Philosophy

This book explains the perceptual knowledge involved in aesthetic judgements. It does so by linking Kant's aesthetics to a critically upgraded account of his theory of knowledge. This upgraded theory emphasizes conceptual and imaginative structures, which Kant terms respectively, ‘categories’ and ‘schemata’. By describing examples of aesthetic judgement, it is shown that these judgements must involve categories and fundamental schemata (even though Kant himself, and most other commentators, have not fully appreciated the fact). It is argued, in turn, that this shows the aesthetic to be not just one kind of pleasurable experience amongst others, but one based on factors necessary to objective knowledge and personal identity, and one, indeed, which plays a role in how these capacities develop. The explanation of how individual aesthetic judgements claim universal validity, and the aesthetic basis of art, however, requires that the Kantian position is developed further. This is done by exploring his ideas concerning critical comparisons in the cultivation of taste, and art's relation to aesthetic ideas and genius. By linking earlier points to a more developed account of comparative critical factors, the Kantian approach offers a satisfying and comprehensive explanation of aesthetic experience and fine art. It is shown to also encompass some kinds of avant-garde work that were previously thought to limit its relevance.

Disgust has a strong claim to be a distinctively human emotion. But what is it to be disgusting? What unifies the class of disgusting things? This book sets out to analyze the content of disgust, arguing that life and death are implicit in its meaning. Disgust is a kind of philosophical emotion, reflecting the human attitude to the biological world. Yet it is an emotion we strive to repress. It may have initially arisen as a method of curbing voracious human desire, which itself results from our powerful imagination. Because we feel disgust towards ourselves as a species, we are placed in a fraught emotional predicament: we admire ourselves for our achievements, but we also experience revulsion at our necessary organic nature. We are subject to an affective split. Death involves the disgusting, in the shape of the rotting corpse, and our complex attitudes towards death feed into our feelings of disgust. We are beings with a “disgust consciousness,” unlike animals and gods—and we cannot shake our self-ambivalence. Existentialism and psychoanalysis sought a general theory of human emotion; this book seeks to replace them with a theory in which our primary mode of feeling centers around disgust.

The essays in this book cover a spread of topics in the philosophy of music: how music expresses emotion and what is distinctive to the listener's response to this expressiveness; the modes of perception and understanding that can be expected of skilled listeners, performers, analysts, and composers and the various manners in which these understandings can be manifest; the manner in which musical works exist and their relation to their instances or performances; and musical profundity. As well as reviewing the work of philosophers of music, a number of the chapters both draw on and critically reflect on current work by psychologists concerning music.

This book provides a contextualist ontology of musical works, distinguishing works for playback from ones for performance and, among the latter, studio from live performances. Works are variously thick or thin to the extent that they determine details of their faithful renditions. Through the element of interpretation, performances are richer in constitutive properties than are the works they faithfully present. Features of the musico‐historical context in which the work is created affect what the composer can make work‐determinative via the scores he issues as instructions to performers. Scores must be read in terms of the notional conventions and musical practices they take for granted. To be of a work, a performance must match its contents, must intentionally follow the work‐determinative instructions, and must be tied by a robust causal chain to the work's creation. Also, the performance must be at least minimally faithful, so the work can be recognized in it. Authenticity is a virtue in a performance, and only small departures from the ideal are acceptable when made for the sake of an interesting interpretation. Non‐Western music can remain authentic if it assimilates influences and changes in ways compatible with its traditions and values. Recordings simulate live performances or create virtual ones and, because the medium is not transparent, are to be understood and appreciated differently from live music‐making.

Narratives are artefacts of a special kind: they are devices which function to tell stories, and do so by conveying the storytelling intentions of their makers. But, narrative itself is too inclusive a category for much more to be said about it than this; we should focus attention instead on the vaguely defined but interesting category of things rich in narrative structure. Such devices offer significant possibilities, not merely for the representation of stories, but for the expression of point of view; they have also played an important role in the evolution of reliable channels of information, an issue pursued in three chapter appendices. This book argues that much of the pleasure of narrative depends on early developing tendencies in human beings to imitation and to joint attention, and imitation turns out to be the key to understanding such important literary techniques as free indirect discourse and character‐focused narration. The book also examines irony in narrative, with an emphasis on the idea of the expression of ironic points of view; a case study of this phenomenon is offered. Finally, the book examines the idea of Character, as evidenced in robust, situation‐independent ways of acting and thinking, and its important role in many narratives. It is asked whether scepticism about the notion of Character should have us reassess the dramatic and literary tradition which places such emphasis on Character.

The Necessity of Theater examines the whole art of theater, which teaches us how best to watch and be watched, and is as necessary to human life as language. We practice the art of theater on the formal stage, but also in sports events, weddings, and ceremonies of all kinds. The book begins by defining the art in a broad way, so as to include as many kinds of theater as possible across world cultures. After defining theater, The Necessity of Theater examines in turn each of the main elements of its two main components: the art of watching and that of being watched. Performers practice the art of making their actions worth watching. This means that they should pay attention to such elements as action, choice, plot, character, mimesis, and the sacredness of performance space. All of these are covered in the book. Audiences practice the art of paying attention to the actions before them. To do that they need to know how to find events worth watching. A good audience is emotionally engaged through one of the many forms of empathy that are distinguished in this book, one of which leads to human wisdom. Plato's ancient attack on theater is right in that theater cannot teach us transcendent truths, but theater does each us about ourselves.

Thought, to be thought at all, must be about a world independent of us. But thinking takes capacities for thought, which inevitably shape thought's objects. What would count as something being green—so when it would be true that it was—is identified, somehow, by what those who have being green in mind, are prepared to recognize. Which can make it seem that what is true, and what not, is not independent of us. In which case our thought is not really about an independent world—so not really thought at all. Two apparent truisms thus form an apparent paradox. Much philosophy, from Locke to Quine, from Kant to Frege to Wittgenstein, to Putnam, to John McDowell, is a response to this, often dominated by it. This book contains eleven chapters, each working in its own way towards dissolving this air of paradox, and towards giving the role of the parochial in our thought—features of our thought which need not belong to all thought—its proper, unthreatening, due.

This book argues that what it is to be a picture does not fundamentally concern how such representations can be perceived, but how they relate to one another syntactically and semantically. This kind of approach, first championed by Nelson Goodman in his Languages of Art, has not found many supporters in part because of weaknesses with Goodman’s account. It is shown that a properly crafted structural account of pictures has many advantages over the perceptual accounts that dominate the literature on this topic. Part I (Chapters 1-5) presents the account and draws out some of its immediate consequences. In particular, it explains the close relationship between pictures, diagrams, graphs, and other kinds of non-linguistic representation. Also, it undermines the claim that pictures are essentially visual by showing how many kinds of non-visual representations, including audio recordings and tactile line drawings, are genuinely pictorial. Part II (Chapters 6-10) shows that the structural account of depiction can help to explain why pictures seem so perceptually special. Part III (Chapters 11-12) provides a new account of pictorial realism and shows how accounting for realism relates to an account of depiction in general.