Ioannis G. Ntagkas

Introduced into the philosophical lexicon during the Eighteenth Century, the term ‘aesthetic’ has come to be used to designate, among other things, a kind of object, a kind of judgment, a kind of attitude, a kind of experience, and a kind of value. For the most part, aesthetic theories have divided over questions particular to one or another of these designations: whether artworks are necessarily aesthetic objects; how to square the allegedly perceptual basis of aesthetic judgments with the fact that we give reasons in support of them; how best to capture the elusive contrast between an aesthetic attitude and a practical one; whether to define aesthetic experience according to its phenomenological or representational content; how best to understand the relation between aesthetic value and aesthetic experience. But questions of more general nature have lately arisen, and these have tended to have a skeptical cast: whether any use of ‘aesthetic’ may be explicated without appeal to some other; whether agreement respecting any use is sufficient to ground meaningful theoretical agreement or disagreement; whether the term ultimately answers to any legitimate philosophical purpose that justifies its inclusion in the lexicon. The skepticism expressed by such general questions did not begin to take hold until the later part of the 20th century, and this fact prompts the question whether (a) the concept of the aesthetic is inherently problematic and it is only recently that we have managed to see that it is, or (b) the concept is fine and it is only recently that we have become muddled enough to imagine otherwise. Adjudicating between these possibilities requires a vantage from which to take in both early and late theorizing on aesthetic matters.

18th-century British aesthetics addressed itself to a variety of questions: What is taste? What is beauty? Is there is a standard of taste and of beauty? What is the relation between the beauty of nature and that of artistic representation? What is the relation between one fine art and another? How ought the fine arts be ranked one against another? What is the nature of the sublime and ought it be ranked with the beautiful? What is the nature of genius and what is its relation to taste? Although none of these questions was peripheral to 18th-century British aesthetics, not all were equally central. The question on which the others tended to turn was the question concerning the nature of taste. But this question was not simply how best generally to define taste. Everyone seems to have been in at least rough agreement with Joseph Addison’s early definition of taste as “that faculty of soul, which discerns the beauties of an author with pleasure, and the imperfections with dislike” (Addison and Steele 1879, no. 409). But agreeing with Addison meant agreeing only to use “taste” to refer to that faculty and to acknowledge that such discerning has something of the phenomenology of sensation. The central question was how to think of taste so defined. Is taste a higher, cognitive faculty, akin perhaps to reason, with objects of a primarily intellectual nature? Or is it a lower, bodily faculty, more akin to the five bodily senses, and with objects of a primarily material nature? The major theories that arose in response to this question can be grouped into three main lineages: (a) internal-sense theories, of which the theories of Shaftesbury (1711), Hutcheson (1725), Hume (1739–40, 1751, and 1757) and Reid (1785) are representative; (b) imagination theories, of which theories of Addison (1712) and Burke (1757/59) are representative; and (c) association theories, of which the theories of Gerard (1757) and Alison (1790) are representative.

Arthur Danto argued from the premiss that artworks are essentially cognitive to the conclusion that they are incidentally aesthetic. I wonder why Danto, and the very many of us he persuaded, came to believe that the cognitive and the aesthetic oppose one another. I argue, contrary to Danto’s historical claims, that the cognitive and the aesthetic did not come into opposition until the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, and that they were brought into opposition for reasons of art-critical expediency rather than philosophical necessity. I conclude that a robustly cognitive notion of the aesthetic remains an option for us.

© British Society of Aesthetics 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] you are philosophically uncurious or have no aesthetic life, Peter Kivy’s new book may not be for you. Otherwise you owe it to yourself to read it. Kivy’s question—why we argue about art—has received scant philosophical attention, yet the slightest philosophy is all you need to motivate it. Though aesthetic disputes are, as Kivy says, widespread, persistent, vigorous and often heated, we seem unable to account for why we engage in them. Kivy develops his own account with patience and good sense. He writes with unusual care for his reader. He is indeed unwilling to leave any intelligent layperson behind. Yet the force of his arguments and the novelty of his conclusions are likely to shake the assumptions of the most...

Most students of philosophy, at one time or another, have worked through Descartes' Meditations and witnessed this reduction of the world to the res cogitans and consequent attempt to recover the real, or extra-mental, world through proofs for God's existence and divine veracity. Whatever our final assessment of the validity and soundness of these proofs may be, there can be no doubt that the judgment of history is that they fail, leaving Descartes' conception of the self forever confined to the horizons of thought. Without the proofs for God's existence, Descartes becomes an idealist. Indeed, Kant labels him a "problematic idealist" for whom "there is only one empirical assertion that is indubitably certain, namely that 'I am'", suggesting that, as far as Kant is concerned, Descartes' attempt to prove the real existence of anything outside of his mind, including God, does not work. And Schopenhauer, just before claiming that "true philosophy must at all costs be idealistic," praises Descartes for finding the "only correct starting point... of all philosophy". Husserl is so taken by this starting point that he will title one of his introductions to pure phenomenology, Cartesian Meditations, thus inviting his reader to repeat Descartes' Meditations, this time, without the proofs for God's existence and divine veracity. Due to the tradition in which he has been passed down to us, Descartes may be called not only the "father of modern philosophy," but also "the grandfather of transcendental phenomenology." Oddly enough, evidence for this claim is seen in the fact that, at least within contemporary continental circles, Heidegger's reworking of the Husserlian project gets conceived as a simultaneous reworking of the Cartesian project.

