Jennifer A. McMahon

(1956 - 2023)

I argue in this paper that our concept of pictorial realism should include a reference to perceptual proficiency relative to a cultural context. I argue this by demonstrating the greater explanatory power of such a concept for understanding pictorial realism. The central idea is that gestalt-like mechanisms that are normally involved in object recognition can be deployed at a second order level in picture perception. Styles of picturing that exploit this second order gestalt-like mechanism are learnable and transferable. The hypothesis is that once a style of picturing is internalised, a picture that exploits this style will be experienced as true and fitting.

The participants in this Symposium gathered for a two-day conference on Pictorial Realism at the University of Adelaide. Our aim was to analyse the notion of pictorial realism with a view to its relevance for the way in which art history is conceived and appreciated. Specifically, we examined the extent to which the representational content of artworks can be ascertained independently of preconceived theoretical knowledge about the representational system within which the artwork is made. Papers focus in particular on the implications for understanding pictorial realism.

A discussion of the way the visual artists represented in Adelaide’s 2012 Biennale draw attention to new conceptions of place, time and self which highlight the contingent nature of the narratives that underlie our day to day existence. Disenchantment or re-enchantment are increasingly redundant conceptions. Such narratives are always fluid. Among the ebbs and flows, new conceptions emerge, providing in effect new ways of being in the world, and in turn prompting a reshuffling of what we thought we knew.

Aesthetic autonomy has been given a variety of interpretations, which in many cases involve a number of claims. Key among them are: (i) art eludes conventional conceptual frameworks and their inherent incompatibility with invention and creativity; and (ii) art can communicate aspects of experience too fine‐grained for discursive language. To accommodate such claims one can adopt either a convention‐based account or a natural‐kind account. A natural‐kind theory can explain the first but requires some special scaffolding in order to support the second, while a convention‐based account accommodates the second but is incompatible with the first. Theodor W. Adorno attempts to incorporate both claims within his aesthetic theory, but arguably in his aesthetic theory each is cancelled out by the other. Art’s independence of entrenched conceptual frameworks needs to be made compatible with its communicative role. Jürgen Habermas, in contrast, provides a solution by way of his theory of language. I draw upon the art practice of the contemporary Icelandic‐Danish artist Olafur Eliasson in order to demonstrate this.

Cavell’s interest in aesthetic objects can be understood to be motivated by an interest in the nature of meaning and value. The idea is that perceptual objects considered as cultural artefacts under-determine the meaning and value attributed to them. The process involved in determining their meaning and value is essentially a creative one. Through his study of film, literature and music, Cavell could be said to indirectly address the axiomatic, or what is sometimes referred to as the bedrock, of our value judgments. In being embedded within larger cultural commitments, such axioms are impenetrable to the traditional analytical approaches in Anglo-American philosophy. Cavell’s style of philosophy can be understood to have been pioneered to attempt to understand and clarify aspects of experience which elude traditional analytical methods.

I identify two mutually exclusive notions of formalism in Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement: a thin concept of aesthetic formalism and a thick concept of aesthetic formalism. Arguably there is textual support for both concepts in Kant’s third critique. I offer interpretations of three key elements in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement which support a thick formalism. The three key elements are: Harmony of the Faculties, Aesthetic Ideas and Sensus Communis. I interpret these concepts in relation to the conditions for theoretical Reason, the conditions for moral motivation and the conditions for intersubjectivity, respectively. I conclude that there is no support for a thin concept of aesthetic formalism when the key elements of Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement are understood in the context of his broader critical aims.

This paper comments on an article by V.S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein (JCS,1999) in which they purport to be identifying the neurological principles of beauty. I draw attention to the way the problem of beauty is construed in the philosophical literature by Mary Mothersill (1984) and Immanuel Kant (Critique of Judgment). I argue that Ramachandran and Hirsteins' principles do not address the problem of beauty because they do not differentiate between the experience of beauty and other closely related phenomena. I then show how one might address the problem of beauty within the framework that they have adopted.

