Do We See Aesthetic Properties?

Both common sense and dominant traditions in art criticism and philosophical aesthetics maintain that aesthetic features or properties are perceived. However, there are many reasons to be sceptical of this. This chapter defends the thesis—that aesthetic properties are sometimes represented in perceptual experience—against one of those sceptical opponents who maintains that perception represents only low-level properties, and since all theorists agree that aesthetic properties are not low-level properties, perception does not represent aesthetic properties. This chapter offers a novel argument—the argument from seeing-as—against that sceptic which moves from consideration of ambiguous figures to consideration of visual art, concluding that aesthetic properties are sometimes perceived and delivers a general lesson for philosophy of perception. Contrary to extant theories of rich perceptual content, aesthetic properties are better candidates for high-level perceptual contents than standardly theorized rich contents like natural kinds.

Moral properties such as being wrong or being obligatory are not brute but based on other kinds of properties, such as being a lie or being promised. Aesthetic properties such as being graceful or being beautiful are similar to moral properties in being based on other kinds of properties, but in the aesthetic cases it may be impossible to specify just what these grounding properties are. Does any single property ground poetic beauty in the way promising grounds obligation to do the promised deed? If aesthetic properties do differ from moral properties in this way, may we conclude that, although ethics is like aesthetics in being a realm of intuitive and perceptual knowledge—or at least intuitive and perceptual sensitivity—it is unlike aesthetics because the latter lacks principles that connect grounding properties with aesthetic properties? Are there any such generalities in aesthetics, or even aesthetic generalities connecting aesthetic properties with other aesthetic properties? If there are, how much like or unlike rules and principles in ethics are they? This paper explores all these questions in the light of examples from the arts, with poetry as the main case study.

I argue that ethical features of sport strongly interact with aesthetic features of sport, such that all pro tanto ethical merits/defects count as aesthetic merits/defects. This is a much-debated topic in the philosophy of art and aesthetics literature, in which recent critics have taken to task this interactionist take on how ethical evaluative properties interact with aesthetic ones. The critics’ main argument against this view is that far too many works of art than theorists of this strong interactionist kind care to admit either lack the evaluative ethical properties they claim for them, or their ethical properties do not appreciably affect their aesthetic properties. Sport, I argue, is a notable exception. That’s because in sport ethical flaws in athletic performances double as aesthetic flaws with very few exceptions, or so I will argue. Unlike artworks, therefore, the interactionist thesis holds mostly true across the entire athletic spectrum, which is why, in my view, it warrants far more serious attention and appreciation than it is commonly given in both the philosophy of art and aesthetics and philosophy of sport literature.

This volume brings together recent work on belief and its connection to truth with issues concerning belief that arise in the philosophy of art. In the twelve new essays collected here, contributors address questions at the intersection of philosophy of mind and philosophy of art, while also advancing these debates. Some of the chapters herein discuss the cognitive contributions artworks can make, for example, whether authors of fiction can testify to their readers. If they can, are they culpable for the false beliefs of their readers formed in response to their work? If they cannot, that is, if the testimonial powers of authors of fiction are limited, is there some non-testimonial epistemic role that fiction can play? And in any case, is such a role relevant when determining the value of the work? Also taken up in the volume are issues concerned with the phenomenon of fictional persuasion, specifically, what is the nature of the attitude involved in such cases (those in which we seem to form beliefs about the real world in response to reading fiction)? If these attitudes are typically unstable, unjustified, and unreliable, does this put pressure on the view that they are beliefs? If these attitudes are beliefs, does this put pressure on the view that all beliefs are aimed at truth? The final pair of papers in the volume take different stances on the nature of aesthetic testimony, in particular, is testimony of this kind a legitimate source of beliefs about aesthetic properties and value?

