Anthony Savile

How are the beautiful and the good related? A popular answer to this ancient question takes it that to call something beautiful is just to bring it under the most general term of favourable aesthetic assessment and that since the good is in general what we reflectively want then, crudely put, the beautiful is the good's aesthetic dimension. Following this train of thought, we avoid the suggestion that there is any intimate connection between the beautiful and some more narrowly conceived moral or ethical good, since that is, again crudely put, restricted to the good's practical dimension, a dimension supposedly alien to aesthetic concerns

Recent approaches to scepticism have followed a pattern which Descartes was the first modern to outline with anything approaching clarity. He is not often given credit for the best of his insights here largely because they are obscured by misleading theological assumptions, yet once these assumptions are removed we should be impressed by the subtle ring of the underlying account of rational belief. To demonstrate these claims the first section of this essay discusses the irrelevance of Descartes’ theology to his epistemology — the misère of the title — the second, devoted to the grandeur, expounds his operative theory of reasonable belief, and the remainder applies this theory to Descartes’ original sceptical problem and offers some comment both on its strength and its weakness.Descartes is less careful than he might be in formulating the exact form of the most general sceptical doubt that he aims to rebut. On some occasions he appears to be asking the question and, on others, the question.

Concerned with topics at the heart of Kant's aesthetics, this provoking reading of The Critique of Judgement focuses on often misunderstood or neglected themes. Starting from the issues of the truth and justifiability of our critical assertions, Anthony Savile develops Kantian theory broadly across the arts, and shows it working with subtlety and rigour in cases as diverse as music and architecture. New light is thrown on the exemplary necessity of our aesthetic pleasures, on the Antimony of Taste, on the distinction between free and dependent beauty, on the supposed idealism of taste, and on the a priori limits of fine art. Eminently subjective material is here given a place in Kant's overall idealism in a sophisticated discussion that will invite the close attention of Kant scholars and aestheticians alike.

[Richard Glauser] Shaftesbury's theory of aesthetic experience is based on his conception of a natural disposition to apprehend beauty, a real 'form' of things. I examine the implications of the disposition's naturalness. I argue that the disposition is not an extra faculty or a sixth sense, and attempt to situate Shaftesbury's position on this issue between those of Locke and Hutcheson. I argue that the natural disposition is to be perfected in many different ways in order to be exercised in the perception of the different degrees of beauty within Shaftesbury's hierarchy. This leads to the conclusion that the exercise of the disposition depends, from case to case, on many different cognitive and affective conditions, that are realised by the collaborative functionings of our ordinary faculties. Essential to Shaftesbury's conception of aesthetic experience is a disinterested, contemplative love, that causes what we may call a 'disinterested pleasure', but also an interested pleasure. I argue that, within any given aesthetic experience, the role of the disinterested pleasure is secondary to that of the disinterested love. However, an important function of the disinterested pleasure is that, in combination with the interested pleasure, it leads one to aspire to pass from the aesthetic experience of lower degrees of beauty to the experience of higher ones in the hierarchy. /// [Anthony Savile] If Shaftesbury is to be seen as the doyen of modern aesthetics, his most valuable legacy to us may not so much be his viewing aesthetic response as a sui generis disinterested delight as his insistence on its turning 'wholly on [experience of] what is exterior and foreign to ourselves'. Not that we cannot experience ourselves, or what is our own, as a source of such admiration. Rather our responses, favourable or no, are improperly grounded in any essentially reflexive, or first-personal, ways of taking what engages us. The suggestion is tested against the case of Narcissus. Glauser interestingly emphasizes Shaftesbury's neo-Platonic conception of a hierarchy of aesthetic experience that culminates in the joyful contemplation of God. That hierarchy must be something that is less unitary and systematic than Shaftesbury himself had supposed, even when his emphasis on the tie between aesthetic pleasure and contemplative experience is allowed to extend beyond perception and to encompass episodes of thought itself.

This fresh orientation to Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_ presents his central theme, the development of his Transcendental Idealism, as a ground-breaking response to perceived weaknesses in his predecessors' accounts of experiential knowledge. Traces the central theme of the Critique, the development of Kant's Transcendental Idealism. Offers new and original readings of the central arguments in both the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic. Appraises the success and failure of Kant's project in the _Critique_