ P* simultaneously. I address three objections, including the strongest one invoking Levinson’s contextual properties as part of the subvenient base. I argue this strategy fails because contextual attributes are not distinct from but rather constitute the supervenient meanings themselves, thus cannot explain differences at the supervenient level without circularity.
In this communication, I examine the role of mistake in clarifying both the ontology and the appreciation of musical improvisation. In the case of a previously composed work, a performative mistake largely consists in a departure from features that are integral to the identity of the work intended to be performed. In the case of improvisation, however, matters become more complex, since there is no pre-existing work and no plan comparable in determinacy to that of composed or recorded music, making it unclear which kind of deviation could ground the possibility of an improvisational mistake. I consider two competing ontological hypotheses concerning the relation between an improvised work and its performance. According to the first, the improvised work is numerically identical with its performance; according to the second, the improvised work consists in a set of creative intentions in the improviser’s mind, of which the performance is the audible realization. I argue that, although both hypotheses face difficulties, the second has problems that render it ultimately untenable: (1) it introduces the possibility of repeatability; (2) it relies on an implausible separation between intention and action; and (3) it fails to account for the fact that the evaluation of a present note is strongly context-dependent, crucially shaped by both the preceding and the subsequent audible note. On the basis of these considerations, I argue in favour of an event-based account on which improvisation coincides with its own performance. In order to defend it, I propose, on the one hand, a distinction between technical–performative mistakes and musical mistakes, and, on the other hand, an immanent self-referential account of mistake in improvisation, according to which the very possibility of error is internally related to the dynamic process through which it may be resolved.
Jerrold Levinson has developed the most systematic set of reasons, why perception of large-scale musical form is not necessary for experiencing music with understanding. Instead, he defends a concatenationist view, according to which musical understanding consists of the ability to follow the development of a musical work as it unfolds from moment to moment. Against concatenationism I maintain that musical understanding goes beyond grasping the moment-by-moment unfolding of the musical piece. I begin by pointing out two shortcomings in concatenationism, first its inability to account for the difference between knowing a musical piece by heart and understanding it, and second its inability to explain the fact that musical understanding comes in degrees and can deepen in time. Both points suggest that musical understanding involves something that transcends the moment-by-moment grasp of a musical piece’s unfolding, as that is understood in concatenationism. I, however, argue that it is a mistake to equate the element, which transcends the immanent musical moment, to large-scale musical structure. Rather listening to music with understanding involves the ability to identify the basic elements of the music, its inherent possibilities, and to achieve a sense of how they are exemplified by different parts of the work. What this account adds to concatenationism is the requirement of a sense of structure of sorts, not in the sense of awareness of a musical work’s overall form, but how the inner potentialities of the work come to life or, alternatively, fail to. This is precisely what I mean by grasping the music’s light switch. Even Levinson at times acknowledges that musical understanding involves grasping the relationship between temporally distant musical elements or between the structural and immanent qualities of the music. While he thinks such cases are the exception rather than the rule, I argue for an opposite conclusion.
This paper examines how architectural meaning is constructed, transformed, and renegotiated through the interaction of symbolic form, landscape, and cultural interpretation. It focuses on the ways in which architectural forms do not merely represent ideas or functions, but operate as symbolic artifacts embedded in broader systems of reference that link built form, natural environment, and collective memory. The central aim of the study is to explore how meaning emerges relationally—through interpretation, historical context, and symbolic association—rather than being fixed at the moment of design. The theoretical framework of the paper is grounded primarily in Nelson Goodman’s philosophy of symbols and worldmaking, particularly his concepts of denotation, reference, exemplification, and mediated meaning. Goodman’s approach is complemented by Juan Pablo Bonta’s critique of architectural historiography and his emphasis on interpretation and re-semanticization, as well as by William Whyte’s account of the layered and stratified nature of architectural meaning. Together, these perspectives provide a non-essentialist, interpretive framework for understanding architecture as a dynamic process of meaning-making that unfolds over time and across changing cultural and institutional contexts. Building on this theoretical foundation, the study applies this framework to a series of case studies, focusing on architectural works produced during the late socialist period and reinterpreted in the post-socialist era. These case studies examine how architectural forms acquired new meanings—or lost earlier ones—through shifts in political regimes, cultural narratives, institutional frameworks, and public reception. By tracing these transformations, the paper demonstrates how architecture participates in processes of worldmaking and re-semanticization, revealing meaning as historically situated, layered, and continuously negotiated rather than stable or universal.
