Aesthetics of British Enlightenment

THE PUZZLING nature of Kant's distinction between two kinds of beauty has not been overlooked entirely by his commentators. Some of these1 have attempted to clarify his intentions on the assumption that the puzzle follows from a faulty presentation. 'Good will' and original thinking ...

MANY RECENT aestheticians have criticized the notion of disinterest. The aestheticians in question take the notion to have a vaguely Kantian pedigree. And in attacking this notion, they think of themselves as attempting to remove a corner-stone of Kant's aesthetics. This procedure is hardly likely to be effective if what they attack bears little resemblance to Kant's original notion. In this brief note, I want to show how far these anti-Kantian aestheticians have missed their mark.

Publication of this book was aided by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to The MIT Press.

Research Support: Dumbarton Oaks-Harvard University Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Center for Studies in Landscape Architecture (1979-80); National Endowment for the Arts, Project Fellowship (1979-80); Fulbright-Hays Full Grant for France (1973-74); Council for European Studies, Pre-Dissertation Summer Research Grant (1971)

IT is now well over thirty years since George Dickie's 'The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude'. 1 The paper continues to appear regularly in aesthetics anthologies and course reading lists, but the issue has largely receded from view. 2 This might be because significantly many aestheticians have accepted that Dickie's criticisms reveal the notion of the aesthetic attitude to be empty, a myth. I think they do not, and suggest that their failure can be attributed to Dickie's having attempted to evaluate the notion of an aesthetic attitude in isolation, in detachment from the more general sorts of theoretical commitments that historically have provided its most cogent motivation.

Appropriation art has often been thought to support the view that authorship in art is an outmoded or misguided notion. Through a thought experiment comparing appropriation art to a unique case of artistic forgery, I examine and reject a number of candidates for the distinction that makes artists the authors of their work while forgers are not. The crucial difference is seen to lie in the fact that artists bear ultimate responsibility for whatever objectives they choose to pursue through their work, whereas the forger's central objectives are determined by the nature of the activity of forgery.

I argue that the imagination was a crucial concept for the understanding of marvellous phenomena, divination and magic in general. Exploring a debate on prophecy at the turn of the seventeenth century, I show that four explanatory categories (God, demons, nature and fraud) were consistently evoked and I elucidate the role of the imagination in each of them. I introduce the term 'floating concept' to conceptualise the different understandings of the imagination and animal spirits in different discourses. I underpin my argument with a broader and less known discussion of the imagination. I argue that theories of the imagination, and particularly of the powers of the imagination, acquired negative associations and became linked with illicit magic in the Renaissance. Furthermore, I show that the relation between both animal spirits and imagination, and the power of the latter over external bodies, points to the importance of a 'history of vapours' and this suggests an adjustment to Hutchison's argument on occult qualities in mechanical philosophy. The accompanying paper gives more evidence of these claims and elaborates on the relation between the natural and the moral.

This new Routledge Companion signals the continuing development of the new fi eld loosely known as fi lm and philosophy. The book is another contribution to a new subdiscipline within philosophy (as philosophers may think of it) and an interesting, if somewhat suspect, meeting point of fi lm and philosophy (as some fi lm studies scholars may see it).

Rather than reading Shaftesbury in anticipation of later forms of disinterestedness, this essay seeks to unpack the larger significance of his aesthetics by tracing his ideas back to their ancient sources. This essay looks to the venerable tradition of world contemplation. It argues that Shaftesbury advances a specifically Stoic model of world contemplation in The Moralists. The text's principal concern is not with this or that beautiful object but with the whole of which it and the viewer are indivisibly a part; its aim is not so much to account for how we perceive beauty as to foster a characteristically Stoic orientation toward the world, one in which we overcome our egocentric view of things and align ourselves with the natural workings of the world or universe in its entirety. Far from being 'autonomous' from the rest of life, the Stoic world contemplation Shaftesbury advocates entails a robust affirmation of existence, clear-eyed gratitude for being part of the universe, whatever the challenges and however fleeting our time in it may be.

I discuss three theories regarding the interpretation of fictional literature: actual intentionalism (author's intentions constrain how their works are to be interpreted), hypothetical intentionalism (interpretations are justified as those most likely intended by a postulated author), and the ...

Similarly to his contemporaries, Burke's »splendid, truly Newtonian system« 5 aimed to explain, through observing how we respond to beautiful and sublime objects, the way certain sensible properties, by striking the senses, produce certain ideas and evoke certain passions in the mind. Just like his contemporaries in the empirico-psychological tradition, Burke held that aesthetic perceptions (i.e. the ideas of beauty or sublimity) are not the products of rational reflexion but of »certain affections of the mind, that cause certain changes in the body; or certain powers and properties in bodies, that work a change in the mind.« 6 However, unlike his contemporaries, as Samuel H. Monk already noted, he went »beyond the passions to the body«: 7 pointing out the close interaction between body and mind, Burke wanted to identify the »efficient causes« of our aesthetic perceptions in the physiological mechanisms of the nerve fibres, while also paying attention to their various functions in human life. 8 Thus, eighteenth-century British ›aesthetics‹, taken in this sense, goes well beyond the philosophy of beauty or the theory of art: the analysis of the sublime and the beautiful is only the first step, followed by revealing our psychological -or, in Burke's case, our physiological -make-up. Aesthetics -both the discipline in Germany and the various British and French discourses running up to it -emerged as anthropology: 9 Burke's theory of beauty and theory of sublimity are engulfed by his aesthetic theory, which is, in turn, engulfed by ›the science of man‹. Read in this light, the Enquiry is not a ›literary‹ enclave within the oeuvre of a genius in political philosophy, and neither, as it is often read, is it political philosophy in disguise, an ›aesthetic ideology‹ reflecting the social changes of the time.

