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65Key, temperament and musical expressionJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49 (3): 235-242. 1991.
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18The World We Found: The Limits of Ontological Talk Mark Sacks La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989, x + 198 pDialogue 31 (1): 124-. 1992.
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50Critique of Pure MusicOxford University Press. 2014.James O. Young seeks to explain why we value music so highly. He draws on the latest psychological research to argue that music is expressive of emotion by resembling human expressive behaviour. The representation of emotion in music gives it the capacity to provide psychological insight--and it is this which explains a good deal of its value
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1Berys Gaut and Paisley Livingston, eds., The Creation of Art: New Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 24 (2): 107-109. 2004.
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25Relatively Speaking: The Coherence of Anti-Realist RelativismCanadian Journal of Philosophy 16 (3). 1986.The current debate between realists and anti-realists has brought to the fore some ancient questions about the coherence of relativism. Realism is the doctrine according to which the truth of sentences is determined by the way things really are. Truth is thus the result of a relation between sentences and reality. One species of anti-realism holds, on the contrary, the truth results from a relation between sentences within a theory: a sentence is true if warranted by a correct theory.
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106Art and KnowledgeRoutledge. 2001.Almost all of us would agree that the experience of art is deeply rewarding. Why this is the case remains a puzzle; nor does it explain why many of us find works of art much more important than other sources of pleasure. Art and Knowledge argues that the experience of art is so rewarding because it can be an important source of knowledge about ourselves and our relation to each other and to the world. The view that art is a source of knowledge can be traced as far back as Aristotle and Horace. A…Read more
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247Profound offense and cultural appropriationJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (2). 2005.
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19Inquiry in the Arts and SciencesPhilosophy 71 (276). 1996.In his 1836 lectures to the Royal Institute, the great landscape painter John Constable stated that ‘Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature.’ Landscape, he went on to say, should ‘be considered a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments.’1Constable makes two claims in this striking passage. The first is that painting is a form of inquiry. This is, by itself, a bold claim, but Constable goes on to state that painters and s…Read more
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25E. Lepore : "Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson" (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 66 (n/a): 249. 1988.
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461The Poverty of Musical OntologyJournal of Music and Meaning 13 1-19. 2014.Aaron Ridley posed the question of whether results in the ontology of musical works would have implications for judgements about the interpretation, meaning or aesthetic value of musical works and performances. His arguments for the conclusion that the ontology of musical works have no aesthetic consequences are unsuccessful, but he is right in thinking (in opposition to Andrew Kania and others) that ontological judgements have no aesthetic consequences. The key to demonstrating this concl…Read more
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77Coherence, anti-realism and the vienna circleSynthese 86 (3). 1991.Some members of the Vienna Circle argued for a coherence theory of truth. Their coherentism is immune to standard objections. Most versions of coherentism are unable to show why a sentence cannot be true even though it fails to cohere with a system of beliefs. That is, it seems that truth may transcend what we can be warranted in believing. If so, truth cannot consist in coherence with a system of beliefs. The Vienna Circle's coherentists held, first, that sentences are warranted by coherence wi…Read more
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48The Ancient and Modern System of the ArtsBritish Journal of Aesthetics 55 (1): 1-17. 2015.Paul Oskar Kristeller famously argued that the modern ‘ system of the arts ’ did not emerge until the mid-eighteenth century, in the work of Charles Batteux. On this view, the modern conception of the fine arts had no parallel in the ancient world, the middle-ages or the modern period prior to Batteux. This paper argues that Kristeller was wrong. The ancient conception of the imitative arts completely overlaps with Batteux’s fine arts : poetry, painting, music, sculpture, and dance. Writers from…Read more
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55A Defence of the Coherence Theory of TruthJournal of Philosophical Research 26 89-101. 2001.Recent critics of the coherence theory of truth (notably Ralph Walker) have alleged that the theory is incoherent, since its defence presupposes the correctness of the contrary correspondence theory of truth. Coherentists must specify the system of propositions with which true propositons cohere (the specified system). Generally, coherentists claim that the specified system is a system composed of propositions believed by a community. Critics of coherentism maintain that the coherentist’s assert…Read more
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21Review of noël Carroll, Art in Three Dimensions (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (12). 2010.
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11Aesthetics (edited book)Routledge. 2005.This four volume set brings together both classic and contemporary writings to provide a comprehensive collection of the most important essays on the subject. All of the various artistic genres are addressed, with sections on film, dance and architecture as well as music, literature and the visual arts. With a new introduction by the editor to guide the reader through the volumes, this major new work will provide student and researcher alike with key writings on aesthetics in one convenient, uni…Read more
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23Bonds, mark Evan. Absolute music: The history of an idea. Oxford university press, 2014, XIII + 375 pp., $35.00 cloth (review)Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73 (2): 207-208. 2015.
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20Semantic Challenges to Realism (review)Dialogue 41 (2): 405-406. 2002.Semantic realism is the view that sentences can be true even if speakers cannot know that they are. Anti-realists believe that sentences cannot be true unless speakers can know that they are. The difference between the two positions can be characterized as a dispute about truth conditions. Realists believe that they are objective, that is, they can obtain even though speakers cannot know that they do. Anti-realists believe that truth conditions are always recognizable. Two major lines of argumen…Read more
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3Jenefer Robinson, Deeper Than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music, and Art Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 26 (5): 374-376. 2006.
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191The slingshot argument and the correspondence theory of truthActa Analytica 17 (2): 121-132. 2002.The correspondence theory of truth holds that each true sentence corresponds to a discrete fact. Donald Davidson and others have argued (using an argument that has come to be known as the slingshot) that this theory is mistaken, since all true sentences correspond to the same “Great Fact.” The argument is designed to show that by substituting logically equivalent sentences and coreferring terms for each other in the context of sentences of the form ‘P corresponds to the fact that P’ every true s…Read more
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Aesthetics |