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37Canon and Cultural NegotiationJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. forthcoming.By questions of “canon,” we mean questions of what is fictionally true of some character, story, or world. What is canon is treated as authoritative or official, usually by creators and fans alike. But disputes about canon have arisen as storytellers and publishers have sought to capitalize on the popularity of their characters, churning out more and more stories to meet public demand, and at the same time engaging with growing fan bases. As audiences have become more involved, and as fictional …Read more
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7The Language of Comics1In Aaron Meskin & Roy T. Cook (eds.), The Art of Comics, Wiley‐blackwell. 2012-01-27.This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction A Pre‐Emptive Strike How Comics Mean The Unified Comic Conclusion Notes References.
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8Hell Is Other People's TastesIn Kimberly S. Engels (ed.), The Good Place and Philosophy, Wiley. 2020-08-27.Much ink has been spilled in philosophy over the question of whether morality is an objective or subjective matter. In the world of The Good Place, the answer to the moral question seems fairly firmly determined: right and wrong are objective matters, and there is a fact about whether our actions are good or bad. The ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras believed that beauty was a quantifiable principle of nature, and that we could find the source of beauty in the harmony, order, and regularity o…Read more
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19Introducing aesthetics and the philosophy of artBloomsbury Academic, An Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. 2017.'Place in garden, lawn, to beautify landscape.'When Don Featherstone's plastic pink flamingos were first advertised in the 1957 Sears catalogue, these were the instructions. The flamingos are placed on the cover of this book for another reason: to start us asking questions. That's where philosophy always begins.Introducing Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art is written to introduce students to a broad array of questions that have occupied philosophers since antiquity, and which continue to both…Read more
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14On CanonContemporary Aesthetics 16 (1). 2018.Canon is a concept from aesthetics that has become a regular subject of commonplace discussions. The nature of canon, especially as it is used in these commonplace discussions, has not been subject to adequate philosophical scrutiny. We attempt to remedy that by placing canon in its historical and philosophical context, exploring and rejecting several common accounts, and presenting some basics of how canon works. We reject the accounts that place control with the author or the legal property ho…Read more
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15Ontology and the Challenge of Literary AppropriationJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71 (2): 155-165. 2013.
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15Artistic License: The Philosophical Problems of Copyright and AppropriationUniversity of Chicago Press. 2017.Culture clashes -- Ontology, copyright, and artistic practice -- The myth of unoriginality -- Authorship, power, and responsibility -- Toward an ontology of authored works -- The rights of authors -- The rights of others -- Appropriation and transformation -- Afterword.
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82Art Forgery: The History of a Modern Obsession (review)British Journal of Aesthetics 52 (4): 427-430. 2012.
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57Authorship, Co‐Authorship, and Multiple AuthorshipJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72 (2): 147-156. 2014.In this article, I use the example of the novel Micro, authored by Michael Crichton and Richard Preston, to tease out the relationships between an author and his work and with other authors of that work. The case presents a complication for a number of contemporary views on authorship and co-authorship, which suggest that Crichton is either not an author of the novel or an author but not a co-author—both, I suggest, are counterintuitive views. After working through the leading views on the topic…Read more
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14Young, James O., Radically Rethinking Copyright in the Arts: A Philosophical Approach (Routledge, 2021), 184 pp., $155.00 cloth (review)Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 79 (1): 124-127. 2021.
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20Young, James O., Radically Rethinking Copyright in the Arts: A Philosophical ApproachJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. forthcoming.
