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1692Aesthetic Adjectives Lack Uniform BehaviorInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (6): 618-631. 2016.The goal of this short paper is to show that esthetic adjectives—exemplified by “beautiful” and “elegant”—do not pattern stably on a range of linguistic diagnostics that have been used to taxonomize the gradability properties of adjectives. We argue that a plausible explanation for this puzzling data involves distinguishing two properties of gradable adjectives that have been frequently conflated: whether an adjective’s applicability is sensitive to a comparison class, and whether an adjective’s…Read more
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672Videogames and the First PersonIn G. Currie, P. Kotako & M. Pokorny (eds.), Mimesis: Metaphysics, Cognition, Pragmatics, College Publishing. 2012.
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77The Cluster Account of Art ReconsideredBritish Journal of Aesthetics 47 (4): 388-400. 2007.Berys Gaut has recently articulated and defended a putatively anti-definitional ‘cluster’ theory of art. In the first part of this paper, I argue that Gaut's version of the cluster account is flawed. The key notion of ‘counting toward the application of a concept’ is formulated in such a way that a range of apparently irrelevant properties will count as criterial for the concept of art. Moreover, there does not appear to be any quick fix to this problem. I then turn to an exploration of the rela…Read more
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Relevance and the Philosophy of ArtDissertation, Rutgers the State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick. 2000.This dissertation explores the notion of relevance as it appears in debates within the philosophy of art. ;Chapter one begins by exploring the extent to which notions of relevance inform many of the central debates within the philosophy of art. I distinguish some contexts in which questions about relevance arise and show that there are at least two importantly distinct notions of relevance that get referred to in the literature---a metaphysical notion and an epistemological notion. Chapter two a…Read more
APA Eastern Division
Athens, Georgia, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
1 more
Aesthetics |
Philosophy of Literature |
Philosophy of Film |
Comics |
Aesthetics and Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Food and Drink |
Areas of Interest
Value Theory |