James Shelley

In its simplest form, hedonism about aesthetic value, the standard account of aesthetic normativity, holds that an object’s aesthetic value is the value it possesses in virtue of its capacity to provide aesthetic pleasure. I argue that hedonism cannot be true because it cannot reconcile itself with our concern to make true aesthetic judgments. Then I argue for an alternative account of aesthetic normativity that is not only consistent with that concern but the very expression of it. The argument for the alternative account largely consists of arguments against two theses associated with Kant: subjectivism, which holds that the ascription of aesthetic value to an object depends on the sentiments of the subject making the ascription and not on the subject’s recognition of a property residing in the object, and disinterestedness, which holds that the ascription of beauty to an object neither depends on nor results in the subject’s having a motive to act in regard to the object.

Arthur Danto argued from the premiss that artworks are essentially cognitive to the conclusion that they are incidentally aesthetic. I wonder why Danto, and the very many of us he persuaded, came to believe that the cognitive and the aesthetic oppose one another. I argue, contrary to Danto’s historical claims, that the cognitive and the aesthetic did not come into opposition until the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, and that they were brought into opposition for reasons of art-critical expediency rather than philosophical necessity. I conclude that a robustly cognitive notion of the aesthetic remains an option for us.

If, as Richard Wollheim says, the Acquaintance Principle is ‘a well-entrenched principle in aesthetics,’ it would be surprising if there were not something true at which those who have asserted it have been aiming. I argue that the Acquaintance Principle cannot be true on any traditional epistemic interpretation, nor on any usability interpretation of the sort Robert Hopkins has recently suggested. I then argue for an interpretation of the principle that treats acquaintance as the end to which judgments of aesthetic value are the means as opposed to the other way around.

Isenbergian particularism is the view that we make no appeal to general principles in criticism. Sibleyan generalism is the view that we do make appeal to general reasons in criticism. I argue that Isenbergian particularism and Sibleyan generalism are compatible one with another. I refer to their conjunction as "critical compatibilism" and argue that we ought to accept it over its rivals: strong particularism (the view that we make appeal neither to general principles nor to general reasons in criticism) and strong generalism (the view that we make appeal both to general principles and to general reasons in criticism).

The problem of tragedy is the problem of explaining why tragedy gives us the pleasure that it does, given that it has the content that it has. I propose a series of constraints that any adequate solution to the problem must satisfy. Then I develop a solution to the problem that satisfies those constraints. But I do not claim that the solution I develop uniquely satisfies the constraints I propose. I aim merely to narrow the field of contending solutions, and then to draw attention to an overlooked contended in that narrowed field.

The default theory of aesthetic value combines hedonism about aesthetic value with strict perceptual formalism about aesthetic value, holding the aesthetic value of an object to be the value it has in virtue of the pleasure it gives strictly in virtue of its perceptual properties. A standard theory of aesthetic value is any theory of aesthetic value that takes the default theory as its theoretical point of departure. This paper argues that standard theories fail because they theorize from the default theory.

© British Society of Aesthetics 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] you are philosophically uncurious or have no aesthetic life, Peter Kivy’s new book may not be for you. Otherwise you owe it to yourself to read it. Kivy’s question—why we argue about art—has received scant philosophical attention, yet the slightest philosophy is all you need to motivate it. Though aesthetic disputes are, as Kivy says, widespread, persistent, vigorous and often heated, we seem unable to account for why we engage in them. Kivy develops his own account with patience and good sense. He writes with unusual care for his reader. He is indeed unwilling to leave any intelligent layperson behind. Yet the force of his arguments and the novelty of his conclusions are likely to shake the assumptions of the most...