Last year, as some of you may recall, I took it upon my chairly shoulders to solve the problem of causation, where this problem can be stated this way: What is causation? According to the analysis I offered, C is a cause of E if and only if C makes E happen. I am happy to report that, in the year since delivering this account of causation, no objections have arisen. The critics have been silenced. Indeed, my colleague Dan Hausman, the Herbert Simon Professor of Philosophy, reports that he is no longer satisfied with the view he expressed in his recent book on causation, and I have no doubt that his change of mind is due in no small part to my seminal contribution to this subject. If you would permit me a joke, I think I “made happen” a change in Dan’s mind. I should also mention that we are now fortunate to have amongst us Carolina Sartorio, whose own analysis of causation, arrived at independently, seems but a stylistic variant of my own. Where I see causes as things that make things happen, she sees them as things that make a difference. I think, but can’t be certain, that our analyses come to the same thing. Perhaps if she hadn’t muddied the waters with all those numbered propositions and ‘ifs’ and ‘thens’ we could settle the matter

Toot. Pass gas. Break wind. Cut the cheese. Float an air biscuit. Burp from behind. Blow the brown horn. The backfire, bant, bucksnort, booty bomb, colon cologne, drifter, fanny bubble, gasser, gurgler, moon beam, nether belch, pants puffer, pooh tune, rip-snort, sphincter whistle, thunder dumpling, tush tickler, and trouser cough. These are synonyms for a bodily function that is as natural as breathing, eating, or sleeping. Yet unlike other physiological functions, the ‘flatus’ is a source of endless humor – perhaps more so than any other subject in human experience. But why are farts funny? That is a question that is both serious and philosophically interesting

The liar and kindred paradoxes show that we can derive contradictions if our language possesses sentences lending themselves to paradox and we reason classically from schema about truth: Sis true iffp, where the letter p is to be replaced with a sentence and the letter S with a name of that sentence. This article presents a theory of truth that keeps at the expense of classical logic. The theory is couched in a language that possesses paradoxical sentences. It incorporates all the instances of the analogue of for that language and also includes other platitudes about truth. The theory avoids contradiction because its logical framework is an appropriately constructed nonclassical propositional logic. The logic and the theory are different from others that have been proposed for keeping, and the methods used in the main proofs are novel.

The liar and kindred paradoxes show that we can derive contradictions when we reason in accordance with classical logic from the schema (T) about truth: S is true iff p, where ‘p’ is to be replaced with a sentence and ‘S’ with a name of that sentence. The paper presents two arguments to the effect that the blame lies not with (T) but with classical logic. The arguments derive contradictions using classical logic, but instead of appealing to (T), they invoke semantic claims that seem even harder to reject. The first argument relies on two standard semantic principles that are not disquotational and on the claim that if there is such a thing as the property of being true, then ‘true’ expresses that property. The second argument relies on a schema about meaning: S means that p, where ‘S’ and ‘p’ are to be replaced as before.

Existentialism about propositions is the view that a proposition expressed in a sentence containing a nonempty name or indexical depends ontologically on the referent of the name or indexical: the proposition could not exist if the referent did not. The paper focuses on names. It discusses some arguments for existentialism and then presents a novel one. That argument does not presuppose that propositions have constituents, and it could be accepted by those who hold broadly Fregean views about names. It shows that, for example, if Aristotle had not existed, no sentence could have meant that Aristotle is a philosopher. The paper also touches on the consequences of existentialism.

If we wish to formulate an axiomatic truth-theory interpreting a modal language and treat the symbol of necessity as a sentential operator and not as a quantifier over possible worlds, there arise various problems. These are due partly to the fact that words could have meant something other than what they actually mean and partly to certain principles of modal metaphysics. One of those principles is existentialism about propositions: a proposition that is expressed in a sentence containing a non-empty name could not exist if the referent of the name did not exist. The paper explains how the problems arise. It also explains how we can avoid them using substitutional quantification in the metalanguage. The truth-theory we can construct in that way is compositional and homophonic, and its theorems interpreting the various sentences of the modal language are derived in a straightforward way. The paper develops one such theory for a propositional modal language and one for a first-order modal language. The first-order case involves a number of intricacies that are discussed.

