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75Perception in PracticeReview of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (2): 387-400. 2022.A study of culturally-embedded perceptual responses to aesthetic value indicates that learned perceptual capacities can secure compliance with social norms. We should therefore resist the temptation to draw a line between cognitive processes, such as perception, that can adapt to differences in physical environments, and cognitive processes, such as economic decision-making, that are shaped by social norms. Compliance with social norms is a result of perceptual learning when that same compliance…Read more
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42The New Theory of Photography: Critical Examination and ResponsesAisthesis: Pratiche, Linguaggi E Saperi Dell’Estetico 11 (2): 207-234. 2018.Dominic McIver Lopes’ Four Arts of Photography and Diarmuid Costello’s On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry examine the state of the art in analytic philosophy of photography and present a new approach to the study of the medium. As opposed to the orthodox and prevalent view, which emphasizes its epistemic capacities, the new theory reconsiders the nature of photography, and redirects focus towards the aesthetic potential of the medium. This symposium comprises two papers that critically exam…Read more
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98Two Dogmas of Aesthetic EmpiricismMetaphilosophy 52 (5): 583-592. 2021.Aesthetic hedonism is the default theory of aesthetic value. Some of its critics share with it a pair of unquestioned assumptions, namely, that any theory of aesthetic value should make special appeal to its being the case that the canonical form of aesthetic evaluation is a state of pleasure and to its being the case that the canonical purpose of aesthetic acts is to access pleasure. This paper argues that there is reason to doubt both assumptions. Doubting both assumptions suggests a wider ran…Read more
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812Précis of Being for Beauty: Aesthetic Agency and ValuePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 102 (1): 209-213. 2021.One question that leads us into aesthetics is: why does beauty matter? Or, what do aesthetic goods bring to my life, to make it a life that goes well? Or, how does beauty deserve the place we have evidently made for it in our lives? A theory of aesthetic value states what beauty is so as to equip us to answer this question. According to aesthetic hedonism, aesthetic values are properties of items that stand in constitutive relation to pleasure. Contemporary versions of aesthetic hedonism don’t e…Read more
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149Normativity, Agency, and Value: A View from AestheticsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 102 (1): 232-242. 2021.Being for Beauty has two ambitions. It makes a case that the network theory of aesthetic value has enough going for it to be taken seriously in philosophical aesthetics, and in work on practical values and reasons more generally. In addition, by illustrating how much room we have to maneuver outside the bounds of aesthetic hedonism, the book invites work on alternative approaches. James Shelley, Julia Driver, and Samantha Matherne take up the invitation with such aplomb that one might declare su…Read more
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17John M. Kennedy, Drawing and The Blind: Pictures To Touch (review)Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (3): 339-342. 1995.
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80Desolation Sound: Social Practices of Natural BeautyThought: A Journal of Philosophy 9 (4). 2020.Instances of natural beauty are widely regarded as counterexamples to practice-based theories of aesthetic value. They are not. To see that they are not, we require the correct account of natural beauty and the correct account of social practices.
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1022Beyond the Pleasure Principle: A Kantian Aesthetics of AutonomyEstetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 58 (1): 1-18. 2021.Aesthetic hedonism is the view that to be aesthetically good is to please. For most aesthetic hedonists, aesthetic normativity is hedonic normativity. This paper argues that Kant's third critique contains resources for a non-hedonic account of aesthetic normativity as sourced in autonomy as self-legislation. A case is made that the account is also Kant's because it ties his aesthetics into a key theme of his larger philosophy.
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330Sherlock Is Law AbidingJournal of Applied Logics 7 (2): 171-176. 2020.An approach to the semantics of fiction that uses the tools of truth relativism provides an alternative to Meinongian and pretence-based approaches. The approach is consistent with the deep motivations of John Wood's Truth in Fiction.
