Aesthetic Value

This paper offers an interpretation of the theories of aesthetic value and agency in the Zhuangzi 莊子. The first section outlines two claims that articulate an aesthetics that can be found in the Analects: (1) there is a single ideal of aesthetic value, and (2) ideal aesthetic agents are those with the competence to access that ideal. The Zhuangzi rejects both claims. The second section argues, contra (1), that the Zhuangzi embraces a variety of pluralism about aesthetic value. This pluralism (...) is rooted in some of the text’s broader metaphysical commitments. The third section argues, contra (2), that the Zhuangzi portrays ideal aesthetic agents as those with the competence to access what it calls “utmost beauty” (zhimei 至美), the plurality of aesthetic values. As this ideal of aesthetic agency is beyond the reach of ordinary human beings, the concluding section of the paper argues that the Zhuangzi additionally recommends a modified ideal of aesthetic agency that is within our reach. (shrink)

The Bulut Doctrine has been persistently misread as making a deterministic claim: that physical narrative parameters force specific emotional responses in every reader. This paper formally resolves this misreading. The Bulut Doctrine does not claim deterministic output. It claims probabilistic convergence — that a given physical matrix systematically narrows the probability distribution of autonomic nervous system responses across a reader population, producing a statistically identifiable cluster of biophysical outputs that is non-random and reproducible. This paper traces the source of the (...) terminological problem, demonstrates why the probabilistic framing is the correct scientific formulation, and adopts a formal terminological revision across all Bulut Doctrine publications. The revision does not retreat from the doctrine's core claims — it upgrades their epistemological precision. (shrink)

Contemporary narrative theory operates primarily within interpretive and cultural frameworks, producing readings that are inherently plural, non-reproducible, and culturally contingent. The Bulut Doctrine proposes a fundamental paradigm shift: a narrative text is not an abstract cultural artifact but a closed physical system whose environmental parameters — thermal gradients, acoustic impedance, luminous decay, and kinetic momentum — interface directly with the human autonomic nervous system, producing measurable and reproducible biophysical outputs independent of cultural background. -/- This paper introduces the Objective Projection (...) Calibration Test (OPCT v1.0), the formal empirical verification protocol of the Bulut Doctrine. The protocol operationalizes the core claim of the Objective Projection methodology: that identical physical matrix specifications, when encoded into narrative form by independent writers under mandatory Adjective Embargo and Exclusion of Similes conditions, will produce statistically convergent biophysical responses — measured via EEG, ECG, and pupillometry — across culturally diverse reader groups. -/- The theoretical foundation rests on the neurobiological distinction between two amygdala activation pathways documented by Romanski and LeDoux (1992): the rapid thalamo-amygdala route, which bypasses cortical processing entirely, and the slower thalamo-cortico-amygdala route, subject to interpretive variation. The paper presents the complete formal specification of OPCT v1.0, including input parameters, writer protocol, reader group composition, biometric measurement standards, and pre-registered falsification criteria. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes between two fundamentally different approaches that share similar terminology: the "Literature and Science" tradition, which examines how physics appears in literature as metaphor and cultural material, and the Bulut Doctrine's Physics of Literature, which claims that narrative is itself a closed physical system governed by thermodynamics, acoustics, and optics. Three structural differences are identified: metaphor vs. formula, cultural analysis vs. engineering protocol, and cultural specificity vs. biophysical universality. The paper argues that this distinction has immediate consequences for (...) AI narrative generation and cross-cultural emotional universality. (shrink)

This document constitutes the formal Academic Defense Framework of the Bulut Doctrine — a comprehensive methodology comprising Objective Projection, Narrative Engineering, Physics of Literature, and the Narrative Entropy metric (Sₙ). It systematically addresses six categories of academic critique: (1) physics or metaphor, (2) the Shannon distinction, (3) determinism and naturalism, (4) universality and the Western canon, (5) originality, and (6) reproducibility. The document establishes the epistemological boundaries of the doctrine and introduces the Objective Projection Calibration Test (OPCT v1.0) as a (...) formal reproducibility protocol with biometric verification criteria. (shrink)

This manifesto formalizes the Cloud Doctrine, an overarching intellectual framework that synthesizes the author’s primary research into a unified disciplinary structure. It introduces The Physics of Literature as a foundational philosophy, Narrative Engineering as a professional discipline, and Objective Projection as a systematic methodology. By initiating a deterministic break from traditional literary theories, this doctrine establishes a bridge between physical laws and narrative construction through the rigorous measurement of Narrative Entropy.

The subjectivity of emotional transmission and adjective-based narrative forms in traditional literary theory constitute the primary obstacles to constructing a text as a universal and objective data system. This study introduces the concept of the "Universal Biological Interface" (UBI), which I developed within the discipline of "Narrative Engineering," to the academic literature. Using the "Objective Projection" methodology, literature is stripped of cultural noise and provided with an experimentally reproducible structure directly targeting the human autonomic nervous system.

Traditional literary and cinematic criticism has lazily labeled objects that drive character action but remain unexplained as "MacGuffins." The Bulut Doctrine and the discipline of Narrative Engineering reject this interpretive approach, reconstructing the literary text as a physical system. In this study, focal points in storytelling are stripped of being abstract "themes" and are transformed into the "Narrative Gravity" (Ng) parameter—a mathematical gravitational force that holds increasing Narrative Entropy (Sn) together. The famous "briefcase" in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is analyzed (...) not as a literary mystery, but as a "Vacuum Variable" and central mass driving the kinetic energy of the system and preserving the structural integrity of sub-plots. This parametric model transitions story construction from an intuitive act into an engineering calculation that controls chaos. (shrink)

This paper formalizes the concept of Narrative Entropy as a quantifiable metric for assessing structural disorder and informational friction within literary and cinematic systems. While the term finds its roots in Shannon’s Information Theory and Pynchonian metaphors, this study defines it as a core component of the Objective Projection methodology. By analyzing the tension between causal predictability and structural chaos, we establish a parametric framework for Narrative Engineering, allowing for the mathematical modeling of story progression.