Research Article| July 01 1997 "Adrift on Neurath's Boat": The Case for a Naturalized Music Theory Matthew Brown Matthew Brown Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Musicology (1997) 15 (3): 330–342. https://doi.org/10.2307/763914 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Matthew Brown; "Adrift on Neurath's Boat": The Case for a Naturalized Music Theory. Journal of Musicology 1 July 1997; 15 (3): 330–342. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/763914 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Musicology Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1997 Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

It is the beginning of a powerful argument for an experiential account of aesthetic value that one must experience an artwork for oneself in order to appreciate its aesthetic value. One can know that some hero is a great man from an accurate description of his actions or characteristics in nonnormative terms; similarly for a great computer or any other machine. But the aesthetic value of artworks is manifest only in experiencing them for oneself. This point has been made many times by many philosophers of art. Typically, they seek an explanation for it in some peculiar logical relation between the nonaesthetic properties of artworks and their aesthetic properties. But the less mysterious explanation is threefold: first and foremost, that the aesthetic value of artworks lies only in the experience of them; second, that the context in which any property of an artwork is experienced can radically alter the experience of it; and third, that different observers, even fully qualified observers, can experience the same objective properties of artworks differently. If the value of artworks lies in the experience of them, and if that experience varies with context and observer, then one must experience artworks in order to appreciate their value. (What may look like the fallacy of affirming the consequent is really an inference to the best explanation.) That the aesthetic value of artworks lies in the

Supported by John McDowell’s conceptualism, Sonia Sedivy develops her conceptual realism as a response to a perplexity she identifies in Arthur C. Danto’s views on the theoretical and historical nature of artworks and their aesthetic properties. Namely, that at least some of these objects and properties are not visible. Considering the connection between the question on the visibility of artworks and their aesthetic properties and the broader issue of aesthetic realism, this paper challenges the assumption that representationalism is the only possible application of the apparatus from philosophy of perception to philosophical aesthetics. Drawing on Charles Travis’s anti-representationalism and Michael Martin’s non-representationalist account of looks, the paper proposes an alternative account of the historical and visible character of at least some aesthetic properties of artworks, one that does not rely on the assumption that they involve representational content.

Article Summary The resumption of serious and sustained analysis of the concept of aesthetic value in the twentieth century which was described in Section 5 of the article ‘Beauty’ in the 1998 edition of the Encyclopedia (hereafter ‘Beauty1998§5’) broke new ground but failed to solve the problems that stand in the way of a credibly unified theory. For instance, Guy Sircello provides a keen analysis of beauty-making properties, which he takes to be ‘properties of qualitative degree’ (‘PQDs’) such as the vividness or softness of colour, the brilliance or harshness of sound, the melancholy or joviality of a mood. These admit of no quantitative analysis and range over a wide swath of domains. They are not in themselves positively or negatively value-laden, which is essential to avoid circularity. Their aesthetic value is determined by their being intense, non-defective, and non-defective seeming on a nonaesthetic basis (again, to avoid circularity). By intensity is meant that the PQD exists to a high degree. Thus the seeming suede-softness of hills as seen from a distance in a certain light is intensely suede-soft. In a different context the softness might be drab. But he finds little to tell us about the ontological and epistemological standing of these properties or about the rank properly assigned to the overall value of the complex ensembles of properties of a thing. A second standout is the reflection of Kendall Walton (see Walton, K. (1939–)) on what we can call secondary appreciation aroused by awe or wonder at the capacity of things to elicit pleasurable admiration even when they have little claim to direct aesthetic appeal but impress us for their practical, moral, intellectual, or natural value, or for their radically avant-garde strangeness. The virtue of this is to expand the reach of aesthetic admiration beyond traditional limits without losing connection with more paradigmatic beauties. But it raises deep questions about how far we should extend our vision of aesthetic appreciation and how to understand the ontology and epistemology of beauty. What criterion of accuracy will apply to wonder and awe? (Aside from that question there is an important connection between it and aesthetic evaluation. Awe heightens a person’s disinterestedness: ‘Awe basically shuts down self-interest and self-representation and the nagging voice of the self,’ said Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, ‘two- to three-minute “micro awe” experiences (like gazing at a reflection on the water or visiting a nostalgic playground). … Both can have a profound impact on one’s quality of life.’ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/05/well/live/awe-microadventure-exploration.html?action=click&module=Editors%20Picks&pgtype=Homepage). If we scan the scene of philosophical aesthetics honestly, we can hardly fail to be impressed by how much disarray it presents, ranging from presumption to disinclination to take a position. Consider the presumption of Mary Mothersill’s claim that the aesthetic properties of a work depend on literally every feature being what it is. This is certainly not true for the wavelike contour she cites in El Greco’s Burial of Count Orgaz. Much detail could be altered without affecting that contour. If this were not so then all changes in the work, even its aging, would affect the aesthetic properties we confidently ascribe to it. The opposite of presumption is evasion, as when philosophers refuse to engage with the issue of how aesthetic value can be a single species of evaluation, doubtless wide but still possessed of unity. A case can also be made for the evasiveness saturating the prevalence of studies of what a historical philosopher may or may not have meant in this or that work, rather than direct confrontation with the central theoretical issues. The conclusion one comes to is that philosophical aesthetics is at present a strikingly undercultivated domain. We have much work to do. At the same time our aesthetic commerce with the things that move us (positively or negatively) is a source of major satisfaction. That is a deeply important truism. The oddity is that our passion does not come with deep understanding. It is to this mismatch that the best twenty-first century contributors are devoting themselves. To their contributions we now turn.

