Philosophy

The standard way of thinking about non-repeatable (single-instance) artworks such as paintings, drawings, and non-cast sculpture is that they are concrete things (i.e. material, causally efficacious, located in space and time). For example, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is currently located in Paris, Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc weighs 73 tonnes, Vermeer’s The Concert was stolen in 1990, and Michaelangelo’s David was attacked with a hammer in 1991. By contrast, consider the current location of Melville’s Moby Dick or the weight of Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ or how one might go about stealing Puccini’s La Bohemme. The standard view of repeatable (multiple-instance) artworks such as novels, poems, plays, operas, films, and symphonies is that they must be abstract things (i.e. immaterial, casually inert, outside space-time). Although novels, poems, and symphonies may not appear to be stock abstract objects, most philosophers of art claim that for the basic intuitions, practices, and conventions surrounding such works to be preserved, repeatable artworks must be abstracta. The purpose of this volume is to examine how philosophical enquiry into the nature of art might productively inform or be productively informed by enquiry into the nature of abstracta taking place within other areas of philosophy such as metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind and language. The aim is to provide a general methodological blueprint from which those within philosophy of art and those without can begin building responsible, and therefore mutually informative and productive, relationships between their respective fields.

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 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.