Objective Projection is a narrative methodology developed by Levent Bulut that encodes emotional states exclusively through measurable physical variables — thermodynamics, acoustics, optics, and fluid mechanics — rather than through subjective adjectives or symbolic description. The methodology introduces the Adjective Embargo and Exclusion of Similes as constitutional rules, and operates through six physical parameters: Luminous Decay, Thermal Gradient, Acoustic Impedance, Kinetic Momentum, Atmospheric Pressure, and Spatial Geometry. The complete framework is formalized within the Bulut Doctrine and documented at Zenodo (DOI: (...) 10.5281/zenodo.18481356). (shrink)

This paper argues that commodification is a category error when applied to the central aesthetic value of art. The standard view treats market price as an imperfect proxy for artistic value. I argue instead that the problem is prior to mismeasurement. Commodity exchange presupposes a value that can be treated as transferable, comparable, and sufficiently specifiable for pricing. But the central aesthetic value of art is encounter-dependent, non-substitutable without remainder, and only partially pre-specifiable ex ante. It is therefore not the (...) kind of value commodity exchange captures when it prices what is transferred. On this basis, I distinguish the inherent features of a work from the fantasy that its realized value can be inherited intact across time, ownership, or transmission: what endures are conditions for renewed realization, not a settled possession of significance. I then show how this bears on artistic compensation. Payment may legitimately track labor, skill, rights, risk, and enabling conditions, but it does not purchase accomplished aesthetic value in advance. The commodity form, I conclude, approaches artistic value under the wrong description. (shrink)

Death is ubiquitous in film and television, both fiction and documentary, and while homicide is the primary cause of death in fiction film, suicide accounts for twice as many deaths in the world. Since fictional media is predicated on stimulating emotions of one sort or another, positive or negative, it is not difficult to understand that death in general and suicide in particular provides ample opportunity to encourage strong audience reactions and interest. This chapter provides a taxonomy of the ways (...) in which the moving image, primarily cinema, presents suicide, including: (1) Hollywood glamor and suicide, (2) art-house suicide, (3) euthanasia and assisted dying, (4) religious and cult suicide, (5) war and political suicide, (6) honorable suicide, and (7) depression, guilt, and drugs. This list is not exhaustive, and the categories are non-exclusive, meaning that films discussed in one category may be relevant to others. The focus is on the internal logic of individual films without making any claims as to their possible effects in the real world. Ultimately, this chapter argues that fictional representation of suicide on screen is an important part of our philosophical engagement with questions of human freedom and choice. (shrink)

There are many paradoxes of aversive or painful art. We enjoy being disgusted, scared, sad, and stressed in engaging with art in a way that we don’t, for instance, on the train into work. A similar problem arises in extreme music (metal, hardcore punk, and their various offshoots). In this case, the puzzle is explaining why we enjoy listening to screaming in extreme music but not in our workaday lives. Here, I argue that there is not one, but many answers (...) to the screamed vocals problem. Particular kinds of musical screaming take on their character and value according to the function they play in different genre practices and in order to support the values and activities of those communities. Accordingly, we ought to be pragmatic pluralists about musical screaming. Beyond attempting to make sense of this one particular problem from the philosophy of popular music, I also argue that thinking carefully about the screamed vocals problem can help us clarify some merits of a good aesthetic explanation. (shrink)

While Ross did not, so far as it seems, write on aesthetic value in any work dedicated exclusively to that topic, he nevertheless defends a view of aesthetic value in The Right and the Good that he further develops in Foundations of Ethics. Ross has a dispositionalist account of the definition of aesthetic value, meaning that he holds the view that aesthetic value, specifically beauty, is a disposition to induce aesthetic experience. Ross is further an instrumentalist about the value of (...) beauty. Beauty is instrumentally, not intrinsically, valuable. Rather, it is aesthetic experience that is intrinsically valuable. However, its value is derivative: it is composed of the value of pleasure and the value of knowledge, two underivative goods. Ross’ view runs contrary to important views of his time, especially Moore’s, and finds company in contemporary views in aesthetics, and, as a result, is subject to similar objections. Ross enhances his aesthetic axiology in Foundations of Ethics, adding that artistic creation may have intrinsic value which he does by, perhaps surprisingly, drawing on a perfectionist rationale. Ross’ views on these points have both their strengths and their weaknesses. This paper presents an overview and critical discussion of Ross’ views on aesthetic value. (shrink)

Vision Language Models (VLMs), like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, have raised significant concerns regarding authorship and whether AI-generated images devalue artistic practices and traditions. Recently, some have argued that VLMs should be viewed as another tool that artists use to generate their creative outputs. I defend this position and expand on it by introducing an account of agency that demonstrates that only biological agents, at least for now, possess the necessary powers to be responsible for the act of creation (...) (for example, the capacity to realize autonomous goal-directed actions and manipulate affordances). I ultimately argue that although VLMs afford artists the ability to output high-quality images with minimal technical skill, creating artworks that are artistically valued using VLMs will require significant ingenuity. Therefore, in my view, concerns that this new tool will blur the lines of authorship and undermine artistic practices and traditions are unwarranted. (shrink)

