Kalle Puolakka

It might come as a surprise for someone who has only a superficial knowledge of Donald Davidson’s philosophy that he has claimed literary language to be ‘a prime test of the adequacy of any view on the nature of language’.1 The claim, however, captures well the transformation that has happened in Davidson’s thinking on language since he began in the 1960’s to develop a truth-conditional semantic theory for natural languages in the lines of Alfred Tarski’s semantic conception of truth. About twenty years afterwards, this project was replaced with a view that highlights the flexible nature of language and, in consequence, the importance of the speaker’s intentions for a theory of meaning, culminating in Davidson’s staggering claim that ‘there is no such thing as a language’.

In the past few years, commentary literature on the work of Richard Shusterman, the foremost contemporary representative of pragmatist aesthetics, has steadily grown. Symposia on Shusterman’s theory have been published in various journals, and about three years ago the first monograph-length study examining Shusterman’s views on aesthetics was released. Now alongside these pieces a collection of articles edited by Dorota Koczanowicz and the author of the book on Shusterman’s pragmatist aesthetics Wojcieh Malecki has appeared. The anthology consists of twelve essays devoted to different parts of Shusterman’s pragmatism, as well as two articles by Shusterman himself, an intellectual biography that begins the article..

This article considers the validity and strength of Richard Rorty’s pragmatist theory of interpretation in the light of two ethical issues related to literature and interpretation. Rorty’s theory is rejected on two grounds. First, it is argued that his unrestrained account of interpretation is incompatible with the distinctive moral concerns that have been seen to restrict the scope and nature of valid approaches to artworks. The second part of the paper claims that there is no indispensable relationship between supporting Rorty’s pragmatist theory of interpretation and the important place that is attached to literature in the liberal society outlined by him. A reading of Donald Davidson’s texts on literary language and interpretation implies that an intentionalist theory of interpretation can accommodate those features that Rorty values in literature as well.

The aesthetic and political sides of public art have recently been examined from different theoretical vantage points. Pragmatist accounts, however, have been largely absent from the discussion. This article develops a theory of public art on some central ideas of John Dewey's aesthetics and social philosophy. From a pragmatist perspective, the best cases of public art turn out to have high social significance, for they are means of promoting the sense of community, which Dewey saw as foundational for well-functioning democracies. The Deweyan account of public art developed in this article is set against theories that explain its social value by public artworks’ ability to disrupt people's everyday routines and beliefs, as well as by the political alertness they often raise. Diana Boros's recent treatment of what she calls “visionary public art” serves as the main specimen of this approach. The Deweyan understanding of public art is illuminated and defended with the help of a reading of John Adams's On the Transmigration of Souls—a piece composed in memory of the victims of 9/11—that highlights its capacity to generate such communal experiences that have a fundamental role in Dewey's theory of democracy.

In this essay I discuss the relationship between naturalism and culture by drawing on the aesthetic notions of two leading pragmatists, John Dewey and Richard Rorty. Rorty’s view of the cultural significance of metaphor, which is based on Donald Davidson’s theory of metaphor, centers on the distinction between a naturalistic and an idealistic view of the cognitive value of metaphor. I then discuss the development from idealism to naturalism in Dewey’s view of the imagination and the parallels that may be drawn between Dewey’s and Rorty’s views, particularly regarding the latter’s critique of idealism and its failure to provide a credible philosophical understanding of culture. In the final section I outline a naturalistic view of the emergence of culture based on Dewey’s notions of rhythm and rite as presented in his classic work Art as Experience.

Many philosophers have devoted a lot of attention to the work of Richard Wagner. This article provides philosophical accounts of two important aspects of Wagner’s most ambitious work, the tetralogy Ring of the Nibelung. First, I examine how the musical device developed by Wagner known as the leitmotif functions in Act 1 of the second opera of Wagner’s Ring, Die Walküre, through the analysis of leitmotifs presented by Roger Scruton. I shall focus particularly on the perspective that the use of this musical device provides on the love between the siblings Siegmund and Sieglinde depicted in the act. My belief is that Scruton’s account of leitmotifs helps to explain the unique character that has been attributed to this act. The second part of the article presents a more detailed examination of the significance of the love between Siegmund and Sieglinde for The Ring. Besides Scruton’s views, the interpretation of The Ring by Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht will have an important role in this examination

Everyday aestheticians have had relatively little to say about literature. Inspired by Peter Kivy’s philosophy of literature as laid out in his books The Performance of Reading and Once-Told Tales, I examine reading literature as a part of everyday life. I argue that not only do Kivy’s views help explain the value that avid readers place on their daily silent engagement with a book, but that his philosophy of literature also shows how literary works can have an aesthetic presence in our everyday lives even during periods in-between reading a book. In light of the paper, literary reading turns out to be an artistic routine that fills avid readers’ everyday lives in a very literal sense.