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47Using Things as ArtGrazer Philosophische Studien 96 (1): 56-80. 2019.Secured to a table in my living room is an antique apple peeler—a cast iron 19th century mechanical contrivance that I gave my wife for her birthday some years ago. This thing is not art. At the very least, I do not believe it is art. Yet my wife and I do not use it as an apple peeler; we use it as art. Indeed, my living room is filled with things that we are using as art—some artifacts, some natural objects—but my living room is not filled with art. This is not, I think, all that unusual a phen…Read more
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23Why Can't You Take a Joke? The Several Moral Dimensions of Pilfering a Ha‐HaJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 78 (4): 465-476. 2020.ABSTRACT This article investigates the moral wrongness of joke theft. Working through a trove of real-world cases, and using the sitcom The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel as a touchstone, I argue, ultimately, for a pluralist approach, contending that there are several wrongs that may be present in any case of joke theft, but which cannot be reduced to each other and which are collectively irreducible to any sort of “superwrong.”
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14Expressing Ideas: A Reply to Roger A. ShinerJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68 (4): 405-408. 2010.
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30The Problem of Tragedy and the Protective FrameEmotion Review 9 (2): 140-145. 2017.We explore the classical philosophical problem of the “paradox of tragedy”—the problem of accounting for our apparent pleasure in feeling pity and terror as audiences of staged tragedies. After outlining the history of the problem in philosophy, we suggest that Apter’s reversal theory offers great potential for resolving the paradox, while explaining some of the central intuitions motivating philosophical proposals—an ideal starting point to bridge a narrowing gap between philosophy and psycholo…Read more
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24The Co‐Author Is Dead; Long Live the Co‐Author: A Reply to Killin, Bacharach, and TollefsenJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73 (3): 337-341. 2015.
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62Toward an Ontology of Authored WorksBritish Journal of Aesthetics 51 (2): 185-199. 2011.In 2003, a photograph taken by Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy) , sold at auction for $332,300. Some might be surprised that a photograph could garner such a sum, but, in this case at least, none more so than Jim Krantz. Krantz might be allowed a certain level of incredulity, for Prince's photograph was a photograph of another photograph, this one taken by Krantz himself. As far as copyright is concerned, Krantz's photograph and Prince's are the same work, and so Krantz is almost certainly infr…Read more
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23Making Sense of the Copyrightability of Plots: A Case Study in the Ontology of ArtJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (4). 2009.
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115Horror and Its AffectsJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 80 (2): 140-150. 2022.In this article, following a trajectory set out by Noël Carroll, Matt Hills, and Andrea Sauchelli, I propose a definition of horror, according to which something qualifies as a work of horror if and only if it centrally and demonstrably aims at provoking one or more of a particular set of negative affects. A catalog of characteristically negative affects is associated with horror—including terror, revulsion, the uncanny, and the abject—but which cannot be collapsed into any single affect. Furthe…Read more
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172Forgery and Appropriation in ArtPhilosophy Compass 5 (12): 1047-1056. 2010.Although art forgery is documented throughout the history of Western art, philosophical discussion of the problems of art forgery is a relatively recent matter, beginning largely in the latter half of the twentieth century. Arising even more recently is the practice of creating ‘appropriation art’, a topic that has so far been largely ignored in aesthetics but which raises some challenging questions especially when compared with forgery. This article introduces some of the philosophical problems…Read more
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18Carroll, Noël. Minerva's Night Out: Philosophy, Pop Culture, and Moving Pictures. Malden, MA: Wiley‐Blackwell, 2013, x + 358 pp., $99.95 cloth, $29.95 paper (review)Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73 (4): 463-465. 2015.
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125Aesthetic Supervenience RevisitedBritish Journal of Aesthetics 52 (3): 301-316. 2012.In this paper, I hope to reintroduce debate on the issue of aesthetic supervenience, especially in light of work undertaken by metaphysicians in recent years. After providing a brief walkthrough of some of the major views on supervenience generally, including several important metaphysical distinctions, I build upon views by Jerrold Levinson, John Bender, Nick Zangwill, and Gregory Currie, to develop a realist thesis of strong local supervenience, such that aesthetic properties of artworks and o…Read more
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Furman UniversityAssistant Professor
Areas of Specialization
Aesthetics |
Applied Ethics |
Metaphysics |
Areas of Interest
Aesthetics |
Applied Ethics |
Metaphysics |