This paper examines the work of Peter Eisenman as an aesthetic investigation into the capacity of architecture to function as a temporal medium. Rather than understanding Eisenman primarily through debates about usability or ideology, the paper argues that his architecture operates as a “time machine” that projects past architectural grammars into the present in order to destabilize meaning and renew interpretation. Situating Eisenman within the linguistic and deconstructivist currents of late twentieth-century architecture, the paper traces his engagement with philosophy, particularly Jacques Derrida’s theory of writing, to articulate an understanding of architecture as a system of signs governed by grammar and syntax rather than by function alone. Eisenman’s work is analyzed through his commitment to aesthetic negativity, defamiliarization and formal autonomy. Projects such as House VI, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Guardiola House reveal a strategy of composition through decomposition, in which architectural elements are displaced, rendered ambiguous or stripped of conventional utility. These operations do not negate meaning but instead recover it by exposing the historically contingent assumptions embedded in architectural conventions. In this sense, Eisenman’s architecture resists anthropomorphism, commodification and immediate aesthetic pleasure, foregrounding interpretive engagement over comfort or use-value. The paper also addresses the ethical limits of aesthetic autonomy, particularly through Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Here, architectural negativity manifests as disorientation and unease, refusing narrative closure or symbolic redemption. Drawing on theorists such as Karsten Harries and Hilde Heynen, the paper situates Eisenman’s work within broader debates about architecture’s moral dimension and its capacity for critique rather than social resolution.
The thesis of my paper is that one function of art is to help us talk about values (values of art and values in general). With a metaphor, I claim that art is the value detection device of society. I suggest that art is a cooperative practice in the sense that there are legitimate expectations in play concerning what art is or should be. I apply a Gricean framework of relevance and I claim that one expectation concerning art is that it should be relevant, that it “should not waste our time”, as Jeffrey Wieand says. Relevance is a principle or value that we expect others to observe when they „put forward” an artwork for our appreciation. Relevance is what defines art history. Art can be relevant by offering valuable experience, something that is worth appreciating. I will call this, after Gary Iseminger, the aesthetic relevance of art. It can also be relevant by contributing to the ongoing social practice of artistic appreciation that depends on an artworld with its notions of genres (kinds) and expectations of originality. This is the artworld relevance of art. To these two functions I want to add a third one: a game theoretical relevance where artworks question the rules or norms of the very game of art creation and art appreciation, defying expectations, flaunting norms. Because such expectations are social, flaunting them is a violation of social norms. Often artists who create conceptual or pop inspired art, or avant-gardist art, flaunt expectations in this way thereby making it possible to talk about the values embodied in the norms the expectations target. Finally I state my view that audience expectations of our era had been mostly formed by Romanticism.
An emerging research field in aesthetics is existential aesthetics (Maes 2022), which explores how artworks may have existential significance either by addressing existential questions or by affecting people’s lives in important ways. This paper places itself in this field by advancing the claim that art may contribute to the realization of the appreciator’s authenticity, understood in a robust sense: not merely as adherence to one’s values but as the adoption of a system of commitments that one has agentially shaped rather than passively absorbed (Varga 2012). I will argue for this thesis in three main steps. 1) I begin by elucidating the robust interpretation of authenticity. 2) I then respond to skeptical objections concerning the idea of agential self-creation (Kemp 2015), by drawing especially on Callard’s (2018) account of aspiration. 3) Finally, I illustrate the ways in which art may promote a person’s authenticity, by examining four considerations. a) Artworks present unfamiliar and thought-provoking situations that may induce moral disorientation (Mikkonen 2021), and hence prompt the appreciator to critically consider the value system they have inherited from external sources. b) By providing what-it-is-like knowledge (Puolakka 2022), art offers a wide variety of experiences and alternative possibilities for behavior that may inspire a person to reorient their life in a given direction. c) Artworks provide a dimension of playfulness (Riggle 2020), in which the appreciator may distance themselves from their commitments and explore different (moral) perspectives. d) Aesthetic value and artistic beauty may play a role in the realization of one’s authenticity, by constituting instances of external reasons that the appreciator may appeal to in sustaining their aspirational process towards a new self-created identity (Aumann 2022).
