Nick Zangwill

I foreground the principle of epistemic dependence. I isolate that relation and distinguish it from other relations and note what it does and does not entail. In particular, I distinguish between dependence and necessitation. This has many interesting consequences. On the negative side, many standard arguments in epistemology are subverted. More positively, once we are liberated from the necessary and sufficient conditions project, many fruitful paths for future epistemological investigation open up. I argue that that not being defeated does not make for knowledge. And I argue for the multiple realization of epistemic properties in non-epistemic properties.

Music seems mysterious, and our experience of some can have a peculiar depth. I think we should embrace this mysteriousness and not try to explain it away. There is something about music and our experience of it that is indescribable, and sometimes wonderfully indescribable. I here explore a view of music that is unashamedly mystical. However, this mysticism takes a particular form. Near the entry on “music” in Robert Audi’s Dictionary of Philosophy (Audi 1999) is an entry on “mysticism” by William Mann, in which he writes: Mystics claim that, although veridical, their experience cannot be adequately described in language, because ordinary communication is based on sense-experience and conceptual differentiation: mystical writings are thus characterised by metaphor and simile. I think that we should embrace just such a view of music. Music has what are sometimes called ‘ineffable’ qualities — qualities that we can think of but that are literally indescribable. And our experience of music has ineffable qualities. We reach for metaphor and simile to describe aesthetic properties that cannot otherwise be described (Zangwill 2001, chapter 10). Metaphor and simile are the best we can do to capture the aesthetic nature of music, and our experience of it. Only by means of metaphor and simile can we describe music and our experience of it, and even then our description is doomed to inadequacy. There is a reality in the music and in our experience of it that escapes literal description, and we gesture at it by any means at our disposal. But we inevitably fail to capture its true character. Metaphor and simile are the best we can do, however, and some metaphorical descriptions are better than others. But the character of the music and of our musical experience is ultimately ineffable. To ward off one source of..

Aesthetic theories of art refuse to go away. In spite of decades of criticism and derision, a minority of thinkers stubbornly persist in maintaining that we need a general theory of art that makes essential appeal to beauty, elegance, daintiness, and other aesthetic properties.1 However, those who approach the theory of art from a sociological point of view tend to be skeptical about any account of art that appeals to aesthetic properties in a fundamental way. This skepticism takes two overlapping forms, only one of which I will pursue here. The form of skepticism I am interested in is concerned to deny that we need to appeal to aesthetic considerations in explaining the production of art. Let us call this production skepticism. This form of skepticism does not coincide with skepticism about the appeal to aesthetic considerations in explaining our experiences and judgments about art. Let us call that consumption skepticism. Examples of consumption skeptics are Pierre Bourdieu and Terry Eagleton, who think that aesthetic value judgments about art really reflect social status rather than being a response to qualities of the works.2 In my view, the reasons, such as they are, that Bourdieu and Eagleton put forward in favor of..

I defend logical realism. I begin by motivating the realist approach by underlining the difficulties for its main rival: inferentialism. I then focus on AND and OR, and delineate a realist view of these two logical constants. The realist view is developed in terms of Alexander’s Principleshowing that AND and OR have distinctive determining roles. After that, I say what logic is not. We should not take logic to be essentially about the mind, or language, or exclusively about an abstract realm, or about reasoning, truth, truth-tables, truth-functions, topic-neutrality or form. Lastly, I turn to consider NEGATION and argue that we cannot escape negative facts, and facts conjoining and disjoining negative facts with positive facts. I then give NEGATION a distinctive role, one that contrasts with AND and OR. I reflect on the notion of logic in the coda

What can a moral realist say about why we should take morality seriously and about the relation between morality and rationality? I take off from Christine Korsgaard's criticism of moral realism on this score. The aim is to achieve an understanding of the relation between moral and rational properties and of the role of practical deliberation on a realist view. I argue that the justification for being concerned with rational and moral normative properties may not be an aspect of our minds to which we have access. I argue against a view that gives automatic pride of place to the rational properties of our mind by drawing attention to valuable non-rational modes of thought such as creative, imaginative and instinctive thought. Thus the value of taking account of rationality is contingent on its benefits. But this is not why we should be taking account of morality

I argue against the analytic moral functionalist view propounded by Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit. I focus on the ‘input’ clauses of our alleged ‘folk moral theory’. I argue that the examples they give of such input clauses cannot plausibly be interpreted as analytic truths. They are in fact substantive moral claims about the moral ‘domain’. It is a substantive claim that all human beings have equal moral standing. There are those who have rejected this, such as Herman Göring. He was loyal to a sub-class of humankind, but he suffered no conceptual confusion. Claims about what is morally relevant are substantive claims that cannot be known on purely conceptual grounds.

