Aaron Ridley

This essay argues that R.G. Collingwood's remarks about genre are implausible, and that they stem, despite their apparent origin in his wider account of art, from his failure to take some of his own most important insights seriously enough. Some possible reasons for that failure are suggested; and it is shown that, once the relevant insights are given their proper weight, Collingwood's account commands the resources from which a plausible story about genre might have been constructed. To this extent, the present essay constitutes a defence of Collingwood's philosophy of art.

Beginning Bioethics introduces students to the language of philosophical ethics before leading them in Part Two through six major issues in bioethics. The author gives clear explanations of all sides of a given issue and engages with several major contributions to the debate. This book can stand alone, but was written also to accompany the third edition of Bette-Jane Crigger's Cases in Bioethics, providing the philosophical counterpart to cases discussed there by US medical practitioners. Both books originate with St Martin's Press in the United States.

I am generally unsympathetic to the project, pursued by many recent philosophers of music, of attempting to specify the identity conditions for musical works – of attempting to specify the conditions that something, typically a performance, must satisfy if it is to count as an instance of this or that work. Call this the identity-project. Elsewhere, I have suggested that any such project is fundamentally misconceived. Here, however, I want simply to explore a couple of the difficulties with which the identity-project is confronted, and to point out some of the costs that are likely to be incurred in trying to overcome them

The discussion in this paper sets out from two thoughts, one a straightforward empirical observation, the other a worry. The observation is that many who do not believe in God nevertheless regard certain pieces of religious music, such as Bach’s B minor Mass, as among the greatest works of art. The worry is that there must be something compromised or incomplete in the atheist’s experience of such works. Taken together, these thoughts would seem to point to the sceptical conclusion that the high regard in which many atheists hold works such as the B minor Mass must itself be compromised, or in some way unwarranted. The majority of the paper is devoted to clarifying the initial worry through the investigation of a series of (failed) attempts to avoid the sceptical conclusion, before — at the end of the paper — we argue that, for at least one sort of atheist, there is, after all, a mode of engagement with great religious music that might afford an experience of it which would underwrite his judgement that the work is, indeed, great

This anthology is intended as a core text for courses in aesthetics or philosophy of art. It contains a wealth of readings from both classic and contemporary sources, and aims to present substantial selections from those texts rather than mere "snippets." Readings are organized historically within four broad themes so that students can see how concepts of art have evolved and been debated. Each reading is introduced by the authors, who suggest connections between the reading and others in the anthology. Unlike other anthologies on the market, The Philosophy of Art is both comprehensive and affordable, making it the ideal book for course use.

Relational theories of art—paradigmatically, the ‘Institutional’ theory—arose from dissatisfaction with the Wittgenstein-inspired ‘family resemblance’ account of art, and were taken not merely to be preferable in various ways to that account, but actually to falsify it. We argue that this latter thought is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the falsification-conditions of a family resemblance account; and we suggest that, once the reasons for this are appreciated, any apparent motivation to engage in relational theorizing about art evaporates.