The dominant view about the nature of aesthetic value holds it to be response-dependent. We believe that the dominance of this view owes largely to some combination of the following prevalent beliefs: 1 The belief that challenges brought against response-dependent accounts in other areas of philosophy are less challenging when applied to response-dependent accounts of aesthetic value. 2 The belief that aesthetic value is instrumental and that response-dependence about aesthetic value alone accommodates this purported fact. 3 The belief that response-dependence about aesthetic value alone accommodates the widely acknowledged anthropocentricity of aesthetic value. 4 The belief that response-dependence about aesthetic value alone accommodates aesthetic normativity. We argue that each of these beliefs is false, and that the dominance of response-dependent accounts of aesthetic value is therefore largely without foundation

Consider the following three propositions: (R) Artworks necessarily have aesthetic properties that are relevant to their appreciation as artworks. (S) Aesthetic properties necessarily depend, at least in part, on properties perceived by means of the five senses. (X) There exist artworks that need not be perceived by means of the five senses to be appreciated as artworks. The independent plausibility and apparent joint inconsistency of these three propositions give rise to what I refer to as ‘the problem of non-perceptual art’. Assuming that the propositions are independently plausible and jointly inconsistent, there will be three ways of solving the problem: you may affirm (R) and (S) while denying (X); you may affirm (S) and (X) while denying (R); or you may affirm (R) and (X) while denying (S). The first of these, once the orthodox solution, has been displaced in recent years by the second. The third has never really been defended. I defend it here. If successful, my defence will have shown that there is reason to deny the existence of non-aesthetic art and no reason to believe that art is not essentially aesthetic.

Introduced into the philosophical lexicon during the Eighteenth Century, the term ‘aesthetic’ has come to be used to designate, among other things, a kind of object, a kind of judgment, a kind of attitude, a kind of experience, and a kind of value. For the most part, aesthetic theories have divided over questions particular to one or another of these designations: whether artworks are necessarily aesthetic objects; how to square the allegedly perceptual basis of aesthetic judgments with the fact that we give reasons in support of them; how best to capture the elusive contrast between an aesthetic attitude and a practical one; whether to define aesthetic experience according to its phenomenological or representational content; how best to understand the relation between aesthetic value and aesthetic experience. But questions of more general nature have lately arisen, and these have tended to have a skeptical cast: whether any use of ‘aesthetic’ may be explicated without appeal to some other; whether agreement respecting any use is sufficient to ground meaningful theoretical agreement or disagreement; whether the term ultimately answers to any legitimate philosophical purpose that justifies its inclusion in the lexicon. The skepticism expressed by such general questions did not begin to take hold until the later part of the 20th century, and this fact prompts the question whether (a) the concept of the aesthetic is inherently problematic and it is only recently that we have managed to see that it is, or (b) the concept is fine and it is only recently that we have become muddled enough to imagine otherwise. Adjudicating between these possibilities requires a vantage from which to take in both early and late theorizing on aesthetic matters.

Hume is plausibly interpreted as asserting that an artwork is beautiful if and only if it pleases ideal critics. Jerrold Levinson maintains that Hume's commitment to this biconditional gives rise to a problem that occurs neither to Hume nor to his any of his interpreters—the problem of explaining why you should care what pleases ideal critics if you are not one yourself. I argue that this problem arises only if you hold an empiricist theory of aesthetic value—that is, a theory that reduces the aesthetic value of a work to the value of the experience it affords—as Levinson does. I argue that Levinson's own attempted solution to the problem cannot succeed. And I argue that the problem never arises for Hume because his commitment to the biconditional is not a commitment to an empiricist theory of aesthetic value, but to an empiricist theory of aesthetic evaluation

George Dickie argues that Hume's principles of taste have value-laden properties as their subjects, including those properties we now refer to as ‘aesthetic’. I counter that Hume's principles have value-neutral properties as their subjects, and so exclude those properties we now refer to as ‘aesthetic’. Dickie also argues that Hume's essay on taste provides ‘the conceptual means for recognizing the problem of the interaction of aesthetic properties with other properties of artworks’. I counter that the very passages Dickie takes to provide these conceptual means in fact suggest that Hume recognizes no such problem.

Value empiricists in aesthetics claim that we can explain the value of artworks by appeal to the value of the experiences they afford. I raise the question of the value of those experiences. I argue that while there are many values that such experiences might have, none is adequate to explaining the value of the works that afford the experiences. I then turn to defending the alternative to value empiricism, which I dub the object theory . I argue that if there is some problem attending the object theory, commensurate with the problems attending empiricism, no one seems to have any idea what it is. I close by urging that the object theory be granted a fresh hearing