Preliminary version. Model testing in progress. First Cause active The public release of diffusion-based text-to-image models has produced a new aesthetic regime: outputs whose perceptual quality can be near-indistinguishable from human-made artifacts, generated at industrial scale. This convergence yields what we call a collapse of the criterion: customary markers that support robust claims of authorship, value, and responsibility (skill, effort, medium constraints, provenance) become epistemically fragile. Against two unsatisfying extremes—(i) humanist essentialism that treats AI outputs as categorically non-art, and (ii) (...) aesthetic flattening that treats all outputs as equivalent—we propose a third path: strong aesthetic value depends less on perceptual features than on the traceability of situated intention and attributable responsibility. We formalize this claim through the Intention Traceability Metric (ITM), a five-dimensional forensic heuristic that scores decision-making, material constraint, exposure to error, ontological cost, and attributable responsibility. A pilot coding study on sixteen cases suggests substantial inter-rater agreement and discriminative capacity between minimal prompting, intermediate human–AI workflows, traditional works, and historically decisive conceptual gestures. We then read contemporary “forensic” technologies—Glaze, Nightshade, and Content Credentials (C2PA)—as socio-technical evidence that markets and institutions are rebuilding provenance under generative conditions. Finally, we treat Duchamp’s readymade as a crucial test case: it secures strong authorship despite low material labor because its performative gesture is traceable, risky, and responsibility-bearing—features that generative models can imitate in appearance but not instantiate as an act. We close by outlining implications for intellectual property, art markets, and aesthetic theory. (shrink)

Dominic McIver Lopes’s Aesthetic Injustice (OUP, 2024) makes an ambitious and important contribution to discussions of the relationship between aesthetics and justice. After briefly summarizing the distinction between aesthetic injustice and weaponized aesthetics which motivates much of the book, we turn our attention to three issues. First, we put critical pressure on Lopes’s claim of originality by showing that many earlier scholars and artists had already explored the unjust restriction of aesthetic capacities. Second, we argue that Lopes’s cosmopolitanism is a (...) universalizing framework that risks erasing asymmetries between victims and perpetrators and leaves the theory ill-equipped to address oppressive aesthetic cultures. Third, we apply critical scrutiny to Lopes's assumption that aesthetic cultures are “conflict-free zones,” drawing on everyday and artistic practices to argue that conflict is a pervasive and sometimes desirable feature of aesthetic life. This, we argue, casts doubt on cosmopolitanism as the foundation for a theory of aesthetic injustice. We conclude by questioning the desirability of a cosmopolitan theory based on the preservation of the value diversity and social autonomy of aesthetic cultures. Please note that in sections III and IV, we discuss gendered and racialized violence. (shrink)

It is widely acknowledged that aesthetic judgments of works of art are (often, if not always) category-dependent. In this paper, I argue that the categories in which a work is correctly perceived, judged and appreciated are not necessarily the categories to which it actually belongs. The principle that the adequate appreciation of a work must be made in a category to which it belongs should be rejected because it cannot accommodate the strangeness of some innovative works of art. An innovative (...) work might be correctly judged in an old category to which it does not belong, which supports my conclusion that classification may not really matter in category-dependent aesthetic judgments. (shrink)

In recent years, interest in the value of consciousness has gained momentum. Much of the debate has focused on the epistemic and ethical value of consciousness. At least in principle, there is a third kind of value that may be attributed to consciousness: aesthetic value. The question of the aesthetic value of consciousness concerns not (or not just) whether consciousness is a necessary condition for the existence or instantiation of aesthetic value, but whether consciousness itself instantiates some aesthetic value. Research (...) on the aesthetic value of consciousness in this sense has been virtually inexistent until very recently. Due to its embryonic state, almost everything about this potential new research area is yet undefined. In this paper, I attempt a preliminary articulation of some of the questions an aesthetics of consciousness may investigate, suggest a tentative evaluation of possible answers and lines of investigation, and offer some reflections on whether an aesthetics of consciousness is a philosophical enterprise worth pursuing. (shrink)

Aesthetic hedonism, the view that the value of an artwork is determined by its pleasure-inducing properties, is largely regarded as the default theory of aesthetic value. However, aesthetic hedonism has significant challenges as well. One notable challenge points to the high value we ascribe to some works of art that arouse negative or unpleasant sensations, like Picasso’s Guernica. Relatedly, the paradox of painful art points out that some of us seek out art that evokes unpleasant sensations yet avoid unpleasant sensations (...) in real life. If this claim is correct, then it appears that aesthetic hedonism is false. With this project, I draw a parallel between the paradox of painful art and a neurobiological puzzle (the cocaine puzzle), which asks how cocaine induces hedonic sensations even though it does not directly activate hedonic neural mechanisms. I ultimately demonstrate that the neural mechanisms that can resolve the cocaine puzzle can also resolve the paradox of painful art. Importantly, this response to the paradox of painful art also defends aesthetic hedonism since it highlights underlying hedonic mechanisms that become active even in the face of painful art. (shrink)

Is value personal in the sense that what is of value is of value for someone, or is it impersonal in the sense that what is of value, while it pertains to a subject, is of value simpliciter? Ross was a staunch proponent of the view that value is impersonal. I am a proponent of the view that value is personal. This essay asks which of us is right. The controversy is over the metaphysical structure of noninstrumental value. But this (...) abstract question is brought to bear on particular kinds of evaluative phenomena: forms of value that are properly thought ‘admirable’ or ‘commendable’ such as aesthetic and intellectual excellence. These values are marshalled as hard cases for the personal value theorist, so a lot turns on whether she can give a plausible account of them. I make the case that she can. (shrink)

