Elisabeth Schellekens

We are very pleased to be publishing a special issue on Art, History, Perception. We would like to take this opportunity to thank Sonia Sedivy, who proposed a special issue at the intersection of art history, aesthetics, and the philosophy of perception, on the basis of a workshop held at the University of Toronto in 2017, which was supported by the American Society for Aesthetics, the SSHRC, and the University of Toronto. The plan for this special issue has evolved since then, and not all of the articles included are based on papers presented at the workshop. But the goal of the workshop, which was to foster integrated, multi-dimensional research into works of art and visual culture, remains the purpose of the special issue, and we are very grateful to Prof. Sedivy for her invaluable advice and assistance during its preparation.

The main aim of this paper is to examine the practice of describing intellectual pursuits in aesthetic terms, and to investigate whether this practice can be accounted for in the framework of a standard conception of aesthetic experience. Following a discussion of some historical approaches, the paper proposes a way of conceiving of aesthetic experience as both epistemically motivating and epistemically inventive. It is argued that the aesthetics of intellectual pursuits should be considered as central rather than marginal to our philosophical accounts of aesthetic experience, and that our views about the relation between the aesthetic and cognitive domains should be reconfigured accordingly.

The symposium published here began life as a somewhat unusual ‘author meets critics’ session at the British Society of Aesthetics annual conference, at St Anne’s College, Oxford, on 16 September 2016 – unusual inasmuch as the focus was not on a single book, but on two books (Bence Nanay’s Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception and Murray Smith’s Film, Art, and the Third Culture) exploring different but related themes. In addition, rather than encompassing all the issues these two books address, the session focused on one general question that both books explore in some depth: is psychology relevant to aesthetics?

This paper investigates the way in which we adduce reasons in support of our aesthetic judgements. We examine the seemingly question-begging nature of that process, such that any aesthetic quality we adduce as a reason can be found compelling qua reason for a particular judgement if and only if that judgement is already assented to. We then analyse this phenomenon in the parallel contexts of gustatory taste and friendship, where the differences are understood to lie primarily with differences in the normative force of reasons held in support of gustatory judgements, aesthetic judgements, and personal friendships. While some question-begging obtains in all cases, in the latter we can begin to see that friendship can be justified with reference to its contribution to the good of ourselves. This is explored further in connection with the way in which examining our reasons for being friends with people is actually productive and generative of that friendship. Our conclusion is that while the giving of reasons for aesthetic judgements is still subject to a certain question-begging, those judgements acquire a powerful normative force in cultural contexts where it can be seen that assenting to them constitutes the realization of our good as individuals.