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The Geography of TasteOxford University Press. 2024.Aesthetic preferences and practices vary widely between individuals and between cultures. How should aesthetics proceed if we take this fact of aesthetic diversity, rather than the presumption of aesthetic universality, as our starting point? How should we theorize the cultural origins and cultural basis of aesthetic diversity? How should we think about the value and normativity of aesthetic diversity? In an effort to model what the turn toward diversity might look like in aesthetic inquiry, eac…Read more
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On the Importance of Beauty and TasteRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 92 229-252. 2022.We have all heard people say ‘Beauty is only skin-deep’, or ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’: our culture promulgates a conception of beauty as subjective, superficial, and independent of other values like moral goodness or knowledge and understanding. Yet our taste in beauty affects many aspects of our lives, sometimes playing a decisive – and often detrimental – role in areas as wide-ranging as our identity and self-esteem, our morally salient decisions, and our relationship to the envir…Read more
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Experimental philosophy of aestheticsIn Alexander Max Bauer & Stephan Kornmesser (eds.), The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy, De Gruyter. 2023.
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Being for Beauty: Aesthetic Agency and ValueOxford University Press. 2018.
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Experimental Philosophy: Impossible MetaphorsProceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy 38 3-11. 2018.In his 2005 paper, DeClercq observes that aesthetic terms such as ‘beautiful’, ‘elegant’, ‘harmonious’, etc. resist metaphorical interpretation and argues that it is the fact that such terms cannot be involved in category-mistakes that explains their metaphorical uninterpretability. While I largely agree with DeClercq’s observation of the metaphorical uninterpretability of aesthetic terms, I offer both non-empirical and empirical considerations against his category-based explanation of the phe…Read more
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A defence of experimental philosophy in aestheticsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (8): 885-907. 2020.Although experimental philosophy is now over a decade old, it has only recently been introduced to the domain of philosophical aesthetics. So why is there already a need to defend it? Because, as I argue in this paper, we can anticipate the three main types of objection generally addressed to experimental philosophy and show that none of them concern experimental philosophers in aesthetics. I begin with some general considerations about experimental philosophy and its, sometimes conflicting, cha…Read more
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Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics (edited book)Bloomsbury Academic. 2018.Experimental philosophy has blossomed into a variety of philosophical fields including ethics, epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of language. But there has been very little experimental philosophical research in the domain of philosophical aesthetics. Advances to Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics introduces this burgeoning research field, presenting it both in its unity and diversity, and determining the nature and methods of an experimental philosophy of aesthetics. Addressing a wide…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Ethics |
Aesthetics |
Philosophy of Psychology |