Aesthetic Virtues Research Articles

Шекспировская традиция в современном британском романе: Йен Макьюэн

Ian McEwan (born 1948), one of the most outstanding contemporary British writers, is brought to the literary forefront thanks to the current social, ethical issues and aesthetic virtues of his works and belonging to the New Time British Gothic tradition whose foundations were laid by Shakespeare and his younger contemporaries (John Webster, John Ford, et al.). One finds basic topoi of literary Gothic in their tragedies: horror as an inescapable component of human existence; evil and villains who violate the moral norm in society; castle as a setting; fatal secret; supernatural element; motives of violence, revenge, adultery, incest and most importantly — of God and devil. Of course, Shakespeare is multiform and is not limited to Gothic. Like Shakespeare, who as a tragedian started with a “bloody tragedy” (Titus Andronicus) and then used its techniques in his great tragedies, McEwan began with a “thriller” (The Сement Garden, 1978), based on the motifs of fatal secret and incest. His later novel Nutshell (2016) is a modern version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet written in line with the realities of the 21st century. “Intertextual game” (usual for postmodernism) is not the main thing for McEwan here. Nutshell is his aesthetic-philosophical declaration of the adherence to Shakespeare’s tradition. In this novel, he creates the image of his time and shows that civilization has achieved tremendous scientific and technological success over four centuries, but human nature hasn’t changed. Despite all the historical and sociocultural differences, the image of the world in McEwan’s novels is similar to the world of Shakespeare’s tragedies — cold, full of horror and death, abandoned by God.

From Aesthetic Virtues to God:

I argue that the aesthetic theoretical virtues of beauty, simplicity, and unification, as well as the evidential virtue of explanatory depth, can transform theistic-friendly personal cause (PC) arguments—like the kalām cosmological argument (KCA) and the fine-tuning argument—into stand-alone arguments for monotheism. The aesthetic virtues allow this by providing us with the grounds to rationally accept a perfect personal cause (i.e., God) as the best PC to believe in given the success of some PC argument. Using the KCA as an example, I argue that, once the KCA is accepted and a PC believed in, then a theory that posits a perfect PC as the cause of the universe is more beautiful, simpler, and has more unification and explanatory depth than the imperfect PC normally posited by the KCA’s standard conceptual analysis. And the same would hold true for any imperfect PC. Thus, once a PC argument has been accepted, the perfect PC theory is preferable to hold over any other PC theory. Finally, I address various objections to this reasoning.

Aesthetic Humility: A Kantian Model

Abstract Unlike its moral and intellectual counterparts, the virtue of aesthetic humility has been widely neglected. In order to begin filling in this gap, I argue that Kant’s aesthetics is a promising resource for developing a model of aesthetic humility. Initially, however, this may seem like an unpromising starting point as Kant’s aesthetics might appear to promote aesthetic arrogance instead. In spite of this prima facie worry, I claim that Kant’s aesthetics provides an illuminating model of aesthetic humility that sheds light not only on the self- and other-directed attitudes it involves, but also on how aesthetic humility can serve as a corrective to the vices of aesthetic arrogance and aesthetic servility. In addition to revealing the ways in which Kant’s aesthetics prizes humility rather than arrogance, I aim to show that the Kantian model of aesthetic humility can enrich our understanding of humility more generally and contribute to the on-going effort in aesthetics to analyse specific aesthetic virtues and vices.

Pandemic and community’s sense of justice through suo motu in India

ABSTRACT An ideal citizen centric society wedded to the democratic governance always keeps its laws in motion to build an egalitarian and just order. Aesthetic virtue of law lies in the realisation of justice and the creation of an egalitarian order. Against this backdrop, the present paper aims to examine the approach of the Supreme Court of India (SCI) towards COVID-19 Pandemic through suo motu proceedings from various perspectives of jurisprudence and constitutionalism. The government claimed to have strived intensively with full vigour but the response due tolack of preparedness and intense gravity of the catastrophe, the efforts of the government appeared negligible. It warranted prompt revisit of priorities which compelled the SCI to intervene and evaluate the legitimacy of the executive action. Furthermore, it impelled to examine the role of the SCI in responding to the community’s sense of justice and humanising justice. The paper presents the solution to the paradox generated out of the inherent friction between constitutional authority of judicial review and resistance of judicial review of executive actions by a populist government. The scope of the discussion has primarily been confined to Orders of the SCI in suo motu hearings and examined accordingly.