It is a fact that wine tasting can at times take the form of an aesthetic experience and that many wines can be regarded as proper aesthetic objects. Can we consider wines works of art, then? This is the question I explore in this essay. I have reservations towards a positive answer to the question, but I think their nature is psychological or cultural, rather than theoretical. From a theoretical point of view we probably have sufficient reasons to claim that high quality wines are artworks: in this essay I try to lay out those reasons. My remarks are based on the discussion of three key points: (a) the artifactual nature of wine, (b) a version of the aesthetic theory of art, and (c) the metaphysical view Nick Zangwill calls ‘Aesthetic Functionalism’. According to this view, in order to be an artwork an object must have originated in an insight concerning the fact that certain aesthetic properties would be realized by certain non-aesthetic properties. The thesis I defend is that a certain wine is an artwork if and only if it has been produced with the intention to realize certain aesthetic properties in other, non-aesthetic properties, i.e. in the smell and taste of the wine, on the ground of an insight into the dependence of the former on the latter.

Aesthetic theories of art have always had trouble with nonperceptual artworks. James Shelley’s solution of broadening the notion of perception to cover properties that are directly felt is incomplete, until we specify what kind of response to a given property suffices to qualify it as aesthetic. I argue that all aesthetic properties are inherently evaluative and always prompt a positive response in the perceiver, since they are the outcome of an unpredictable and successful interpenetration of formal and semantic elements. An aesthetic definition can legitimately deny that conceptual works are art to the extent that they are not able to formally support the aesthetic qualities usually attributed to them, as is shown by their lack of compliance with the acquaintance principle, while at the same time the definition does not run the risk of undermining the aesthetic status of literature, on which it sheds new light.

