Vítor Guerreiro

This paper argues that the role emotions from fiction play in structuring experience is incompatible with treating them by default as either irrational or merely ersatz. It has five sections. § 1 outlines the paradox of fiction and three standard solutions: broad cognitivism, non-cognitivism, and Walton’s theory of quasi-emotion. Broad cognitivism and non-cognitivism reject the doxastic thesis — the claim that belief is necessary for emotion — while Walton is taken to deny that emotions from fiction are ‘genuine.’ § 2 endorses rejecting the doxastic thesis but argues that the true heart of the paradox is the genuine/non-genuine dichotomy. We propose an alternative interpretation of quasi-emotion that avoids this dichotomy. We further compare emotions from fiction with emotions from abstract art and music, contrasting the latter with quasi-emotions. § 3 discusses mental simulation, comparing fictions with external simulators that feed into ongoing cognitive-emotional calibration. § 4 introduces a dual-track model of fiction, in which symbols operate simultaneously through quasi-denotation — fictions denote what they prescribe us to imagine — and exemplification — they illustrate by way of what they quasi-denote. Track one is the fiction’s frame, track two its focus; emotional responses are thus dual-track — in a way that bypasses the paradox. § 5 turns to the more fundamental fiction/reality dichotomy, suggesting that the most interesting feature of fictions is not the nonexistence (or shadowy existence) of their supposed denotata — since the factual also functions as fiction — but their being models of how the world is experienced.

This paper addresses James O. Young's and Nemesio Puy's critical assessments of Nelson Goodman's account of musical expressiveness. For that, I draw substantially on the work of Maria do Carmo d’Orey (1933–2023), an important although underrecognized Goodman scholar who argued (pace Goodman) that exemplified resemblance—not plain resemblance—is the core of expressiveness, as well as of other forms of representation. I call theories of exemplified resemblance ‘frame theories.’ Young claims that (1) Goodman's theory is but a muddled version of resemblance theory; (2) if emotion predicates applied to music are literal, then Goodman's theory lacks motivation; (3) Goodman's version bears no theoretical benefits. Puy denies 3 while granting 1 and 2. In this paper, §3, §4, §5, and §6 constitute an argument that: (i) resemblance theory is a defective version of frame theory; (ii) objections based on the metaphoric-literal distinction have no legs; (iii) the theoretical payoffs of Goodman's version outstrip what Puy concedes. Sections 3 and 4 challenge Claim 1; §5 and §6 challenge Claim 2; together they show that framing generates resemblance, which conflicts with granting Claims 1 and 2.

In this article I enquire into the notion of ‘political art’, by drawing on ideas from R. G. Collingwood’s often neglected Principles of Art. I show that his characterisation of ‘expression’ reveals what I call the ‘Narrow Aretaic Structure’ (NAS), distinguishable from a ‘Wide Aretaic Structure’ (WAS). Whatever satisfies NAS satisfies WAS, but not vice-versa. Though we have reasons to call ‘art’ anything satisfying WAS, Collingwoodian ‘art proper’ must also satisfy NAS. I then suggest that the distinction between WAS and NAS is more interesting than the distinction between art and non-art and even as a criterion for ‘aesthetic’ (though this is not my main issue). The main issue is articulating a view of when the ‘politicalness’ of ‘political art’ is relevant in light of its being art, or, in Collingwoodian terms, ‘expression’ (under the NAS model). Collingwood allows us to give an alternative answer to these questions; one that does not appeal to ‘messages’ in art and their hypothesised effects on the audience. In other words, an answer that avoids the consequentialist ‘template’, which is restricted to the WAS model. As case studies, I use some of Aleksander Deineka’s ‘Socialist-Realist’ mosaics, as well as other examples of political artworks, and the recording of a work song.

The way we think about disagreement is shaped by the systematic emphasizing of its adversarial, non-cooperative aspects. This is due to a perspective on arguing and disagreeing. Perspectives enable some thoughts and occlude others. We claim that the way some issues are thought of in aesthetics is conditioned by a similar phenomenon we call ‘the Received Image’ (RI), which parallels the influence on ethics of what Bernard Williams called ‘systems of morality’. Peter Kivy argued that disagreements in aesthetics, if genuine, presuppose that contenders are tacit realists about ‘art-relevant properties’: the motivation for arguing lies in making the adversary acknowledge (epistemic) defeat (in pursuing agreement from others). He draws this conclusion from what he sees as a fundamental difference between aesthetics and ethics. However, in our view, Kivy and his opponents in the semantic meta-debate on disagreement think under the aegis of the RI. We look at disagreements about art from a neo-cognitivist perspective, and argue that heuristic similarities between aesthetics and ethics stand out with an understanding-based epistemology coupled with an adequate theory of artistic form: form as a perspective-generating device whose grasping involves ‘infinitely fine adjustments’.