Spoiler Alert

Spoiler Alert

The Virtue of Aesthetic Courage

Abstract Theorists have recently been exploring the prospects for a virtue-centred approach to aesthetics. Virtue aesthetics encourages a re-focusing of philosophical attention onto the aesthetic character traits of agents, in the same way that virtue ethics and virtue epistemology have encouraged us to focus on moral and intellectual traits. In this paper, I aim to contribute to the development of virtue aesthetics by discussing aesthetic courage, the aesthetic analogue of one of the most widely acknowledged moral virtues. In addition to proposing an account of the nature of this trait, I also argue that aesthetic courage is vital for any sort of aesthetically virtuous life. It is not possible to possess any aesthetic virtue without possessing aesthetic courage. It is important, therefore, for any future development of virtue aesthetics to acknowledge the central importance of aesthetic courage.

Aesthetic testimony, understanding and virtue

AbstractThough much of what we learn about the world comes from trusting testimony, the status of aesthetic testimony – testimony about aesthetic value – is equivocal. We do listen to art critics but our trust in them is typically only provisional, until we are in a position to make up our own mind. I argue that provisional trust (but not full trust) in testimony typically allows us to develop and use aesthetic understanding (understanding why a work of art is valuable, or similar); and aesthetic understanding is an essential component of aesthetic virtue. Aesthetic virtue is the orientation of a whole person towards aesthetic value and aesthetic reasons, through action, non‐cognitive and cognitive attitudes. The ideal (aesthetically virtuous) way to make aesthetic judgements is through your own aesthetic understanding.

There are no aesthetic emotions: Comment on Menninghaus et al. (2019).

Menninghaus and colleagues (2019) have recently argued that aesthetic emotions constitute a distinct class of emotions. They claim that aesthetic emotions are distinct because they involve an aesthetic evaluation, they are tuned to specific aesthetic virtues, they involve subjectively felt pleasure or displeasure, and predict liking or disliking. Here we examine the theory in the light of psychological and neurobiological empirical findings. We show that Menninghaus and colleagues failed to provide evidence that aesthetic emotions are different than other kinds of emotions in terms of psychological components or neurobiological underpinnings. We present empirical evidence that strongly suggests that affective states observed during aesthetic appreciation events are not distinctly different from affective states observed during other forms of sensory valuation. We conclude that it may be time to retire the idea that aesthetic emotions constitute a special class of human emotions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Is Art a Virtue?

In several articles, Peter Goldie argues that artistic production and appreciation should enjoy the status of full-fledged virtues. In this paper, I draw on the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas to provide a more nuanced account of artistic or aesthetic virtue. First, I raise some objections to Goldie’s account. Next, I show that, unlike Goldie, Aquinas distinguishes between virtue “properly so called” and virtue in a more restricted sense, and he calls art a virtue only in the restricted sense. In other words, art is a true human excellence, but is not (as Goldie claims) intimately connected to human flourishing in the way that the moral virtues are. Next, I show that there is room in Aquinas’s account for Goldie’s claims that art is done not as a means to another end but rather “under the guise of the good.” Finally, I consider some other ways to understand Goldie’s intuition and affirm that there might be an intimate connection between artistic practice and some kinds of moral virtue.

XI—Moral and Aesthetic Virtue

XI—Moral and Aesthetic Virtue

Aesthetic virtues: traits and faculties

Two varieties of aesthetic virtue are distinguished. Trait virtues are features of the agent’s character, and reflect an overarching concern for aesthetic goods such as beauty and novelty, while faculty virtues are excellences of artistic execution that permit the agent to succeed in her chosen domain. The distinction makes possible a fuller account of why art matters to us—it matters not only insofar as it is aesthetically good, but also in its capacity as an achievement that is creditable to an individual, and as a reflection or embodiment of virtuous motives.

The Distancing-Embracing model of the enjoyment of negative emotions in art reception

Why are negative emotions so central in art reception far beyond tragedy? Revisiting classical aesthetics in the light of recent psychological research, we present a novel model to explain this much discussed (apparent) paradox. We argue that negative emotions are an important resource for the arts in general, rather than a special license for exceptional art forms only. The underlying rationale is that negative emotions have been shown to be particularly powerful in securing attention, intense emotional involvement, and high memorability, and hence is precisely what artworks strive for. Two groups of processing mechanisms are identified that conjointly adopt the particular powers of negative emotions for art's purposes. The first group consists of psychological distancing mechanisms that are activated along with the cognitive schemata of art, representation, and fiction. These schemata imply personal safety and control over continuing or discontinuing exposure to artworks, thereby preventing negative emotions from becoming outright incompatible with expectations of enjoyment. This distancing sets the stage for a second group of processing components that allow art recipients to positively embrace the experiencing of negative emotions, thereby rendering art reception more intense, more interesting, more emotionally moving, more profound, and occasionally even more beautiful. These components include compositional interplays of positive and negative emotions, the effects of aesthetic virtues of using the media of (re)presentation (musical sound, words/language, color, shapes) on emotion perception, and meaning-making efforts. Moreover, our Distancing-Embracing model proposes that concomitant mixed emotions often help integrate negative emotions into altogether pleasurable trajectories.