Aesthetics is not an area to which the Stoics are normally understood to have contributed. I adopt a broad description of the purview of Aesthetics according to which Aesthetics pertains to the study of those preferences and values that ground what is considered worthy of attention. According to this approach, we find that the Stoics exhibit an Aesthetic that reveals a direct line of development between Plato, the Stoics, Thomas Aquinas and the eighteenth century, specifically Kant’s aesthetics. I will reveal an interpretation of the aesthetic of the Stoics which has more explanatory power for the history of aesthetic theory than a history of aesthetic theory which leaves out the Stoics.

The essays collected in this volume are written by scholars from a wide range of disciplines (anthropology, archaeology, art history, philosophy and psychology). The papers ostensibly address how to evaluate rock art, but can also be read in the context of offering support for the affirmative in the debate regarding whether aesthetics is a cross-cultural discipline. Two alternative conceptions of the aesthetic provide the underlying antithesis and thesis respectively to all papers. The antithesis holds that the aesthetic pertains to a conception of art that is an historical artefact of eighteenth century Europe. Most of the writers refer to this idea of art in terms of the object of a disinterested gaze (a second-hand reading of Kant), or as ‘art-for-art’s-sake’. The thesis of all papers, be it explicit or implicit, is that the aesthetic is a certain human predisposition or capacity to imbue physical properties with meaning and value; to link the sensuous with the semantic; to find meaning in form (Lamarque pp.27-8, Morphy pp.54, 59.). Some authors extend this beyond the artefact to the perception of nature (see the papers of Heyd, Ogawa, Stone).

This symposium is inspired by the round tables organised by James Elkins in Cork, Ireland and Chicago which aimed to create a dialogue between art historians and philosophers on concepts which are central to the way both disciplines conduct their respective endeavours. For our symposium, art historians and philosophers will discuss topics and concepts which are likely to be given different interpretations by the respective disciplines. We will attempt to bridge the gap between the respective interpretations by inviting a closer consideration of the alternative perspective. The first topic will be the relation of aesthetic and moral considerations in evaluating the photography of Bill Henson. The second will be "Beauty" and the third, will be the nature of "Aesthetic Autonomy".

In this paper I suggest ways in which vision theory and psychology of perception may illuminate our understanding of beauty. I identify beauty as a phenomenon which is (i) ineffable, (ii) subjectively universal (intersubjective), and (iii) manifested in objects as formal structure. I present a model of perception by which I can identify a representation whose underlying principles would explain these features of beauty. The fact that these principles underlie the representation rather than constitute the content of representation, provides an explanation for the ineffability and subjective universality of the perception of beauty in the form of objects. In part one, I set out two models of perception conducive to this approach. In part two, I suggest how such theories can offer a way of explaining and understanding the experience of beauty.

In this book, McMahon argues that a reading of Kant’s body of work in the light of a pragmatist theory of meaning and language leads one to put community reception ahead of individual reception in the order of aesthetic relations. A core premise of the book is that neo-pragmatism draws attention to an otherwise overlooked aspect of Kant’s "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment," and this is the conception of community which it sets forth. While offering an interpretation of Kant’s aesthetic theory, the book focuses on the implications of Kant’s third critique for contemporary art. McMahon draws upon Kant and his legacy in pragmatist theories of meaning and language to argue that aesthetic judgment is a version of moral judgment: a way to cultivate attitudes conducive to community, which plays a pivotal role in the evolution of language, meaning, and knowledge.

Ormerod and Chronicle reported that optimal solutions to traveling salesperson problems were judged to be aesthetically more pleasing than poorer solutions and that solutions with more convex hull nodes were rated as better figures. To test these conclusions, solution regularity and the number of potential intersections were held constant, whereas solution optimality, the number of internal nodes, and the number of nearest neighbors in each solution were varied factorially. The results did not support the view that the convex hull is an important determinant of figural attractiveness. Also, in contrast to the findings of Ormerod and Chronicle, there were consistent individual differences. Participants appeared to be divided as to whether the most attractive figure enclosed a given area within a perimeter of minimum or maximum length. It is concluded that future research in this area cannot afford to focus exclusively on group performance measures.

