Aesthetics and the Private Realm

ASAGE, 2011

Aesthetic valuism maintains that aesthetic properties harbor an ineliminable evaluative component, and that to correctly and sincerely apply an aesthetic predicate to a thing just is to give an appraisal of its aesthetic goodness or badness. Anti-valuism denies this, and holds that even in the identification and ascription of evaluatively-loaded aesthetic properties, such as beautiful or graceful, we may identify a non-evaluative, purely descriptive, and patently aesthetic form of judgment or discrimination. In this essay, I formulate a new definition of aesthetic properties that is consistent with anti-valuism, in order to see how well it serves us, in comparison with a valuist definition that appears in the published philosophical literature. If my definition is at least as intuitively plausible as the valuist?s, it should be preferred. This is because the most complicated concept my definition asks you to understand is perceptual resemblance (a concept I spend a fair amount of time explaining). Value is harder to understand, and we don?t make it very easy on ourselves if we use one mystery (value) to define another (aesthetic properties). I end by reflecting on how my definition fits into wider aesthetic concerns.

1974

In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by his representatives.

Encyclopedia of Consciousness, 2009

2017

Undoubtedly, the relationship between Everyday Aesthetics and aestheticization is controversial, although they share the same historical context. Against everyday aestheticians’ tendency to refuse any proximity between everyday aesthetic experience and aestheticization as the “contagion-logic” underlying commodified reality, we will show how they are both based on the reflective structure of aisthesis. The latter emerges thanks to a critical conception here illustrated through both an archeological path (involving Sibley, Kant, and Herder), and the consideration of the determining factors for current aesthetic practices. Our thesis is, therefore, that Everyday Aesthetics can take advantage of a non-ideological approach to aestheticization, in order to become aware of the perception theory it actually needs and to promote an incisive critical stance.

British Journal of Aesthetics, 2023

In this paper, I want to claim that, in conformity with basic intuitions, there are some aesthetic properties that are perceivable. For they are high-level properties that are not only grasped immediately, but also attended to holistically, just like the grouping properties they depend on and that are responsible for the Gestalt effects or switches through which they are grasped. Yet, unlike such grouping properties, they are holistically attended to in a disinterested modality, where objects and their properties are regarded for their own sake.

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 2021

Is there tension in a view of the conditions of being in a proper position to make aesthetic evaluations that is committed to aesthetic autonomy and norms of exposure? I define 'aesthetic autonomy' in terms of the Kantian idea that in order to make a proper aesthetic evaluation, one must rely on oneself rather than on any outside source. I define 'norms of exposure' in terms of the Humean idea that practice and aesthetic education are conditions of proper aesthetic evaluation. Prima facie, these two commitments point toward competing accounts of whether exposure is a condition of being in a position to make proper aesthetic evaluations. However, I argue that a closer look at the Kantian position reveals that aesthetic exposure is a condition of being able to make aesthetic evaluations in an autonomous way in the Kantian framework.

The notion of the ‘free harmony of the faculties’ has baffled many of Kant’s readers and also attracted much criticism. In this paper I attempt to shed light on this puzzling notion. By doing so, I aim to challenge some of the criticisms that this notion has attracted, and to point to its relevance to contemporary debates in aesthetics. While most of the literature on the free harmony is characterized by what I regard as an ‘extra-aesthetic approach’, I propose ‘an aesthetic approach’ to the harmony. Such an aesthetic interpretation explains why aesthetic judgement, but not cognitive judgement, is based on a free agreement of the faculties in distinctively aesthetic terms. By contrast, an extra-aesthetic approach to Kant’s aesthetic theory does not explain what it is in beautiful objects as beautiful that calls for a free agreement of the faculties. I argue that this approach is limited, and suggest an alternative to it by articulating the necessary reciprocity and explanatory interdependence between the form and value of beautiful objects and the form of the mental activity that underlies judgements of taste. My proposal is not only aesthetic, but also normative in its attempt to carve up a space for a distinct form of aesthetic normativity, the one that Kant describes as ‘free lawfulness’ or ‘lawfulness without a law’. I opt for a specifically normative variant of aesthetic interpretation because I believe that Kant is committed to the view of aesthetic judgement as normatively autonomous and irreducible.

Prima facie, we seem to have no difficulty understanding the frustration or even anger that must have arisen in the minds of those respectable art critics when it was revealed that the artistic object of their praise actually amounted to no more than an indistinguishable forgery. Philosophically however, the matter is not so obvious, since concepts such as forgery and authenticity demand elucidation: why does a forged object of art that is 'aesthetically' identical to an authentic one receive the negative criticism it usually does?

Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol.53, No.4, 2019

CORRECTION: Endnote 38 should be "Dewey, Art as Experience, 150." This article revisits a Platonic idea that has been formative for the history of aesthetics and then explores how this idea can be reinterpreted meaningfully in today's aesthetic context. The Platonic idea I discuss (which Plato introduces in Ion and Phaedrus) is that artistic creation and its appreciative reception involve a form of divine possession. After exploring how this nonrational, supernatural idea has been critically countered yet repeatedly recurs in important subsequent theories of aesthetic experienced proposed by rational thinkers, my presentation suggests how we might give the notion of possession a more naturalistic explanation. I exemplify this through an analysis of performance art presented in The Adventures of the Man in Gold.