Philosophy as Total Axiomatics: Serious Metaphysics, Scrutability Bases, and Aesthetic Evaluation

ABSTRACT:What is the aim of philosophy? There may be too many philosophical branches, traditions, practices, and programs to admit of a single overarching aim. Here, I focus on a fairly traditional philosophical project that has recently received increasingly sophisticated articulation, especially by Frank Jackson (1998) and David Chalmers (2012). In Section 1, I present the project and suggest that it is usefully thought of as ‘total axiomatics’: the project of attempting to axiomatize the total theory of the world. In Section 2, I raise a problem for the project that I call the ‘problem of multiple axiomatizations’. I consider some initially alluring but ultimately unpromising approaches to this problem in Section 3. In Section 4, I defend a surprising approach to the problem, according to which competing axiomatizations of the total theory of the world are effectively evaluated for their aesthetic virtues.

Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life by Omri Moses (review)

Reviewed by: Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life by Omri Moses Claire Laville Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life. Omri Moses. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. Pp. 296. $65.00 (cloth). High modernists were known to reject “the realism of character” (as Gertrude Stein described the novels of George Eliot), with its static social types and transparent personal motivations. Since the 1960s, many critics have extrapolated those representational choices into a wholesale rejection of consciousness or subjectivity. Out of Character sets out to “repsychologize” modernism while avoiding the error of depth psychology—in short, the idea that each of us possesses a truer self than the outward-facing one, or that we can explain our present behavior in reference to a concrete, traumatic event in the past. For Stein, Henry James, and T. S. Eliot, the vitalist philosophy of Henri Bergson and William James offered a way to describe character that was thick with the transitory stuff of life, a holism in which the meaning of the whole was always changing. For Moses, vitalist modernism offers a corrective to other critical movements, which he gathers into two loose groups: those that view the self as the product of external forces (including Frankfurt School critical theory, Foucauldian analysis, and behaviorism) and those that see it as a conservative edifice needing to be subverted or shattered (poststructuralism and queer theory). Out of Character is a strikingly optimistic book. It takes characters widely associated with mental paralysis—Stein’s Melanctha, Eliot’s Prufrock—and recasts them as agents with the power to transform their circumstances, within limits. Most of the action takes place in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick called the “middle ranges of agency,” in which one is aware of some, but not all, of the forces bearing upon oneself and acts tentatively and locally.1 Like Sedgwick, Moses is amenable to a biological picture of life. He accepts that there is some evolutionary basis for our species-wide interest in fictional characters, yet his suggestions are more accommodating than the cognitive-literary mainstream would be. One prominent adaptationist view holds that we read fiction in order to better predict the outcomes of social situations; Moses offers instead that the value of literature is its difference from real life, its allowing us to try out the “reactions we might have toward others when our own instrumental calculations are not at issue” (58). This follows from Bergson’s principle of creative evolution, which stipulates that culture, rather than being an epiphenomenon of the survival instincts, actually contributes to the evolution of life. [End Page 257] The reading of Bergson is lucid and subtle throughout. Moses sketches out a genealogy of vitalism intertwined closely with classical pragmatism, beginning with the physiological investigation of memory and habit in 1880s Germany. (His insistence on distinguishing vitalism from pragmatism is not entirely convincing.2) From investigations scientific and aesthetic, Bergson and William James concluded that learned inattention, rather than diluting perception, makes perceptions meaningful. Moses finds in their writings a pluralistic alternative to some recent ethico-political studies of modernism. Where some critics have tried to determine the ethical valence of art’s seeming withdrawal from the social world (either it represents a retreat from war and empire, or the inadequacy of politics as such), Moses simply observes that modernists—and the psychologies of perception that inspired so many of them—were uniquely alert to the “variability in response that make[s] social and political freedom a value in the first place” (48). This is a liberal and a pragmatic aesthetic virtue as much as a vitalist one. Bergson linked habit with comedy at a time when the discourse surrounding habit was fatalistic and very often a conduit for racist and sexist ideology. In his early essay “Laughter,” Bergson argued that laughter interrupted the human tendency to automatism, including the capitulation to type. “Melanctha,” Stein’s novella depicting an African American community in Baltimore, has been widely read against the backdrop of social Darwinism, with Melanctha’s death from tuberculosis said to be a punishment for poor self-control. In contrast, Moses shows that the text enacts a comic Darwinism in which habits are value-neutral...

