After reviewing the strategies for defining art that have been adopted by Anglophone analytic phi... more After reviewing the strategies for defining art that have been adopted by Anglophone analytic philosophers in the past fifty years, I consider the prospect of defining art conjunctively, that is, by defining the individual arts and joining these definitions in an exhaustive list. I suggest that the individual art forms are no easier to define than is the general category of art. As well, not everything falling within a given art form counts as art, not every instance of art in the given medium falls within the art form, and some artworks do not belong to an art form at all, so conjoining definitions of the individual art forms (supposing they could be defined) would not map the extension of 'art'. Taken together, these problems indicate that the approach advocated here to art's definition cannot be successful or convincing.
Co-authored with Robert Stecker twentieth-century Anglo-American aesthetics The 20 th century beg... more Co-authored with Robert Stecker twentieth-century Anglo-American aesthetics The 20 th century began with all forms of art dominated by a modernist avant-garde that has its roots in the last third of the previous century. Also inherited from the 19 th century were several important ideas in aesthetics itself. One was a redefinition of aesthetics as the philosophy of art, or at least an almost exclusive focus on art as the subject of aesthetic inquiry. Second, via such figures as Schopenhauer, the idea that art is autonomous from other aspects of human life and is to be appreciated in an experience that was similarly autonomous-aesthetic experiencewas taking root. A third development was abandonment of the idea that the question 'what is art?' could be answered in terms of representation or mimesis, as it had been for at least a century and arguably since ancient times. This was prompted in part by the advent of photography, in part by painting that aimed to distinguish itself from the photograph, and in part by the recognition of instrumental music as a supreme but nonrepresentational artform. Hence there was a search for a new way of defining art that accommodated modernism and these other developments. Expression theory One of these approaches defines art in terms of expression rather than representation. This approach also had roots in late 19 th-century thought but received much attention in the first half of the 20 th century. Its 20 th-century exponents include most prominently Bernadetto Croce and R.G. Collingwood. In 1898, Tolstoy proposed that art is concerned with the communication (or 'infection' as he called it) of an emotion experienced by the artist to an audience by means of external signs. A work that fails to do this is not truly art, even if it is in a recognized 'art' form. Tolstoy also provided criteria for evaluating artworks. These criteria are both formal and substantive. An artwork is formally good if it is sincere, and it lucidly expresses an individualized emotion. The substantive criteria are moral, but not in a conventional sense. A work is substantively good if it supplies the spiritual message needed in its day and age, and this changes over time. In general, the function of art is to unite human beings in a common, spiritually beneficial feeling. On Tolstoy's criteria, many works considered among the greatest products of Western art, such as Shakespeare's plays, Beethoven's symphonies, and Wagner's operas, are either not art at all or bad art. Many later expression theorists, though they depart from many specifics tenets of Tolstoy, are remarkably influenced by him. Thus Collingwood, the proponent of the expression theory who is now most read, agrees with Tolstoy that it is essential to distinguish between genuine art and various counterfeits that are often assumed to be art but actually are not. For example, anything made for the purpose of amusement or giving pleasure ('amusement art'), no matter how highbrow, is not art properly so called. Like Tolstoy many items assumed to be among the greatest artworks are not art at all according to Collingwood. The mark of true art is, of course, expression, by which Collingwood means something quite specific. Expression is neither the production of an indicator of what one feels, as when one sighs in sadness, nor the intentional arousal of emotion in another. The expression of emotion is the coming to know in full specificity exactly what emotion one
The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, 2011
Analytic philosophy, with its emphasis on clear, topic-based argument, is usually dated to the ea... more Analytic philosophy, with its emphasis on clear, topic-based argument, is usually dated to the early 20th century and is contrasted with Continental philosophy, which is more often concerned with overarching systems and theories. Analytic philosophers did not turn their attention to music until the last decades of the 20th century. Of course, they were influenced by and commented on earlier, philosophically motivated discussions of music, starting with the Greeks and much later including relevant work by musicologists, composers, critics, and psychologists as well as philosophers. Three topics became prominent: the expression of emotion in music, the nature of musical works, and what is involved in understanding and appreciating music. Philosophers asked if music expresses emotion, and if they answered yes, as most did, they asked how this is possible and whether the attribution could be literal. Is music expressive by virtue of some connection with the world of human feeling or in ...
