Dominic McIver Lopes

Pictorialists prefigure contemporary photographers for whom there are no holds barred when it comes to making an image from a recording event. The difference is that the inventory of image rendering tricks is now colossal. Liberal use of this inventory characterizes the third, lyric, art of photography. In lyric verse, the authors find heightened attention to the musical qualities of language, to the materiality of the sounds of speech, and to their emotional resonances. Lyric photographs tweak the variables of the photographic process as it is characterized by the new theory of photography, whereas the traditional theory of photography does not welcome lyric photographs with the same warmth. By expanding the conception of pure photography to include lyricism, the new theory runs head to head with the traditional theory but also with the proposition that purity implies uniqueness.

What are pictures good for? “Nothing” recurs as the apparently irrepress- ible reply of a motley collection iconophobes from Plato to the mediaeval iconoclasts, to parents concerned about comic books, to postmoderns in a lather over “scopic regimes”. In the aftermath of Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art (1976), philosophers doubled down on theories of depiction and pictorial experience, but they have not rushed to work on the value of pictures. Those few who have written about pictorial value have taken for granted an approach aptly dubbed “psychologism” (Wol- lheim 1987; Hopkins 1997; Lopes 2005). According to psychologism, we can understand pictorial value by appealing only to cognitive traits and capacities. Yet psychologism is enough out of step with studies of pic- tures outside philosophy that it dampens philosophy’s impact on the very scholars who could most use a defense of pictorial value. Here is a thesis: psychologism is false. Here is its payoff: an alternative to psychologism better suits the work of scholars outside philosophy.

Les Arts et les Images se veut une introduction aux principaux terrains d’investigation de Dominic McIver Lopes, philosophe canadien contemporain, figure incontournable de l’esthétique et de la philosophie de l’art en langue anglaise au cours des vingt dernières années. Il ouvre une réflexion sur les méthodes employées en esthétique et philosophie de l’art aujourd’hui, qu’on soit un philosophe dit « analytique » ou bien « continental », Lopes cherchant à penser le lien entre les deux traditions. À travers leur textes respectifs, Laure Blanc-Benon, Jacques Morizot et Frédéric Pouillaude instaurent un dialogue avec Dominic McIver Lopes, sur plusieurs de ses livres : Understanding Pictures (1996), ouvrage de référence sur la question philosophique des images et de la représentation, Beyond Art (2014), livre qui traite de la question classique au XXe siècle de la définition de l’œuvre d’art, et Four Arts of Photography (2016) dans lequel Dominic Lopes met en avant une nouvelle philosophie de la photographie. À ce dialogue s’ajoutent trois textes de Lopes inédits en français, portant sur la méthode de l’esthétique et de la philosophie de l’art et également sur la question de la beauté et de la valeur esthétique.

Empirical research on aesthetic response poses two challenges to philosophy. The more familiar challenge is that scientific explanations of aesthetic responses debunk what we take to be our reasons for those responses. One reaction to this challenge is an accommodation strategy that seeks to reconcile the scientific findings with an improved understanding of our normative reasons. This paper presents a more fundamental challenge: a well-established body of research in social psychology indicates that we routinely confabulate the reasons we give for our aesthetic response. This challenges the accommodation strategy and suggests that philosophy should adopt a more radical naturalism about aesthetic response.

The third edition of the acclaimed Routledge Companion to Aesthetics contains over sixty chapters written by leading international scholars covering all aspects of aesthetics. This companion opens with an historical overview of aesthetics including entries on Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Foucault, Goodman, and Wollheim. The second part covers the central concepts and theories of aesthetics, including the definitions of art, taste, the value of art, beauty, imagination, fiction, narrative, metaphor and pictorial representation. Part three is devoted to issues and challenges in aesthetics, including art and ethics, art and religion, creativity, environmental aesthetics and feminist aesthetics. The final part addresses the individual arts, including music, photography, film, videogames, literature, theater, dance, architecture and design. With ten new entries, and revisions and updated suggestions for further reading throughout, The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics is essential for anyone interested in aesthetics, art, literature, and visual studies

This chapter begins with a historical overview of aesthetics and the philosophy of art before turning to a discussion of how the philosophy of art bears upon human culture. It then considers the methods used in attacking problems in aesthetics and the philosophy of art by highlighting the distinctions between pure and applied philosophy, between internal and external perspectives on aesthetic and artistic phenomena, and between first-order and second-order methods. It also examines how aesthetics and the philosophy of art are affected as the arts evolve and as empirical studies of aesthetic and artistic phenomena become well established in the social and behavioural sciences as well as the humanities.