•  296
    On the Destruction of Musical Instruments
    Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 8. 2016.
    In this article, I aim to provide an account of the peculiar reasons that motivate our negative reaction whenever we see musical instruments being mistreated and destroyed. Stephen Davies has suggested that this happens because we seem to treat musical instruments as we treat human beings, at least in some relevant respects. I argue in favour of a different explanation, one that is based on the nature of music as an art form. The main idea behind my account is that musical instruments are not me…Read more
  •  274
    Emotions in the Listener: A Criterion of Artistic Relevance
    American Society for Aesthetics Graduate E-Journal 9 (1). 2017.
    Philosophers of music and psychologists have examined the various ways in which music is capable of arousing emotions in a listener. Among philosophers, opinions diverge as to the different types of music-induced emotions and as to their relevance to music listening. A somewhat neglected question concerns the possibility of developing a general criterion for the artistic relevance of music-induced emotions. In this paper, I will try to formulate such a criterion. In whatever way music may induce…Read more
  •  269
    Stephen Davies on the Issue of Literalism
    Debates in Aesthetics 13 (1). 2017.
    In this paper I discuss Stephen Davies’s defence of literalism about emotional descriptions of music. According to literalism, a piece of music literally possesses the expressive properties we attribute to it when we describe it as ‘sad’, ‘happy’, etc. Davies’s literalist strategy exploits the concept of polysemy: the meaning of emotion words in descriptions of expressive music is related to the meaning of those words when used in their primary psychological sense. The relation between the two m…Read more
  •  257
    On Evolutionary Explanations of Musical Expressiveness
    Evental Aesthetics 7 (1): 6-29. 2018.
    In this paper, I will examine an evolutionary hypothesis about musical expressiveness first proposed by Peter Kivy. I will first present the hypothesis and explain why I take it to be different from ordinary evolutionary explanations of musical expressiveness. I will then argue that Kivy’s hypothesis is of crucial importance for most available resemblancebased accounts of musical expressiveness. For this reason, it is particularly important to assess its plausibility. After having reviewed the e…Read more
  •  185
    Reply to Yee
    American Society for Aesthetics Graduate E-Journal 10 (1). 2018.
  •  143
    Wollheim, Wittgenstein, and Pictorial Representation. Seeing-as and Seeing-in (review)
    British Journal of Aesthetics 58 (2): 209-212. 2018.
    Wollheim, Wittgenstein, and Pictorial Representation. Seeing-as and Seeing-in KempGary and MrasGabriel M. Routledge. 2016. pp. 308. £110.00.
  •  84
    In this paper I claim that Allen Carlson’s object-centered model for the aesthetic appreciation of nature could be extended to food. The application of an object-centered model to food requires the identification of appropriate foci of appreciative attention. I claim that knowledge about food function and history is relevant to its appreciation, as is the interplay between the resources of a territory and the way in which these are used by its inhabitants. After having offered a brief applicatio…Read more
  •  77
    What 4′33″ also Is: A Response to Dodd
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (2): 395-400. 2019.
    Julian Dodd [2018] persuasively argues that John Cage’s 4′33″ should be characterised as a silent piece, as opposed to a sonically replete piece, containing the environmental sounds that occur as it is performed; a piece of performance art, but not a piece of music; a work of conceptual art. While I agree with Dodd’s claims, I contend that he fails to account for two features of 4′33″. I argue that a qualified description of Cage’s work as belonging to a subgenre of conceptual art could address …Read more
  •  74
    Historically Uninformed Views of Historically Informed Performance
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 77 (2): 193-205. 2019.
    This paper argues that contemporary analytic philosophy of music has characterized historically informed performance practice as compliance-focused, impersonal, and work-centered. The first part of the paper gathers evidence in support of this claim from the works of Julian Dodd, Peter Kivy, James O. Young, Aron Edidin, and Stephen Davies. In the second part of the paper, I reject this received view. Evidence from actual performance practice, as well as from the practitioners’ reflection on thei…Read more
  •  65
    Engineering Human Beauty
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 1-14. 2022.
    Individual differences in bodily beauty result in significant differences in life outcomes. Some such differences seem unwarranted. On this basis, various authors have argued that there is a kind of discrimination—lookism—that affects those who are aesthetically disadvantaged. Several strategies have been proposed to address lookism. One aim of this paper is to draw a distinction between two sorts of anti-lookist strategies. Redistributive approaches propose to alter the current distribution of …Read more
  •  64
    Appearance Emotionalism in Music: Analysis and Criticism
    Journal of Aesthetic Education 53 (3): 93-105. 2019.