In this clearly written and well argued book, Mark Johnson presents a theory of embodied cognition and discusses the implications it has for theories of meaning, language and aesthetics. His pragmatist foundations are on show when he writes that ‘The so-called norms of logical inference are just the patterns of thinking that we have discovered as having served us well in our prior inquiries, relative to certain values, purposes, and types of situations’ (p.109). Johnson’s particular contribution to theories of meaning and language is that he grounds ‘inference’ even at the most abstract level in patterns of sensorimotor experience (p.279). He rejects traditional analytic theories of language on the basis that their central concept of reference is grounded in an erroneous and unfounded distinction between transcendent universals and bodily particulars (p.89-91).

There are a number of problems associated with the classic notion of beauty understood as an experience of perceptual form. These problems are that there is an apparent incompatibility between beauty’s objectivity and subjectivity; and an incompatibility between the two self-evident theses that (i) there are no principles of beauty and (ii) there are genuine judgements of beauty. There is also the problem of explaining the possibility of a disinterested pleasure. To solve these problems I draw upon the work of Glyn Humphreys & Dietmar Heinke (1998) according to whom the processing of ‘between-object’ relations draws upon view-dependent primitives and the processing of ‘within-object’ relations draws upon view-invariant primitives. I argue that if what we experience as aesthetic form or beauty is some kind of play on the processes involved in processing within-object-relations during the course of perceiving certain objects, then the apparent problems of beauty would be resolved. I speculate that perhaps the perception of certain objects employs perceptual principles in an unprecedented way or in a way which epitomizes their normal operation. The idea is that when perception is employed in such a way that our attention is drawn from the object recognized to the experience of perception as something like a solution to a problem (that is, to the experience of the construction of within-object relations), then we experience what we know of as aesthetic form and beauty.

The idea of a ‘global’ concept of art might suggest a transcending of the categories which would locate an artwork relative to one place and one time. Is this possible? If we answer in the negative, this suggests that a global concept of art is not possible, but on the positive side, the significance of the particular is kept intact. If we answer in the affirmative, then a global concept of art is possible, but we lose the very aspect that defines art: its particularity. I will argue that we can limit the damage all round by construing art in a way that allows the particular features of an artwork’s time and place to feature within the broader placeholders of a global concept of art. According to the global concept of art I will present here, art is a normative system. Its place holders could be a narrative, representation, expression of emotion or perceptual experience but what in each case explains our engagement with it as art rather than say a scientific experiment or an historical record is the particular kind of reflection that the form of the work gives rise to. Hence the form of the work or the form that our engagement with it takes is what qualifies the narrative, representation, expression of emotion or perceptual experience as art. The damage referred to above is not eliminated entirely though. The norms in a system are taken on board through day to day interaction with others who engage these norms. As such, when art is construed according to such systems, the meanings it embodies as art may be inaccessible to those not acculturated into the relevant norms. A theory of art for a global concept of art, then, must identify in what sense art is a normative system and it must provide some account of how we engage with it when we engage with it as art. For the former, I draw upon philosophical analyses of moral judgment, and for the latter, I turn to that much maligned, indeed bogus, divide between the aesthetic and the antiaesthetic. I conclude that a global concept of art is one that maintains the integrity of the artwork, and that writing is art historical rather than merely historical when it is conducted from within the culture that grounds the art under discussion.

Aesthetic autonomy is sometimes equated with an art for art’s sake approach to art. On the contrary, the philosophers whose work is often cited as backup to this concept of aesthetic autonomy held a very different conception of it. I will trace an alternative notion of aesthetic autonomy in the work of Adorno and Habermas, the origins of which can be found in Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic theory, the popular notion of his formalism, notwithstanding. I draw upon the art practice of the contemporary Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson in order to demonstrate this alternative notion of aesthetic autonomy.