That knowledge does not depend on truth is a consequence of a basic principle concerning dependence applied to the case of knowledge: that A depends on C, and that B depends on C, do not mean that A depends on B. This is a standard causal scenario, where two things with a common cause are not themselves causally dependent. Similarly, knowledge that p depends in part on some combination of the belief that p, the fact that p and the proposition that p, and perhaps other facts or even objects. Truth depends on a proper sub-class of the elements on which knowledge depends. It does not follow that knowledge depends on truth, and the idea that it does is implausible

Music is elusive. describing it is problematic. In particular its aesthetic properties cannot be captured in literal description. Beyond very simple terms, they cannot be literally described. In this sense, the aesthetic description of music is essentially nonliteral. An adequate aesthetic description of music must have resort to metaphor or other nonliteral devices. I maintain that this is because of the nature of the aesthetic properties being described. I defend this view against an apparently simple objection put by Malcolm Budd. dealing with this objection will take us into some surprising terrain. We are led to consider issues concerning privacy and the language for describing sensations. In the light of these considerations, I develop the essentially nonliteralist thesis and explore some of its consequences.

How do aesthetic judgements differ from ordinary empirical judgements? It is widely accepted that one important respect in which judgements of taste differ from empirical judgements is that they are based on some kind of felt reaction or response — typically a pleasure or displeasure. This doctrine gained its classic statement in Kant’s Critique of Judgement.[1] And it is the basis for the prevalent view that in aesthetics, we must ’judge for ourselves’. The doctrine is generally taken to imply that a judgement which is not based on such a reaction is not a judgement of taste.

I discuss the social dimension of musical experience. I focus on the question of whether there is joint musical listening. One reason for this focus is that Adorno and those in his tradition give us little in the way of an understanding of what the social dimension of musical experience might be. We need a proper clear conception of the issue, which the issue of joint experience yields. I defend a radically individualistic view, while conceding that such a view, inspired by Hanslick, may have political ramifications. I have two arguments. The first is a principled argument against joint musical listening from the impossibility of perceiving the aesthetic properties of music. I connect this with the privacy of our grounds for aesthetic judgements about music. The second argument accepts that joint listening could in principle span different sense modalities, but draws attention to the fact that the experiences on which aesthetic judgements are based cannot be willed in a way they would have to be if there was joint listening. Lastly, I consider two phenomena, of making music together and dancing together, which seem to involve joint listening, but in fact do not. I end by drawing an individualist conclusion about the nature of musical experience

I begin this paper by describing and making attractive a physicalist aesthetic realist view of aesthetic properties. I then argue against this view on the basis of two premises. The first premise is thesis of aesthetic/sensory dependence that I have defended elsewhere. The second premise is the denial of a mind-independence thesis about sensory properties. I give an argument for that denial. Lastly, I put these two premises together and conclude that physicalist aesthetic realism is false. I articulate and give a limited defence of the view that if aesthetic properties exist at all, they are a certain kind of mind-dependent property.

I exist. That is something I know. Most philosophers think that Descartes was right that each of us knows that we exist. Furthermore most philosophers agree with Descartes that there is something special about how we know it. Agreement ends there. There is little agreement about exactly what is special about this knowledge. I shall present an account that is in some respects Cartesian in spirit, although I shall not pursue interpretive questions very far. On this account, I know that I exist a priori; and I shall advance an explanation of how this a priori knowledge is possible and actual. I then consider the question of whether the belief that I exist is justified and, if so, how. I argue that the situation is different in important ways from the knowledge that I exist

Most of the debate for and against aesthetic formalism in the twentieth century has been little more than a sequence of assertions, on both sides. But there is one discussion that stands out for its argumentative subtlety and depth, and that is Kendall Walton’s paper ‘Categories of Art’.1 In what follows I shall defend a certain version of formalism against the antiformalist arguments which Walton deploys. I want to show that while Walton’s arguments do indeed create insurmountable difficulties for an extreme version of formalism, he has not shown that a moderate version is problematic or inadequate. (I have no space to address anti-formalist arguments other than Walton’s.2) I shall defend moderate formalism rather than put forward positive considerations in its favour, although some of its attractions will become apparent as a side-effect. I pursue the positive case for moderate formalism elsewhere.3 I. FORMAL PROPERTIES AND FORMALISMS I.1. Walton begins his paper by raising an issue about whether those who make aesthetic judgements should only be concerned with what can be directly perceived in works of art. The issue of formalism has often been described in these terms. But Walton rightly distances himself from setting up a debate in that way. He moves on to take as his target the view that ‘Circumstances connected with a work’s origin ... have no essential bearing on an assessment of its aesthetic nature’ (p. 334).