This paper forwards dance teaching as a model of aesthetic teaching in an education taking the work of the senses seriously. Teaching dance, allowing children and students to engage in movement exploration, in doing and undergoing kinaesthetics, is advocated as a practice of non-control, providing space for the aesthetic, the pre-cognitive, the pre-emotional, the unpredictable, the not-yet-known and the unknowable, all part of art making and art experiencing. Creating such spaces is advocated as an equally vital part of education, in terms of what Biesta (2021, 2017) emphasises as education’s existential remit, and how the arts matter in that respect: to provide space for new beginnings, for true dialogue with the social and natural world – democracy and the planet calling for survival – and ultimately for the encounter with the Self in the world.
Dance teaching as aesthetic teaching, it is argued, inscribes itself in an aesthetics of resistance to any objectification of the subject-body (Manchev 2011), to utilitarian claims on the arts in education and to current rationalist and authoritarian policies in education. At the core of aesthetic education is passibility, the capability to be permeated, through the senses, by what comes from the outside (Roth 2011), making cognition possible. Aesthetic teaching is seen as allowing the world and its phenomena to reveal itself aesthetically (Herbart 2017/1902), offering its ‘gifts’ to the subject becoming as ‘gifted’ (Marion 2002, 2017), questioning constructivist knowledge acquisition. The paper highlights aesthetic, ethical and existential aspects of teaching dance, catering for unforeseeable (kin)aesthetic experiencing (Stinson 2016), providing space for initiative and response to movement, in a blend of agency and vulnerability, creating space in school for young individuals to act upon their freedom and ‘break into the world’ as subjects of their own lives (Biesta 2021) in search for knowledge and meaning.
Debates concerning metaphor often revolve around an apparent bifurcation of meaning: metaphoric expressions seem to oscillate between “literal” semantic content and a “metaphoric” sense. Authors such as Davidson (1978) and Scruton (1974) reject this bifurcation by reducing metaphor to literal meaning alone. Contextualist critiques emphasise that truth-conditional approaches detach literal meaning from its concrete use context. In both cases, however, the ontological status of metaphoric expression remains underdetermined. This paper proposes an alternative approach by returning to Alexander Baumgarten’s aesthetics. Rather than treating metaphor as a merely linguistic substitution, Baumgarten situates it within a broader theory of sensible perception. This extends the modification of sense effectuated by metaphor beyond linguistic expression, to the realm of sensibility more generally—including sounds and colours. Here, metaphor must be understood as a mode of expression grounded in sensibility, whose reality cannot be reduced following epistemological criteria of truth or falsity. Centrally, Baumgarten’s distinction between intensive and extensive clarity allows him to distinguish two expressions of truth: logical truth, oriented toward conceptual generality, and aesthetic truth, oriented toward the extensive richness of a sensible individual. Metaphor exemplifies an aesthetic mode of determination expressing the multiplicity of sensible individuals, without subsumption under conceptual generality. By reconstructing this position’s metaphysical presuppositions—especially the Leibnizian conception of perception as a real, constitutive relation between monads and the world—the paper shows how Baumgarten develops a realist ontology of the sensible that grants metaphoric expression genuine ontological scope. At the same time, it highlights a constitutive tension in this framework: while metaphor articulates the richness of sensible reality, the notion of a “sensible individual” remains structurally problematic. This tension a critical limit that defines the foundations of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline more broadly, as situated on the fault line between sensibility and intelligibility.
Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde is commonly understood as a critique of normative aesthetics and as a shift toward a sociological conception of art as institution. At the same time, Bürger’s diagnosis of a “false realization” of avant-garde intentions reveals an unresolved tension within his own theoretical framework. This paper argues that this tension is not accidental but structurally bound to the problem of aesthetic normativity after the historical avant-garde. The paper reconstructs Bürger’s engagement with Georg Lukács and Theodor W. Adorno as an attempt to overcome their formally normative aesthetic theories while preserving their critical ambitions. Despite their opposing evaluations of modernism and the avant-garde, both Lukács and Adorno rely on historically derived aesthetic norms that function as implicit ideals. Bürger challenges this shared structure by shifting the focus from work-immanent form to the “institution of art” and by interpreting the avant-garde as an attack on the very possibility of universally valid aesthetic norms. However, the paper contends that Bürger’s own reservations about the neo-avant-garde indicate a persistent need for evaluative criteria even after this institutional turn. By situating Bürger’s theory in relation to recent attempts to reintroduce normative concepts into aesthetic theory, the paper shows why the question of normativity after the avant-garde remains philosophically unresolved and theoretically urgent today.
Typefaces elicit strong aesthetic opinions, yet the aesthetics of typography has received little attention in analytic philosophy. Existing design aesthetics does not straightforwardly apply: Parsons and Carlson’s Functional Beauty account requires a gap between perceiving an object’s appearance and using it, but with typography, perceiving the visual form of text just is reading it. There is no gap between perception and use for this account to exploit. What, then, makes a typeface beautiful? There are two natural answers. The first connects beauty to the experience of reading: good typography produces aesthetic effortlessness—the text flows, you do not stumble. Call this *fluency*. The second locates beauty in the letterforms themselves: one might admire Garamond’s italic e the way one admires a well-drawn figure. Call this *elegance*. Fluency and elegance appear distinct, even conflicting. A display typeface might be elegant in isolation but produce laborious reading when set as body text. If the two are independent, a typeface could score high on one and low on the other. But this does not match our actual judgements: typefaces praised for elegance tend also to be highly readable, and poor typefaces fail on both counts. This correlation demands explanation. I argue that fluency and elegance are not independent dimensions but manifestations of the same underlying quality at different scales. Typographic properties form an interdependent system in which adjusting any one parameter changes how the others appear. Beauty therefore cannot consist in each property being individually optimal; it must be relational—the properties fitting together harmoniously. Drawing on Cochrane’s (2021) account of beauty as fittingness, I show that at the micro level of individual letterforms, fittingness constitutes elegance, while at the macro level of the text block, it constitutes fluency. The apparent tension dissolves once we recognise them as the same quality operating at different scales.
A persistent tension in aesthetics concerns how judgments of beauty can be both immediate and subject to rational discussion and disagreement. On the one hand, they appear perceptual, involuntary, and non-inferential; on the other, we routinely offer reasons for them, criticize them, and treat some as better grounded than others. I trace the immediacy thesis to its origins by revisiting Francis Hutcheson’s (1725) theory of the sense of beauty. Drawing on contemporary debates about phenomenal concepts, I argue that even judgments about one’s own perceptual experience—such as judgments about color—require conceptual mediation. By parity of reasons, judgments of beauty cannot be epistemically immediate either. I then develop an inferential account of beauty grounded in recognitional theories of phenomenal concepts. On this model, judgments of beauty are not object-directed property ascriptions but self-ascriptions of a particular kind of experience. To judge something beautiful is to recognize that one is undergoing a distinctive kind of pleasure, individuated by a disinterested attitude. I further argue that mastery of the concept of beauty requires having undergone such pleasure, the ability to discriminate it from other kinds of pleasure, and a conceptual grasp of its disinterested character. This model preserves the involuntariness and apparent immediacy associated with the judgment of beauty, while reinterpreting that immediacy as temporal rather than epistemic. It also reinforces Hutcheson’s claim that displeasure does not arise from formal properties of objects themselves, but from associative, culturally conditioned, or expectation-dependent factors.
