Alessandro Giovannelli

In Art in Three Dimensions,1 Noël Carroll presents the most comprehensive account of his views on narrative and character engagement. Expanding on his previous work, Carroll remains a representative of what elsewhere I dubbed the "onlooker," in contrast to the "participant," view.2 That is, he is among those who see, as central to our interactions with narratives, what we may call other-oriented responses. Such responses do not require that readers or viewers imaginatively place themselves within a narrative's fictive world or in the place of the characters. Rather, for Carroll, understanding and engaging with a narrative entails offering the responses the characters and their circumstances, as construed by the... Read More.

Jerrold Levinson has elegantly defended a proposal for the ethical evaluation of popular songs, which looks at the ‘personal qualities’ a song exhibits. I claim that the personal-qualities theory of artistic expression importantly contributes to explaining how songs get to have their meanings, yet that it does not very profitably extend to their ethical evaluation. I propose that the notion of a work’s ethical perspective best generates a central way of ethically evaluating popular songs, by properly linking the ethical evaluation of songs to their meanings. Reference to songs’ ethical perspectives proves able to (a) enjoy broad scope; (b) produce charitable ethical assessments; (c) generate fine-grained and comparative attributions of ethical value; and (d) deal, better than the personal-qualities view, with songs that include multiple characters, manifest despicable personae without explicitly condemning them, or exhibit a persona that eschews ethical evaluation. Investigating the theoretical centrality of this type of ethical judgment also provides us with an opportunity to better understand what construing the meaning of songs—and more generally works of art—involves: when relevant, the proper construal of works’ ethical perspectives’ objects, and of the perspectives themselves as often presenting us with outlooks just for our consideration, not approval. I close by suggesting a possible relationship between our song preferences and our sense of self, via David Hume’s notion of pride: the songs we favour help us with self-perception and -assessment, and perhaps with self-construction.

Résumé La critique éthique considère que la valeur éthique d’une œuvre d’art affecte sa valeur artistique. Elle s’intéresse ordinairement à la valeur éthique du point de vue que l’œuvre adopte, ou à celui des effets qu’elles produisent, mais ne considère guère celle du processus de production de l’œuvre. Or celui-ci peut intéresser l’éthique comme lorsqu’une toile est réalisée en laissant des poissons rouges enduits de peinture agoniser et s’agiter sur une toile. C’est précisément de la valeur éthique des procédés utilisés dont il est ici question. L’auteur défend un moralisme des moyens, selon lequel le jugement éthique des procédés a une place légitime dans l’évaluation artistique, et formule deux versions compatibles de cette position : la thèse esthétique et la thèse artistique.

I defend the ethical fittingness theory (EFT), the thesis that whenever it is legitimate ethically to evaluate a representational artwork for the perspective it embodies, such evaluation systematically bears on the work's artistic value. EFT is a form of radical moralism, claiming that the systematic relationship between the selected type of ethical evaluation and artistic evaluation always obtains, for works of any kind. The argument for EFT spells out the implications of ethically judging an artwork for its perspective, where such an ethical evaluation is understood as an assessment of how well the work's ethical perspective fits extra-fictional reality—how appropriate, correct, or true the perspective is. The argument shows that the ethical legitimacy of judging a work for its perspective ipso facto proves the judgment's art-critical relevance. Hence, the argument effectively amounts to a reductio ad absurdum of theories that admit the legitimacy of ethically judging artworks this way, but deny or qualify the judgment's relevance to artistic merit. Since EFT is stated conditionally, the argument need not indicate how often artworks are subject to this type of ethical evaluation. Nonetheless, I make a case for the relevance of EFT to actual art criticism and contemporary philosophical debate

In this paper, I critically examine Berys Gaut’s proposals regarding ethical criticism, that is, regarding the question of whether, and if so how, an ethical evaluation of a work of art can be considered amongst the determinants of the work’s value as art. I critically examine Gaut’s proposed taxonomy on the possible positions on the ethical criticism question as well as his own influential answer to such question: ethicism. My critique focuses on one missing element, I argue, in Gaut’s overall approach and in ethicism as he formulates and defends it: reference to artistic categorization and to the aims and commitments artworks have in virtue of the artistic categories they belong to. I show how reference to artistic categorization facilitates the generation of a more fine-grained taxonomy of positions than the one Gaut proposes. Such taxonomy makes it possible to distinguish between two very different types of positions within what Gaut dubs ‘contextualism’: what I call limited or restricted ethicism and particularism. As an application of this more fine-grained taxonomy, I show how Noël Carroll’s ‘moderate moralism’, which Gaut convincingly claims to be incomplete, need not reduce to either ethicism or contextualism as Gaut claims: the view can also be completed in the direction of a limited or restricted ethicism. As for Gaut’s own proposal, surprisingly it itself proves to have leanings towards particularism, in so far as it delegates the question of the artistic (or aesthetic) relevance of ethical features to case-by-case decisions. Again, reference to artistic categorization would offer Gaut grounds to be less sceptical on the possibility of finding general philosophical principles governing the relevance of ethical features to artistic worth. Further, lack of reference to artistic categorization can be shown to affect Gaut’s claims within all three the arguments he puts forward in defence of ethicism—the moral beauty, the cognitive, and the merited-response argument. I show such claims to be ill founded when not implausible.

