Emine Hande Tuna

This paper applies the account developed by Susanna Siegel in The Rationality of Perception to aesthetic cases and explores the implications of such an account for aesthetic engagement as well as curatorial and exhibitionary practices. It argues that one’s prior outlook – expertise, beliefs, desires, fears, preferences, attitudes – can have both aesthetically good and bad influences on perceptual experiences, just as it can have both epistemically good and bad influences. Analysing these bad influences in cases of ‘hijacked’ aesthetic perception will reveal that, unless we recognize that our perception of high-level and low-level aesthetically relevant properties is norm-governed, we will be at a loss to explain what goes wrong in these cases. Just as perception can be rational or irrational, so too can it be apt or inapt.

The topic of imaginative resistance attracted considerable philosophical attention in recent years. Yet, with a few exceptions, no historical investigation of the phenomenon has been carried out. This paper amends this gap in the literature by constructing a Humean and a Kantian explanation. The main contributions of this historical analysis to this debate are to make room for emotions in explanations of resistance reactions and to upset the polarization between rival accounts by suggesting that our possible responses to morally flawed works can vary. In some cases, we resist imagining counter‐evaluative claims due to our unwillingness to do so, and in others, due to our inability.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Baumgarten's Aesthetics: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives ed. by J. Colin McQuillanEmine Hande TunaJ. Colin McQuillan, editor. Baumgarten's Aesthetics: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. Pp. viii + 364. Hardcover, $130.00.Contemporary philosophers have often overlooked the originality and impact of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's views on aesthetics, and his contribution to the field is often reduced to his introduction of the term 'aesthetics' into the philosophical lexicon. By illuminating the seminal character of Baumgarten's aesthetics and its enduring significance, J. Colin McQuillan's collection of twelve essays endeavors to rectify this neglect, particularly within the anglophone philosophical community. The collection aims to make recent scholarship on Baumgarten's aesthetics more accessible, with translated works from German scholars and their English counterparts presented in a single volume to entice anglophone readers. It stands as the first collection of essays devoted to Baumgarten's aesthetics to be published in English. Through the essays contained in this volume, readers are offered a comprehensive overview of Baumgarten's aesthetic theory and its progression as well as a deeper understanding of his substantial and influential contributions to the field.The collection begins with a comprehensive introduction by McQuillan, which provides insightful analysis of the reasons behind Baumgarten's neglected status and a concise biography of the philosopher. McQuillan lucidly summarizes Baumgarten's goals for his new science of aesthetics, the extent to which he was able to accomplish these goals, and what remained unfinished. McQuillan highlights Baumgarten's view that his aesthetics was not just a theoretical exercise, but rather had practical implications, such as the potential to enhance poetry, rhetoric, and other arts, and more generally all sensible cognition.The opening two essays of the collection offer dual perspectives on Baumgarten's aesthetics, one exploring the connection of his theories to the pursuit of establishing art as the presentation or representation of the absolute and the other presenting his aesthetics as modeled on the "art of invention" (ars inveniendi). Ursula Franke's essay contextualizes [End Page 711] Baumgarten's ideas within the historical framework and demonstrates his impact on the development of German idealist aesthetics, but it also serves as a valuable guide for further research on Baumgarten by providing an overview of contemporary research and avenues for engagement with his work. In the second essay, Stefanie Buchenau offers an insightful examination of the relationship between Baumgarten and Cicero, illuminating how the former crafted aesthetics as a new method of invention.The third and fourth essays of the collection have a narrower focus. In his analysis, Matthew McAndrew, following George Friedrich Meier, posits that Baumgarten, despite seemingly presenting two conflicting definitions of beauty—one attributing beauty to the object of cognition, and the other to the cognition itself—only held the former definition. Departing from previous interpretations that attempted to reconcile both definitions, McAndrew rejects the definition of beauty as the perfection of sensible cognition. Angelica Nuzzo argues that Baumgarten had a pluralistic understanding of truth and distinguished between aesthetic truth and logical truth. She examines Baumgarten's conception of aesthetic truth and contends that it is imperative to comprehend how poetry embodies and incorporates aesthetic truth. According to Nuzzo, Baumgarten believed that aesthetic truth is embodied.In the fifth essay, Simon Grote delves into the theological sources of Baumgarten's aesthetics. Grote claims that Baumgarten's definition of aesthetics was influenced by the definition of aisthēsis put forth by Halle Pietists. Indeed, he claims that seeing this connection between the Pietists and Baumgarten is vital to fully grasp the ethical dimensions of Baumgarten's early aesthetic theory. Like many Halle Pietists, Baumgarten was advancing a conception of moral education as involving the improvement of the human affects through the proper use of the sensible faculties. In the following essay, McQuillan examines the aspects of Baumgarten's aesthetics that set him apart from his rationalist predecessor Christian Wolff. Challenging the orthodox view that portrays Baumgarten as a Wolffian rationalist, McQuillan argues that Baumgarten limited the application of Wolff's mathematical method, circumscribed the scope of logic, and distinguished between sensible and intellectual perfection, separating what Wolff aimed to unite. In his contribution, Alessandro...

