Rob Van Gerwen

This paper discusses the viability of claims of mathematical beauty, asking whether mathematical beauty, if indeed there is such a thing, should be conceived of as a sub-variety of the more commonplace kinds of beauty: natural, artistic and human beauty; or, rather, as a substantive variety in its own right. If the latter, then, per the argument, it does not show itself in perceptual awareness – because perceptual presence is what characterises the commonplace kinds of beauty, and mathematical beauty is not among these. I conclude that the reference to mathematical beauty merely expresses the awe in the mathematician about the intricate complexities and simplicity of certain proofs, theorems or mathematical “objects.”

Much contemporary art seems morally out of control. Yet, philosophers seem to have trouble finding the right way to morally evaluate works of art. The debate between autonomists and moralists, I argue, has turned into a stalemate due to two mistaken assumptions. Against these assumptions, I argue that the moral nature of a work's contents does not transfer to the work and that, if we are to morally evaluate works we should try to conceive of them as moral agents. Ethical autonomism holds that art's autonomy consists in its demand that art appreciators take up an artistic attitude. A work's agency then is in how it merits their audiences' attitudinal switch. Ethical autonomism allows for the moral assessment of art works without giving up their autonomy, by viewing artistic merit as a moral category and art-relevant moral evaluation as having the form of art criticism

Roger Scruton’s ontology of sound is found wanting on two counts. Scruton removes from music the importance of the performer’s manipulating of his instrument. This misconceives the phenomenology of hearing and, as a consequence, impoverishes our understanding of music. I argue that the musician’s manipulations can be heard in the music; and, in a discussion of notions developed by Richard Wollheim and Jerrold Levinson, that these manipulations have psychological reality, and that it is this psychological reality which brings to life the sui generis musical persona of musical expressiveness.

My pleasure in being here, at the Studiecentrum Soeterbeeck, to discuss the book Roger Scruton wrote on beauty, is twofold. It so happens that I am finishing a book on facial expression and facial beauty, and the chapter I sent to Roger to request his comments, resurfaced unopened in my own mail box, last week. Apparently something went wrong in the mail. Today I might get some of those comments. Secondly, reading Roger’s book, an impression of a kindred spirit has stuck with me throughout.1) Sometimes, though, something like an ungrounded preference surfaces, which for Roger, clearly has intuitive force, maybe even the force of a conclusion, but for me this doesn’t always ring true. I only mention two instances where my own preferences would be different. One is, where after rightly criticising the reverence allotted to Duchamp’s Fountain, in a single sentence (on p. 98) both Radiohead and Brahms are mentioned, in an obvious effort to disqualify the former. The other is where he defends film as an art by comparing it to traditional art, by pointing to shots from an Ingmar Bergman movie, which “would sit on your wall like an engraving, resonant, engaging and composed.” (p. 102). What the incidental surfacing of such preferences makes available to us is that doing aesthetics is not a merely technical philosophical endeavour, but involves art criticism, from time to time. If you don’t love art or its core values, how could you do aesthetics? And there is a deeper thought behind this in Roger’s writings: that the use of taste belongs to the good life.2) All this, also, indicates my predicament, here and now. I feel most inclined..

Cellular, or mobile phones are great: they allow people to communicate over long distances whenever and wherever they are, and instantaneously at that when the one called is wearing one too. Having said that, though, it must immediately be added that they, also, have a complex disadvantage, and it is one we are hard pushed to understand. In fact, due to its complexity people simply tend to neglect it, even though everyone in his right mind has had experience with it. Now Walter Benjamin defined aura as “a distance however close it may be”.1) This has standardly been interpreted as a characterisation of an experience of presence, also by Benjamin. This aura supposedly suffered from the rise of photography. Aura can, also, be understood as inertia, the absence of something present. And whether aura is gone or widespread I gladly leave to more speculative-minded thinkers. I submit that we experience a person’s “aura”—her distance however close she may be—when perception tells us the person is present yet our mind realises that she isn’t. I am referring here to the observation had of another person engaged in a cell phone conversation. The inertia of the cell phone caller consists in her incapacity to address those who observe her. I think there is an immoral streak to her selfappointed moral autonomy. In a previous edition of this Dutch-Russian exchange on inertia I argued that our trafficking with facial expressions forms the model with which we’d best understand the workings of art—facial expression is the anthropological foundation of art. My discussion, today, of the cell phone conversation is meant to add to that previous suggestion