Dominic McIver Lopes

In The Geography of Taste (2024), Dominic McIver Lopes, Samantha Matherne, Mohan Matthen, and Bence Nanay pursue an ambitious project of reconfiguring theoretical aesthetics in light of a shared commitment to the cultural diversity of aesthetic value. Developed from an ‘Authors Meet Critics’ discussion held at the 82nd Annual Meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics, this symposium comprises critical commentaries by Murray Smith, James Harold, and Paloma Atencia-Linares, together with responses by the authors.

A familiar question in the literature on emotional responses to fiction, originally put forward by Colin Radford, is how such responses can be rational. How can we make sense of pitying Anna Karenina when we know there is no such person? In this paper I argue that contrary to the usual interpretation, the question of rationality has nothing to do with the Paradox of Fiction. Instead, the real problem is why there is a divergence in our normative assessments of emotions in different contexts. I argue that explaining this divergence requires a more nuanced account of the rationality of emotion than has previously been proposed. One advantage of my proposal over alternatives is that it helps to explain one way we can learn emotionally from fiction and imagination.

This essay surveys the main objections to aesthetic hedonism, the view that aesthetic value is reducible to the value of aesthetic pleasure or experience. Hedonism is the dominant view of aesthetic value, but a spate of recent criticisms has drawn its accuracy into question. I introduce some distinctions crucial to the criticisms, before using the bulk of the essay to identify and review six major lines of argument that hedonism's critics have employed against it. Whether or not these arguments suffice to refute hedonism decisively, I argue that its privileged status, as the sole contender in aesthetic value theory, is detrimental to downstream research on aesthetic phenomena. The essay concludes with an overview of current work and promising avenues of inquiry into non-hedonic alternatives.