Mark Windsor

Authenticity is an important and widely used concept in aesthetics. Yet it is also a contested and elusive one. In this article, we clarify the concept of authenticity as it is used in aesthetic discourse. Authenticity, we argue, is a term used to assert the truth of something possessing some contextually relevant feature that it is purported to have. Typically, however, this has an evaluative or normative dimension: the feature that an authenticity attribution verifies is either part of what grounds the object's aesthetic value or is normatively required by the aesthetic practice to which it belongs. We then propose a taxonomy of applications of authenticity according to the type of contextually relevant feature an object must possess to count as authentic—material authenticity, work authenticity, cultural authenticity, and personal authenticity. Using these categories, we provide a roadmap for navigating recent debates on authenticity in aesthetics.

Any adequate account of aesthetic experience must be able to accommodate the pervasiveness of aesthetic experiences in everyday life. While writers on everyday aesthetics have frequently taken inspiration from John Dewey’s Art as Experience, my aim in this article is to show that there is another work in the history of the discipline that provides a much better account of the diversity of everyday aesthetic experiences: R. G. Collingwood’s The Principles of Art. Whereas Dewey limits aesthetic experience to the fulfilment of an interaction with an aspect of the world, Collingwood identifies it with an imaginative activity that affords a conscious awareness and understanding of the felt character of one’s experiences in their individuality. Not only, I argue, does this capture the diversity of aesthetic experiences, but it also provides a more informative account of what makes those experiences aesthetic than its more recent competitors.

Many authors have remarked on the relationship between the aesthetic categories of the sublime and the uncanny. Building on a suggestion made by Cynthia Freeland, my aim in this paper is to show how, once inverted, Kant’s theory of the sublime provides a valuable resource for developing a novel theoretical approach to the uncanny. Whereas, according to Kant, the positive feeling of the sublime is a feeling of the superiority of one’s faculty of reason over anything in nature, the uncanny as antisublime is a feeling that arises when something in nature overwhelms one’s faculty of reason. Using Kant’s distinction between the mathematically sublime and the dynamically sublime, I propose that there are two sources of uncanny experiences: one that involves a threat to one’s capacity to make sense of the world as a systematic whole (the “theoretical uncanny”), and another that involves a threat to the unity or autonomy of the thinking subject (the “moral uncanny”). I illustrate these with two examples from literature: the house in Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves, and the doppelganger in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “William Wilson.”

In a recent article, Byoungjae Kim has proposed a novel solution to the puzzle of why Hume offers two standards of taste—the rules of art and the joint verdict of true judges. The rules of art, Kim proposes, are easy to formulate, but difficult to apply to particular cases. True judges are those who can reliably apply the rules of art to arrive at their superior judgements of taste. In this discussion note, I argue that this proposal should be rejected. Not only does it lack textual support, but it can also be shown to be implausible on independent grounds. Worse still, Hume explicitly contradicts it. An attentive reading of Hume’s essay does, however, show that Hume thinks that the rules of art have an important use in identifying true judges. This, I argue, is key to understanding the relationship between his two standards of taste.

Keepsakes are nostalgic objects par excellence. We value keepsakes because they prompt nostalgic memories of the past. But perhaps more importantly, we also value them because they afford a feeling of contact with that which they remind us of. Drawing on work in philosophy and psychology, this chapter aims to give an account of the nature and value of keepsakes as nostalgic objects. Keepsakes, it argues, are objects that bear a material continuity with some person, event, or place from one’s past to which one has a personal attachment. To understand the distinctive experiential value of keepsakes as nostalgic objects, however, the chapter argues that we need to invoke the imagination. Keepsakes manifest the presence of the past by prompting one to imaginatively project what a keepsake is historically connected with onto the object as one experiences it in the present.

