•  106
    Kant’s Sublime and Ingenious Insights into Judgments of the Ugly
    In Lars Aagaard-Mogensen & Jane Forsey (eds.), On Taste: Aesthetic Exchanges, Cambridge Scholars Press. pp. 67-84. 2018.
    I explore the question of whether Kant's theory in the _Critique of Judgment_ can account for judgments of taste regarding the ugly. While there has been much debate regarding this issue in recent decades, many scholars consider the harmonious free play of the faculties to be central to this question. Harmony between the imagination and understanding is stressed in a series of articles regarding pure judgments of taste of the ugly beginning in the mid-1990s and extending into the 2000s. I invest…Read more
  •  149
    Generative Disgust, Aesthetic Engagement, and Community
    In Max Ryynänen, Heidi Kosonen & Susanne Ylönen (eds.), Cultural Approaches to Disgust and the Visceral, Routledge. pp. 175-187. 2022.
    How do individuals and communities respond to negative aesthetic experience? Historically, philosophical aesthetics has devoted much thought to positive aesthetic experience, including the beautiful, agreeable, charming, and tasteful. But this is only a partial picture. Some aesthetic experience displeases: the ugly, disgusting, and horrific are but a few examples with which aestheticians have grappled in recent decades. The aversive and visceral nature of disgust has generated particular intere…Read more
  •  69
    Productive Excess: Aesthetic Ideas, Silence, and Community
    Journal of Aesthetic Education 48 (2): 1-15. 2014.
    Due to the complexity of aesthetic ideas and the lack of a determinate concept that is adequate to the experience, we search for the words to describe our encounters with art. Sometimes, that search is in vain, and we have difficulty expressing ourselves. In such cases, we are so taken aback by the sheer amount of cognitive activity spurred by our aesthetic experience that we are silenced by art. Instead of viewing what happens in judgments of taste as “discursively mute,” as does Joseph Cannon …Read more