In this paper, I reflect on the importance of the traditional conceptual pair of beauty and taste. Despite recent proclamations within philosophy that beauty is making a comeback, the concept still provokes confusion. I trace such confusion, in part, to philosophers increasingly viewing beauty—in the so-called narrow, common-sense way—as an essentially shallow and thin concept. However, in stark contrast to most philosophers today, I observe that ‘beauty’, in the narrow sense, allowed philosophers in the past—not unlike many laypersons today—to see (...) beauty as linked to our most fundamental values, speaking of beauty of intellect, moral beauty, or the beauty of theorems, as well as artistic and natural beauty. And it is this understanding of beauty that was seen as a fundamental component of a flourishing life. Thus, to think of beauty as shallow and thin is not just undesirable, but evinces an impoverished outlook on aesthetics and value more generally. I begin by giving some background on beauty’s alleged comeback in recent philosophy. I then note that in recent years, this comeback has concentrated on aesthetic value rather than beauty, which is often dismissed as less important. I suggest that this is at least partly due to an association between, or a running together of, three distinctions: between a narrow and a broad sense of beauty; between beauty as a thin and a thick concept; and between beauty that is easy, sensuous, and shallow on the one hand, and deep, profound, and meaningful, on the other. I argue that useful as these distinctions may be, they are unrelated to one another. Importantly, there is a distinct concept of beauty in the narrow sense that is thick, neither easy nor shallow, and inextricably tied to form, pleasure, and (non-aesthetic) value. However, whether an alleged instance of beauty, or indeed a person’s or group’s conceptions and experiences of beauty, are easy and shallow or profound and meaningful, turns on another recently disparaged, yet central concept—namely, taste. If we wish to better understand and promote the profound, meaningful, and enlightening varieties of beauty, we should ensure that the conceptual pair of beauty and taste stand at the forefront of our philosophical enquiries. (shrink)

Apparent orthodoxy holds that artistic understanding is finally valuable. Artistic understanding—grasping, as such, the features of an artwork that make it aesthetically or artistically good or bad—is a species of understanding, which is widely taken to be finally valuable. The objection from mystery, by contrast, holds that a lack of artistic understanding is valuable. I distinguish and critically assess two versions of this objection. The first holds that a lack of artistic understanding is finally valuable, because it preserves the pleasure (...) of an artwork’s incomprehensibility; the second holds that a lack of artistic understanding is conditionally valuable, as the enabling condition of a finally valuable relationship with an artwork. I defend orthodoxy by arguing that both versions of the objection fail and that we have no general reason against gaining artistic understanding. (shrink)

The Auburn view of aesthetic value understands aesthetic value to be among the basic kinds of value. In distinguishing the Auburn view from reductive theories, James Shelley claims that value specifies aesthetic value via the determinable-determinate relation. First, I argue that aesthetic value is not a determinate of the value determinable by showing that the current Auburn view fails to satisfy standard features of determination. Second, I propose a friendly amendment to the Auburn view. I argue that Auburn theorists should (...) claim that aesthetic value is a determination dimension, rather than a determinate, of the value determinable. Taking aesthetic value to be a dimension satisfies standard features of determination and explains the failures of the current Auburn view to satisfy those features. Doing so also preserves the structural features that made Shelley’s initial claim appealing, thereby capturing the essential aspects of the Auburn view. (shrink)

An Introduction to Contemporary Aesthetics: Art, Community, and Experience gives students and other readers a comprehensive sense of the dynamic issues and problems in aesthetics and philosophy of art today. Each of the 14 chapters is written by a different expert in the field and together they cover a wide range of methodological approaches and perspectives, including those from analytic and Continental philosophy, non-Eurocentric global traditions, and critical stances taken up by feminist philosophers and philosophers of race. In addition, the (...) volume makes use of recent empirical work on art and beauty as well as examples of artistic expressions from cultures from around the world. In contrast to other coursebooks, which are often structured entirely around artforms, this volume frames much of its contents around core aesthetic concepts--like good or bad taste, interpretation, or authenticity--with each chapter devoted to a different concept. Within each chapter, the reader will find a range of engaging artforms and experiences. The contents of the volume are laid out in four sections: the first focuses on foundational questions in aesthetics, and the second on key aesthetic concepts. The third section focuses on applied questions relating to particular artforms and genres (e.g., horror, comedy, AI art, games). Finally, the last section of the volume takes a wider, but still practical, view; focusing on why aesthetic life matters to us, both as a society and as individuals. Key Features Written in a non-technical style for readers new to aesthetics and with little or no background in philosophy or the study of the arts Draws on examples readers encounter in everyday life and popular culture, from Drake to Philly cheesesteaks Deals with questions that concern many college students today: Does authenticity even matter and, if so, why? What's wrong with enjoying the work of an immoral artist? How are our homes and schools important places of aesthetic meaning? Each chapter is written as a biased survey, with clear coverage of the historical and contemporary literature on the topic but also from a distinct, subjective point of view Non-Eurocentric philosophies or examples are included throughout the book, highlighting the rich and diverse philosophical work from around the globe Discussion Questions offer student readers opportunities to engage more fully with the problems raised in the text Suggestions for Further Reading at the end of each chapter identify the most promising avenues for further research on the topic. (shrink)