This paper argues for the necessity of a critical ecological aesthetics capable of mediating between contemporary ecological art, environmental activism, and scientific discourse. While ecological crises increasingly shape artistic practices, aesthetic theory still lacks a coherent framework that avoids reducing such works either to political instruments or to formal experimentation. Conversely, environmental sciences often privilege technocratic paradigms that marginalize experiential, affective, and cultural dimensions.
Such an aesthetics must be phenomenologically grounded, cognitively informed, and culturally situated. Drawing on Heidegger, Böhme, and Merleau-Ponty, it establishes a relational and embodied foundation, subsequently revised through eco-phenomenology toward ethical responsibility and ecological justice. A position of weak cognitivism is advanced in order to address the aestheticization of pollution and toxicity, allowing scientific knowledge to inform without subordinating aesthetic experience.
Against disinterested contemplation, the paper adopts a participatory model of aesthetic engagement (Berleant), in which perception is ethically and politically implicated. Ecological aesthetics is further articulated through a relational ontology that understands artworks, environments, and materials as dynamic networks of forces and affects. Rejecting both pastoral idealization and apocalyptic abstraction, the paper aligns further with a dark ecological sensibility, arguing that the dominant aesthetic categories of ecological art remain the sublime and the uncanny. These categories enable a more adequate articulation of ecological entanglement, vulnerability, and non-human alterity. Methodologically, the paper advocates a moderate cultural relativism, emphasizing climatic diversity and situated perception. Building on the work of Mădălina Diaconu and Yuriko Saito, it argues that distinct ecological contexts generate distinct inflections of aesthetic categories.
The theoretical framework is applied to Romanian ecological art through a horizontal art historical perspective, revealing a Levantine sublime shaped by post-socialist transformation, environmental neglect, and cultural hybridity. The paper concludes that ecological aesthetics must be redefined as a critical, phenomenological, cognitively informed, and culturally situated discipline for the Anthropocene.
This paper outlines the contours of a theoretical framework called planetary aesthetics, grounded in the conviction that a renewed sensibility for planetary life and an expanded imagination of how the planet may be inhabited are both urgently needed and already emerging. Drawing on critical theory (especially Marcuse, Adorno, and Davis), the paper understands aesthetic theory not merely as formal analysis but as materially engaged with aesthetic works—in this case works of speculative fiction—that reflect and shape planetary entanglements of life. Central to the argument is a distinction between “the planet” and “the planetary.” “The planet” refers to the object in space that humans inhabit alongside other species, an entity whose internal vastness and deep temporal dimensions ultimately exceed human comprehension. “The planetary,” by contrast, designates the open, relational totality of living dynamics of which humans are a constitutive part. While both the planet and the planetary resist totalizing knowledge, they are not closed to a sensibility which acknowledges their opacity and still feeds the imagination of planetary life. Thus, the paper challenges the claim that contemporary planetary crises entail a crisis of the imagination, argueing instead that aesthetic imagination exceeds such epistemic limits. Through an analysis of speculative fiction, the paper highlights aesthetic devices such as estrangement, subjunctivity, and speculative world-building as crucial for fostering planetary sensibility. Works by authors including Octavia E. Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Jeff VanderMeer exemplify a productive dialectic of identification and alienation that respects planetary opacity while enhancing awareness of eco-geological interconnectedness. The paper concludes by advocating a reintegration of speculative imagination into aesthetic theory, proposing the philosophical stance of a “docta ignorantia” that embraces unknowability as the very basis for critical conjectures about the planetary nexus and ways of inhabiting the planet.
