Aesthetics is the Grammar of Desire

2015

This essay presents (i) the nature of aesthetic judgement, (ii) the significance of aesthetic judgement and finally, (iii) the relevance of art to understanding aesthetic judgement.

Aesthetic mind, 2019

An aesthetic object should be understood and analyzed by the subject in accordance with its object characteristics, except that it is the subject of the subject. In this sense, the aesthetic object, rather than just an object, has all the cognitive characteristics of its artist. The aesthetic subject faces these cognitive characteristics. The perception-perception structure of the subject and the reciprocity relation with the object are examined in this thesis study in order to perceive the aesthetic object correctly and to judge about it. This study is also a study of what the subject can perceive in terms of their perception and interpretation abilities. Additionally, such an approach will enrich the perception-based aesthetic perspectives in the focus of discussions in the philosophy of art.

Croatian Journal of Philosophy, 2019

In this article I propose a way of thinking about aesthetic and artistic verdicts that would keep them distinct from one another. The former are refl ections of the kinds of things we prefer and take pleasure in; the latter are refl ections of other judgments we make about the kinds of achievements that are made in works of art. In part to support this view of verdicts, I also propose a way of keeping distinct the description, the interpretation, and the evaluation of works of art. (And along the way, I worry about whether we offer the same kinds of interpretations of the objects of our aesthetic pleasures, properly considered, that we clearly do offer with respect to works of art.) The thesis I propose-the achievement model-is not original with me. What is original, perhaps, is that it is posed as an alternative to two other views of artistic evaluation, namely the appeal to "ideal critics" and the appeal to one way of understanding our preferences with regard to works of art. I do not attempt to show that each of these alternatives meets with insuperable problems; but I do indicate what I take to be the substantive content of those problems. In the end, in order to fl esh out the thesis I propose, I borrow some material from the literature on human well-being concerning how we determine what an achievement is.

The aim of this essay is not to enter directly into the discussion of the best semantic and/or epistemological account of faultless disagreements about taste, but to discuss the meaning, content and use of utterances of the form “X is beautiful” when X denotes a particular work of art. To do that, I draw, on the one hand, from aesthetics and the philosophy of art, broadly adopting Peter Kivy’s aesthetic realism about aesthetic properties as well as his distinction between the analysis, the interpretation, and the evaluation of artworks as presented in his recent work De Gustibus (2015). And, on the other hand, I also consider McNally and Stojanovic’s (forthcoming) groundbreaking work on aesthetic adjectives and, in particular, on the term “beautiful” (see also Liao, McNally, and Meshin [2016] and Sundell [2016]).

This article deals with the analysis of aesthetic judgment. Indeed, as a being endowed with consciousness and relation, man has the faculty of judging or appreciating all that presents to his sensitivity. In other words, man is an aesthetic being, that is to say, able to feel and enjoy the beauty in nature, even to realize it and judge its value in the work of art. It is thus distinguished from the other beings of the world. The aesthetic sense reveals itself to this effect inherent in the human existence by the fact that only the man can carry a judgment of the taste, that is to say, to emit statements such as "it is beautiful" or "this thing is beautiful." These statements of aesthetic judgment can be carried on an object of nature or a work of art.

Essays on Values and Practical Rationality - Ethical and Aesthetical Dimensions (Ed. by A. Marques & J. Sáàgua), (Bern: Peter Lang AG), 2018

One of the main purposes of this chapter is to determine the meaning and scope of the expression ‘aesthetic value’, to argue that aesthetic and artistic values are not exactly the same even though the artistic value of an artwork may result in part from its aesthetic value. Moreover, other types of values such as cognitive, ethical, political and social shall every so often be taken into account in the evaluation of artworks. And one of the consequences of that distinction – between the aesthetic and the artistic3 – is the fact that the range of consideration of aesthetic values goes way beyond the evaluation of artworks insofar as aesthetic experience is not an exclusive business4 of the artistic domain. Thinking about aesthetic values, as often happens when we think about aesthetic concepts, properties or experiences, will give us the opportunity to question the term 'aesthetic', which progressively entered philosophical discourse during the eighteenth century but whose meaning has oscillated over time and generated various misconceptions and ambiguities. Finally, another important aspect that this chapter takes in consideration for the clarification of the notion of ‘aesthetic value’ is obviously the concept of 'value' per se and the close affinities between aesthetic values, on one hand, and ethical and cognitive ones on the other.

The movement began in reaction to prevailing utilitarian social philosophies and to what was perceived as the ugliness and philistinism of the industrial age. Its philosophical foundations were laid in the 18th century by Immanuel Kant, who postulated the autonomy of aesthetic standards, setting them apart from considerations of morality, utility, or pleasure. The attitudes of the movement were also represented in the writings of Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater. Oscar Wilde, like all great writers, knew that life is complicated. Therefore in this paper we shall be looking at Aesthetics and Aestheticism and understanding their differences and philosophy behind it

The Yearbook on History and Interpretation of Phenomenology, 2014

In the article I aim to answer the question whether and how can we err in aesthetic judgments. Starting with Hume’s thesis that sentiment is always right as a typical example of thesis of infallibility of aesthetic judgments, I ultimately seek to disprove such thesis and show that it is possible to err in aesthetic judgments on normative grounds. I begin with consideration of Husserl’s redefinition of the notion of transcendence and with his interpretation of the phenomenon of error. I then proceed to analyze two approaches to the question: Ingarden’s consideration of aesthetic values as objectively grounded, and Dufrenne’s consideration of aesthetic values as intersubjectively grounded, but because of that actually being capable of being subject to disclosure and analysis. After assessing these approaches I conclude that there are sufficient grounds for the thesis that aesthetic judgments are, in principle, intersubjectively correctible, and that such correction takes, or can take place, in art critical discourse.