This paper explores how the Apple Original Series Severance employs the aesthetics of backrooms and liminal spaces to critique modern office work and the alienation experienced by white-collar employees. Drawing from online liminal aesthetics, video games and theoretical perspectives on capitalism, the show presents a dystopian corporate environment where workers are psychologically and physically severed from their personal identities. Using the poetics of David Bordwell and neoformalist analysis of Kristin Thompson, the study examines Severance’s classical yet subversive narrative structure, its (...) use of restricted narration, and its manipulation of space and time to enhance thematic depth. The paper further explores the show’s visual style, characterized by corporate minimalism, cassette futurism, and geometric compositions that reinforce the sterility and dehumanization of the workplace. Beyond its aesthetic and formal properties, Severance functions as a critique of late-stage capitalism, workplace alienation and ideological control. By severing employees’ identities, the show literalizes the compartmentalization demanded by corporate culture, reflecting the real-world erosion of work-life boundaries. The show’s depiction of arbitrary labor, hierarchical secrecy, and corporate propaganda parallels historical critiques of capitalist labor structures while offering a stark vision of a workforce deprived of agency. Ultimately, the paper argues that Severance is not only a stylistic exercise in liminal mystery but also a powerful cultural reflection on contemporary labor conditions. Its engagement, with both narrative and visual elements, underscores a broader social anxiety about the meaninglessness of work, the psychological toll of corporate control, and the possibility of resistance in an era of pervasive economic alienation. (shrink)

What are the values implied by the 2021 boom in prizewinning African literature, and what are its implications for literary criticism? This essay considers three prizewinning African novelists—Damon Galgut, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Tsitsi Dangarembga—and their popular and scholarly receptions to ascertain what is being valued in these authors when they are awarded the Booker, Nobel, and PEN Pinter Prize, respectively. The article compares this evaluative and interpretive state of affairs to an earlier moment in postcolonial studies in an effort to (...) raise the question of what the task of criticism should or could look like today. (shrink)

Judgments of personal taste such as “Haggis is delicious” are puzzling. On the one hand they express the speaker’s personal taste. On the other hand it is normal to disagree about the truth of such judgments. Giving semantics for predicates of taste that can accommodate both intuitions has proven challenging. Let us call the phenomenon that the truth of judgments of taste depends on variable tastes 'perspective dependence'. The thesis discusses two most popular semantic accounts for predicates of taste. Contextualists (...) hold that the speaker’s perspective is an element of the content of predicates of taste. However, the view has trouble explaining what disagreements of taste are about, if speakers in fact make compatible judgments. Semantic relativism is a recent framework which is motivated by its alleged ability to explain both perspective dependence and disagreements. Relativists hold that whereas the content of a judgment of taste doesn’t refer to a perspective, it gets a truth value only when evaluated relative to a perspective. I argue that neither account is successful, and their fundamental mistake is to hold that people know that judgments of taste are perspective-dependent. I argue that majority of speakers take judgments of taste to be true or false irrespective of their personal preferences. If such “folk objectivism” is true, perspective-independent semantics for predicates of taste becomes a plausible view. However, a metaphysical presupposition that all the theorists agree on is that taste properties are perspective-dependent. Therefore a perspective-independent semantics will be committed to an error theory. I question the metasemantics behind the error theory and conclude that we should adopt a more externalist metasemantics. That allows us to explain how predicates of taste can be perspective-dependent despite of folk objectivism. The resulting perspectivalist view can thus account both for perspective dependence and for why people disagree about taste. (shrink)

Aesthetic hedonism—the view that aesthetic value consists in pleasure—has faced serious objections in recent years, including James Shelley’s influential argument that it cannot account for the possibility of overvaluing an aesthetic object. Shouldn’t a hedonist aim for as much pleasure as possible? We propose an improved version of aesthetic hedonism that focuses on the whole of aesthetic life rather than isolated encounters with aesthetic objects. This shift reveals good reasons for the hedonist to care about correct evaluation, even when it (...) leads to short-run losses in pleasure. (shrink)

Aesthetic responses to human embodiment play important roles in our individual and social flourishing. Our ability to feel comfortable with and even take pleasure in our own embodiment contributes to our well-being, and our capacity to appreciate the embodiment of others contributes to our full recognition of them as persons and to their feeling of being valued and at home in the world. We are socialized into practices of appreciating bodily beauty: the facial and bodily qualities that a culture picks (...) out for special valuing. But these practices are deeply intertwined with objectionable social hierarchies. I argue that we should can and should opt out of practices of appreciating bodily beauty, despite the pleasures they afford, and choose instead to participate in other practices. Practices of appreciating the variety of aesthetic affordances of human bodies in all their diversity are both aesthetically rewarding and more compatible with our duties to ourselves and each other. (shrink)

Ignace Haaz endeavors to thoughtfully confront the intricate phenomenon of embellishing knowledge, which lies at the delicate boundary between aesthetic values and the ethics of knowledge, or intellectual ethics. This boundary should not be pompously perceived as the social status of some armchair academics but rather understood very practically through the noble profession of the editor. In a meticulously curated collection of essays, he addresses the third set of challenges among three sets of problems surrounding aesthetic values, ethics, and education. (...) These challenges are: -The profound nature and intricate problem of aesthetic values, including the role of grace and beauty in fostering ethical values versus art as a playful masking of some key values. -The issue of art as “showbusiness” driven by passion-based attitudes, and the consequences arising from these two initial lines of argument. -A focus on art and research integrity, aiming to find artistic responses to the unexpected problems encountered in art-based learning. Ultimately, this contribution poignantly reminds us of the perennial value of irony in addressing ethical dilemmas with others and poses the question of whether laughter, which transcends mere spiritual humor, could also function therapeutically in restoring the confidence between author and publisher in the process of addressing integrity issues. (shrink)