The image of legong-sumptuously costumed girl dancers crowned with frangiapanis-is the face of Ba... more The image of legong-sumptuously costumed girl dancers crowned with frangiapanis-is the face of Balinese culture. Yet it is only one of twenty dance/drama genres and prominent in only some centers. Legong, a secular court dance, has often been (and still is) in danger of extinction. Balinese are now less interested in legong than ever before and musicians prefer to play other kinds of music. Since the 1930s, legong has been presented at tourist concerts and by ensembles touring overseas. Western expatriates have founded legong groups and generally brokered the relation between Balinese and foreigners. Foreign scholars have studied, recorded, and filmed Balinese performers. Balinese scholars take higher degrees abroad and co-author books on Balinese dance with Westerners. Balinese performers teach across the world, while United States and Japanese student dancers in Bali employ teachers at rates of pay locals cannot match. Legong groups tour Bali from the US and Japan. Non-Balinese influence what aspects of Balinese culture are promoted and sustained. The impetus for the current (modest and localised) revival of legong seems to come mostly from non-Balinese. Despite all this, legong has retained its autonomy and integrity as an emblematic Balinese dance form, and for some surprising reasons.
... So he is not really interested to capture, in his theory, our intuitions concerning the role ... more ... So he is not really interested to capture, in his theory, our intuitions concerning the role of musical scores. ... Lydia Goehr's historicism and the excesses of the New Musicology, because one may descend rapidly from sane contextualism to the Heideggerian idea of the Volkgeist. ...
The Editor and the Associate Editors thank the Consulting Editors, the Members of the Editorial B... more The Editor and the Associate Editors thank the Consulting Editors, the Members of the Editorial Board and the following philosophers for their help with refereeing papers during the period July 1994 to June 1995. ... Adeney, Douglas Kennett, Jeanette Agar, Nicholas Lamarque, Peter Armstrong, David Langton, Rae Audi, Robert Levinson, Jerrold Bacon, John Lewis, David Benitez, Rick Malinas, Gary Biro, John Malpas, Jeff Braddon-Mitchell, David Martin, CB Brady, Ross Maund, Barry Buckle, Stephen May, Larry Burns, Lynda McBeath, Murray ...
Musical meaning has been an ongoing concern of philosophers, musicologists, and semiolo-gists. Ex... more Musical meaning has been an ongoing concern of philosophers, musicologists, and semiolo-gists. Expressiveness and representation have been much discussed during the past two de-cades. Despite this, the debate concerning musi-cal meaning has been limited to ...
In Functional Beauty, Glenn Parsons and Allen Carlson defend the importance of Functional Beauty-... more In Functional Beauty, Glenn Parsons and Allen Carlson defend the importance of Functional Beauty-that is, the view that an item's fitness (or otherwise) for its proper function is a source of positive (or negative) aesthetic value-within a unified, comprehensive aesthetic theory that encompasses art, the everyday, animals and organic nature, natural environments and inorganic nature, and artifacts. In the following section, I outline the main lines of argument presented in the book. I then criticize some of these arguments. I do so, however, from the perspective of someone who shares the authors' commitment to the importance of Functional Beauty and their dismay at its neglect in contemporary aesthetic theory. Notwithstanding the objections I present, I congratulate Parsons and Carlson for developing the case for Functional Beauty to an unprecedented extent. I conclude that their approach presents an important corrective to the narrowness of neo-Kantian aesthetics and opens up aesthetics and the philosophy of art to the influence of and cooperation with the empirical study of aesthetics practiced in the sciences. 1.1 The aim of this book is to rehabilitate the notion of Functional Beauty, which is the view that the match or mismatch between an item's features and its function is a source of aesthetic pleasure or displeasure. I say "rehabilitate" because, as the authors point out in the first part of their historical review (1-20), the idea that beauty measures the adequacy of things for their nature or purpose was advocated from ancient times until at least the late eighteenth century. The dominant rival to this account was and remains what Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz dubs the "Great Theory of Beauty." 1 In classical times, the Great Theory equated beauty with formal proportion and harmony. In the medieval period this idea was given a theological slant, with the assumption that formal unity and integration are reflections of God's perfection and beauty. And formalism, which received Kant's endorsement at the close of the eighteenth century, was most commonly advocated as the basis of aesthetic beauty into the twentieth century. Nevertheless, as Tatarkiewicz observes, the functional theory of beauty was a long-running supplement to the Great Theory up to the eighteenth century where it appears, for instance, in Hume. Above all it was Kant who banished considerations of utility and function from the aesthetic arena. His paradigm of aesthetic appreciation is offered in his account of free beauty, which is the formal beauty of an item regarded disinterestedly and without regard to what kind of thing it is or its roles or purposes (21-4). Recognizing or assessing something's free beauty does not involve bringing it under a determinate concept; rather, it involves the free play 1 Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, "The Great Theory of Beauty and its Decline,"
After reviewing the strategies for defining art that have been adopted by Anglophone analytic phi... more After reviewing the strategies for defining art that have been adopted by Anglophone analytic philosophers in the past fifty years, I consider the prospect of defining art conjunctively, that is, by defining the individual arts and joining these definitions in an exhaustive list. I suggest that the individual art forms are no easier to define than is the general category of art. As well, not everything falling within a given art form counts as art, not every instance of art in the given medium falls within the art form, and some artworks do not belong to an art form at all, so conjoining definitions of the individual art forms (supposing they could be defined) would not map the extension of 'art'. Taken together, these problems indicate that the approach advocated here to art's definition cannot be successful or convincing.
