Abstract
In this chapter, I defend the view that scientific and philosophical theories genuinely (as opposed to metaphorically) possess aesthetic properties and that they are genuine cases of artworks. In order to do so, I argue against the sensory dependence thesis according to which aesthetic properties necessarily depend on sensory properties. The case of intellectual artworks such as theories, as well as other cases of works of art like novels, show us that there is no such dependence, and we can then extend our understanding of what counts as art to such types of objects.
Highlights
My main examples will be mathematical, physical, and metaphysical theories, but I see no obstacle to extend what I will say to other types of theories as well
The case of intellectual artworks is interesting for its own sake and as a further extension of the limits concerning what counts as art and what does not, and as an interesting contribution to the debate about the claim that aesthetic properties necessarily depend on sensory properties
I argued for an extension of the limits of art in order to fully include artworks based in perceptual modalities such as touch, olfaction, taste and proprioception, in addition to the more standard auditory and visual perceptual modalities. In this Chapter, I’ll start by raising the question whether our senses do always have to play a role or not. In his excellent book The metaphysics of beauty2 Nick Zangwill presents an elaborated argument against physicalist aesthetic realism which is based, inter alia, precisely on the premise that aesthetic properties do metaphysically necessarily depend on sensory properties (Zangwill 2001; Chaps. 8 and 11 and Zangwill 1998)
Summary
The main aim of this chapter is to discuss the case of scientific and philosophical theories and to argue that they are genuine cases of what I’ll refer to as “intellectual artworks”. Adajian (2018, §1) classifies theories and mathematical proofs as having aesthetic properties but not as being artworks— to natural entities such as sunsets, landscapes, or flowers. Perhaps the idea here is that theories are not human-made, but that they exist out there and are discovered/appreciated by us. I adopt a different view according to which theories are products of the intellectual activity of conscious beings (mostly, in the sense of being theoretical models (see Paul 2012; Benovsky 2016, Part I).. The notion of being human-made plays a role here; we will see that the idea that theories are created is important, and we will see in Chap.
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