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31Photography and the “Picturesque Agent”Critical Inquiry 38 (4): 855-869. 2012.Even as art theory and analytic philosophy have failed to connect in their studies of photography, the two disciplines have joined in tying conceptions of the specific character of photography to ideas about automaticity and agency.1 In rough caricature, the philosopher reasons: “An item is a work of art only insofar as it is the product of agency, so a photograph is not an art work insofar it is not the product of artistic agency. After all, in Lady Eastlake's colorful words, the ‘obedience of …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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24Pleasure, Desire, and BeautyIn Larissa Berger (ed.), Disinterested Pleasure and Beauty: Perspectives from Kantian and Contemporary Aesthetics, De Gruyter. pp. 233-256. 2023.Pleasure is standardly conceived as a state that motivates. This chapter considers three accounts of disinterested pleasure as motivating. On one, it motivates strictly internal states because it is non-conceptual. On a second, it motivates strictly internal states because the link between motivating internal states and world-oriented acts has been inhibited. On the third, it motivates only contemplative acts. All three accounts are coherent. However, none of the three accounts of disinterested …Read more
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22The Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundaries of the ArtworkIn Perfect Harmony: Picture + Frame, 1850-1920A History of European Picture Frames (review)Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (4): 408. 1998.
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13The Aesthetic Function of Art (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (2): 484-487. 2007.
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11John 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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10Essays on Beauty and the Arts (edited book)Hackett Publishing Company. 2023.Bernard Bolzano’s (1781–1848) writings in aesthetics are clear, concise, and explicit about method. Provocative and revisionary, they champion broad views of beauty, the arts, and their social function. Dominic McIver Lopes's introductory materials place Bolzano's essays in context, give them a new interpretation, and map out how to teach them, in full or in part, in a variety of courses.
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9Conceptual Art Is Not What It SeemsIn Peter Goldie & Elisabeth Schellekens (eds.), Philosophy and conceptual art, Oxford University Press. 2007.Hypotheses in aesthetics should explain appreciative failure as well as appreciative success. They should state the general conditions under which people fail to understand and value works as works of art. This stricture is all the more important when the typical response to conceptual art is one of resistance. Some philosophers explain this by claiming that conceptual art violates traditional theories of art. Others say that it violates folk ontologies of art. In fact, the appreciative failure …Read more
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8Bolzano on Aesthetic NormativityBritish Journal of Aesthetics 64 (2): 143-156. 2024.A theory of aesthetic normativity states what makes it the case that the fact that an item is beautiful is reason to appreciate it. Aesthetic hedonists characteristically hold that the fact that an item is beautiful is reason to appreciate it because anyone always has reason to do what yields pleasure. Bernard Bolzano was an aesthetic hedonist who is best interpreted as offering a mixed theory of aesthetic normativity. The fact that an item is beautiful is reason to appreciate it because anyone …Read more
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6A New Theory of PhotographyIn Four Arts of Photography, Wiley. 2015.The theory that photographs are images made by belief‐independent feature‐tracking is not a philosopher's invention. It gives concise, precise, and unifying expression to an assemblage of ideas about photography with a long and influential history. Traditional theory ironically flubs the line between photography and drawing precisely because it attempts to put them in opposition to each other. Photographs made by drawing can have a special significance because they originate in richly embodied a…Read more
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6The Special and General Theory of Realism: Reply to Abell, Armstrong, and McMahonContemporary Aesthetics 4 40. 2006.
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6The Philosophy of Literature: Contemporary and Classic Readings - an Anthology (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2004.Essential readings in the philosophy of literature are brought together for the first time in this anthology. Contains forty-five substantial and carefully chosen essays and extracts Provides a balanced and coherent overview of developments in the field during the past thirty years, including influential work on fiction, interpretation, metaphor, literary value, and the definition and ontology of literature Includes an additional historical section featuring generous selections of the writings o…Read more
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6GenreIn Paisley Livingston & Carl Plantinga (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, Routledge. pp. 152-161. 2008.
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6The Knowing EyeIn Four Arts of Photography, Wiley. 2015.Having been invented by scientists, who first saw it as a new tool of inquiry and only later began to suspect the possibility of photographic art, photography's special epistemic character has dominated thinking about its nature. Photographs are introduced as evidence in scientific reports, journalism, and courts of law. They can also be used to make discoveries. According to the new theory of photography, a photograph is a product of a photographic process where an artifactual image is rendered…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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4Crosscurrents and Boundary ConditionsIn Four Arts of Photography, Wiley. 2015.Photography is probably the first art to have developed alongside and in tandem with systematic thinking about its nature. Photography theory has always been implicated in photographic creativity and appreciation. Methodological skepticism treats the skeptic's argument as a tool by taking it seriously in a rather special way. In this chapter, philosophy has been used to bring out some hidden structures in the thinking that obscure photography's range of powers. A second art of photography, exemp…Read more
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3How to Do Things with TheoryIn Four Arts of Photography, Wiley. 2015.This chapter uses the patterns of inference that the authors find in the history to understand how photography can be practiced as an art. The history contains the makings of some sophisticated reasoning for the skeptical claim that photography is not an art. The argument for skepticism about photographic art brings on questions about the nature of photography and when it is an art. Purity is a tool designed to sharpen the question of whether photographs can be works of art by nature. The nature…Read more
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3The Domain of DepictionIn Matthew Kieran (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, Blackwell. 2005.
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2Disputing TasteIn James O. Young (ed.), The Semantics of Aesthetic Judgement. 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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2AbstractionIn Four Arts of Photography, Wiley. 2015.The critic Dominic Eichler recently described some abstract photographs by Wolfgang Tillmans as exposing a forgotten reservoir of unseen pictures, a kind of mysterious, enormous underbelly of photography past and present. Modernist period abstract photography shared the ambition of the classic tradition to open up a window into a hitherto unseen reality. Photography's having made realistic depiction a trivial achievement, painters tacked toward an exploration of light and form. The effects of th…Read more
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2To Possess Other EyesIn Four Arts of Photography, Wiley. 2015.The first art of photography best aligns with the production of photographers like Henri Cartier‐Bresson, Edward Weston, Andre Kertesz, and Diane Arbus. Modernism is the moniker that tends to be applied to these photographers and their peers in retrospect, usually by art historians, especially in connection with the writings of John Szarkowski. As curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from the 1960s through the 1980s, Szarkowski commanded attention and used it to lead th…Read more
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2Wonderment to PuzzlementIn Four Arts of Photography, Wiley. 2015.This chapter traces the path of skepticism about photographic art through the history of thinking about photography. Flower 009 is a photogram, made by placing plumbago blossoms directly onto a photosensitive surface, then exposing it to light and developing the print. Flower 009 gives a glimpse of the four arts of photography that are to be found by taking a close look at the history of photography and the history of thinking about photography. The early theorists’ skepticism about photographic…Read more
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2Aesthetic Theory and Aesthetic Science: Prospects for IntegrationIn Steven Palmer & Arthur Shimamura (eds.), , with Vincent Bergeron, Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience, Oxford University Press. 2012.
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1Digital ArtIn Luciano Floridi (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information, Blackwell. 2003.
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1Out of Sight, Out of MindIn Matthew Kieran & Dominic McIver Lopes (eds.), Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts, . 2003.
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1True AppreciationIn Scott Walden (ed.), Photography and Philosophy: New Essays on the Pencil of Nature. 2008.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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1LyricismIn Four Arts of Photography, Wiley. 2015.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 …Read more
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1Perception and ArtIn Mohan Matthen (ed.), Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception. 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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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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