This work by fourteen authors, on the topic of aesthetic values, ethics, and education, gathers contributors from diverse backgrounds. University professors, theologians, international practitioners, music performers, and literary artists from different continents, i.e. Africa, Asia, and Europe, explore the profound intersection between intercultural and universal values, ethical considerations, and education through arts. The book presents essays and poems addressing the value and role of arts in challenging cultural and societal norms to nurture reasoning and social responsibility, and ultimately to promote (...) intercultural dialogue and understanding with ethics in aesthetic value and education to foster respect and collaboration. In exploring the profound intersection between these parameters through arts, this book invites readers to reimagine the world, ethics, and critical thinking in contemporary society. (shrink)

Dans son chapitre, Ignace Haaz analyse la pratique littéraire depuis son poste d’observation d’éditeur. Traditionnellement, la publication scientifique est le fruit d’un processus rigoureux de recherche, de vérification et de validation par les pairs. Cependant, avec la capacité de l’IA à générer de manière autonome des textes cohérents et détaillés, il devient plus difficile de distinguer les travaux véritablement innovants de ceux qui ne sont que des répliques ou des compilations automatisées de travaux existants. Comment garantir que l’utilisation de l’IA (...) ne conduira pas à une érosion de la rigueur linguistique ? Pour l’auteur de ce chapitre, une automatisation de la production scientifique poserait des questions cruciales sur l’authenticité et l’originalité du contenu d’un manuscrit. (shrink)

According to Borges' "Three Versions of Judas": The Redeemer could feel fatigue, cold, confusion, hunger and thirst; it is reasonable to admit that he could also sin and be damned. The Redeemer, the infinite ascetic, lowered himself to a man completely, a man to the point of infamy, a man to the point of being reprehensible—all the way to the abyss. In order to save us, He could have chosen any of the destinies which together weave the uncertain web of (...) history; but He chose an infamous destiny: He was Judas. Who with a terrible lucidity premeditated his offense. ·------- Lets agree with everything EXCEPT that there was no lucidity involved. Because the Redeemer must have no regrets, no guilt (Nietzsche: "likewise sinners and bad consciences! the sting of conscience teaches one to sting"). No guilt, no regret just forgetfulness means that Judas' act of identifying Christ involved a causally deviant chain, an awkward nervous non-intentional gesture, a comic-tragic act. So it merely appeared as dishonorable but internally or psychologically was not dishonorable. (shrink)

The fundamental problem for theoretical aesthetics is its inability to account for art’s meaning-value (Trimarchi, 2022). As previously argued, Art’s higher meaning is only found emerging from the artwork’s tacit dimensions, where empirical-historical intentionality is almost completely inconsequential (Trimarchi, 2024b). The latter’s interpretable ‘phenomenology of sequence’ produces a false theorising tendency, disconnecting art from the history of ideas and severing aesthetics from ethics and logic. Art appears ‘infinitely interpretable’, hence entirely subjective. Adapting Arnold’s (2011) actantial processual approach, I show how (...) Peircian semiotics, via ‘real Secondness’, uncovers art’s higher meaning. Peirce’s ‘diagrammatic thinking’ exposes art’s unique role of ‘objectifying’ the Person (in any subject, via appropriate propositions), without de-valuing this bearer of moral values. His ‘semiotic realism’ helps unveil Scheler’s anthropological (also termed ‘ethical’) phenomenology emerging from Merleau-Ponty’s ‘obscure zone’, to discern poetic from other speculation. Art’s ‘subject-objectivation’ (or, ethical intentionality) is thus able to be mapped phenomenologically to reveal any artwork’s meaning-value orientation. This paper combines Peirce’s ‘phenomenology of reason’ with Scheler’s hierarchy of values and Schelling’s ‘mythological categories’ (Trimarchi 2024b) to suggest a methodology for moving beyond neo-Kantian theoretical aesthetics (and analytical philosophy’s grip on the anti-art of ‘modernity’). That is, moving from the realm of perception to knowing, reviving art’s ontological connection to normative aesthetics. In conclusion, Peirce’s ‘science of ideals’ is thus revealed as Complexity Science, which – via his ‘suspended second’ (or, Ricoeur’s ‘second ontology’) - vindicates Schelling’s claim for how ‘aesthetics becomes objective’ (Trimarchi, 2024a). (shrink)

“According to the principle by which it is only in the burning house that the fundamental architectural problem becomes visible for the first time, art, at the furthest point of its destiny, makes visible its original project.” The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in the final sentence of his book The Man Without Content (L'uomo senza contenuto), just quoted, compares the current state of art to a burning house. At the same time, he points out that precisely at this moment of (...) absolute crisis, we can regain sight of the original stakes of art. Man Without Content, Agamben's most explicit contribution to the philosophy of art, is his debut. The book was first published in 1970 and reissued in 1994. Almost 35 years later, in 2014, he published the collection of essays Il fuoco e il racconto, which was recently translated into English under the title The Fire and the Tale. Although Agamben often focuses on literature in this collection of stand-alone essays, it can be read as a further elaboration of his philosophy of art. This philosophy of art can be summarized as a poetics of inoperativity, which at the same time implies a certain politics. To figure out how to understand Agamen's philosophy of art, this review will place this poetics in the broader framework of The Man Without Content. (shrink)

The argument that is in question in this article concerns the would-be dependence of one form of value on another. When something is intrinsically good for someone, which is to say, directly beneficial for them, it is so because it is good simpliciter. Proponents of the argument have so-called ‘perfectionist’ values chiefly in mind: worthwhile artworks, striking natural formations, intellectual and scientific achievements. They contend that the fact that engaging with perfectionist goods is non-instrumentally good for people depends on the (...) fact that perfectionist goods are good simpliciter. I argue that the dependency argument is not forced on us by intuitive claims about dependence, or by the need to be adequate to our practices with the relevant class of values. The good for theorist can provide a sophisticated account of perfectionist goods. If successful, the article provides a line of defense for the view that good is good for. (shrink)