Recent work in aesthetics has increasingly turned to moods and atmospheres as key concepts for understanding the affective dimension of artworks. Through their holistic and non-intentionally directed nature, both notions promise to overcome limitations of emotion-based accounts. The talk argues that while both mood and atmosphere are indispensable for aesthetic theory, mood is the more appropriate concept for understanding expression in artworks, whereas atmosphere is better suited to explaining effects, resonance, and experiential impact. This claim is developed through a critical comparison of the two concepts, drawing on the concept of atmosphere as it has been developed in phenomenological aesthetics as well as on the diverse philosophical history of the term mood, enmeshed as it is with attunement and Stimmung. Atmospheres are typically understood as spatially diffused, causally efficacious affective qualities that arise in situations and shape bodily experience. Mood, by contrast, is first a psychological term and often understood through the lens of musical metaphors. Applied to aesthetic objects, moods enable an understanding of them as expressive. Unlike atmospheres, the expression recognized most appropriately through moods is not a question of actual reactions but can be justified through reasons. The central argument is developed with a focus on literature. Written texts, it is argued, can have a mood as an expressive property of the work itself, while atmospheres arise only in concrete realizations such as readings, performances, or recitations. Four central problems are identified for atmosphere-based accounts of literary expression: the difficulty of integrating form and content, the dependence on concrete realizations, the lack of intersubjective justifiability, and the variability of affective reactions. The paper concludes that mood is logically prior to atmosphere in the interpretation of aesthetic expression: moods structure and constrain the atmospheres a work can legitimately give rise to, while remaining open to multiple legitimate responses
While the use of non-diegetic music in films to arouse emotions in the audience has been well discussed, less attention has been paid to how music can be a component of the atmosphere of a film. The notion of atmosphere we are working with is in line with Gernot Böhme’s understanding of atmosphere as something real existing ‘between’ subject and object that is more than the sum of the perceptual inputs that make up an experience. Our paper will examine how sound, and specifically non-diegetic music, contributes to the creation of atmosphere along three dimensions: the spatial, the temporal, and the affective. We illustrate this with clips from two films. We argue that music allows for resonances and congruences with the visual space of a scene on screen (including the forced perspective of the camera’s movements). Congruences with, or tensions between, the temporalities of sound and sight also have consequences for the affect of a particular scene or sequence. We argue that our study suggests that, just as Böhme’s atmospheres break down the subject/object division, the creation of cinematic atmospheres through music challenges the diagetic/non-diagetic barrier by linking the consciousness of the spectator with the situation on screen.
Biodiversity loss is a major ecological crisis of our time. Although the seriousness of the issue is widely acknowledged, communicating its complexity remains a challenge. Interestingly, many biologists and philosophers have argued that the strongest case for protecting biodiversity may lie in its aesthetic value. Recently, we explored the aesthetic appreciation of biodiversity, arguing that there is a mismatch between “real” and “apparent” biodiversity, primarily because human perception offers only a limited view of biological diversity at all its levels. However, we only touched upon a central issue: namely, that biodiversity is dynamic, and nature exists as a web of interactive systems. In this presentation, we continue to argue that people’s direct perception and understanding of biological variation, as it occurs in their aesthetic experiences in nature, radically differs from the scientific understanding of biodiversity. We address the aesthetic appreciation of ecosystems by examining the issue from the perspective of biotic and abiotic relations, ecological networks and interspecific interactions, as well as flows of energy and matter in and through ecosystems. We attempt to explain why the assessment of ecosystem functioning does not align with aesthetic experience. Our thesis is that the human mind has difficulty grasping, in any comprehensive and meaningful way relevant to science-based biodiversity conservation, the nuanced functioning of an ecosystem and the complex networks of interspecies relationships within a given area. Finally, we do not claim that all lay perceptions, or the aesthetic experiences related to them, lack value in understanding certain aspects of biodiversity loss. Rather, our presentation is best understood as a critical survey of ecological aesthetics, encouraging more careful and comprehensive exploration.
Theories grounding aesthetic goodness by appeal to idealized entities (Hume’s “true judges”) are familiar and controversial, recently and historically. They aim to capture the subjective,mind-dependent nature of aesthetic properties, allowing for a robust distinction between the aesthetic better and worse, while avoiding extreme realism about aesthetic properties that assimilates them to scientific properties. The connection between ideal accounts in aesthetics and ethics has been explored. But the connection between aesthetic goodness and another normative property – truth – is largely unexplored. Plausibly, a unified account of the varieties of normative properties is desirable. One attempt to unify aesthetic goodness and truth is found in the writings of Charles Peirce, the founder of pragmatism. On the Peircean pragmatist definition of truth, truth is what the ideal community of inquiry would settle down on, at the limit of inquiry, in the long run. What is real is defined in terms of truth, as the object of that final opinion. Analogously, aesthetic goodness is what would be pleasurable to the fully developed, mature sensibility, – the “aesthetic superman” – what would please a sensibility at the ideal limit of aesthetic education. This connects aesthetic goodness internally with human responses, not wholly apart from them, as Platonic realism might seem to do, and with pleasure, as any adequate theory must. Crucially, on the Peircean view, aesthetic goodness is independent of what any finite group of sensibilities feels, but not independent of feeling in general. Analogously: truth is independent of what any particular finite group thinks, but not independent of thought in general. Some objections considered: such ideal theories are not “useful”; they cannot be consistently motivated; they entail the arbitrariness of aesthetic value; they must hold that “true judges” are actual humans, not ideal entities; ideal sensibilities would diverge.
