•  49
    Are Musical Works Sound Structures?
    Filozofija I Društvo 30 (1): 36-53. 2019.
    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:…Read more
  •  49
    Thinking Clearly About Music
    Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 31 (3): 25-48. 2012.
    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 soci…Read more
  •  26
    Entanglement and Non-Ontology
    European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 14 (1). 2022.
    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 a…Read more
  •  14
    Review of Critique of Pure Music, by James O. Young (review)
    Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics 11 (1): 37-44. 2014.
  •  6
    Introduction
    Disputatio 13 (62): 159-180. 2021.
    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 t…Read more
  •  5
    Is There an Aesthetics of Political Song?
    Disputatio 13 (62): 299-328. 2021.
    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, m…Read more
  •  3
    Unseen beauty
    Veritas – Revista de Filosofia da Pucrs 67 (1). 2022.
    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 –…Read more
  •  2
    Robert Bartlett, The Middle Ages and the Movies: Eight Key Films (London, 2022)
    with Joana Matos Gomes
    Revista Española de Filosofía Medieval 30 (2): 125-129. 2024.