Skeleton‐Intrinsic Symmetrization of Shapes

AbstractEnhancing the self‐symmetry of a shape is of fundamental aesthetic virtue. In this paper, we are interested in recovering the aesthetics of intrinsic reflection symmetries, where an asymmetric shape is symmetrized while keeping its general pose and perceived dynamics. The key challenge to intrinsic symmetrization is that the input shape has only approximate reflection symmetries, possibly far from perfect. The main premise of our work is that curve skeletons provide a concise and effective shape abstraction for analyzing approximate intrinsic symmetries as well as symmetrization. By measuring intrinsic distances over a curve skeleton for symmetry analysis, symmetrizing the skeleton, and then propagating the symmetrization from skeleton to shape, our approach to shape symmetrization is skeleton‐intrinsic. Specifically, given an input shape and an extracted curve skeleton, we introduce the notion of a backbone as the path in the skeleton graph about which a self‐matching of the input shape is optimal. We define an objective function for the reflective self‐matching and develop an algorithm based on genetic programming to solve the global search problem for the backbone. The extracted backbone then guides the symmetrization of the skeleton, which in turn, guides the symmetrization of the whole shape. We show numerous intrinsic symmetrization results of hand drawn sketches and artist‐modeled or reconstructed 3D shapes, as well as several applications of skeleton‐intrinsic symmetrization of shapes.

Hume on Art Critics, Wise Men, and the Virtues of Taste

In this paper I compare two models of expert judgment: the art critic in Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste” and the “wise man” in “Of Miracles.” The art critic is a true judge of beauty because he has made himself into a person who is optimally receptive to beauty. He possesses the virtues of taste: “Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice” (“Of the Standard of Taste,” 241). But the virtues of the art critic, I argue, are also those of the “wise man,” the person who consistently “proportions his belief to the evidence” (EHU 10.4; SBN 110). Comparison of these two characters reveals that for Hume the virtues fundamental to the art critic’s critical competence are also epistemic virtues. Hume’s exposition of aesthetic excellences should thus be of interest for virtue epistemology. Because contemporary virtue epistemologists have tended to focus almost exclusively on the relationships between intellectual and moral virtues, Hume offers something new: an account of epistemic virtues based on aesthetic virtues.

Mixed Motivations: Creativity as a Virtue

The thought that creativity is a kind of virtue is an attractive one. Virtues are valuable traits that are praised and admired, and creativity is a widely celebrated trait in our society. In philosophical ethics, epistemology, and increasingly aesthetics, virtue-theoretical approaches are influential, so an account of creativity as a virtue can draw on well-established theories. Several philosophers, including Linda Zagzebski, Christine Swanton and Matthew Kieran, have argued for the claim that creativity is a virtue, locating this claim within a broader picture of intellectual, ethical and aesthetic virtues respectively. Moreover, a prominent research programme in psychology, led by Teresa Amabile, holds that people have an intrinsic motivation when they are creative, and this seems seamlessly to fit with the view that creativity is a virtue, for it is often held that a requirement for a trait to be a virtue is that the virtuous agent acts from an intrinsic motivation.

Pedagogy Without Pedagogy: Dancing with Living, Knowing and Morale

This article takes its retrospective lead from the oppressive schooling years during the Chinese Cultural Revolution to reflect on the educational significance of artistic activities through considering aesthetic virtues and moral agency cultivated in these activities. Describing an unconventional educational milieu where schooling was deliberately ‘dismantled’, I emphasize the important role that artistic endeavours can play in building a person’s aesthetic strength and moral power to overcome the adversity of life, hence for the fuller human development. By blending philosophical discussion with historical manifestation, I stress the less articulated educational discourse that makes dance relevant to the educational formation of epistemic virtues and moral sensibilities. Joining in the emerging efforts to improving the worlds of schools, curricula, and pedagogies, I argue that the contingent integration of different histories, life conditions, and social and cultural discourses are ‘transformative’ sites for pedagogy. Thus, I seek to shed historically fresh light on the ways of thinking of schooling, education, and the arts for hope and possibility to ultimately argue for ways that can speak to the diversity of global societies today.