I claim that Susanne K. Langer’s focus on art forms, in addition to artworks, as bearers of knowledge allows one to loosen the constraints of the usual debates about how a work’s aesthetic value relates to its cognitive value — debates that have tended to dominate aesthetic cognitivism. These debates often turn on disputes about the type of knowledge in question (the knowledge problem) and the entanglement between the cognitive value ascribed to a work of art and its aesthetic value (the value problem). In my talk, I explore Langer’s take on these two problems. My aim is to explain how her orientation toward art forms helps reorient aesthetic cognitivism toward questions such as the one posed at the beginning of her final work, Mind: The Essay on Human Feeling: ‘What new empirical knowledge of the morphology of feeling can we derive from its image in works of art, and what light can this knowledge throw on the unfelt processes of life and the emergence of feeling, animal mentality, human experience and mind?’ (Langer 1967/1975, 74).
Avant-garde artworks of the modern era are often described in terms of the art movement they belong to: we talk about Manet’s Impression, Sunrise as an ‘Impressionist Artwork’, Dali’s Persistence of Memory as a ‘Surrealist Artwork’, etc. Here, I argue that “art movement” is a distinct category of art having unique characteristics. Avant-garde art movements like Impressionism, Surrealism and Cubism emerged in the 20th century as phenomena of modern art. Artist collectives were established, creating art under one umbrella, using similar techniques, and focusing on specific subject-matter. They made their intentions clear to the public by publishing manifestos that state their vision of what art is and how it should be done. Art movements are art categories in Walton’s sense, they are concepts we use to classify art and that play a role in our appreciation of the artworks (1970). Other major categories of art include style, genre, and art form, which have been widely studied. In contrast, art movements as an art category remain comparatively underexplored in the literature and are often used imprecisely: sometimes they are considered to be styles and other times to be genres. This raises some questions: what are the specific characteristics of art movements, and can they be reduced to other categories of art? In this paper, I examine “art movement” as a separate art category that cannot be reduced to style or genre. Using tools from social ontology, I explain that although art movements, genre and style share some characteristics, art movement-membership is distinct as it depends on the collective intentionality of the artists. I conclude that art movements are a distinct category of art; moreover, they can give rise to other art categories like art forms and styles.
Two intuitive claims are in tension. On the one hand, aesthetic judgement cannot be grounded on reasons from others. We are ordinarily expected to judge, evaluate and appreciate things for ourselves, not by somebody else’s standards or reasons, mainly by virtue of the autonomy of aesthetic appreciation. On the other hand, reasons from others, such are those found in art criticism, play an important role in the formation and development of one’s taste. We are ordinarily sensitive to how others –especially critics and those who master the art of judging– appreciate and value things, and peer disagreement seldom leaves us cold. Both intuitions make a claim about the normative force of reasons from others in one’s aesthetic appreciation. I do not wish to resolve the tension but preserve it. To do so, this paper gives a picture of what it takes to be responsive to reasons from others. Aesthetic reasons, I claim, are not independent from judging, in the sense that one cannot be responsive to them and not make the corresponding judgement. This argues for a characterization of the relationship between critical reasons and judgement as distinctively normative and immediate, where accepting the normative force of other people’s reasons is itself being affected by it and judging accordingly for oneself. Yet this is not the same as saying that for reasons to disclose their normative force one must already judge in a certain way (cf. Dammann & Schellekens 2017). If reasons from the critic could not affect those who do not already endorse the judgement, the role of reasons from others in shaping or modifying one’s appreciation would be, against our second intuition, dubious. Nevertheless, critical reasons, I suggest, have the power to provide a new experience for us, on which an autonomous judgement can be legitimately grounded.
