Christopher Stevens

Review of a collection resulting from a 2003 British Society of Aesthetics sponsored London conference, ‘The Value of Aesthetic Experience’. Includes work by well-known analytic aestheticians. The book is more an exploration than a sustained argument for the following conjecture: aestheticians would do well for themselves and their discipline were they to eschew focus on art objects and instead take seriously connections between human well-being and something like a moral imperative to seek out aesthetic experience at large. I lay out the editors’ strategy for effectively presenting that conjecture and mention the main point of each of the book’s chapters so that it might be understood how that point is intended by them to contribute to this goal. I include an assessment of their efforts and a few ideas of a way forward for those who might want to take up where the volume leaves off.

Review of the first and only existing collection devoted to consideration of links between nature’s beauty and reasons for its preservation. The book collects work by leading aestheticians in the analytic tradition, sourced from top journals in their respective areas. Hoping to inspire potential readers unfamiliar with environmental aesthetics to have a closer look, I make clear what I see as some of the editors’ intentions in organizing the volume as they have, give an idea of the main theoretical views on which most of the argumentative action centers, discuss some of the volume’s highlights, and along the way offer a few thoughts about the way in which the debates in preservationist-inspired environmental aesthetics have so far proceeded. Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 251-257, June 2011

Despite commitments to claims about the welfare-enhancing superiority of art-interested ways of life implicit in much of their work, aestheticians have shown little interest in explicitly bringing their discipline to bear on issues at the intersection of ethics, aesthetics, and politics. Roger Scruton’s work on culture bucks that trend, but few have contributed to the discussion he initiated. After an extended treatment of one of many possible examples showing that aesthetics-related matters can and do bear significantly on social and political issues, I present key components of Scruton’s brand of cultural conservatism and explore one way of working out some of the details, in an attempt to show that the kinds of off-putting unwieldiness and putative sociopolitical dubiousness from which ambivalence toward issues at the intersection stems might be satisfactorily dealt with.