Aesthetics

This book offers the first full treatment of design in the field of philosophical aesthetics. Aesthetic theory has traditionally occupied itself with fine art in all its forms, sometimes with craft, and often with notions of beauty and sublimity in art and nature. In so doing, it has largely ignored the quotidian and familiar objects and experiences that make up our daily lives. Yet how we interact with design involves aesthetic choices and judgements as well as practical, cognitive and moral considerations. This work challenges the discipline to broaden its scope to include design, and illustrates how aesthetics helps define our human concerns. Subjecting design to as rigorous a treatment as any other aesthetic object exposes it to three main challenges that form the core of this book. First, design must be distinguished from art and craft as a unique kind of object meriting separate philosophical attention, and is here defined in part by its functional qualities. Second, the experience of design must be defended as having a particularly aesthetic nature. Here Forsey adapts the Kantian notion of dependent beauty to provide a model for our appreciation of design as different from our judgments of art, craft and natural beauty. Finally, design is important for aesthetics and philosophy as a whole in that it is implicated in broader human concerns. Forsey situates her theory of design as a constructive contribution to the recent movement of Everyday Aesthetics, which seeks to re-enfranchise philosophical aesthetics as an important part of philosophy at large.

This book is about metaphor, imaginativeness, and criticism of the arts. Since the eighteenth century, many philosophers have argued that appreciating art is rewarding because it involves responding imaginatively to a work. Literary works can be interpreted in many ways; architecture can be seen as stately, meditative, or forbidding; and sensitive descriptions of art are often colourful metaphors: music can ‘shimmer’, prose can be ‘perfumed’, and a painter’s colouring can be ‘effervescent’. Engaging with art, like creating it, seems to offer great scope for imagination. Hume, Kant, Oscar Wilde, Roger Scruton, and others have defended variations on this attractive idea. This book critically examines it. The first half explains the role imaginativeness plays in criticism. To do this, it answers three questions that are of interest in their own right. First, what are the aims of criticism? Is the point of criticizing a work to evaluate it, to explain it, to modify our response to it, or something else? Second, what is it to appreciate art? Third, what is imaginativeness? This book gives new answers to all three questions. It uses them to explain the role of imaginativeness in criticism. The book’s second half focuses on metaphor. Why are some metaphors so effective? How do we understand metaphors? Are some thoughts expressible only in metaphor? The book’s answers to these questions go against much current thinking in the philosophy of language. It uses these answers to explain why imaginative metaphors are so common in art criticism.

According to the literary humanist, works of literature refer to the real world and make statements about that world which are of cognitive as well as aesthetic value; the two kinds of value are indeed intimately connected. This humanist also holds that such works have an objective meaning which is fixed at the time of their production and which is the same for all readers, then and thereafter. This book aims to defend literary humanism, so understood, against attacks from two directions. On the one hand, some analytically minded aestheticians have argued that works of literature do not bear referentially on the world and do not make true statements about it; others hold that such works do not make a contribution to knowledge; others again allow that works of literature may have cognitive value, but deny that this depends on their having truth or reference. On the other hand, reception-theorists and deconstructionists have rejected the humanist’s objectivist conception of literary meaning, and typically take a pragmatist and anti-realist approach to truth and meaning. This latter, poststructuralist assault on the traditional understanding of literature has often been accompanied by a radical politicization of its study. In defending literary humanism against these various forms of criticism, this book shows that the reading and appreciation of literature is a cognitive activity on a par with scientific investigation, and that it can and should be approached disinterestedly for the sake of what can be learnt about the world and our place in it.

Part 1, Philosophy of Novels, defends theories of literary value and interpretation. Literary value, the value of literary works as such, is a species of aesthetic value. Works have aesthetic value when they simultaneously engage all our mental capacities: perceptual, cognitive, imaginative, and emotional. This view contrasts with now prevalent narrower formalist views of literary value. According to it, cognitive engagement with novels includes appreciation of their broad themes and the theses these imply, often moral and hence philosophical theses, which are therefore part of the novels’ literary value. Interpretation explains elements of works so as to allow readers maximum appreciation, so as to maximize the literary value of the texts as written. Once more this view contrasts with narrower views of literary interpretation, especially that which limits it to uncovering what authors intended. One implication of the broader view is the possibility of incompatible but equally acceptable interpretations, which is illustrated by rival interpretations of The Sun Also Rises. The theory of value is tested by explaining the immense appeal of good mystery novels in its terms. Part 2, Philosophy in Novels, explores themes relating to moral agency—moral development, motivation, and disintegration—in Pride and Prejudice, Huckleberry Finn, The Cider House Rules, and Nostromo. By narrating the course of characters’ lives, including their inner lives, over extended periods, these novels allow us to vicariously experience the characters’ moral progressions, positive and negative, to learn in a more focused way moral truths, as we do from real life experiences.

This book presents a series of multiply interrelated chapters which together make up an original study of selfhood (subjectivity or personal identity). It explores a variety of articulations (in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the arts) of the idea that selfhood is best conceived as a matter of non-self-identity — for example, as becoming or self-overcoming, or as being what one is not and not being what one is, or as being doubled or divided. Philosophically, a sustained reading of the work of Nietzsche and Sartre is central to this project, although Wittgenstein is also fundamental to its concerns; the book therefore draws extensively on texts usually associated with ‘Continental’ philosophical traditions, primarily in order to test the feasibility of a non-elitist form of moral perfectionism. Within the arts, several chapters examine various films whose themes intersect with those of the philosophers under study (including Hollywood melodramas, recent spy movies such as the Bourne trilogy and the latest incarnation of James Bond, and David Fincher's Benjamin Button); Wagner's Ring cycle is a recurrent concern; and the novels of Kingsley Amis, J. M. Coetzee, and David Foster Wallace are also prominent.

There seems to be an interesting difference between judging someone to be good and judging them to be kind. Both judgements are typically positive, but the latter seems to offer more description of the person: we get a slightly more specific sense of what they are like. Very general evaluative concepts are referred to as thin concepts, whilst more specific ones are termed thick concepts. Examples of the former include good, bad, right and wrong, whilst there are countless examples of the latter: brave, rude, gracious, wicked, sympathetic, mean. Marking this distinction opens up some interesting questions. How do the descriptive and evaluative elements of thick concepts combine? Are these elements separable in the first place? Is there a sharp division between thin and thick concepts? Can we mark interesting further distinctions between how thick ethical concepts work and how their aesthetic and epistemic counterparts work? How, if at all, are thick and thin concepts related to reasons and action?.These questions, and others, touch on some of the deepest philosophical issues about the evaluative and normative. They force us to think hard about the place of the evaluative in a (seemingly) nonevaluative world, and they also raise fascinating issues about how language works.This volume of twelve papers explores the phenomenon of thin and thick concepts. They are accompanied by a large introduction that offers an overview of the current and historic field.Authors: Simon Blackburn, Jonathan Dancy, Timothy Chappell, Matti Eklund, Edward Harcourt and Alan Thomas, Simon Kirchin, Debbie Roberts, Michael Smith, Valerie Tiberius, Pekka Väyrynen Eric Wiland, and Nick Zangwill.