•  305
    Towards defending a semantic theory of expression in art: Revisiting Goodman
    South African Journal of Philosophy 31 (3): 600-612. 2012.
    Nelson Goodman’s attempt to analyse the expressiveness of artworks in semantic terms has been widely criticised. In this paper I try to show how the use of an adapted version of his concept of exemplification, as proposed by Mark Textor, can help to alleviate the worst problems with his theory of expression. More particularly I argue that the recognition of an intention, which is central to Textor’s account of exemplification, is also fundamental to our understanding of expressiveness in art. Mo…Read more
  •  2015
    Aesthetic Hedonism and Its Critics
    Philosophy Compass 15 (1). 2020.
    This essay surveys the main objections to aesthetic hedonism, the view that aesthetic value is reducible to the value of aesthetic pleasure or experience. Hedonism is the dominant view of aesthetic value, but a spate of recent criticisms has drawn its accuracy into question. I introduce some distinctions crucial to the criticisms, before using the bulk of the essay to identify and review six major lines of argument that hedonism's critics have employed against it. Whether or not these arguments …Read more
  •  373
    Social Aesthetics and Moral Judgment: Pleasure, Reflection and Accountability (review)
    British Journal of Aesthetics 60 (1). 2020.
    McMahon, Jennifer A. Routledge. 2018. pp. 230. £115.
  •  821
    The Motivational Structure of Appreciation
    Philosophical Quarterly 69 (276): 445-466. 2019.
    On a widely held view in aesthetics, appreciation requires disinterested attention. George Dickie famously criticized a version of this view championed by the aesthetic attitude theorists. I revisit his criticisms and extract an overlooked challenge for accounts that seek to characterize appreciative engagement in terms of distinctive motivation: at minimum, the motivational profile such accounts propose must make a difference to how appreciative episodes unfold over time. I then develop a propo…Read more