In his recent article, “Beauty and Utility in Kant’s Aesthetics: The Origins of Adherent Beauty,” Robert Clewis aims to offer a fresh perspective on Kant’s views on the relation between beauty and utility. While, admittedly, a fresh approach is hard to come by, given the extensive treatment of the topic, Clewis thinks that a study of its historical context and origins might give us the needed edge. The most interesting and novel aspect of Clewis’s discussion is his detailed treatment of Kant’s changing use of the term “selbstständig” (which in general means “independent,” “self-standing,” “stable,” “lasting,” “self-subsisting”). In the process of tackling the more general question as to what kind of eighteenth-century model of beauty-utility relation Kant proposes, Clewis addresses other issues, such as the seeming inconsistency between Kant’s earlier and later views on free and purpose-based beauty. As noted in the editor’s footnote of the Critique of the Power of Judgment (KU), while Kant uses the term “selbstständig,” in his precritical period to refer to “purpose-based beauty” (what he calls in the KU adherent or dependent beauty), he uses the same term to denote free beauty (independent beauty, that is to say) in the KU.1 Clewis argues that even though Kant uses the same term to refer to both dependent and independent beauty, albeit in different periods of his life, this switch in the application of the term is not caused by a change in the meaning of the term from Kant’s perspective, but a change in Kant’s views concerning the status of free beauty. I agree with Clewis that Kant did not change his mind about the meaning of the term “selbstständig.” Nevertheless, I disagree with the line Clewis pursues.I will argue that Clewis’s mistake lies in thinking that, throughout his career, Kant endorsed what he calls the “blocking-unifi cationist” view on the relation between beauty and utility (“beauty and perfection/utility are distinct concepts yet can be united or unifi ed” (2018, p. 309)). As I will show, this mistake results in an inconsistent story about Kant’s aesthetics as well as an inconsistency within Clewis’ own argument. I will try to articulate a more consistent story about the development of Kant’s ideas on aesthetics in general and his ideas on adherent beauty in particular by proposing that, contra Clewis, earlier Kant subscribed to what Clewis calls the “containment” account (beauty is a form of perfection) while the later Kant changed his mind (having given up on rationalism) and came to defend a version of “blocking-unificationist” view.

Books on Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment usually fall into one of the following sorts: introductions, in-depth companions, scholarly work offering specific interpretations of certain aspects of the book. Where does Michel Chaouli's book fit within this taxonomy? Reading the preface and the first few dozen pages, one gets the impression that it falls under the third rubric, aiming to defend a specific interpretation of Kant's aesthetic theory: in making a judgment of taste, our imagination is productive; it can make anything into an object of pleasure. According to Chaouli, the activity of making, as creative production, is also constitutive of aesthetic experience, and it demands...