    This paper is composed of two related parts. The first raises questions regarding the characterisation of the phenomenology of music listening required by Davies’s theory of musical expressiveness, appearance emotionalism. I will identify two possible readings of the theory, a thick and a thin one, and claim that the former represents the basic characterisation of what it is to hear expressive music according to appearance emotionalism. The thick characterisation is to be preferred, I will claim…Read more
  •  51
    Inanimation: A network of feeling and perception
    Analysis 80 (2): 301-309. 2020.
    We often use terms primarily concerned with the description of inanimate objects in order to characterize psychological states or dispositions, without being able to specify the connection between the two uses. I call this inanimation. In this paper, I propose an account of inanimation and of its connection to expressiveness.
  •  47
    Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics (review)
    British Journal of Aesthetics 61 (2): 262-269. 2021.
    Rhythm is an underexplored topic in contemporary Anglophone philosophy of music.1 This collection is an attempt to change this trend. It contains twenty-four essays, dealing with issues that range from the ontology of rhythm to questions regarding its existence and relative importance in art forms other than music.I cannot here discuss all of the contributions and my selection should not be taken as indicative of differences in quality among the various chapters.The book’s introduction is worthy…Read more
  •  38
    Imagination, Music, and the Emotions: a Philosophical Study (review)
    British Journal of Aesthetics 59 (2): 230-233. 2019.
    Imagination, Music, and the Emotions: A Philosophical StudyTrivediSaamsuny. 2017. pp. 205. £57
  •  27
    Historically Informed Performance: A Reply to Dodd
    The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 78 (1): 90-94. 2020.
    The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 78, Issue 1, Page 90-94, Winter 2020.
  •  27
    Edited book containing Italian translations of essays from prominent contemporary English-speaking philosophers on the topics of expression and expressiveness.
  •  18
    Pourquoi la musique? (review)
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74 (1): 113-115. 2016.
  •  18
    Improvisational mistakes
    British Journal of Aesthetics. forthcoming.
    This paper discusses mistakes that occur in improvised musical performance. I first develop a couple of distinctions that are useful to understand the varied nature of such mistakes. Particularly, I think that it is important to distinguish mistakes that depend upon formal features of the music, and mistakes that are such in virtue of a failure of the performer’s intentions. Within this latter category, I argue that it is useful to distinguish between two different layers of performance intentio…Read more
  •  17
    Why B-Flat Is Not Natural: Reply to Dyck
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 75 (2): 187-191. 2017.
  •  16
    Calligraphy as a Symbol System
    with Jiachen Liu and Ye Zhu
    Philosophy East and West. forthcoming.
    We apply to the art of calligraphy some of the semiotic concepts developed by Nelson Goodman. While this framework cannot describe everything that is interesting and valuable about specific calligraphic traditions, we argue that it can nonetheless elegantly capture some distinctive features of calligraphy and of its position among other major art forms.
  •  13
    Andrea Baldini, "A Philosophy Guide to Street Art and the Law." (review)
    Philosophy in Review 40 (3): 91-93. 2020.
  •  11
    Engineering Human Beauty
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4): 998-1011. 2023.
    ABSTRACT Individual differences in bodily beauty result in significant differences in life outcomes. Some such differences seem unwarranted. On this basis, various authors have argued that there is a kind of discrimination—lookism—that affects those who are aesthetically disadvantaged. Several strategies have been proposed to address lookism. One aim of this paper is to draw a distinction between two sorts of anti-lookist strategies. Redistributive approaches propose to alter the current distrib…Read more
  •  10
    Stakeholders and Experts in Culinary Cultural Heritage
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. forthcoming.
    This article is about culinary authenticity as a cultural heritage issue. Our purpose is to establish a distinction between experts and stakeholders that, as we.
  •  8
    Critique of Pure Music (review)
    American Society for Aesthetics Graduate E-Journal 7 (2). 2015.
  •  7
    Philosophy of Music: Analytic Perspectives
    Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2018.
    Analytic Perspectives in the Philosophy of Music The philosophy of music attempts to answer questions concerning the nature and value of musical practices. Contemporary analytic philosophy has tackled these issues in its characteristically piecemeal approach, and has revived interest in questions about the ontological nature of musical works, the experience of musical expressiveness, the value … Continue reading Philosophy of Music: Analytic Perspectives →
  •  7
    Replicating Paintings
    Contemporary Aesthetics 16. 2018.
    In this paper, I discuss cases of replication in the visual arts, with particular focus on paintings. In the first part, I focus on painted copies, that is, manual reproductions of paintings created by artists. Painted copies are sometimes used for the purpose of aesthetic education on the original. I explore the relation between the creation of painted copies and their use as aesthetic surrogates of the original artwork and draw a positive conclusion on the aesthetic benefits of replica product…Read more