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Les Arts et les images: Dialogues avec Dominic McIver LopesSorbonne Université Presses. 2019.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.…Read more
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36Neo-PicturesqueIn Jeanette Bicknell, Carolyn Korsmeyer & Jennifer Judkins (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on Ruins, Monuments, and Memorials, Routledge. pp. 133-146. 2019.Neo-picturesque landscapes are former industrial sites redeveloped as parks in a way that preserves, maintains, and shapes memory of the materials, mechanics, and scale of the industrial age. This paper presents case studies of Duisburg Nord, the High Line, and Evergreen Brick Works. It distinguishes neo-picturesque ruins from archaeological ruins on the one hand and mere redevelopment projects on the other hand; traces a continuity between the eighteenth-century picturesque and the neo-pictures…Read more
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42An Argument for the New Theory of Photography: Reply to CostelloJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 77 (3): 311-313. 2019.
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124Feeling for Freedom: K. C. Bhattacharyya on RasaBritish Journal of Aesthetics 59 (4): 465-477. 2019.Aesthetic hedonists agree that an aesthetic value is a property of an item that stands in some constitutive relation to pleasure. Surprisingly, however, aesthetic hedonists need not reduce aesthetic normativity to hedonic normativity. They might demarcate aesthetic value as a species of hedonic value, but deny that the reason we have to appreciate an item is simply that it pleases. Such is the approach taken by an important strand of South Asian rasa theory that is represented with great clarity…Read more
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1Picture This: Image-Based DemonstrativesIn Catharine Abell & Katerina Bantinaki (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on Depiction, Oxford University Press. pp. 52-80. 2010.Settling down after the big meal at the family reunion brings on a little nostalgia. Out come the photo albums. As the pages turn, you see familiar faces as they looked long ago. One photo shows a surprisingly sexy young woman, and you exclaim, "That's Aunt Jane!" What you say is true. The explanation is this: what you say is true in part because the picture puts you in the same kind of position with respect to Aunt Jane as the position you are in when you see her face to face. In general, (DR) …Read more
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34Pictorial Colour: Aesthetics and Cognitive SciencePhilosophical Psychology 12 (4): 415-428. 1999.The representation of color by pictures raises worthwhile questions for philosophers and psychologists. Moreover, philosophers and psychologists interested in answering these questions will benefit by paying attention to each other's work. Failure to recognize the potential for interdisciplinary cooperation can be attributed to tacit acceptance of the resemblance theory of pictorial color. I argue that this theory is inadequate, so philosophers of art have work to do devising an alternative. At …Read more
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1True AppreciationIn Scott Walden (ed.), Photography and Philosophy: Essays on the Pencil of Nature, Wiley-blackwell. 2010.Aesthetic appreciation involves background belief. While some appreciations are adequate when these beliefs are false, there is an important class of beliefs -- beliefs about the nature art work kinds -- whose truth is required for adequate appreciation. Photography is an interesting case, since many of our beliefs about it are false.
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Feckless ReasonIn Greg Currie, Matthew Kieran, Aaron Meskin & Jon Robson (eds.), Aesthetics and the Sciences of Mind, Oxford University Press. pp. 21-36. 2014.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…Read more
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1Perception and ArtIn Mohan Matthen (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 871-884. 2015.Pictures are valuable partly because they engage perception in distinctive ways. This chapter surveys recent accounts of depiction, of the distinctive content and phenomenology of our experiences of images, and of the artistic or aesthetic value that these experiences afford. Particular attention is paid to recent research on the relationship between seeing a flat image surface and having an experience as of the scene it represents.