Filmmaking with Artificial Intelligence Image Generation Models In just about one year, OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT 4 has caused panic in our daily lives. After a year, OpenAI introduced Sora, a moving image-generating model from text, similar to DALL-E for still images. Even though Sora is not yet available to the public, the very potential itself has raised issues in film production from the perspectives of producers and studios, as well as directors, actors, writers, and editors. In this chapter, the (...) role and expected impact of AI video generation technologies, such as OpenAI Sora and Stable Diffusion 3, will be considered in regard to filmmaking. To discuss these issues, it is necessary to further analyze the concept of artificial intelligence, what it means, and how it is misunderstood by the general public. These misunderstandings also lead to sci-fi fantasy and doomsday talk, adding nothing valuable to the debate. Once this concept is defined, the argument of why an artificial general intelligence akin to a human being is unlikely will be set, mostly referring to Hubert Dreyfus and David Chalmers. However, even though the good old-fashioned AI seems impossible, the AI tools we have now seem to be enough to cause many of the problems that the thought of a complete artificial intelligence also brings forth. It is important to treat these tools as tools and not entities in their current forms to focus on the more practical problems regarding human labor, interaction, and experience in the world. In this regard, it is important to look back in history to see how technology has shifted ways of making films. When thought of as such, it becomes clearer that these tools will likely not end human involvement in the practice of creating art but transform the methods and aesthetics of film production, challenging conventions in both artistic and commercial works in some ways and exaggerating them in others. Furthermore, the chapter will consist of the investigation of the impact of various AI tools on human creativity. Regarding human creativity, commercial films will most likely go through a paradigm shift. Production companies will most likely regard this shift as a way of improving performance and production. However, this advancement poses dire questions in the field and pursuit of creating art. AI tools help automate and accelerate the filmmaking process at the cost of filmmaking as an art form. The discussion will address why commercial filmmaking will see a paradigm shift and loss of some human labor, but in an optimistic world of philosophical thought, film as fine art will gain much in return. This is because AI tools in their current and foreseeable state are not capable of willing to make art due to their limitations regarding embodied cognition, experience, unconsciousness, and intuition. These things make us what we are more than we think. There is no better way to explain why human beings make art than to show how tools do not matter but the ideas and the will to do it. (shrink)

Richard Rorty’s conception of literature has been criticised more than acclaimed. While Rorty certainly has impacted literary studies, a comprehensive account of his understanding of literature is still lacking. Moreover, while literature is seen as significant to his later work, the philosophical role this plays in Rortyan thought is underexamined and underappreciated. This paper aims to provide an account of the role of literature and the “literary” in Rorty’s philosophy and the functions he assigns to literature and poetry – in (...) a broad and narrow sense – in democratic cultures. Beginning with an account of Rorty’s conceptions of metaphor and “unfamiliar” language, it draws on this to explain Rorty’s parallel view of literature in the “narrower sense” as playing the same role in culture as metaphors do in language. “Stimulating” literature unsettles settled selves and beliefs and expands human imagination. Using Rorty’s readings of Lolita and 1984 as examples, it shows that to him, literature not only plays a part in increasing empathy and solidarity but has a distinct therapeutic epistemological task: it helps individuals and societies adopt a more pluralist, ironist, post-metaphysical outlook. Both are important democratic functions. For these reasons, Rorty recommends that we work to realise a “literary” culture that rejects any ontologically inflected distinctions between kinds of texts, where philosophy becomes comparative “literary” criticism, and we see literature in the “narrower sense” as equally necessary material for making selves, communities and just institutions as any philosophical or political treatise. (shrink)

Tarot cards are a rich and fascinating art form. They are also an excellent tool for inquiry. I show why tarot has value, regardless of the user’s beliefs about magic. And I explain how novice or skeptical tarot users can appreciate (and create) that value by focusing on the card’s images, rather than consulting texts or expert guides. This is because, on a naturalistic conception, tarot’s zetetic value—that is, its value to inquiry—stems from its artistic properties.

This paper explores the epistemology of a particular dimension of perceptual experience—its affective character: the ‘badness’ of, for example, the smell of garbage or the pain of a stubbed toe; the ‘goodness’ of the taste of chocolate, touch of sunshine, or sound of a musical chord. I take the view that affective character is epistemically significant, putting the perceiver in touch with axiological relations in which elements (garbage, bodily harm, sunshine, chocolate, and consonance) stand to perceivers. Two representationalist approaches to (...) accommodate the affective character of experience—cognitivist and non-cognitivist—are explained and analyzed. Considering the objections they face, I motivate a non-representationalist alternative for capturing the epistemic significance of affective character. Because affective character is ubiquitous across the senses, the view developed suggests that perception is an inherently evaluative capacity and that some of the empirical judgments based on affectively valenced perceptual appearances are normative judgments. (shrink)

The debate over whether we can learn from art is as contentious as it is enduring. With the debate often centring on literature, recent theories claim that literature can deepen and enrich our understanding in novel and valuable ways. Contrary to this, Peter Lamarque accuses the neo-cognitivist of relying on empty metaphors of illumination and enrichment to spell out literature’s cognitive import. This paper links philosophical and psychological research to defend the neo-cognitivist against Lamarque’s charge. It highlights some of the (...) processes and mechanisms central to experiencing the cognitive impact of literary reading. These processes help the neo-cognitivist tell a robust and empirically informed story about how ‘enhanced understanding’ manifests in the experience of reading. (shrink)