This is an 18,500 word bibliography of philosophical scholarship on Beauty which was published online in the Oxford Bibliographies Online. The entry includes an Introduction of 800 words, 21 x 400-word sub-themes and 168 annotated references. INTRODUCTION Philosophical interest in beauty began with the earliest recorded philosophers. Beauty was deemed to be an essential ingredient in a good life and so what it was, where it was to be found and how it was to be included in a life were prime considerations. The way beauty has been conceived has been influenced by an author’s other philosophical commitments, metaphysical, epistemological and ethical and such commitments reflect the historical and cultural position of the author. For example, beauty is a manifestation of the divine on earth to which we respond with love and adoration; beauty is a harmony of the soul which we achieve through cultivating feeling in a rational and tempered way; beauty is an idea raised in us by certain objective features of the world; beauty is a sentiment which can nonetheless be cultivated to be appropriate to its object; beauty is the object of a judgment by which we exercise the social, comparative and inter-subjective elements of cognition and so on. Such views on beauty not only reveal underlying philosophical commitments but also reflect positive contributions to understanding the nature of value and the relation of mind and world. One way to distinguish between beauty theories is according to the conception of the human being that they assume or imply, for example, where they fall on the continuum from determinism to free will, ungrounded notions of compatibilism notwithstanding. For example, theories at the latter end might carve out a sense of genuine innovation and creativity in human endeavours while at the other end of the spectrum authors may conceive of beauty as an environmental trigger for consumption, procreation or preservation in the interests of the individual. Treating beauty experiences as in some respect intentional, characterises beauty theory prior to the twentieth century and since, mainly in historically inspired writing on beauty. On the other hand, treating beauty as affect or sensation has always had its representatives and is most visible today in evolutionary inspired accounts of beauty (though not all evolutionary accounts fit this classification). Beauty theory falls under some combination of metaphysics, epistemology, meta-ethics, aesthetics and psychology. While in the twentieth century beauty was more likely to be conceived as an evaluative concept for art, recent philosophical interest in beauty can again be seen to exercise arguments pertaining to metaphysics, epistemology, meta-ethics, philosophy of meaning and language in addition to philosophy of art and environmental aesthetics.

Plato’s distinction between appearance and reality which he attempts to demonstrate in his allegory of the cave established the conceptual framework for theories of knowledge for many centuries. The quest for certainty set us on the path to believing that reality is there to be discovered. We only have to open our eyes and minds. Yet a recurring question about the interface between culturally acquired concepts and objective sense perception remains a point of contention. Mischa Kuball’s Platon’s Mirror addresses this question. Kuball’s Platon’s Mirror exhibited at Artspace Sydney during September 2011 is an intriguing exploration of the various layers involved in the process of meaning. Light is the metaphor. Light is filtered through a variety of devices to reveal disparate aspects of the one apparent object. The easy distinction between appearance and reality is deliberately thrown into disarray. Kuball provides a meditation on the blurring of reality and meaning which suggests a recurrent philosophical theme in Kuball’s oeuvre, the nature of meaning and value.

Aesthetic judgment has often been characterized as a sensuous cognitively unmediated engagement in sensory items whether visual, auditory, haptic, olfactory or gustatory. However, new art forms challenge this assumption. At the very least, new art forms provide evidence of intention which triggers a search for meaning in the perceiver. Perceived order excites the ascription of intention. The ascription of intention employs background knowledge and experience, or in other words, implicates the perceiver’s conceptual framework. In our response to art of every description we witness the incorrigible tendency in humans to construct meaningful narratives to account for events. Such meaningful narratives always implicitly involve the ascription of intention, even when the agent of the intention is not explicitly acknowledged or even clearly conceived. This principle of intention-in-order may seem incompatible with another truism which is that art is a source of novel ideas and essentially a critique of prevailing values and norms including conceptual schemes. I argue on the contrary that the human impulse to read intention in order is a precondition of art’s critical edge. Creativity is possible even though there is no raw perceptual data to which we have conscious access. That is, there are no sensory items, unmediated by the concepts we have internalized through our interaction with our communities, to which we have conscious access.

<The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com > -- In this paper I carve out a space between the concept of "the object" and the seemingly endless ways in which "the object" can be represented pictorially. I will call the aspect of the pictorial representation which is made possible by this space, the pictorial representation's "style". I will explore this space by drawing upon theories of pictorial representation, leaving out, for the sake of my purposes here, a consideration of the artist's intention. That an attribution of "style" can be comprehensive while leaving out a consideration of artists' intentions, I will argue by adopting the conceptual framework of Paul Thom's theory of interpretation. Before embarking on my project, I begin with a brief overview of the rather slippery notion of "style".

