Sandy Shapshay

This symposium paper has two main aims: first, to offer an analysis of what I see as the vanguard of public commemorative art today—what I am calling the ‘generative memorial’—suggesting that it is the culmination (thus far) of a narrative of memorial development. I will do this through a discussion of the most exemplary case of which I am aware: The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama (USA). Second, I pay special attention to the complicated relationship of this generative memorial to public space. In its deft straddling of private and public spaces, I shall argue that the memorial raises and successfully addresses a significant danger in public memorials, namely, that their creation be seen as sufficient for discharging a society’s duty to remember grave injustices committed or permitted in its name.

How to justify ascribing intrinsic value to nature? This task emerged in the 1990s as “the central theoretical quest of environmental philosophy”, especially as concerns non-sentient living nature and superorganismic entities such as species. Since then, many theories have been offered to answer the ontological question of how nature's intrinsic value is to be understood, ranging from Moorean non-naturalist, objectivist theories to Elliot's subjectivist “indexical theory”. The question I shall focus on in this paper is related but different: How can we have evidence for the existence of such a value (however, nature's intrinsic value is to be understood, and whatever properties it is based on)? In other words, my focus is on the question of the epistemology of the (putative) intrinsic value of nature. My proposal is that there is a hitherto underappreciated epistemological resource lurking in aesthetic experiences of nature. Serious aesthetic experiences of nature can awaken emotions such as wonder and awe that, in light of recent perceptual theories of emotion, can be recognized as disclosing the intrinsic value of nature. In summary, I shall argue for what I see as a key epistemic role that aesthetic experience (of a certain sort) can have in grounding ascriptions of intrinsic value to nature.

Rustin Cohle, the protagonist of the first season of True Detective, declares that he is "in philosophical terms, a pessimist". The doctrine of "pessimism" espoused by Rust is remarkably similar to the view adumbrated by Arthur Schopenhauer, who holds that conscious life (both human and nonhuman animal) involves a tremendous amount of suffering that is essentially built into the structure of the world and there is no Creator (providential or otherwise) to redeem all of this suffering, by, say, punishing the wicked and rewarding the good. Rust finds some grounds for hope, and he chooses to continue on the path of compassion and justice, the path to try to improve the world. This prompts the question of whether he ever really embraced suicide in principle, and just lacked the constitution to pull it off, or whether, like Schopenhauer, he perhaps always found the intellectual grounds for such a radical decision to be shaky.

Danto's end of art thesis as well as his partial definition of art as “embodied meaning” have sparked much controversy, but I shall not quarrel with either here. Rather, my aim is to suggest that there was another distinct chapter in the grand narrative described by Danto, one taking place right under his nose. This was an environmental chapter, crystallized most forcefully in my view by the work of Latvian‐American artist Vija Celmins (1938‐ ), especially by her work To Fix the Image in Memory I‐XI (1977‐82) consisting of 11 pairs of perceptually indiscernible stones, one found one made. Without the benefit of seeing her first retrospective in 2019, it would have been very hard to see how her own artistic narrative, culminating in these indiscernible stone pair works, offers “the appropriate next stage in the story.” Inspired by Danto, this is exactly what I hope to show.

Zoltán Somhegyi’s Reviewing the Past: The Presence of Ruins takes the reader on a captivating journey through the phenomenon of ruins. It is a remarkable achievement that, I believe, only someone like Somhegyi--a philosophical aesthetician as well as an art historian, and one who has studied ruins on a global scale--could pull off so brilliantly.What I focus on in this essay, however, is on the side of ruins that I believe gets shorter shrift in this book, namely, the environmental side. First, I take up some difficult cases for Somhegyi’s ontology of ruins, which I believe his account handles quite well, namely, the phenomenon of contemporary industrial and commercial ruins and the case of so-called ruins brought about through the destruction of war. Next, I turn to my main criticism of his treatment of ruins: that he looks at them predominantly through the lens of art, and not enough through the lens of nature. I suggest that Somhegyi is not sufficiently alive to consequences of the ruin’s artistic/natural hybridity; more specifically, I think he neglects some of the consequences of nature being a co-creator of the ruin. Finally, I propose further attention to the environmental views embodied in the change from the picturesque to the sublime treatment of ruins in art.

The study of aesthetics concerns the arts broadly conceived, as well as the nature of aesthetic experience, which includes our responses to beauty, sublimity, ugliness, and other such qualities found in works of art, nature, the built-environment and in the course of everyday life. Although the term "aesthetics" to denote this area of study goes back only to the eighteenth century with the work of Alexander Baumgarten, the field has had a long and distinguished history dating back to classical antiquity. Aesthetics is currently the scene of provocative philosophical exploration, and one which has become increasingly connected to work in disciplines outside of philosophy such as art history, psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, gender studies, and critical race theory.