Philosophy

In aesthetics, the topic of intentions comes up most often in the perennial debate between intentionalists and anti-intentionalists over standards of interpretation. The underlying assumptions about the nature and functions of intentions are, however, rarely explicitly developed, even though divergent and at times tendentious premises are often relied upon in this controversy. Livingston provides a survey of contentions about the nature and status of intentions and intentionalist psychology more generally, arguing for an account that recognizes the multiple functions fulfilled by intentions in the lives of temporally situated agents who deliberate over what to do, settle on ends and means, and try to realize some of their plans. Artists’ intentions are the same sorts of attitudes that we attribute to ourselves and to others as we attempt to describe, explain, and predict our actions. As such, intentions are relevant not only to debates over the interpretation of works of art but also to a range of other basic topics in the philosophy of art, including artistic creation and authorship, the ontology of art, the nature of texts, works, versions, and life-works, and the status and nature of fiction and fictional truth. With regard to the controversy over the interpretation of art, Livingston advocates a ‘partial’ intentionalism. Intentions are never infallible, so there is a conceptual gap between the completed work and the intentions that initiated and guided its making. Yet in spite of the fallibility of intentions and of our beliefs and claims about them, intentions regularly contribute to the determination of a work’s features, including implicit meanings, the recognition of which requires the uptake of the artist’s intentional design. Partial intentionalism also finds support in the idea that at least one sort of artistic value depends on the artist’s skilful accomplishment of intentions.

The chapters in this collection are ranged under four broad themes. Part I tackles the central issue of whether or not art and pornography are mutually exclusive in the most direct way. Part II explores the topic of imagination and fictionality in relation to pornography. Issues surrounding medium and genre provide the central focus of Part III, while Part IV addresses ethical and feminist concerns about pornography. This book will surely not constitute the last word on the debate in philosophy about the relationship between art and pornography. We fervently hope, though, that it will contribute to clarifying, enriching, and invigorating that debate.

This book investigates the relation of art to morality, a topic that has been of central and recurring interest to the philosophy of art since Plato. The book explores the various positions that have been taken in this debate, and argues for ethicism — a position that holds that an artwork is always aesthetically flawed insofar as it possesses an ethical demerit that is aesthetically relevant. Three main arguments are developed for this view: these involve showing that moral goodness is a kind of beauty (the moral beauty argument); that art can teach us about morality and thereby often has aesthetic value (the cognitive argument); and that our emotional responses to works are merited in part by ethical considerations (the merited response argument). In the course of its argument for the correctness of ethical criticism of art, the book also develops a new theory of the nature of aesthetic value, explores how art can teach us about the world and what we morally ought to do by guiding our imaginings, and argues that we can have genuine emotions towards people and events that we know are merely fictional. The book also examines several artworks in detail, showing how ethical criticism can yield rich and plausible accounts of works such as Rembrandt's Bathsheba and Nabokov's Lolita.

Art changes the totality of human experience as Dewey emphasized. Goodman and Heidegger propose that art reveals a special contribution to the world-making experience of the artist and the receivers of the artwork. Art is often representational. It may, as Bell and Fry affirmed, contain significant form giving rise to a special emotion, it may be expressive of human feelings, as Croce and Collingwood averred. It may deconstruct previous artworks, removing them from their frames to assemble something new, as Derrida suggests. Some art does each, and I seek to explain how. But not all art does these things, and not only art does them. So what is the special contribution that art makes to experience that changes human life? Art uses sensory consciousness as the focus of attention to create new form and content out of exemplars of experience. The exemplars mark a new distinction in conceptual space. I call this exemplarization. We value art because of the new content it offers us in our lives. We are provoked by art to ask ourselves whether to transfer the content of the artwork to our world and ourselves beyond the artwork. Our answer reveals to us what we are like as we exercise our freedom and autonomy in how we represent our world. Art is that part of experience that uses experience to change the content of experience. Exemplar representation, exemplarization, unifies the aesthetic, creating a new understanding of our selves and our world.

This book explores the idea that our aesthetic responses and art behaviors are connected to our evolved human nature. Our humanoid forerunners displayed aesthetic sensibilities hundreds of thousands of years ago and the art standing of prehistoric cave paintings is virtually uncontested. After introducing the topic, Part I analyzes the key concepts of the aesthetic, art, evolution, and how they might be related. Among other issues, there is consideration of whether animals have aesthetic tastes and whether art is not only universal but cross-culturally comprehensible. Part II is on aesthetics. The many aesthetic interests that humans take in animals and how these reflect our biological interests are examined, as is the idea that our environmental and landscape preferences are rooted in the experiences of our distant ancestors. In considering the controversial subject of human beauty, evolutionary psychologists focus on female physical attractiveness in the context of mate selection, but here a broader view decouples human beauty from mate choice and explains why it goes more with social performance and self-presentation. Part III asks if the arts, together or singly, are biological adaptations, incidental by-products of nonart adaptations, or so removed from biology that they rate as purely cultural technologies. None of the many positions examined is conclusively supported, but there are grounds, nevertheless, for seeing art as part of human nature. It serves as a powerful and complex signal of human fitness, and so cannot be incidental to biology. Indeed, such behaviors are the touchstones of our humanity.