Why Was There So Much Ugly Art in the Twentieth Century? David E.W. Fenner (bio) Two of the most common challenges that teachers of aesthetics have to face in their classrooms today are, first, the presumption that since "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and "there's no disputing taste," every aesthetic judgment is as good as every other one. The second is that the content from which aesthetics courses commonly draw for examples and for the impetus for contemporary philosophy of art theory — and by this I mean art from Post-Impressionism to the present — is made up of "stuff I could have done when I was four years old." The substance behind these two challenges — that aesthetic judgment is highly or perhaps exclusively subjective and that twentieth-century art does not demonstrate care of technique, or that it is simply ugly1 — are intimately connected. This connection is the focus of this essay. The answer to the question, "why was there so much ugly art in the twentieth century?" may be that the tradition of showing beauty to be a highly or purely subjective phenomenon renders beauty apparently less valuable than if it were objective in character, and so we have, in the twentieth century, a move away from the production in art of beauty to that which is simply "artistic" or "artistically important." I want to come at this thesis not through a discussion about either the location or the reality of aesthetic properties. Instead, I want to focus on the "ugly art." Students in aesthetics courses tend to take one of three positions regarding modern art, and by "modern art," I mean art from Post-Impressionism to the present, including Pop Art, Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and the rest: 1. They deny the value of it, together with claims about their artistic abilities during their kindergarten years. 2. Because they know something of the history and progression of twentieth-century art, or because they have an experiential basis for approaching modern art conceptually, they actually appreciate and value it. 3. They think they ought to value it (the way so many of us feel when buying our very first tickets to the [End Page 13] opera), and they do their level best to act in accord with what they see as their aesthetic obligation. Those of the first camp will probably voice their positions early in aesthetics courses, and at that point the challenge for the teacher is raised. Teachers in aesthetics courses, when faced with this challenge, tend, I think, to take one of three positions in response: 1. They use the authority of their office to stifle the discussion, hoping that students of the first camp will over the course of time and exposure at least move to being students of the third camp. 2. They embrace the complaint, discuss it, give it due regard (after all, those teachers probably read Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word themselves), but leave the final decision about the merit of modern art open and unsettled. I presume this is the majority position, at least in philosophical courses of aesthetics. 3. They seek to impart to students — through exposure, discussion, and the eloquence they can muster of descriptions of their own positive, valuable experiences with modern art — some sense of its merit. In this essay, I will sketch out yet another way to deal with the challenge, one that focuses on the history of aesthetics itself. The History The history of aesthetic judgment — that is, with the correctness of particular aesthetic judgments — begins with Aristotle.2 He said that an object is aesthetically good — or, actually, beautiful — if it is ordered, symmetrical, and definite, and if it demonstrates each of these virtues to a high degree.3 This analysis we call "formal," because it focuses on the presence in the object of certain aesthetic properties, ones that have to do with the form (as distinguished from the content) of the object. The more basic the cited aesthetic properties, the better, because the strength of the power of one's judgment, along with the power of evidence that can be cited in support of that judgment...

The theory of art as sedimentation as is originated from an anthropo-historical viewpoint peculiar of Li Zehou’s practical aesthetics. Up till now there still arises a question as regards whether or not the theory of art as sedimentation has overcome the difficulty in defining art as such. Li holds up to his conception of art as sedimentation of form, image, and significance, and retains his personal preference for the aesthetic values, cultural properties, and moral messages all exemplified in artworks to his mind. He therefore finds the avant-garde pieces failing to meet the requirements on art in his conception. Quite ironically, Li follows Dewey to stress the necessity and importance of daily life and intends to propose a broad scope and view of art as experience, but both of them stay in their individual tastes and senses of art that seem to be more traditional and classical than modern, more moral than sensual, more serious than playful, and more elite than popular.

An ethical perspective to using bone grafts in dentistry

Praised in its original edition for its up-to-date, rigorous presentation of current debates and for the clarity of its presentation, Robert Stecker's new edition of Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art preserves the major themes and conclusions of the original, while expanding its content, providing new features, and enhancing accessibility. Stecker introduces students to the history and evolution of aesthetics, and also makes an important distinction between aesthetics and philosophy of art. While aesthetics is the study of value, philosophy of art deals with a much wider array of questions including issues in metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of mind, as well value theory. Described as a 'remarkably unified introduction to many contemporary debates in aesthetics and the philosophy of art,' Stecker specializes in sympathetically laying bear the play of argument that emerges as competing views on a topic engage each other. This book does not simply present a controversy in its current state of play, but instead demonstrates a philosophical mind at work helping to advance the issue toward a solution.

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