According to one strongly supported view, fiction is a functional kind that communicates imaginings. Combining this definitional thesis with a plausible principle concerning functional kinds leads to the following evaluative thesis: features that contribute to communicating imaginings constitute good-making features as fiction, and features that impede this constitute bad-making features as fiction. However, this thesis is at odds with the actual practice of fiction. Critics can show their admiration for complicated works of fiction by stating, “That’s beyond my imagination!” I (...) argue that in resolving this paradox of hard-to-imagine fiction, we should not deny the observation, but rethink the definitional thesis. Works of fiction that are puzzling, redundant, contradictory, and collapsed can have a unique value that smooth works cannot. They can have value as fiction in that they challenge our imagination or place us in an exotic state of being lost in the imagination. (shrink)

Aesthetic statements of the form ‘X is beautiful’ are evaluative; they indicate the speaker’s positive affective attitude regarding X. Why is this so? Is the evaluative content part of the truth conditions, or is it a pragmatic phenomenon (i.e. presupposition, implicature)? First, I argue that semantic approaches as well as these pragmatic ones cannot satisfactorily explain the evaluativity of aesthetic statements. Second, I offer a positive proposal based on a speech-act theoretical version of hybrid expressivism, which states that, with the (...) literal utterance of ‘X is beautiful’, we perform two illocutionary acts simultaneously, an assertive and an expressive one. I will specify this theory in detail and argue that it can satisfactorily account for the evaluative content of aesthetic statements. I will also discuss the advantages of the theory over other variants of expressivism in meta-aesthetics. (shrink)

Is it possible to joke about everything? Are there topics that we should not joke about? Is it possible to say which jokes are good and which are wrong,or are jokes simply beyond good and evil? This issue seems to be more pressing in today’s multicultural world. In this study I reason,contrary to amoralism,that there are some jokes that can be morally judged. In order to present my argument, I use the type and token distinction as well as the results (...) of debate between Bartel and Cremaldi(2018)and Brandon Cooke’s(2014)arguments in the favour of amoralism in art in general. I argue that,even though amoralism is right in the case of some joke types as well as in the case of some joke tokens,not all jokes are fictive utterances. Therefore, the study concludes that it is reasonable to morally assess certain joke utterances. (shrink)

This chapter analyzes a pivotal music production – British band Radiohead's seminal album "OK Computer" (1997) – as a document of its time and contemporaneity, focusing on its modes of reflection of attitude and practice from a philosophical perspective. After scrutinizing the details of the album's production values, music, lyrics, and artwork, the article distils the 'habitus' of the work and compares it with related musical documents. These findings of reconstructive social research are subsequently deepened with insights from reconstructive ethics, (...) the similarities and overlaps of which are pointed out. It is argued that the Radiohead album retrospectively appears as a clairvoyant document of anger and despair voiced in an evolving setting of the dehumanization, exploitation, and subjugation of human beings in a world increasingly dominated by corporate and technological power, formulated at a time when large-scale digitalization was still in its infancy. The frequent vagueness of the songs and their lyrics, their ambiguity and indecision, reveal their inherent nihilistic tendencies. Radiohead's "OK Computer" summarizes what 1997 felt like and reflects a transformation process towards digitalized practices that is by no means complete even 20 or 25 years later. (shrink)

Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and Grade Point Averages. We are vulnerable to value capture because of the competitive advantage that such crisp and clear expressions of value have in (...) our private reasoning and our public justification. There is, however, a price. In value capture, we take a central component of our autonomy — our ongoing deliberation over the exact articulation of our values — and we outsource it. And the metrics to which we outsource usually engineered for the interests of some external force, like a large-scale institution’s interest in cross-contextual comprehensibility and quick aggregability. That outsourcing cuts off one of the key benefits to personal deliberation. In value capture, we no longer adjust our values and their articulations in light of own rich experience of the world. Our values should often be carefully tailored to our particular selves or our small-scale communities, but in value capture, we buy our values off the rack. In some cases – like decreasing CO2 emissions – the costs of non-tailored values are outweighed by the benefit of precise collective coordination. In other cases, like in our aesthetic lives, they are not. This suggests that we should want different values suited to different scales. We should want value federalism. Some values are perhaps best pursued at the largest-scale level, others at smaller scales. The problem occurs when we exhibit an excess preference for the largest-scale values – when we consistently let the universal metrics swamp our quieter interests. (shrink)

Seit ungefähr Mitte der 90er-Jahre und bis heute wird der Frage nach dem Zusammenhang zwischen Ästhetik und Ethik hauptsächlich in der angloamerikanischen und der angelsächsischen analytischen Ästhetik besondere Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt. In der Einleitung des Bandes Aesthetics and Ethics. Essays at the Intersection (1998), der eine der ersten Publikationen über das Thema ist, macht Levinson deutlich, dass das Buch das Ziel hat, Debatten der Ästhetik und Ethik zu verbinden, die während der vergangenen 30 Jahre isoliert behandelt worden sind (Levinson 1998, 1). (...) Er bezieht sich dabei auf die angloamerikanische Ästhetik. Seit der Veröffentlichung dieses Bandes ist eine beachtliche Zahl von Beiträgen entstanden, die explizit Themen an der Schnittstelle beider Disziplinen behandeln. Vor diesem Hintergrund soll in diesem Beitrag die Beziehung zwischen Ästhetik und Ethik unter dem Gesichtspunkt der zeitgenössischen philosophischen Ästhetik behandelt werden. Dabei sollen die Anknüpfungspunkte zwischen der neuen englischsprachigen Literatur und den Beiträgen in der deutschen ästhetischen Tradition sichtbar gemacht werden. (shrink)