Review of Matthew Dirst,Engaging Bach: The Keyboard Legacy from Marpurg to Mendelssohn(Cambridge University Press, 2012)

[1] Historical research on Johann Sebastian entered its modern era in the late 1950s with the development, spearheaded by Alfred Durr, Georg von Dadelsen, and Wisso Weiss, of the so-called chronology of works.(1) In parallel with this revolution, the history of the dissemination and reception of was also being rewritten. Whereas Hans T. David and Arthur Mendel wrote, in 1945, that Bach and works ...[were] practically forgotten by the generations following his (358), by 1998 Christoph Wolff could describe the far more nuanced understanding of reception that had arisen in the intervening years in terms of complementary aspects:on the one hand, the beginning of a more broadly based reception of Bach's music in the early nineteenth century, for which Mendelssohn's 1829 performance of the St. Matthew Passion represents a decisive milestone; on the other hand, the uninterrupted reception of a more kind, largely confined to circles of professional musicians, who regarded Bach's fugues and chorales in particular as a continuing challenge, a source of inspiration, and a yardstick for measuring compositional quality. (485-86)[2] In most respects it is with the latter (though chronologically earlier) aspect that Matthew Dirst's survey Engaging Bach: Keyboard Legacy from Marpurg to Mendelssohn concerns itself, serving as a fine single-volume introduction to the private side of reception up to about 1850. Yet with a growing focus in its later chapters on performance trends for this private repertoire, it satisfyingly sets the stage for the emergence of the public Bach, stitching the two narratives together. Copiously footnoted and engagingly written, the book collects in one place many compositional, critical, and performative responses to that have previously been detailed in monographs, book chapters, and German-language sources.(2)*[3] breadth of Engaging can be seen in the topics of the three chapters of Part I, The posthumous reassessment of selected Chapter 1, Why the keyboard works?, is an overview of critical reaction to from well before death to about the turn of the nineteenth century. answer to the titular question, then, is less that Dirst wished to focus on the keyboard works to the exclusion of other repertoire, and more that reception in those first decades was largely reception of the keyboard works. While the 1720s and -30s saw controversy around Bach's sacred vocal music in well-known polemics involving Johann Mattheson and Johann Adolph Scheibe, advocates of Bach's music from death onward mostly chose to make their case on works such as Art of Fugue and Well-Tempered Clavier. Berlin-based critics and theorists such as Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg and Johann Friedrich Agricola constructed entire systems of aesthetic virtue around qualities they perceived in Bach's music, in which naturalness became equated with unity in diversity. At chapter's end, Friedrich Rochlitz's writings for Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung foreshadow what the new century would make of Bach, with a renewed interest in the intellectual and didactic value of works, a thread that is picked up in the second half of the book.[4] By contrast, Chapter 2, Inventing the chorale, is about the nexus of the world of music publishing in the later eighteenth century and the transformation of the practical, sacred genre of the harmonized chorale into a type of piece whose value lay in its exemplification of harmony and voice leading, and which was expected to be more studied than performed. key figures here are Marpurg, C. P. E. Bach, and Johann Philipp Kirnberger, who in various combinations collaborated to produce two early editions of the chorales-a selection of 200 published by Birnstiel (1765-69) and the famous complete Breitkopf edition (1784-87)-both of which suffered from nearly nonexistent sales. …

Holographic Interferometry (HI), Infrared Vision and X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy for the assessment of painted wooden statues: a new integrated approach

Wood has been routinely employed in decorative arts, as well as in sculptures and paintings (support) during the Middle Ages, because of its unique aesthetic virtues. It may safely be assumed that wood, as a material for monumental sculpture, was much more commonly employed in the mediaeval period than existing examples would seem to indicate (Bulletin of the metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013). Wood is easily obtainable; it could be carved and put in place with less difficulty than stone, it is chemically stable when dry, and its surface offers a compatible substrate for paint application. However, the use of wood is not without pitfalls, and requires an understanding of its anisotropic and hygroscopic nature. It is also dimensionally unstable and subject to deterioration by fungi and insects. Moisture-related dimensional changes are certainly among the most challenging problems in painting conservation. With the purpose of preventing important damages, the use of non-or microdestructive testing (NDT) techniques is undoubtedly of paramount interest for painted wooden statues of great value. This work has a threefold purpose: (1) to validate the effectiveness of an integrated approach using near-infrared (NIR) reflectography, square pulse thermography (SPT), and holographic interferometry (HI) techniques for discovering old repairs and/or inclusions of foreign materials in a wooden structure, (2) to confirm and approximately date the restoration carried out by x-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy and energy-dispersive x-ray spectroscopy (EDS) (that is assembled with a scanning electron microscopy—SEM) techniques, and (3) to combine into a multidisciplinary approach two quantitative NDT results coming from optical and thermographic methods. The subject of the present study was a statue named “Virgin with her Child” (XIV century), whose origins are mysterious and not properly documented.