The goal of this paper is methodological. It offers a comprehensive mapping of the theoretical positions on the ethical criticism of art, correcting omissions and inadequacies in the conceptual framework adopted in the current debate. Three principles are recommended as general guidelines: ethical amenability, basic value pluralism, and relativity to ethical dimension. Hence a taxonomy distinguishing between different versions of autonomism, moralism, and immoralism is established, by reference to criteria that are different from what emerging in the current literature. The mapping is then proved capable of (1) locating the various theories that have been proposed so far and clarifying such theories’ real commitments, (2) having the correct relationship with actual art making and art criticism practices, and (3) showing the real weight of the alleged counter-example to a moralist position of a work that succeeds artistically because of its immorality.

Recent literature on emotional participation in narratives witnesses a contrast between those who emphasize the role of readers and spectators of narratives as participants and those who emphasize their role as mere onlookers. The former refer to notions like identification, empathy, and what Richard Wollheim calls «central imagining». The latter criticize the idea of identification, and use notions like sympathy and Wollheim’s «acentral imagining». I claim this debate to be vitiated by simplistic accounts of identification and empathy, a lack of attention for the relationships between self- and other-oriented emotions, a misinterpretation of Wollheim’s central/acentral distinction in relation to another distinction suggested by him, that between «iconic» and «non-iconic» imagining. I defend an understanding – different from Wollheim’s correctly interpreted one – of these two distinctions and maintain the importance of iconic and central imaginings to the interpretation and appreciation of narratives.

Offers a comprehensive historical overview of the field of aesthetics. Eighteen specially commissioned essays introduce and explore the contributions of those philosophers who have shaped the subject, from its origins in the work of the ancient Greeks to contemporary developments in the 21st Century. The book reconstructs the history of aesthetics, clearly illustrating the most important attempts to address such crucial issues as the nature of aesthetic judgment, the status of art, and the place of the arts within society. Ideal for undergraduate students, the book lays the necessary foundations for a complete and thorough understanding of this fascinating subject. Table of Contents Introduction \ 1. Plato, Robert Stecker \ 2. Aristotle, Angela Curran \ 3. Medieval Aesthetics, Gian Carlo Garfagnini \ 4. David Hume, Alan Goldman \ 5. Immanuel Kant, Elisabeth Schellekens \ 6. G.W.F. Hegel, Richard Eldridge \ 7. Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, Scott Jenkins \ 8. Benedetto Croce and Robin Collingwood, Gary Kemp \ 9. Roger Fry and Clive Bell, Susan Feagin \ 10. John Dewey, Thomas Leddy \ 11. Martin Heidegger, Joseph Shieber \ 12. Walter Benjamin and T.W. Adorno, Gerhard Richter \ 13. Monroe Beardsley, Noël Carroll \14. Nelson Goodman, Alessandro Giovannelli \ 15. Richard A.Wollheim, Malcolm Budd \ 16. Arthur C. Danto, Sondra Bacharach \ 17. Kendall L. Walton, David Davies \ Some Contemporary Developments, Alessandro Giovannelli

The ethical criticism of art has received increasing attention in contemporary aesthetics, especially with respect to the evaluation of narratives. The most prominent philosophical defenses of this art-critical practice concentrate on the notion of response , specifically on the emotional responses a narrative requires for it to be correctly apprehended and appreciated. I first investigate the mechanisms of emotional participation in narratives ; then, I address the question of the legitimacy of the ethical criticism of narratives and advance an argument in support of such a practice . ;Chapter 1 analyzes different modes of emotional participation in narratives, distinguishing between: emotional inference, affective mimicry, empathy, sympathy, and concern. Chapter 2 first critically discusses Noel Carroll's objections to identificationism and to an empathy-based account of character participation, and then analyzes the sorts of imaginative activities involved in narrative engagement, by investigating the distinctions introduced by Richard Wollheim between central and acentral imagining, and iconic and non-iconic imagination. ;Chapter 3 offers a taxonomy of the possible views on the relationship between the ethical and the artistic values of a narrative, distinguishing between reductionist and non-reductionist views, and sorting the latter ones into autonomism and moralism, radical and moderate. Chapter 4 analyzes the ethical assessment of narratives for their consequences on their perceivers and the means of their production, and indicates the evaluation in terms of the ethical perspective a narrative embodies as the kind of ethical evaluation on which an argument for the ethical criticism of narratives ought to concentrate. Chapter 5 critically assesses the accounts of "imaginative resistance" to fiction offered by Kendall Walton, Richard Moran, and Tamar Gendler, and concludes that none of them is adequate to ground an argument for the ethical criticism of narratives. Chapter 6 looks at Carroll's argument for moderate moralism and Berys Gaut's "merited-response" argument for "ethicism," and finds both arguments wanting. Chapter 7 proposes a version of moralism grounded in the notion of a narrative's ethical perspective, and defended on the grounds of narratives' commitments to provide a realistic representation of reality