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254Building Plans as Natural SymbolsArchitecture Philosophy 1 (1): 61-78. 2014.Carroll William Westfall has claimed that building types can serve as natural symbols of (the purposes served by) activities such as venerating, celebrating, trading, and dwelling. The aim of this paper is to interpret Westfall’s claim in a way that makes it non-trivial and yet worthy of further investigation. In particular, an attempt is made to explain the connection between building types and what they symbolize without appealing to convention. The question is also answered whether a non-conv…Read more
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177Scruton on rightness of proportion in architectureBritish Journal of Aesthetics 49 (4): 405-414. 2009.In The Aesthetics of Architecture, Roger Scruton makes at least four claims about rightness of architectural proportion. The present paper lists those claims, briefly discusses the way they are related, and, finally, selects one as the topic of discussion: the claim that there cannot be an exact, mathematical definition of rightness of proportion. Scruton’s arguments for this claim are reviewed. The first is found to be substantially correct, whereas the second is found to rely on a mistaken ass…Read more
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114Autographic and allographic aspects of ritualPhilosophia 29 (1-4): 133-147. 2002.This paper continues Israel Scheffler's investigation of rituals as autographic/allographic. It concludes that the autographic/allographic distinction is more fruitfully applied to rituals as a gradual distinction, distinguishing rituals in terms of their autographic/allographic elements or aspects.
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183A peculiarity in pearl’s logic of interventionist counterfactualsJournal of Philosophical Logic 42 (5): 783-794. 2013.We examine a formal semantics for counterfactual conditionals due to Judea Pearl, which formalizes the interventionist interpretation of counterfactuals central to the interventionist accounts of causation and explanation. We show that a characteristic principle validated by Pearl’s semantics, known as the principle of reversibility, states a kind of irreversibility: counterfactual dependence (in David Lewis’s sense) between two distinct events is irreversible. Moreover, we show that Pearl’s sem…Read more
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126The aesthetic peculiarity of multifunctional artefactsBritish Journal of Aesthetics 45 (4): 412-425. 2005.Echoing a distinction made by David Wiggins in his discussion of the relation of identity, this paper investigates whether aesthetic adjectives such as ‘beautiful’ are sortal-relative or merely sortal-dependent. The hypothesis guiding the paper is that aesthetic adjectives, though probably sortal-dependent in general, are sortal-relative only when used to characterize multifunctional artefacts. This means that multifunctional artefacts should be unique in allowing the following situation to occu…Read more
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257Locke's Principle is an Applicable Criterion of IdentityNoûs 47 (4): 697-705. 2011.According to Locke’s Principle, material objects are identical if and only if they are of the same kind and once occupy the same place at the same time. There is disagreement about whether this principle is true, but what is seldom disputed is that, even if true, the principle fails to constitute an applicable criterion of identity. In this paper, I take issue with two arguments that have been offered in support of this claim by arguing (i) that we can have knowledge of past whereabouts, and so …Read more
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343A criterion of diachronic identity based on Locke's PrincipleMetaphysica 6 (1): 23-38. 2005.The aim of this paper is to derive a perfectly general criterion of identity through time from Locke’s Principle, which says that two things of the same kind cannot occupy the same space at the same time. In this way, the paper pursues a suggestion made by Peter F. Strawson almost thirty years ago in an article called ‘Entity and Identity’. The reason why the potential of this suggestion has so far remained unrealized is twofold: firstly, the suggestion was never properly developed by Strawson, …Read more
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5BeautyIn Berys Gaut Gaut & Dominic Lopes (eds.), Routledge Companion to Aesthetics 3rd Edition, Routledge. 2013.This survey chapter focuses on two questions concerning the nature of beauty. First, can “beauty” be defined, and if so, how? Second, what is the relation between beauty and the mind; for example, between being beautiful and being judged beautiful, or between being beautiful and being the object of pleasure?