This paper critiques Louise Hanson’s non-inferentialist account of aesthetic judgment, proposed as a response to the PRINCIPLES argument—the claim that moral judgments can be derived from principles, whereas aesthetic judgments cannot. Hanson explains this contrast by arguing that aesthetic evaluations are non-inferential, drawing an analogy with facial recognition. While I agree with Hanson’s broader rejection of the asymmetry claim, which holds that moral realism is more defensible than aesthetic realism, I challenge her epistemic thesis and the facial recognition analogy. Recent research suggests that facial recognition involves feature-based processing and task optimization, which, though rapid and automatic, is (at least minimally) inferential. This undermines Hanson’s claim that facial recognition is non-inferential and, by extension, her explanation of aesthetic judgment. I argue that aesthetic evaluations often rely on implicit cognitive mediation, including internalized beliefs and principles, even when they appear spontaneous. Here, I believe we can draw a more direct parallel with emotions. Affective responses such as admiration seem immediate but are mediated by beliefs about what is admirable; they can be justified, revised, or criticized in light of those beliefs. Consequently, the Principles argument fails to establish a genuine contrast between morality and aesthetics. By reframing Hanson’s analogy and incorporating insights from cognitive science, this paper supports metanormative symmetry between ethics and aesthetics and offers a more plausible account of the nature of aesthetic evaluation.
Certain artworks appear to be puzzles, in that they present viewers with a problem they are invited to solve. How can we explain this? What kind of aesthetic experience does this offer? This paper investigates a small group of such works, which I call puzzle paintings. I will argue that a puzzle painting has, as one of its functions, presenting a problem we are invited to solve. I will explain what this function is and how it offers us a unique aesthetic experience. Drawing on James Elkins’ analysis of the art historical obsession with ambiguous images, I argue that the phenomenon he characterizes as a disciplinary ‘pathology’ is better understood as a legitimate form of aesthetic engagement. Elkins describes the fascination with such paintings as a form of obsessive over-interpretation, symptomatic of a modern interpretive impulse. In response, I propose that C. Thi Nguyen’s account of striving play offers a more productive framework. According to Nguyen, certain artifacts, such as games, are valued not only for their intrinsic properties but for the structured activity they invite. I argue that puzzle paintings elicit a dual aesthetic response: both the traditional appreciation of visual form and meaning, and the pleasure of intellectual striving. Even when no definitive solution is reached, the attempt to understand and to discriminate among competing interpretations can be aesthetically rewarding. The viewer’s role becomes that of an active participant – akin to a player engaged in a structured game.
Unlike views that locate aesthetic value solely in mystery, this model explains why puzzle paintings would remain rewarding even if interpretive consensus were achieved. Understanding the peculiar aesthetic pleasure of this game-like engagement may help explain why puzzle paintings are among the most studied and enduringly appreciated works in the history of art.
Many of us are fascinated by material remains of humanity’s deep past: we like to read about new archaeological finds and observe them up close in situ or in museums. What is it about them (and us) that enchants us so? Characteristic of the experience of many such objects is a profound sense of mystery. Who were the people who made them? For what purpose? In this paper, we propose that this ambivalent experience characteristic of archaeological objects can be fruitfully approached using the concept of the sublime. Our goal is to introduce and propose an analysis of the concept of the ‘archaeological sublime’. The paper comes in four parts. In the first part, we set up the problem and introduce the concept of the sublime. In the second and third parts, we analyse the archaeological sublime as comprising two moments of imaginative failure: a failure to imaginatively grasp the distance separating one from the an object’s original time period (the ‘temporal sublime’), and a failure to accurately imagine the object’s original use context that would ground its historical meaning (the ‘historical sublime’). Finally, we propose two explanations of why this experience may be a source of pleasure.
