Valery Vinogradovs

EXOCRITICISM is a special issue edited by Arne De Boever & Frédéric Neyrat and it asks: 'how to write criticism when artificial intelligence tends to write for us? In 1958, two years after the term AI was coined, Theodor Adorno (of all people) makes the case for the essay—as opposed to the standard scholarly article–as a writerly form through which the critic can be intellectually free. While Adorno does not mention AI, it is not a big step from the standard scholarly article to the AI-generated article. The two are part of a same history that is marked by the loss of a critical form that would share some aesthetic value with its object, and demonstrate its own aesthetic autonomy. If the essay is one form through which such criticism may be achieved, what others might we generate in the time of AI?'

Philosophy is generally identified with free and open-ended enquiry, grounded in universal reason, and capable of subjecting all other forms of knowledge to critical interrogation. At the same time, philosophy only exists in the form of particular schools: Platonic, Thomistic, Kantian, Hegelian, Marxist, Heideggerian, analytic, ‘continental’ and so on. These schools are notorious for being mutually exclusive, rivalrous and combative. What then is the relation between philosophy’s claim to disinterested universal rational inquiry and its historical existence as an assemblage of apparently sectarian schools? This is the question that prompted the following conversation between Valery Vino and Ian Hunter, the author of Rival Enlightenments (Cambridge UP, 2001) and The Kantian Religion (Princeton UP, forthcoming 2026). The conversation was recorded on the 2nd of April 2025 and subsequently edited, revised, augmented, and footnoted by the discussants. If you need access to a free copy, email me.

The essay situates Michel Foucault’s final pedagogical cycle, Fearless Speech (1983/4), in relation to journalistic practice and, more pointedly, concerns about critical education today. In the introductory section, we note that philosophers and journalists, particularly in the matter of parrhesia, have neither classroom nor arena to share. The key findings of our special volume developing this nexus are discussed next, in view of diverse sites, skills, insights, and genres of hybrid parrhesiastic work. Since not only for Foucault courage of truth is an educational issue, we then engage with a reputable charge against academia as an “aparrhesiastic” milieu, with a special focus on graphomania as a root-cause of the trouble. In closing, we briefly return to eternity with Pythagoras and Foucault while ascertaining, negatively and positively, a series of parrhesiastic parameters coordinated with an acute social intuition named scenius (for now).

Philosophical discussions about humour go back to ancient aesthetics, to laughing Democritus and the aporia of Socratic self-irony, to Diogenes the Dog performing tricks on the streets of Athens, and to the lost second book of Aristotle’s Poetics. Dramatized in texts and the arts, the comic emerges not only in popular literature and public events, like Dionysia and Saturnalia, but also in the lives of eminent philosophers in antiquity, the Renaissance, and today. Recently, humour has seen a resurgence in aesthetics, in part owing to the titanic efforts of Noël Carroll. Desiring to learn first-hand about the risky aspects of philosophical wit, Valery Vino invited Noël to engage with a series of remarks and anecdotes borrowed from dead authors, led by Michel de Montaigne, about the nexus between humour and cruelty. In what follows, we consider why humans laugh (sometimes at themselves), what social function cruel humour plays, why a callous sense of humour may be of benefit in the face of life’s horrors, and whether we can hold each other morally culpable for vicious jokes.

mongrel matter delivers the third and concluding volume of aesthetic literacy, an open, cross-genre book-exercise designed to cure academic exclusivism and, correspondingly, unabashed illiteracy: as a science and art of perception and experience, aesthetics is the first philosophy! this volume features more than 50 authors, including the likes of Paul C. Taylor (UCLA), Mieke Bal (University of Amsterdam), Michel de Montaigne, Alan Tansman (Berkeley), Nkiru Nzegwu (CUNY), Mahmood Fazal (ABC), INO, Rrose (EAUX), Garry Hagberg (Bard), Richard Deming (Yale), Bernd Heinrich (Vermont), Wolfgang Welsch (Jena), and others ...

This chapter aims to elucidate Everyday Aesthetics and Somaesthetics drawing from the relevant literature, in conjunction with the history of philosophy, which is always to inform the philosopher’s judgement. In the first section, the crux of Saito’s approach to the re-discovery of the neglected sphere of EA is explained. Next, to be in a position to appreciate Shusterman’s project, we consider a number of perspectives—by Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, and Nietzsche—on the body’s status in philosophy. In the third section, we encounter the “soma,” a living and enhanced body, an object and subject of firm neglect in philosophy, aesthetics and, more generally, Western culture. In the conclusion it will be argued that, despite the considerable potential for reorienting our ways of thinking about aesthetic life, both EA and SA represent the philosophies of urban care that neglect wild nature and fall short of matching up to current global circumstances.