We present the structure and guiding principles of this Special Issue, with a brief description of the participants’ contributions and the relations holding between them. The intersection between aesthetics and ethics as a field of philosophical enquiry is presented under the guise of a ‘layer cake’: at the top layer we find the most general metaphysical and epistemological issues concerning the nature of value, aesthetic and ethical; the middle layer encompasses several normative issues about the interactions of aesthetic, moral and cognitive values in art; finally at the bottom layer we introduce issues of a more restricted focus, like the aesthetic peculiarity of political songs and the ethics of artistic appropriation.

Some think politics and art should not mix. The problem with this view is that politics and art were always entwined. Human experience is structured politically, even if much of it is not. Here, I illustrate this with a series of artistic examples that take us from work songs in a Mississippi 1940s forced labour camp to a desolate dead forest landscape in a former Krasnoyarsk gulag, evocative of a Paul Nash World War I painting. Powerful artworks help us to come to grips with human experience, more than merely “expressing emotion”. I treat songs as representations, looking for a way their political significance is part of their aesthetic value. To do this, I defend James Young’s (2001) concept of “illustrative representation” as bridging the gap between formalism and contextualism. But instead of Young’s “Wollheimian” (resemblance between experiences) approach to how such representation works I draw on Kulvicki’s (2020) notion of “syntactic parts”, combining it with Carroll’s (2016) concept of form as the “ensemble of artistic choices”, and Black’s (1954-55) frame-and-focus model of meaning in metaphor. Hopefully, in the end I will have clarified the ways in which (some) songs are both politically and aesthetically meaningful.

The experience of beauty is no less mysterious for the aesthetician today than it was in the Middle Ages. Here I focus on the notion of ‘unseen beauty’ and how certain aspects of medieval philosophizing about the nature of beauty can still be of use for the contemporary aesthetician. I draw a comparison between some concepts that pervade the whole of the Medieval period – that there is a transcendent source of visible beauty, and that visible beauties function as images of the invisible beauty – with a modern conception of aesthetic experience, as it is expressed in authors like Clive Bell.

In this article we consider Putnam’s project of an “ethics without ontology,” focusing on some of its crucial aspects, namely, the entanglement of fact and value and the idea of forming and “imaginatively identifying” with a “particular evaluative outlook.” We use that approach to shed light on the issue of value objectivity. Putnam’s “pragmatist enlightenment” suggests a way of abandoning the traditional project of grounding ethics and aesthetics on metaphysics, preserving the idea of realism and objectivity about values. Ethical and aesthetic discriminations may be contextually specific and depend on the responses and the socially embedded experience of observers, but they are brought about by certain features of reality, far more complex than a domain of “objects” that would “correspond” to values. With our eyes set on these aspects, we draw important lessons for the project of a joint approach to aesthetic and ethical value, taking seriously the pervading entanglement of both, as suggested by the way we are able to apply the so-called thick concepts. This provides us with the outline of a contextualist approach to aesthetics that draws on Putnam’s project for ethics. We conclude by suggesting that a fruitful way of pursuing this connection could be found in co-opting resources from virtue ethics.

This paper is about the dilemma raised against musical ontology by Roger Scruton, in his The Aesthetics of Music: either musical ontology is about certain mind-independent “things” and so music is left out of the picture, or it is about an “intentional object” and so its puzzles are susceptible of an arbitrary answer. I argue the dilemma is merely apparent and deny that musical works can be identified with sound structures, whether or not conceived as abstract entities. The general idea is this: both Platonism and nominalism about musical works are a kind of fetishism: musical works are not “things”, in Danto’s sense of “mere real things”; they rather involve complex relationships between objects, events, and different kinds of functional properties. For this, I draw on Levinson and Howell’s notion of indication, combined with Searle’s approach to institutional reality... with a little twist of my own.

In this article I argue against the arbitrariness of the concept of music and for an essentialist and naturalist framework, according to which music is a cross-cultural human phenomenon, defined by relational properties held together by uniform features of human nature. Building on Dickie’s classification of theories of art in natural kind theories and cultural-kind theories, I argue for an enhanced natural-kind theory (which explains the institutional element), and use some developments in social ontology to show the inadequacy of an institutionalist approach to art and music.