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378The structure of aesthetic propertiesPhilosophy Compass 3 (5): 894-909. 2008.Aesthetic properties are often thought to have either no evaluative component or an evaluative component that can be isolated from their descriptive component. The present article argues that this popular view is without adequate support. First, doubt is cast on the idea that some paradigmatic aesthetic properties are purely descriptive. Second, the idea that the evaluative component of an aesthetic property can always be neatly separated from its descriptive component is called into question. M…Read more
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188Perceptual indiscriminability: In defence of Wright's proofPhilosophical Quarterly 54 (216): 439-444. 2004.A series of unnoticeably small changes in an observable property may add up to a noticeable change. Crispin Wright has used this fact to prove that perceptual indiscriminability is a non-transitive relation. Delia Graff has recently argued that there is a 'tension' between Wright's assumptions. But Graff has misunderstood one of these, that 'phenomenal continua' are possible; and the other, that our powers of discrimination are finite, is sound. If the first assumption is properly understood, it…Read more
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172CloserSynthese 146 (3). 2005.Criteria of identity should mirror the identity relation in being reflexive, symmetrical, and transitive. However, this logical requirement is only rarely met by the criteria that we are most inclined to propose as candidates. The present paper addresses the question how such obvious candidates are best approximated by means of relations that have all of the aforementioned features, i.e., which are equivalence relations. This question divides into two more basic questions. First, what is to be c…Read more
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306The concept of an aesthetic propertyJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60 (2). 2002.This paper provides an analysis of the concept of an aesthetic property in non-aesthetic terms.
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2Aesthetic IdealsIn Kathleen Stock & Katherine Thomson-Jones (eds.), New Waves in Aesthetics, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 188-202. 2008.The aim of this chapter is to understand how sortals determine what aesthetic properties an object has. It is argued that Frank Sibley’s notion of an ideal of beauty does not help us to achieve that aim. Instead, it is argued, the special aesthetic relevance of sortals is better understood by reference to the (non-aesthetic) ideas of normality and functionality associated with sortals. In passing, the paper also argues that there must be a maximum degree of beauty if non-comparative judgments of…Read more
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202Two conceptions of response-dependencePhilosophical Studies 107 (2): 159-177. 2002.The traditional conception of response-dependence isinadequate because it cannot account for all intuitivecases of response-dependence. In particular, it is unableto account for the response-dependence of (aesthetic, moral, epistemic ...) values. I therefore propose tosupplement the traditional conception with an alternativeone. My claim is that only a combination of the twoconceptions is able to account for all intuitivecases of response-dependence.
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264Modern Architecture and the Concept of HarmonyBritish Journal of Aesthetics 51 (1): 69-79. 2011.The aim of this paper is to achieve a better understanding of why modern buildings do not easily harmonize with one another. After proposing, and defending, an analysis of the concept of architectural harmony, the paper turns to three possible views on whether we can expect more harmony from modern architecture in the future
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174A note on the aesthetics of mirror reversalPhilosophical Studies 132 (3). 2007.According to Roy Sorensen [Philosophical Studies 100 (2000) 175–191] an object cannot differ aesthetically from its mirror image. On his view, mirror-reversing an object – changing its left/right orientation – cannot bring about any aesthetic change. However, in arguing for this thesis Sorensen assumes that aesthetic properties supervene on intrinsic properties alone. This is a highly controversial assumption and nothing is offered in its support. Moreover, a plausible weakening of the assumptio…Read more
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211Is There a Problem with the Causal Criterion of Event Identity?American Philosophical Quarterly 51 (2): 109-119. 2014.In this paper, we take another look at the reasons for which the causal criterion of event identity has been abandoned. We argue that the reasons are not strong. First of all, there is a criterion in the neighborhood of the causal criterion—the counterfactual criterion—that is not vulnerable to any of the putative counterexamples brought up in the literature. Secondly, neither the causal criterion nor the counterfactual criterion suffers from any form of vicious circularity. Nonetheless, we do n…Read more
Tuen Mun, Hong Kong, China
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Value Theory |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Value Theory |
PhilPapers Editorships
Aesthetics |