•  19
    Courageous Love: K. C. Bhattacharyya on the Puzzle of Painful Beauty
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 2024 1-16. 2024.
    In the 1930s, the Bengali philosopher K. C. Bhattacharyya proposed a new theory of rasa, or aesthetic emotion, according to which aesthetic emotions are feelings that have other feelings as their intentional objects. This paper articulates how Bhattacharyya’s theory offers a novel solution to the puzzle of how it is both possible and rational to enjoy the kind of negative emotions that are inspired by tragic and sorrowful tales. The new solution is distinct from the conversion and compensation v…Read more
  •  1
    Bolzano on Aesthetic Normativity
    British Journal of Aesthetics 64. 2024.
    A theory of aesthetic normativity states what makes it the case that the fact that an item is beautiful is reason to appreciate it. Aesthetic hedonists characteristically hold that the fact that an item is beautiful is reason to appreciate it because anyone always has reason to do what yields pleasure. Bernard Bolzano was an aesthetic hedonist who is best interpreted as offering a mixed theory of aesthetic normativity. The fact that an item is beautiful is reason to appreciate it because anyone …Read more
  • Cultures and Values
    In Dominic McIver Lopes, Samantha Matherne, Mohan Matthen & Bence Nanay (eds.), The Geography of Taste, Oxford University Press. 2024.
  •  427
    The Geography of Taste
    Oxford University Press. 2024.
    Aesthetic preferences and practices vary widely between individuals and between cultures. How should aesthetics proceed if we take this fact of aesthetic diversity, rather than the presumption of aesthetic universality, as our starting point? How should we theorize the cultural origins and cultural basis of aesthetic diversity? How should we think about the value and normativity of aesthetic diversity? In an effort to model what the turn toward diversity might look like in aesthetic inquiry, eac…Read more
  •  3
    Essays on Beauty and the Arts (edited book)
    Hackett Publishing Company. 2023.
    Bernard Bolzano’s (1781–1848) writings in aesthetics are clear, concise, and explicit about method. Provocative and revisionary, they champion broad views of beauty, the arts, and their social function. Dominic McIver Lopes's introductory materials place Bolzano's essays in context, give them a new interpretation, and map out how to teach them, in full or in part, in a variety of courses.
  •  6
    Essential readings in the philosophy of literature are brought together for the first time in this anthology. Contains forty-five substantial and carefully chosen essays and extracts Provides a balanced and coherent overview of developments in the field during the past thirty years, including influential work on fiction, interpretation, metaphor, literary value, and the definition and ontology of literature Includes an additional historical section featuring generous selections of the writings o…Read more
  •  10
    Pleasure is standardly conceived as a state that motivates. This chapter considers three accounts of disinterested pleasure as motivating. On one, it motivates strictly internal states because it is non-conceptual. On a second, it motivates strictly internal states because the link between motivating internal states and world-oriented acts has been inhibited. On the third, it motivates only contemplative acts. All three accounts are coherent. However, none of the three accounts of disinterested …Read more
  •  102
    Sight and Sensibility: Evaluating Pictures
    Oxford University Press. 2005.
    Images have power - for good or ill. They may challenge us to see things anew and, in widening our experience, profoundly change who we are. The change can be ugly, as with propaganda, or enriching, as with many works of art. Sight and Sensibility explores the impact of images on what we know, how we see, and the moral assessments we make. Dominic Lopes shows how these are part of, not separate from, the aesthetic appeal of images. His book will be essential reading for anyone working in aesthet…Read more
  •  1
    This chapter traces the path of skepticism about photographic art through the history of thinking about photography. Flower 009 is a photogram, made by placing plumbago blossoms directly onto a photosensitive surface, then exposing it to light and developing the print. Flower 009 gives a glimpse of the four arts of photography that are to be found by taking a close look at the history of photography and the history of thinking about photography. The early theorists’ skepticism about photographic…Read more
  •  2
    This chapter uses the patterns of inference that the authors find in the history to understand how photography can be practiced as an art. The history contains the makings of some sophisticated reasoning for the skeptical claim that photography is not an art. The argument for skepticism about photographic art brings on questions about the nature of photography and when it is an art. Purity is a tool designed to sharpen the question of whether photographs can be works of art by nature. The nature…Read more
  •  2
    The theory that photographs are images made by belief‐independent feature‐tracking is not a philosopher's invention. It gives concise, precise, and unifying expression to an assemblage of ideas about photography with a long and influential history. Traditional theory ironically flubs the line between photography and drawing precisely because it attempts to put them in opposition to each other. Photographs made by drawing can have a special significance because they originate in richly embodied a…Read more
  •  1
    Photography is probably the first art to have developed alongside and in tandem with systematic thinking about its nature. Photography theory has always been implicated in photographic creativity and appreciation. Methodological skepticism treats the skeptic's argument as a tool by taking it seriously in a rather special way. In this chapter, philosophy has been used to bring out some hidden structures in the thinking that obscure photography's range of powers. A second art of photography, exemp…Read more
  • The first art of photography best aligns with the production of photographers like Henri Cartier‐Bresson, Edward Weston, Andre Kertesz, and Diane Arbus. Modernism is the moniker that tends to be applied to these photographers and their peers in retrospect, usually by art historians, especially in connection with the writings of John Szarkowski. As curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from the 1960s through the 1980s, Szarkowski commanded attention and used it to lead th…Read more
  •  1
    Notes
    In Four Arts of Photography, Wiley. 2015.