Canvassing both aesthetic theory and practice, our volume offers fresh perspectives on canonical and emerging topics, and also brings to your attention a number of culturally sensitive topics that are customarily silenced in introductions to philosophical aesthetics. Our papers are heterogeneous in terms of length and degrees of difficulty, inviting the reader into the creative study of contemporary aesthetics, which spans a lifetime. Engagement with aesthetics entails an inquiry into three key categories: “philosophy,” “philosopher,” and “aesthetics.” Aesthetics is a progressive branch of philosophy. It is conceivable that, as a discipline and a way of life, aesthetics is as old as philosophy.

Mont Publishing House and Valery Vino deliver the first volume of an eclectic collection in aesthetic education. Aesthetic Literacy is an experiment in philosophy of culture, and this volume features cross-genre contributions by: Theodore Gracyk (Minnesota), Babette Babich (Fordham), David Konstan (NYU), Katya Mandoki (UNAM), Arnold Berleant (Long Island), Jale Erzen (Middle East Tech), Curtis Carter (Marquette), Clive Cazeaux (Cardiff), Fabrizio Desideri (Florence), Ken-ichi Sasaki (Tokyo), and many others...

In April 2021, longing to learn first-hand about ageing philosophically, Valery Vino reached out to the legendary Arnold Berleant (who was 89 at the time of writing), to see whether he might be interested in recording a dialogue to this theme, with a companion of his choice. Berleant selected his ideal collaborator Michael Alpert, book designer and collector, poet, senior, and treasured friend. Over the following six months, a rich tapestry of leisurely reading, contemplation and discussion unfolded, culminating in an unrehearsed, free-flowing conversation about ageing, which has been recorded, lightly edited and offered here for readers to share.

The second volume of an eclectic collection in aesthetic education, Aesthetic Literacy is an experiment in philosophy of culture, a book-exercise which has taken years to realise, turning into a maze wandering through three parts. Featured authors: Ivan Gaskell (Bard), Emily Brady (Texas A&M), Jesse Prinz (CUNY), Yuriko Saito (Rhode Island), John Carvalho (Villanova), David Goldblatt (Denison), Richard Hickman (Cambridge), Cheng Xiangzhan (Shandong), Stephen Davies (Auckland), Keith Lehrer (Arizona), and many others!

In the thick of the global plague, Richard, Justin and Valery agreed to hold a conversation on the topic of poetics, self-understanding, and health. An analysis and discussion of this trinity requires love of poetry and philosophy. Both supreme human practices take common root in mythology and religion, and also share a notorious categorical divide, that of reason against affect. Is this Platonic divide indeed categorical, given both practices rely on language and creativity to compose their meaning? Interestingly, the practice of poetics does not have the reputation for boosting one's health, in the mainstream understanding of that concept. If anything, poetic practice gained notoriety for corrupting one's mind and, possibly, life. Like philosophy? We touched on these and other classical aporia, on the political struggles in American and Australian poetry. Here is a written record of this encounter, countries and miles apart, three persons simply getting to know one another.

This paper presents a new reading of Kant's moral feeling: in lieu of highlighting a positive feeling of respect, I am interested in a thorough phenomenological interpretation of a negative feeling of humiliation. The paper's tone is set by underscoring that human moral Gesinnung is that which is necessarily cultivated, which entails that the striving moral agent, among other things, learns to identify and confront inclinations. It is argued, then, that one's mindfulness of the various kinds of pain of humiliated inclinations presupposes the agent's aesthetic attunement to the law of duty. To this end, two phenomenological interpretations are offered. First, general humiliation Kant caters for in the Critique of Practical Reason. Second, specific humiliation Kant alludes to in the Metaphysics of Morals. On the whole, the paper's findings ascertain the epistemic weight of humiliation, which to date has been undervalued.

Kant’s doctrine of aesthetic ideas, along with his brief treatment of ugliness, has been the focus of some recent literature. In this paper, I employ an original approach, which nonetheless draws from Kant’s oeuvre, to pin down the phenomenological complexity of a spectacular event that took place at the inception of the French Terror—the decapitation of Louis the XVI. To this end, the first section of the essay fleshes out an interpretative framework explicating how seeing the guillotine as an aesthetic idea could serve as a means to actualise the revolutionary ideal. The second section introduces a reading of Schwärmerei and argues that this unruly genius is accountable for the creation of aesthetic idols, rendering a spurious aesthetic experience. Finally, in the last section, I argue that there is a significant distinction between Kant’s account of ugliness and loathing, and that the latter stands for neither a moral nor an aesthetic response to a morally repellent object, but rather is an extraordinary sensible response.