Co-authored with Robert Stecker twentieth-century Anglo-American aesthetics The 20 th century beg... more Co-authored with Robert Stecker twentieth-century Anglo-American aesthetics The 20 th century began with all forms of art dominated by a modernist avant-garde that has its roots in the last third of the previous century. Also inherited from the 19 th century were several important ideas in aesthetics itself. One was a redefinition of aesthetics as the philosophy of art, or at least an almost exclusive focus on art as the subject of aesthetic inquiry. Second, via such figures as Schopenhauer, the idea that art is autonomous from other aspects of human life and is to be appreciated in an experience that was similarly autonomous-aesthetic experiencewas taking root. A third development was abandonment of the idea that the question 'what is art?' could be answered in terms of representation or mimesis, as it had been for at least a century and arguably since ancient times. This was prompted in part by the advent of photography, in part by painting that aimed to distinguish itself from the photograph, and in part by the recognition of instrumental music as a supreme but nonrepresentational artform. Hence there was a search for a new way of defining art that accommodated modernism and these other developments. Expression theory One of these approaches defines art in terms of expression rather than representation. This approach also had roots in late 19 th-century thought but received much attention in the first half of the 20 th century. Its 20 th-century exponents include most prominently Bernadetto Croce and R.G. Collingwood. In 1898, Tolstoy proposed that art is concerned with the communication (or 'infection' as he called it) of an emotion experienced by the artist to an audience by means of external signs. A work that fails to do this is not truly art, even if it is in a recognized 'art' form. Tolstoy also provided criteria for evaluating artworks. These criteria are both formal and substantive. An artwork is formally good if it is sincere, and it lucidly expresses an individualized emotion. The substantive criteria are moral, but not in a conventional sense. A work is substantively good if it supplies the spiritual message needed in its day and age, and this changes over time. In general, the function of art is to unite human beings in a common, spiritually beneficial feeling. On Tolstoy's criteria, many works considered among the greatest products of Western art, such as Shakespeare's plays, Beethoven's symphonies, and Wagner's operas, are either not art at all or bad art. Many later expression theorists, though they depart from many specifics tenets of Tolstoy, are remarkably influenced by him. Thus Collingwood, the proponent of the expression theory who is now most read, agrees with Tolstoy that it is essential to distinguish between genuine art and various counterfeits that are often assumed to be art but actually are not. For example, anything made for the purpose of amusement or giving pleasure ('amusement art'), no matter how highbrow, is not art properly so called. Like Tolstoy many items assumed to be among the greatest artworks are not art at all according to Collingwood. The mark of true art is, of course, expression, by which Collingwood means something quite specific. Expression is neither the production of an indicator of what one feels, as when one sighs in sadness, nor the intentional arousal of emotion in another. The expression of emotion is the coming to know in full specificity exactly what emotion one
The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, 2011
Analytic philosophy, with its emphasis on clear, topic-based argument, is usually dated to the ea... more Analytic philosophy, with its emphasis on clear, topic-based argument, is usually dated to the early 20th century and is contrasted with Continental philosophy, which is more often concerned with overarching systems and theories. Analytic philosophers did not turn their attention to music until the last decades of the 20th century. Of course, they were influenced by and commented on earlier, philosophically motivated discussions of music, starting with the Greeks and much later including relevant work by musicologists, composers, critics, and psychologists as well as philosophers. Three topics became prominent: the expression of emotion in music, the nature of musical works, and what is involved in understanding and appreciating music. Philosophers asked if music expresses emotion, and if they answered yes, as most did, they asked how this is possible and whether the attribution could be literal. Is music expressive by virtue of some connection with the world of human feeling or in ...