Two dominant interpretations of Kant's notion of adherent beauty, the conjunctive view and the incorporation view, provide an account of how to form informed aesthetic assessments concerning artworks. According to both accounts, judgments of perfection play a crucial role in making informed, although impure, judgments of taste. These accounts only examine aesthetic responses to objects that meet or fail to meet the expectations we have regarding what they ought to be. I demonstrate that Kant's works of genius do not fall within either of these categories. The distinguishing features of these works, namely, originality and exemplarity, become unrecognizable on these interpretations because originality and exemplarity lie in the work's ability to exceed one's expectations concerning its form and content. They contribute to artistic beauty through alternative transformation methods distinct from that of abstraction, namely, concept expansion and repudiation. These additional accounts of transformation lead to a rather surprising outcome: works of genius turn out to be paradigm cases where one can and indeed ought to form informed pure judgments of taste.

In this paper, in answering the question why Kant didn’t think very highly of music, I argue that for Kant (i) music unlike other art forms, lends itself more easily to combination judgments involving judgments of sense, which increases the propensity to make aesthetic mistakes and is ill-suited as an activity for improving one’s taste; (ii) music expresses aesthetic ideas and presents rational ideas only by taking advantage of existing associations while other art forms do so by breaking with the laws of association and creating new associations. I propose that (ii) constitutes the reason why music is not a rich source for reflection and thereby cannot stimulate the enlargement of the cognitive faculties. Given that the standard Kant uses in setting up the hierarchy of fine arts in terms of their cultivating role is the enlargement of cognitive faculties, this explains why music is placed at the bottom of his hierarchy.

I argue that Kant’s aesthetic theory yields a fruitful theory of art criticism and that this theory presents an alternative both to the existing theories of his time and to contemporary theories. In this regard, my dissertation offers an examination of a neglected area in Kant scholarship since it is standardly assumed that a theory of criticism flies in the face of some of Kant’s most central aesthetic tenets, such as his rejection of aesthetic testimony and general objective principles of taste. If art criticism is an enterprise of providing evaluations of artworks supported by reasons, then it is hard to see what the Kantian art critic can do for us. If I cannot defer to the critic’s judgment that she loved Blade Runner and there are no feasible general principles linking the depiction of futuristic cityscapes, or the accompaniment of a haunting minimalist soundtrack to the goodness of a film, then it does not seem to matter whether the critic communicates to me her evaluation of Blade Runner or supports her evaluation with descriptions of Blade Runner scenes. Nevertheless, the assumption that these Kantian tenets preclude the possibility of art criticism is mistaken and it is my aim to show how this can be. The project has two phases. In the first phase I develop a new interpretation of Kant’s theory of artistic beauty. In the second phase I make use of this interpretation to put forward a Kantian account of art criticism. Central to my interpretation is the notion that judgments of perfection, e.g., Blade Runner is an excellent neo-noir science fiction film, inform our aesthetic evaluations and receive support from descriptions of non-aesthetic properties of the film. It is precisely this underappreciated role of judgments of perception that I exploit in making room for Kantian art criticism.

My aim in this paper is to expose a misrepresentation of Jean-Luc Nancy’s ideas on community in the secondary literature. I argue that discussions of Nancy’s work have failed to recognize a transformation that has occurred in his later thought, which distances him from Jacques Derrida. I propose that Nancy’s later work points the way beyond the “persistence of unhappy consciousness” in deconstruction through allowing for the possibility of the creation of a world alternative to globalization. Recognition of this transformation is suggestive for how Nancy’s theoretical framework might be employed in analyses of recent resistance movements.

Noël Carroll proposes a generalist theory of art criticism, which essentially involves evaluations of artworks on the basis of their success value, at the cost of rendering evaluations of reception value irrelevant to criticism. In this article, I argue for a hybrid account of art criticism, which incorporates Carroll's objective model but puts Carroll-type evaluations in the service of evaluations of reception value. I argue that this hybrid model is supported by Kant's theory of taste. Hence, I not only present an alternative theory of metacriticism, which has the merit of reinstating the centrality of reception value in art critics’ evaluations, but also show that, contrary to a common conception, Kant's aesthetic theory can house a fruitful account of art criticism. The benefit of this hybrid account is that, despite being essentially particularist, it should be appealing even to generalists, including Carroll.