Philosophy

Consists of four self‐contained essays on the aesthetics of nature, which complement one another by exploring the subject from different points of view. The first is concerned with how the idea of aesthetic appreciation of nature should be understood and proposes that it is best understood as aesthetic appreciation of nature as nature—as what nature actually is. This idea is elaborated by means of accounts of what is meant by nature, what is meant by a response to nature as nature, and what an aesthetic response consists in, and through an examination of the aesthetic relevance of knowledge of nature. The second essay, which is divided into three separate chapters, expounds and critically examines Immanuel Kant's theory of aesthetic judgements about nature. The first of these chapters deals with Kant's account of aesthetic judgements about natural beauty; the second with his claims about the connections between love of natural beauty and morality (which are contrasted with Schiller's claim about love of naive nature); and the third examines his theory of aesthetic judgements about the sublime in nature, rejecting much of Kant's view and proposing an alternative account of the emotion of the sublime. The third essay argues against the assimilation of the aesthetics of nature to that of art, explores the question of what determines the aesthetic properties of a natural item, and attempts to show that the doctrine of positive aesthetics with respect to nature, which maintains that nature unaffected by humanity is such as to make negative aesthetic judgements about the products of the natural world misplaced, is in certain versions false, in others inherently problematic. The fourth essay is a critical survey of much of the most significant recent literature on the aesthetics of nature. Various models of the aesthetic appreciation of nature have been advanced, but none of these is acceptable and, it is argued, no model is needed.

The first chapter addresses the criteria of adequacy of a theory of art. Chapters 2-5 are constructive — they advance a positive view of the nature of art, explore its consequences, and defend it against objections. The last two chapters are destructive — they argue against other views of the nature of art, and they do so by contrast with the kind of view put forward earlier, and in the light of the groundrules laid down in the first chapter.

The book contains a selection of essays on aesthetics, some of which have been revised or added to. A number of the essays are aimed at the abstract heart of aesthetics, attempting to solve a cluster of the most important issues in aesthetics which are not specific to particular art forms. These include the nature and proper scope of the aesthetic, the intersubjective validity of aesthetic judgements, the correct understanding of aesthetic judgements expressed through metaphors, aesthetic realism versus anti-realism, the character of aesthetic pleasure and aesthetic value, the aim of art, and the artistic expression of emotion. Others are focussed on central issues in the aesthetics of particular art forms: two engage with the most fundamental issue in the aesthetics of music, the question of the correct conception of the phenomenology of the experience of listening to music with understanding; and two consider the nature of pictorial representation, one examining the well-known views of Ernst Gombich, Richard Wollheim, and Kendall Walton, the other articulating an alternative conception of seeing a picture as a depiction of a certain state of affairs. The final essay in the book is a comprehensive reconstruction and critical examination of Wittgenstein's aesthetics, both early and late.

This collection of original essays from leading researchers across a wide range of disciplines engages with a number of issues concerning ‘the aesthetic mind’. It is the only collection which specifically targets the extent to which the empirical sciences can contribute to our philosophical understanding of the notions of the aesthetic and the artistic. The questions addressed include the following: The collection is divided into seven parts: ‘The Aesthetic Mind’, ‘Emotion in Aesthetic Experience’, ‘Beauty and Universality’, Imagination and Make-Believe’, ‘Fiction and Empathy’, ‘Music, Dance and Expressivity’, and ‘Pictorial Representation’.

This book features a collection of essays that seek to provide accurate and well-developed characterizations of the epistemological and metaphysical concerns that shaped the conceptual languages and philosophical thought of sub-Saharan Africa. A common theme between the essays is that a word shared by different cultures can have different extensions while being taken to have the same sense. It is argued that the ability to appreciate or understand the conceptual languages of others is influenced by the extent to which this content is viewed from the perspectives of the native users of the language. Among the topics covered by the essays are conceptions of the person, truth, destiny, personal identity, and metaphysics.

This book contains an analysis, development, and defense of a number of central ideas in Kurt Gödel's writings on the philosophy and foundations of mathematics and logic, with reference to his three philosophical heroes, Plato, Leibniz, and Husserl, and to his engagement with Kant. Close readings of Gödel's texts on foundations are supplemented with materials from the Gödel Nachlass and from Hao Wang's discussions with Gödel. Gödel's views on the philosophical significance of his technical results on completeness, incompleteness, undecidability, consistency proofs, speed‐up theorems, and independence proofs are discussed throughout the book. A detailed analysis of his critique of Hilbert and Carnap, and of his subsequent turn to Husserl's transcendental philosophy in 1959, is provided. On this basis, a new type of platonic rationalism that requires rational intuition, called ‘constituted platonism’, is developed and defended. It is shown how constituted platonism addresses the problem of the objectivity of mathematics and of the knowledge of abstract mathematical objects. The implications of the position for the claim that human minds (‘monads’) are machines are considered in some detail. Issues about pragmatic holism and rationalism are discussed in a final chapter.

Are there things we should value because they are, quite simply, good? If so, such things might be said to have “absolute goodness.” They would be good simpliciter or full stop—not good for someone, not good of a kind, but nonetheless good (period). They might also be called “impersonal values.” The reason why we ought to value such things, if there are any, would merely be the fact that they are, quite simply, good things. In the 20th century, G. E. Moore was the great champion of absolute goodness, but he is not the only philosopher who posits the existence and importance of this property. Against these friends of absolute goodness, this book builds on the argument he made in What is Good and Why, demonstrating that goodness is not a reason-giving property—in fact, there may be no such thing. It is, the book holds, an insidious category of practical thought, because it can be and has been used to justify what is harmful and condemn what is beneficial. Impersonal value draws us away from what is good for persons. The book's strategy for opposing absolute goodness is to search for domains of practical reasoning in which it might be thought to be needed, and this leads the book to an examination of a wide variety of moral phenomena: pleasure, knowledge, beauty, love, cruelty, suicide, future generations, bio-diversity, killing in self-defense, and the extinction of our species. Even persons, the book proposes, should not be said to have absolute value. The special importance of human life rests instead on the great advantages that such lives normally offer.

According to the popular coherence theory of knowledge and justification, if a person's beliefs are coherent, they are also likely to be true. This book is the most extensive and detailed study of coherence and probability to date. The book takes the reader through much of the history of the subject, from early theorists like A. C. Ewing and C. I. Lewis to contemporary figures like Laurence BonJour and C. A. J. Coady. The arguments presented are general enough to cover coherence between any items of information, including those deriving from belief, memory, or testimony. It is argued that coherence does not play the positive role that it is generally ascribed in the process whereby beliefs are acquired. The opposite of coherence, incoherence, is nonetheless the driving force in the process whereby beliefs are retracted.

This volume collects most of the author's publications on human action since the 1970s. The essays collected here are concerned to answer the questions ‘What makes us agents?’ and ‘What makes us responsible to one another for how we live our lives?’ The author develops a unified account of human agency and responsibility in terms of our capacity for critical evaluation, or normative competence. We are agents because we have (and to the extent that we exercise) this capacity, and we are responsible to each other for our lives as reflections of our exercise of this capacity. The account is developed in these essays largely by considering possible sources of normative incapacity, such as compulsion, addiction, manipulation, childhood deprivation, and one's own desires. Many of these essays engage critically with contemporary accounts of free will, action, and moral responsibility.