    Methodological skepticism is a tool for articulating when photography can be practiced as an art, where each art is seen as standing up to one of the main planks of the skeptic's argument. The authors look at photographs that use belief‐independent feature tracking to duplicate scenes and thereby express thoughts. Crisscrossing the second art of photography is a tangled web of post‐conceptual artistic programs. Mimic is an example of what Jeff Wall calls near documentaries. The customary practic…Read more
  •  1
    The critic Dominic Eichler recently described some abstract photographs by Wolfgang Tillmans as exposing a forgotten reservoir of unseen pictures, a kind of mysterious, enormous underbelly of photography past and present. Modernist period abstract photography shared the ambition of the classic tradition to open up a window into a hitherto unseen reality. Photography's having made realistic depiction a trivial achievement, painters tacked toward an exploration of light and form. The effects of th…Read more
  •  2
    Having been invented by scientists, who first saw it as a new tool of inquiry and only later began to suspect the possibility of photographic art, photography's special epistemic character has dominated thinking about its nature. Photographs are introduced as evidence in scientific reports, journalism, and courts of law. They can also be used to make discoveries. According to the new theory of photography, a photograph is a product of a photographic process where an artifactual image is rendered…Read more
  •  1
    Pictorialists prefigure contemporary photographers for whom there are no holds barred when it comes to making an image from a recording event. The difference is that the inventory of image rendering tricks is now colossal. Liberal use of this inventory characterizes the third, lyric, art of photography. In lyric verse, the authors find heightened attention to the musical qualities of language, to the materiality of the sounds of speech, and to their emotional resonances. Lyric photographs tweak …Read more
  •  12
    The Aesthetic Function of Art (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (2): 484-487. 2007.
  •  53
    Big Tent Aesthetics
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 81 (1): 87-88. 2023.
    Theoretical work on aesthetic value has taken off in the past 5 or 10 years. Since work on artistic value dates at least as far back as the first debates about the interaction between artistic and other values, aesthetic value presumably differs from artistic value. Unlike artistic value, aesthetic value is found in art, but also in nature, design, and intellectual material, even philosophy (Lopes 2022a). Indeed, continued use of “aesthetic” as a synonym for “artistic” has held up work on aesthe…Read more
  • Perception and art
    In Mohan Matthen (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception, Oxford University Press Uk. 2015.
  • Pictures as Perceptual Symbols
    Dissertation, Oxford University. 1991.
  •  119
    Aesthetic Life and Why It Matters
    Oxford University Press. 2022.
    You have a complex and detailed aesthetic life. You make aesthetic decisions every day. You wake up, shower, and dress. When you decide what to wear, you think about how it feels and fits. You have aesthetic feelings and reactions every day. The sunset swings into view as you turn a corner and you think, “That’s beautiful.” A wave of calm and pleasure wash over you. You take a bite of cake and you think, “Wow, that’s sweet.” Maybe too sweet. Almost everything you do has an aesthetic dimension—fr…Read more
  •  26
    Beyond the Pleasure Principle: A Kantian Aesthetics of Autonomy
    Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 1 1-18. 2021.
  •  71
    Beautiful Philosophy
    Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics. 2022.
    Provides an account of what it is for works of academic philosophy to be beautiful in their content or in their mode of expression.
  •  56
    Perception in Practice
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (2): 387-400. 2022.
    A study of culturally-embedded perceptual responses to aesthetic value indicates that learned perceptual capacities can secure compliance with social norms. We should therefore resist the temptation to draw a line between cognitive processes, such as perception, that can adapt to differences in physical environments, and cognitive processes, such as economic decision-making, that are shaped by social norms. Compliance with social norms is a result of perceptual learning when that same compliance…Read more
  •  33
    The New Theory of Photography: Critical Examination and Responses
    Aisthesis: Pratiche, Linguaggi E Saperi Dell’Estetico 11 (2): 207-234. 2018.
    Dominic McIver Lopes’ Four Arts of Photography and Diarmuid Costello’s On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry examine the state of the art in analytic philosophy of photography and present a new approach to the study of the medium. As opposed to the orthodox and prevalent view, which emphasizes its epistemic capacities, the new theory reconsiders the nature of photography, and redirects focus towards the aesthetic potential of the medium. This symposium comprises two papers that critically exam…Read more
  •  81
    Two Dogmas of Aesthetic Empiricism
    Metaphilosophy 52 (5): 583-592. 2021.
    Aesthetic hedonism is the default theory of aesthetic value. Some of its critics share with it a pair of unquestioned assumptions, namely, that any theory of aesthetic value should make special appeal to its being the case that the canonical form of aesthetic evaluation is a state of pleasure and to its being the case that the canonical purpose of aesthetic acts is to access pleasure. This paper argues that there is reason to doubt both assumptions. Doubting both assumptions suggests a wider ran…Read more
  •  722
    Précis of Being for Beauty: Aesthetic Agency and Value
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 102 (1): 209-213. 2021.
    One question that leads us into aesthetics is: why does beauty matter? Or, what do aesthetic goods bring to my life, to make it a life that goes well? Or, how does beauty deserve the place we have evidently made for it in our lives? A theory of aesthetic value states what beauty is so as to equip us to answer this question. According to aesthetic hedonism, aesthetic values are properties of items that stand in constitutive relation to pleasure. Contemporary versions of aesthetic hedonism don’t e…Read more
  •  120
    Normativity, Agency, and Value: A View from Aesthetics
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 102 (1): 232-242. 2021.
    Being for Beauty has two ambitions. It makes a case that the network theory of aesthetic value has enough going for it to be taken seriously in philosophical aesthetics, and in work on practical values and reasons more generally. In addition, by illustrating how much room we have to maneuver outside the bounds of aesthetic hedonism, the book invites work on alternative approaches. James Shelley, Julia Driver, and Samantha Matherne take up the invitation with such aplomb that one might declare su…Read more