Thirteen essays, five not previously published, on the arts. These are philosophical essays, mostly concerned with the ways in which theories about mind and language can contribute to our understanding of art. Some explore the challenges posed by art to the empirical sciences of mind – linguistics and pragmatics, psychology and anthropology. Particular problems confronted include: the nature of literary works, genres, and fictional characters; whether there is coherent and useful concept of documentary; whether fiction can tell us anything interesting about time; what pragmatics tells us about interpretation; the prospects for cognitive film theory; the role of empathy in our engagement with fiction; the role of the unreliable narrator; the relations between children's pretend play and their mind reading skills; how we should decide whether animals engage in pretence; what biological and cultural evolution can tell us about the development of art.

The artworld is a complicated place. It contains acts of artistic creation, interpretation, evaluation, preservation, misunderstanding, and condemnation. The goal of this book is to turn a critical reflective eye upon various aspects of the artworld, and to articulate some of the problems, principles, and norms implicit in the actual practices of artistic creation, interpretation, evaluation, and commodification. Aesthetic theory is treated as a descriptive, rather than normative, enterprise: one that relates to artworld realities as a semantic theory relates to the fragments of natural language it seeks to describe. Sustained efforts are made to illuminate emotional expression, correct interpretation, and objectivity in the context of artworld practice; the relevance of jazz to aesthetic theory; the goals of ontology (artworld and otherwise); the relation(s) between art and language; and the relation(s) between artistic/critical practice and aesthetic theory.

Taking atrocities as paradigms of evil, this book develops the theory that evils (plural) are foreseeable, intolerable harms produced by culpable wrongdoing. It places this theory in relation to others put forward by historically influential philosophers (Jeremy Bentham, Friedrich Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant, the ancient Stoics), places the concept of evil in relation to other ethically important concepts (such as justice and equality), and considers case studies: rape in war, domestic violence, child abuse, and “gray zones” understood as certain predicaments of people who are at once victims and perpetrators.

Contesting Nietzsche's rejection of the concept “evil,” this book holds it important to distinguish as evils the very worst wrongs and show how they differ from ordinary wrongs (which are bad but do not make lives intolerable); it finds the concept “evil” rooted not in the envy of the impotent (as Nietzsche thought) but in the belief in entitlement to decent treatment. On the atrocity theory, the nature and severity of harm, rather than degrees of perpetrator culpability, distinguish evils from ordinary wrongs. Intermediate between stoicism and utilitarianism, the atrocity theory treats both wrongful willing and harm as essential components of evils but finds neither all wrongful willing (but only what produces intolerable harm) nor all intolerable harm (but only what issues from wrongful willing) to be evil. Like Kant (in the Stoic tradition), it treats evil as an ethical concept, but it extends Kant's moral psychology in reexamining the possibility (which he rejected) of what he called “diabolical evil,” namely, doing evil for evil's sake.

Unjust inequalities need not be evils, although they are wrong; to be an evil, an injustice must be intolerably harmful, not merely exhibit arbitrary inequality. Hence, political activists, including feminists, should prioritize addressing genuine evils (such as war rape) over eliminating such inequities as the arbitrary exclusion of women from certain occupations. Two chapters examine legacies of past evils, considering forgiveness, mercy, gratitude (for mercy or forgiveness), guilt, and punishment in reflecting on how best to live with evils we have not escaped suffering or avoided perpetrating. The final chapter uses Primo Levi's concept of “gray zones” to construct an all‐too‐human account of diabolical evil, namely, the deliberate and successful pursuit of moral corruption of others as an alternative to the conception Kant rejected.

The first part of this book critically assesses some of the bold claims that have been made about films' contributions to philosophy and defends a balanced perspective on the topic. It argues that in many cases, it is the philosophical commentator and not ‘the film itself’ that is the actual source of the philosophizing attributed to a movie. In some cases, however, it is the film-maker who, by working with a background of specific philosophical sources, creates a work that expresses philosophical ideas. With this possibility in mind, the second part of the book outlines a ‘partial intentionalist’ approach. In response to a series of objections, the book defends underlying assumptions about interpretation, expression, and authorship. The book's partial intentionalist approach is exemplified in the third part of the book, which focuses on the work of Ingmar Bergman. The book argues that Bergman was profoundly influenced by a Finnish philosopher, Eino Kaila. Bergman proclaimed that reading Kaila's book on philosophical psychology a tremendous philosophical experience for him and that he ‘built on this ground’. With reference to unpublished materials in the newly created Ingmar Bergman archive in Stockholm, the book shows how, in works such as Wild Strawberries, Persona, and In the Life of the Marionettes, the Swedish director took up and responded to Kaila's views on motivated irrationality, inauthenticity, ethics, and the problem of self-knowledge.

This book is a compendium of writings from the last ten years by one of the leading figures in aesthetics, Jerrold Levinson. It contains twenty-four essays and is divided into seven parts. The first is about issues relating to art in general, not specific to one art form. The second is about philosophical problems specific to music. The third part focuses on pictorial art, and the fourth on interpretation, in particular, the interpretation of literature. The remaining parts of the book discuss aesthetic properties, issues in historical aesthetics, humor, and intrinsic value.