According to a popular account, literary works can give a sense of the “inside” feel of various human experiences, literature thereby supplementing the external and objective perspective on the world that the different sciences aim at. This paper extends this understanding of literature's cognitive value, usually called “experiential knowledge,” with some key ideas of John Dewey's philosophy. It is argued that Dewey's general take on experience, as well as three of his central concepts—undergoing, inquiry, and growth—can significantly contribute to our understanding of how experiential knowledge emerges from literary engagements and of the general cognitive significance of this type of knowledge. A particularly important goal of the paper is to show, against some skeptics, that experiential knowledge can have genuine epistemic weight, despite its nonpropositional and subjective character. It is also argued that experiential knowledge does not require a complete overlap between real-world experiences and literary experiences, as one recent criticism assumes.

This paper outlines a pragmatist aesthetic theory on the basis of themes relating to naturalism, metaphor, and solidarity found in Richard Rorty’s neopragmatism. A central part of this attempt is to show that some previous readings of Rorty’s work in aesthetics are misguided. I begin by raising aspects of Rorty’s work that have been previously largely overlooked in aesthetics and philosophy of art, and which I believe undermine particularly Richard Shusterman’s critical reading of Rorty. I shall then move on to discuss the social role Rorty assigns to metaphors in his postmetaphysical liberalist culture and argue that the social and cultural view of art and the aesthetic Rorty’s philosophy of literature contains overlaps in some significant respects with some central points of John Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics. I close by outlining some new set of issues for pragmatist aesthetics that emerge from the discussion of Rorty’s work presented in the paper.

Theodor W. Adorno is a gigantic figure in musical aesthetics, and many still consider his views relevant, not only for analyzing the modernist music he was inspired by and that he inspired himself, but also for more contemporary developments in classical music. John Adams is arguably the foremost contemporary composer who has tried to break away from the modernist musical language that was still very much dominant when he began his career as a composer, and he has been very outspoken about his antipathy toward the Schoenbergian-inspired compositional techniques that are at the background of Adorno’s musical aesthetics, particularly his Philosophy of New Music. By presenting an interpretation of Adams’ music that draws on some key aspects of John Dewey’s aesthetics—aesthetic experience, rhythm, and his appreciation of common culture—I raise the question of how relevant Adorno’s seminal book still is for understanding the aesthetics of the new music of today.

Peter Kivy has argued that scholars of the music of Dimitri Shostakovich are misguided when they make interpretations that attribute complex extra-musical content to works of his that bear no indications of such content, such as a title or an explicitly announced programme. Upon Kivy’s account, such works should rather be approached in terms of absolute music. In this paper, I show some decisive weaknesses in this critique. Drawing on the relevant philosophical literature, I examine Shostakovich’s use of musical quotations—an essential feature of his compositions that Kivy ignores—and the significant role these play in constructing the extra-musical content of his works. Relying, in part, on recent research on authorial intentions, I also argue that the criteria Kivy presents for the reclassification of, seeming cases of, absolute music music as programme music is too strict. Such reclassifications need not be accompanied by an explanation as to why the composer has not provided any direct public indication of the content of the work, as Kivy insists.

Relativism and Intentionalism in Interpretation: Davidson, Hermeneutics, and Pragmatism applies a rich philosophical perspective to questions central to the interpretation of art. Puolakka uses discussions of the relativity of interpretations to demonstrate that the pluralistic attitude towards art that characterizes pragmatism and hermeneutics can be combined with a view stressing the role of authorial intentions. Academics concerned with the philosophy of art and aesthetics will find unique and worthwhile contributions to the study here

This discussion piece raises some worries in the view Yuriko Saito develops in her Aesthetics of Care: Practice in Everyday Life (2022), on the role of aesthetics in fostering a way of life, which is infused by a particular kind of care towards the world. My claim is that Saito’s theory is haunted by problems similar to those Gregory Currie has recently addressed towards philosophical views on the cognitive value of literature. Like such approaches in Currie’s view, Saito’s claim that an appropriate kind of aesthetic appreciation nurtures care ethics, too, would benefit from a more empirically grounded inquiry. Moreover, I believe that Currie’s sceptical points on the idea of literature as a vehicle for expanding our emphatic capacities are also relevant to Saito’s account of the relation between aesthetics and care ethics. I close by sketching a different way of relating aesthetics and ethics from Saito’s in terms of the notion of exemplification.

Do not let the subtitle fool you. “An outline” is a far too modest description of Ryder’s book, for it presents an interesting and carefully crafted account of experience in the broadly pragmatic naturalist framework. The author mentions John Dewey’s notion of aesthetic experience as his primary background inspiration and his analysis is at its best in the aesthetic parts of the work, which is by no means to discredit the merits of its other major sections that deal with the cognitive and the political dimensions of experience in interesting ways. Indeed, Ryder’s book is among the most important texts in the tradition of pragmatist aesthetics of recent years and everyone interested in pursuing aesthetics in the...