James Grant

According to some, when you do the right thing, your moral beliefs make no difference to your act’s moral worth. Huckleberry Finn believes he is doing something wrong in helping Jim escape slavery. Yet his act reflects well on him. Some conclude that acting rightly reflects just as well on you whether you believe you are doing something right, wrong, supererogatory, or neutral. I argue against this. Doing the right thing with certain moral beliefs can diminish the moral worth of doing it. In such cases, you do the right thing in the wrong spirit.

The aim of this paper is to explain why creativity is an artistic merit. Artworks and non-artworks can both be creative. But creativity does not help make many other creative things good of their kind. A creative explanation is not a better explanation in virtue of being creative. Why, then, is a creative artwork a better artwork in virtue of being creative? Understanding this will give us a better understanding of the nature of artistic merit. The approach adopted in this paper is as follows. First, I say what creativity is and what an artistic merit is. Second, I identify reasons to doubt that creativity is an artistic merit. A good explanation of the merit of creativity should address these doubts. Third, I develop a theory of artistic merit that appeals to the final value of acting excellently – for example, virtuously or skilfully. Finally, I argue that this enables us to explain why creativity is an artistic merit. This account also enables us to argue that artistic merits give some things final value, and not merely instrumental value. It also provides reason to believe that ethical qualities of artworks enhance their artistic merit for the same reason creativity does.

Many philosophers claim that metaphor is indispensable for various purposes. What I shall call the ‘Indispensability Thesis’ is the view that we use at least some metaphors to think, to express, to communicate, or to discover what cannot be thought, expressed, communicated, or discovered without metaphor. I argue in this paper that support for the Indispensability Thesis is based on several confusions. I criticize arguments presented by Stephen Yablo, Berys Gaut, Richard Boyd, and Elisabeth Camp for the Indispensability Thesis, and distinguish it from several plausible claims with which it is easily confused. Although I do not show that the thesis is false, I provide seven grounds for suspicion of our sense (if we have it) that some metaphors are indispensable for the purposes claimed by advocates of the Indispensability Thesis

The prevalence of colourful metaphors and figurative language in critics’ descriptions of artworks has long attracted attention. Talk of ‘liquid melodies’, ‘purple prose’, ‘soaring arches’, and the use of still more elaborate figurative descriptions, is not uncommon. My aim in this paper is to explain why metaphor is so prevalent in critical description. Many have taken the prevalence of art-critical metaphors to reveal something important about aesthetic experience and aesthetic properties. My focus is different. I attempt to determine what metaphor enables critics to achieve and why it is so well suited to helping them achieve it. I begin by outlining my account of what metaphors communicate and defend it against objections to the effect that it does not apply to art-critical metaphors. I then distinguish between two kinds of art-critical metaphor. This distinction is not normally drawn, but drawing it is essential to understanding why critics use metaphor. I then explain why each kind of metaphor is so common in criticism.

The aim of this paper is to explain why imaginativeness is valuable. Recent discussions of imaginativeness or creativity (which I regard as the same property) have paid relatively little attention to this important question. My discussion has three parts. First, I elucidate the concept of imaginativeness by providing three conditions a product or act must satisfy in order to be imaginative. This account enables us to explain, among other things, why imaginativeness is associated with inspiration, why it is associated with the faculty of imagination, and why it is relative to persons and to contexts. Second, in the light of this account, I say what the imaginativeness of persons is. Philosophical discussions of the imaginativeness of persons usually treat it as a capacity. In fact, it is a tendency or disposition of a certain kind. Third, I give reasons why the imaginativeness of persons has the value it does. I begin by saying what the basic facts about its value are. When a person's imaginativeness is valuable, it is either (i) a good thing about a person, (ii) good for the person, or (iii) good for others. I provide explanations of each of these facts. I conclude by addressing the difficult question of whether a person's imaginativeness is non-instrumentally good for her. On Romantic and Romantic-inspired views, imaginativeness is non-instrumentally good for a person because of its connection with self-realization. I reject this claim. However, I argue that, often, imaginativeness is indeed non-instrumentally good for the imaginative person

Experientialism in aesthetics is the view that the artistic merit or the aesthetic value of something is determined by the final value of certain experiences of it. These are usually specified as experiences of it with understanding and appreciation. Until recently, experientialism was the dominant view. Not anymore. Experientialists are now subject to a barrage of objections, many of which they have not answered. Here I argue that all of these objections fail. I develop a new form of experientialism that is immune to them. It also has an independent rationale. It incorporates an account of the value of art appreciation that is plausible in its own right. And it endorses many of the core insights of anti-experientialists, especially concerning the final value of good art. Those of us unconvinced by experientialism need to take this form of it seriously. I conclude by identifying some genuine problems it faces. Even these aren’t clearly insoluble.

An increasingly popular view in the philosophy of art is that some artworks are good artworks at least partly because they are achievements. This view was introduced to explain why two works that look the same, such as an original painting and a perfect copy, can differ in artistic merit. An achievement theory can say that the original is better because it is a greater achievement. Achievement theories have since been used to answer other questions, and they are now a serious alternative to traditional theories of artistic merit. This paper has three aims. The first is to articulate the achievement theory more fully and explicitly than its advocates have. The second is to show that the achievement theory should be rejected, by raising five problems for it. The third is to show that appealing solely to the excellence, aptitude, and ineptitude a work manifests yields a better theory of artistic merit.

In a recent paper, Nicholas Stang argues that artworks are not valuable for their own sake in virtue of their artistic value, artworks have artistic value in virtue of the final value of the experiences they afford, and the only appropriate objects of appreciation are worktypes. All of these arguments rest on claims about the artistic value of copies of artworks that provide a radical challenge to the views that many philosophers have about copies. Here I argue that Stang's arguments are unsuccessful. The argument for is mistaken about what one is committed to if one thinks artworks are valuable for their own sake in virtue of their artistic value. The defense of fails to explain what it is supposed to explain. The argument for overgeneralizes from one kind of case. Finally, the basic claim Stang makes about the artistic value of copies is false. I defend an alternative view. I conclude by discussing the implications of my arguments for experientialism ). Reflection on the cases Stang considers, far from leading us to embrace experientialism, in fact reveals problems that experientialists need to confront

The Critical Imagination is a study of metaphor, imaginativeness, and criticism of the arts. Since the eighteenth century, many philosophers have argued that appreciating art is rewarding because it involves responding imaginatively to a work. Literary works can be interpreted in many ways; architecture can be seen as stately, meditative, or forbidding; and sensitive descriptions of art are often colourful metaphors: music can 'shimmer', prose can be 'perfumed', and a painter's colouring can be 'effervescent'. Engaging with art, like creating it, seems to offer great scope for imagination. Hume, Kant, Oscar Wilde, Roger Scruton, and others have defended variations on this attractive idea. In this book, James Grant critically examines it. The first half explains the role imaginativeness plays in criticism. To do this, Grant answers three questions that are of interest in their own right. First, what are the aims of criticism? Is the point of criticizing a work to evaluate it, to explain it, to modify our response to it, or something else? Second, what is it to appreciate art? Third, what is imaginativeness? He gives new answers to all three questions, and uses them to explain the role of imaginativeness in criticism. The book's second half focuses on metaphor. Why are some metaphors so effective? How do we understand metaphors? Are some thoughts expressible only in metaphor? Grant's answers to these questions go against much current thinking in the philosophy of language. He uses these answers to explain why imaginative metaphors are so common in art criticism. The result is a rigorous and original theory of metaphor, criticism, imaginativeness, and their interrelations.