The thesis that follows proffers a solution to the mind-matter problem, the problem as to how mind and matter relate. The proposed solution herein is a variant of panpsychism – the theory that all (pan) has minds (psyche) – that we name pansentient monism. By defining the suffix 'psyche' of panpsychism, i.e. by analysing what 'mind' is (Chapter 1), we thereby initiate the effacement of the distinction between mind and matter, and thus advance a monism. We thereafter critically examine the prevalent view, antithetical to a pansentient monism, that mind is not identical to matter but emergent therefrom (Chapter 2). This anti-emergentist critique acts also as a fortification of the Genetic Argument for panpsychism: if mind is not emergent (nor distinct) from matter, mind must always have existed with matter. But what is 'matter'? Chapter 3 investigates what we understand by 'matter', or 'the physical', and exposes it as a highly deficient concept and percept that in concreto points to its identity with that denoted by 'mind'. This also acts as a fortification of the Abstraction Argument for panpsychism, employing a new taxonomy of physicalism and a new taxonomy of the varieties of abstraction. Thus do we reach a monism that is a parsimonious psycho-physical identity theory. But here we face what can be called The Identity Problem for Panpsychism: if our panpsychism is a psycho-physical identity theory, how can it respond to the powerful objections that beset the identity theory of the twentieth century? In Chapter 4 it will be argued that, like emergentism, this psycho-neural identity theory presupposed a deficient concept of 'matter', down to which mind was reduced away, let alone identified. But to identify down phenomena to what is actually an abstraction is to commit failure of explanation. When the theory is amended accordingly, we move from a psycho-neural identity theory to a genuine psycho-physical identity theory that as such can overcome the aforementioned identity problem. Furthermore, as Chapter 5 clarifies, our pansentient monism has, in addition to parsimony, the explanatory power to resolve the problem of mental causation that afflicts both the reductive physicalism of psycho-neural identity theory and the non-reductive physicalism of emergentism, by genuinely identifying physical and mental causation. Jaegwon Kim considers the place of consciousness in a physical world and the nature of mental causation to be the two key components of the mind-matter problem. Through the critical analysis of our prosaic understanding of mind and matter in this thesis, which incorporates the thought of both classical and contemporary thinkers through a novel fusion, it is hoped that both components are addressed and redressed. That is to say that I present this pansentient monism as a plausible, parsimonious, explanatory, and thus, I think, powerful position towards this ever-perplexing mind-matter mystery. [This thesis was passed in January 2019 with viva examination from Galen Strawson and Joel Krueger.

Pantheism – All is God – is the hidden doctrine behind many reported psychedelic-occasioned experiences, both in the literature and in clinical trials, yet its meaning is little understood in the clinical and therapeutic spheres. This essay therefore seeks to remedy this deficit by offering a fresh outline of Pantheism via the exploration of its etymology and history, the meanings of pan/all and theos/God, before traveling into a Pantheism typology that covers the two veritable varieties, Monist and Idealist Pantheism, as well as related doctrines that include Physicalist Pantheism, Partial Pantheism, Panentheism, and Panpsychism.

This is a (preprint) Commentary on: Borkel, Lucas F., et al. "Altered Rationality? Integrating Psychedelic Experiences Into Rational Thinking Through the Critical Anchor Approach." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 2025. Project MUSE. Introduction: In the developing field of psychedelic-assisted therapy and wellness, there loom large philosophical questions pertaining to the significance of the psychedelic experience – questions touching the three traditional pillars of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology (ethics and aesthetics). This paper from Borkel et al. asks for the application of an epistemology against metaphysical postulations in psychedelic-assisted therapy to prevent ‘epistemic harm’ and thus retain what the authors consider to be metaphysical neutrality. More specifically, the authors advocate that a method of rationality – which they formalize as the ‘Critical Anchor Approach’ (CAA) – be applied to psychedelic experiences that encompasses (i) critical thinking, (ii) meta- (self-) consciousness, (iii) epistemic humility, (iv) an empirical epistemology, and (v) the ‘adoption of phenomenal rather than metaphysical interpretations’ of such experiences. This is all to avoid the hazards, or the ‘epistemic risks’, of interpreting ‘psychedelic experiences and other irrational-belief-inducing states’ as that which William James calls ‘genuine metaphysical revelation’ (James, 1902, XVI), experiences the authors consider to be potential delusions. There is certainly material to commend in this paper, but I shall here, as this is a brief commentary, seek to show that this approach implodes under the weight of its own conditions – and moreover could itself be harmful to psychedelic-assisted therapy and wellness. As an alternative I suggest an open, rational, critical, and undogmatic approach to integrating metaphysical experiences into such therapy, as recommended by the Royal College of Psychiatrists. ...