If we conceive of ourselves as animals, it might be accurate to call us visual animals. The visual cortex is much larger in us relative to the size of our brains than in other animals, and large relative to the parts of the cortex responsible for the transmission of signals emanating from the other perceptual transducers. Our ability to recall visual images, recombine them in imagination and enter imaginatively into narratives is linked to this evolved piece of brain architecture. However, what this means within the context of human culture is not so clear. A large visual cortex might not necessarily translate into a heightened susceptibility for fine visual distinctions over auditory or kinetic distinctions, at least not in all cultural contexts.

Each chapter covers one topic and largely consists of brief summaries of arguments for and against various themes. The topic of the first chapter is whether and on what basis a film can be considered art. Photography is used as an analogy. The arguments range from considering the mechanical form of cinema as an obstacle to arthood to arguments considering cinema’s mechanical nature as essential to its arthood; the former by those who ground art in human agency, the latter by those who ground art in some conception of verisimilitude. Those worried by the former argument, emphasize editing and montage effects as the essential aspects of cinema, the idea being that the less representational veracity a film presented, the more it could be classified as art. On the other hand, for those who equate the art of film with verisimilitude, it is argued that the realism of film is superior to the realism of the other representational arts due to film’s retrieval of images as opposed to merely representing them.

This book is a compilation of papers that Zangwill has had published previously in a number of journals; this journal among them. The topics of these papers centre on the nature of aesthetic properties. Read as such, the papers are, for the most part, erudite and illuminating, presenting as they do a very clear synthesis of various well known positions on the relation of aesthetic properties to non-aesthetic properties; the relation of beauty to other aesthetic concepts; and the nature of the aesthetic.

Matthew Kieran addresses a number of key topics in aesthetics including the nature of originality, beauty, artistic knowledge and truth, the moral content of art, and the standards of taste. His treatment of each topic is informed by the thesis that the value of art is to be found in the insights that it provides. The structure of each chapter is to canvas a few positions (usually including one that would represent a counter position to his thesis), before presenting an interpretation of the topic that is compatible with his positive thesis regarding art’s value as insight.

A clear-cut concept of the aesthetic is elusive. Kant’s Critique of Judgment presents one of the more comprehensive aesthetic theories from which we can extract a set of features, some of which pertain to aesthetic experience and others to the logical structure of aesthetic judgment. When considered together, however, these features present a number of tensions and apparent contradictions. Kant’s own attempt to dissolve these apparent contradictions or dichotomies was not entirely satisfactory as it rested on a vague notion of indeterminacy. He addressed the emerging tensions with his distinction between pure and dependent beauty, which is a distinction I believe a satisfactory theory of aesthetic judgment would reveal as unfounded. In addition, Kant left a crucial connection unaccounted for. This was the connection between the two aspects that he envisaged characterized an aesthetic judgment. The two aspects to which I refer are the “purposiveness of form” provided by the Imagination and the associated mental content,which Kant called “aesthetic ideas.” More recent aesthetic theories treat only a subset of the features addressed in Kant’s aesthetic theory. Even so, the standard aesthetic theories, such as expressivism, cognitivism, and formalism, entrench the kind of thinking that grounds these dichotomies. In contrast, I will demonstrate that a naturalized aesthetic theory can accommodate all the features suggested by the Kantian analysis in such a way that they are shown to be complementary rather than contradictory.

The aim of this paper is to draw the attention of those conducting research on imagery to the different kinds of visual information deployed by expert drawers compared to non-expert drawers. To demonstrate this difference I draw upon the cognitive science literature on vision and imagery to distinguish between three different ways that visual phenomena can be represented in memory: structural descriptions, denotative descriptions, and configural descriptions. Research suggests that perception and imagery deploy the same mental processes and that the drawing of one's imagery would require the simultaneous deployment of these very processes. I reason that drawing a picture of one's imagery is not possible. I hypothesize that when required to draw a picture from memory, both expert and non-expert drawers access their denotative description of the object rather than their imagery. I then suggest how my hypothesis could be tested and if accurate, how this finding would impact upon the design and interpretation of experiments on imagery when drawing is involved. I also suggest why the constraints that perception places upon the simultaneous deployment of imagery appear not to cause the same constraints in autistic savant drawers and visual agnosia patients.