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Aesthetics and Philosophy of ArtIn Herman Cappelen, Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, Oxford University Press. pp. 657-670. 2016.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 aesthetic…Read more
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25Making, Meaning, and Meaning by MakingNonsite. 2016.True to his plan to take photographs to find out what things look like photographed, Garry Winogrand liked to delay processing his exposed rolls in order to scrub the memory of what he had in mind when he tripped the shutter. In a rich and astute essay, Walter Benn Michaels puts Winogrand in company with G. E. M. Anscombe. One through photography, the other through philosophy, each explores, articulates, even plays up, the “difficulties” of making sense of what it is for an act to be structured …Read more
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1In the Eye of the BeholderIn Julian Dodd (ed.), Art, Mind, and Narrative: Themes From the Work of Peter Goldie, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 223-340. 2016.According to a core tenet of contemporary philosophy, aesthetic properties are primarily represented in experiences. Obviously, however, the tenet does not apply in any straightforward manner to many items that nevertheless seem to have aesthetic properties. Examples include literary works, mathematical objects, scientific ideas, and works of conceptual art. Aesthetic properties need not be represented in perceptual experiences, but what is an experience if not a perceptual state? This paper ada…Read more
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716Spontaneity and Materiality: What Photography Is in the Photography of James WellingArt History 42 (1): 154-76. 2019.Images are double agents. They receive information from the world, while also projecting visual imagination onto the world. As a result, mind and world tug our thinking about images, or particular kinds of images, in contrary directions. On one common division, world traces itself mechanically in photographs, whereas mind expresses itself through painting.1 Scholars of photography disavow such crude distinctions: much recent writing attends in detail to the materials and processes of photography…Read more
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326A Layered, Bounded, Integrated Approach to Research on the Arts Across DisciplinesLeonardo 53 (5): 537-541. 2020.Cooperation among arts scholars is thought to be hampered by the division of research on the arts into two cultures, one scientific, one humanistic. This paper proposes an alternative model for research into the arts wherein multiple levels of explanation focussed on well-bounded phenomena integrate research across academic disciplines. Two case studies of research that fits the model are presented.
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2Disputing TasteIn James O. Young (ed.), The Semantics of Aesthetic Judgements, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 61-81. 2017.Philosophers have championed contextualist and relativist semantics for aesthetic discourse that attempt to explain faultless disagreement. However, both types of semantics do a good job explaining faultless disagreement. As a rule, more explananda assist in theory choice. This chapter proposes that three more facts need explaining. Aesthetic disputes revolve around objects, even as they express attitudes. They also extend into lengthy exchanges wherein reasons are offered and withdrawn. Finally…Read more
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1Pictures: Their Power in PracticeIn Jérôme Pelletier & Alberto Voltolini (eds.), The Pleasure of Pictures: Pictorial Experience and Aesthetic Appreciation, Routledge. pp. 36-51. 2018.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 ha…Read more
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5Comprendre les images: Une théorie de la représentation iconiquePresses Universitaires de Rennes. 2014.French translation of Understanding Pictures (1996).
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63Go Social! Replies to Abell and Atencia-LinaresAisthesis. Pratiche, Linguaggi E Saperi Dell’Estetico 11 (2): 207-234. 2018.Dominic McIver Lopes’ Four Arts of Photography and Diarmuid Costello’s On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry examine the state of the art in analytic philosophy of photography and present a new approach to the study of the medium. As opposed to the orthodox and prevalent view, which emphasizes its epistemic capacities, the new theory reconsiders the nature of photography, and redirects focus towards the aesthetic potential of the medium. This symposium comprises two papers that critically exam…Read more
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57Being for Beauty: Aesthetic Agency and ValueOxford University Press. 2018.For centuries, philosophers have identified beauty with what brings pleasure. Dominic McIver Lopes challenges this interpretation by offering an entirely new theory of beauty - that beauty engages us in action, in concert with others, in the context of social networks - and sheds light on why aesthetic engagement is crucial for quality of life.
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65Aesthetics on the Edge: Where Philosophy Meets the Human SciencesOxford University Press. 2018.This book proposes a new methodology for aesthetics, where problems in philosophy are addressed by examining how aesthetic phenomena are understood in the human sciences. Lopes then puts the methodology to work, illuminating the perceptual and social-pragmatic capacities involved in responding to works of visual art, literature, and music.
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