Some objects we value because they afford a felt connection with people, events, or places connected with their past. Visiting Canterbury cathedral, you encounter the place where, in 1170, Archbishop Thomas Becket was murdered by four knights of Henry II. Knowing that you are standing in the very place where Becket’s blood was spilled gives the past event a sense of tangible reality. One feels ‘in touch with’ the past; history seems to ‘come alive’. In this paper, I propose an explanation for the phenomenology of such experiences in terms of an imaginative activity that represents what an object is historically connected with as part of the object in the present. One imagines of the site of Becket’s murder Becket being murdered. According to my account, objects that embody their histories are representations in Kendall Walton’s sense: they have the function of serving as props in games of make-believe.

In a recent article, Dawn Wilson (2021) has argued against single-stage accounts of photography by arguing against the latent photographic images upon which those accounts depend. Concomitantly, she argues that the only viable account of photography is multi-stage. Unlike single-stage accounts, multi-stage accounts do not postulate the existence of photographic images of any kind prior to development. Rather, according to multi-stage accounts, photographs are produced from “photographic registers.” In this Discussion Piece, I defend single-stage accounts by arguing that Wilson’s rejection of latent photographic images is premised on an implausible view of what a latent photographic image is. Given a reasonable interpretation, the latent images described in single-stage accounts just are the photographic registers described in multi-stage accounts.

One of the gravest charges that has been brought against Hume’s essay “Of the Standard of Taste” is that of circularity. Hume is accused of defining good art in terms of “true judges,” and of defining true judges in terms of their ability to judge good art. First, I argue that Hume avoids circularity since he offers a way of identifying good art that is logically independent of the verdict of true judges. Second, I argue that this clarifies an enduring puzzle in the scholarship on Hume’s essay: why he appears to offer not one but two standards of taste. Hume’s standard does not consist of general rules; however, Hume needs general rules to establish that some individuals’ tastes are more “delicate” than others’.

I propose a definition of the uncanny: an anxious uncertainty about what is real caused by an apparent impossibility. First, I outline the relevance of the uncanny to art and aesthetics. Second, I disambiguate theoretical uses of ‘uncanny’ and establish the sense of the term that I am interested in—namely, an emotional state directed towards particular objects in the world which are characteristically eerie, creepy, and weird. Third, I look at Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ as a means of drawing out the conditions that I claim are essential to uncanny experiences, and then elaborate the terms of my proposed definition. Finally, I show how the definition accounts for two paradigmatic kinds of uncanny phenomena: cases of ‘uncanny resemblances’, which include twins, doppelgangers, and very lifelike representations of the human body; and unlikely coincidences of events.

Freud’s famous essay “The ‘Uncanny’” is often poorly understood. In this paper, I clear up the popular misconception that Freud identifies all uncanny phenomena with the return of repressed infantile complexes by showing that he offers not one but two theories of the uncanny: “return of the repressed,” and another explanation that has to do with the apparent confirmation of “surmounted primitive beliefs.” Of the two, I argue that it is the latter, more often overlooked theory that faces fewer serious objections and carries greater explanatory power in respect of the uncanny.

‘Tales of dread’ is a genre that has received scant attention in aesthetics. In this paper, I aim to elaborate an account of tales of dread which effectively distinguishes these from horror stories, and helps explain the close affinity between the two, accommodating borderline cases. I briefly consider two existing accounts of the genre – namely, those of Noël Carroll and of Cynthia Freeland – and show why they are inadequate for my purposes. I then develop my own account of tales of dread, drawing on two theoretical resources: Freud’s ‘The “Uncanny”’, and Tzvetan Todorov’s The Fantastic. In particular, I draw on Freud to help distinguish tales of dread from horror stories, and I draw on Todorov to help explain the fluidity between the genres. I argue that both horror stories and tales of dread feature apparent impossibilities which are threatening; but whereas in horror stories the existence of the monster is confirmed, tales of dread are sustained by the audience’s uncertainty pertaining to preternatural objects or events. Where horror monsters pose an immediate, concrete danger to the subject’s physical well-being, these preternatural objects or events pose a psychological threat to the subject’s grasp of reality.