The image of legong-sumptuously costumed girl dancers crowned with frangiapanis-is the face of Ba... more The image of legong-sumptuously costumed girl dancers crowned with frangiapanis-is the face of Balinese culture. Yet it is only one of twenty dance/drama genres and prominent in only some centers. Legong, a secular court dance, has often been (and still is) in danger of extinction. Balinese are now less interested in legong than ever before and musicians prefer to play other kinds of music. Since the 1930s, legong has been presented at tourist concerts and by ensembles touring overseas. Western expatriates have founded legong groups and generally brokered the relation between Balinese and foreigners. Foreign scholars have studied, recorded, and filmed Balinese performers. Balinese scholars take higher degrees abroad and co-author books on Balinese dance with Westerners. Balinese performers teach across the world, while United States and Japanese student dancers in Bali employ teachers at rates of pay locals cannot match. Legong groups tour Bali from the US and Japan. Non-Balinese influence what aspects of Balinese culture are promoted and sustained. The impetus for the current (modest and localised) revival of legong seems to come mostly from non-Balinese. Despite all this, legong has retained its autonomy and integrity as an emblematic Balinese dance form, and for some surprising reasons.
... So he is not really interested to capture, in his theory, our intuitions concerning the role ... more ... So he is not really interested to capture, in his theory, our intuitions concerning the role of musical scores. ... Lydia Goehr's historicism and the excesses of the New Musicology, because one may descend rapidly from sane contextualism to the Heideggerian idea of the Volkgeist. ...
The Editor and the Associate Editors thank the Consulting Editors, the Members of the Editorial B... more The Editor and the Associate Editors thank the Consulting Editors, the Members of the Editorial Board and the following philosophers for their help with refereeing papers during the period July 1994 to June 1995. ... Adeney, Douglas Kennett, Jeanette Agar, Nicholas Lamarque, Peter Armstrong, David Langton, Rae Audi, Robert Levinson, Jerrold Bacon, John Lewis, David Benitez, Rick Malinas, Gary Biro, John Malpas, Jeff Braddon-Mitchell, David Martin, CB Brady, Ross Maund, Barry Buckle, Stephen May, Larry Burns, Lynda McBeath, Murray ...
Musical meaning has been an ongoing concern of philosophers, musicologists, and semiolo-gists. Ex... more Musical meaning has been an ongoing concern of philosophers, musicologists, and semiolo-gists. Expressiveness and representation have been much discussed during the past two de-cades. Despite this, the debate concerning musi-cal meaning has been limited to ...
In Functional Beauty, Glenn Parsons and Allen Carlson defend the importance of Functional Beauty-... more In Functional Beauty, Glenn Parsons and Allen Carlson defend the importance of Functional Beauty-that is, the view that an item's fitness (or otherwise) for its proper function is a source of positive (or negative) aesthetic value-within a unified, comprehensive aesthetic theory that encompasses art, the everyday, animals and organic nature, natural environments and inorganic nature, and artifacts. In the following section, I outline the main lines of argument presented in the book. I then criticize some of these arguments. I do so, however, from the perspective of someone who shares the authors' commitment to the importance of Functional Beauty and their dismay at its neglect in contemporary aesthetic theory. Notwithstanding the objections I present, I congratulate Parsons and Carlson for developing the case for Functional Beauty to an unprecedented extent. I conclude that their approach presents an important corrective to the narrowness of neo-Kantian aesthetics and opens up aesthetics and the philosophy of art to the influence of and cooperation with the empirical study of aesthetics practiced in the sciences. 1.1 The aim of this book is to rehabilitate the notion of Functional Beauty, which is the view that the match or mismatch between an item's features and its function is a source of aesthetic pleasure or displeasure. I say "rehabilitate" because, as the authors point out in the first part of their historical review (1-20), the idea that beauty measures the adequacy of things for their nature or purpose was advocated from ancient times until at least the late eighteenth century. The dominant rival to this account was and remains what Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz dubs the "Great Theory of Beauty." 1 In classical times, the Great Theory equated beauty with formal proportion and harmony. In the medieval period this idea was given a theological slant, with the assumption that formal unity and integration are reflections of God's perfection and beauty. And formalism, which received Kant's endorsement at the close of the eighteenth century, was most commonly advocated as the basis of aesthetic beauty into the twentieth century. Nevertheless, as Tatarkiewicz observes, the functional theory of beauty was a long-running supplement to the Great Theory up to the eighteenth century where it appears, for instance, in Hume. Above all it was Kant who banished considerations of utility and function from the aesthetic arena. His paradigm of aesthetic appreciation is offered in his account of free beauty, which is the formal beauty of an item regarded disinterestedly and without regard to what kind of thing it is or its roles or purposes (21-4). Recognizing or assessing something's free beauty does not involve bringing it under a determinate concept; rather, it involves the free play 1 Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, "The Great Theory of Beauty and its Decline,"
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