The International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS) is pleased to announce the 2018 International Seminar for Early Career Eighteenth-Century Scholars. Colleagues from all fields of eighteenth-century studies are invited to submit abstracts for this one-week event. Formerly called the East-West Seminar, the International Seminar for Early Career Eighteenth-Century Scholars brings together young researchers from a number of countries each year. The 2018 meeting will take place in Viterbo, Italy and will be organized by Prof. Francesca Saggini and the Dipartimento di studi linguistico-letterari, storico-filosofici e giuridici – DISTU.
The seminar will be held from Monday, September 10 to Friday, September 14, 2018 in Viterbo.

The 2018 ISECS International Seminar for Early Career Scholars will engage discussions on the forms, representations and modalities of silence in the eighteenth century.
Silence, of individuals and cultures, of the physical voice or of the written word and information deleted from the page, has historically taken many forms. It may be reticent, dissembling or imposed by others. Voluntary or coerced, it might be the silence of women, of marginal social and religious groups, of communities that are denied the right to speak. There are other silences as well: the interruption of sound in a musical pause and the silence of religious practices, which speak to, and of, the inner life. All these forms of silence were present in the eighteenth century, as they had been throughout history, but perhaps for the first time, some of them were singled out for special scrutiny. Works on aesthetics, for example, investigated the use of silence and the implicit in rhetorical writing, or dwelled on reverie, and how it might be induced in the reader. In rhetoric, attention was paid to discursive figures and strategies capable of making silence more eloquent than the word. Conduct books devoted many pages to the art of conversation, emphasising the essential role of silence to ensure the correctness of social interactions, especially for women, but also for politicians. Censorship – whether institutional or self-imposed – also produces silences, as do the more or less conscious failures of memory found in life writing and in historical discourse: one need only think of the revisions required to write the history of colonialism, wars or slavery. Eighteenth-century historiography attempted to remove some of the silences it found in history, often filling in the lacunae through conjecture. Silence is also represented in the visual arts and, signally, in the novel, which devised new narrative techniques for the purpose, whether to evoke the silences in characters’ conversations, and the contexts and landscapes in which silence reigns (a hallmark of the picturesque, for example), or to leave the reader in suspense by strategically withholding information. And then there is the theatre, where after the triumph of pantomime and the illegitimate spectacles that deployed a hybridized combination of body, speech, stage machinery and lighting effects, the century comes to a close with the rise of melodrama, which replaced the spoken word with music and revolutionised the notion of acting as the art of speech, while giving new prominence to silent characters and heroes. Finally, there is the silence that becomes firmly and widely established in the eighteenth century through the practice of reading narrative texts for oneself, replacing the social activity of reading aloud for a group of listeners with a solitary, interiorized experience. On these and other silences, on silence in all its forms and meanings in the eighteenth century, the seminar calls for contributions. The theme of the conference, “Silence in eighteenth-century arts, history and philosophy,” must thus be understood in the broadest terms possible to include:


- anonymity
- silence, reflection, meditation
- social silence, silence and social interaction
- negation: denials, disclaimers, disavowals
- silence and secrets
- censorship and self-censorship
- ellipses, omissions, blank pages, hyphens, asterisks – the typographical and linguistic modes of silence
- ghost chapters (deleted, lost, rewritten)
- silenced characters, characters that disappear
- quiet spaces: the loci of silence
- reading and silence
- silence as resistance and rebellion
- scripting silence and muteness
- the performativity of silence
- silence and the canon
- silence and history
- silence in relation to cultural memory studies
- silence and/as remembrance

The seminar is limited to 15 participants. The proposals (approx. 3 pages, double-spaced, max 1,000 words) should be based on an original research project (e.g. a doctoral dissertation) which addresses one of the aspects mentioned above. Because this is a seminar rather than a conference, each participant will be given approximately one hour to present the texts and questions that will then form the basis of a group discussion led in turn by one of the participants. Preference will be given to scholars who are at the beginning of their academic career (ABD; PhD or equivalent for less than six years, including ECRs). The official languages of the seminar are English, Italian, French. Translations of abstracts and various seminar materials not in English will be made available to participants.

Applications should include the following information: a brief curriculum vitae with date of PhD (or equivalent); a list of principal publications and scholarly presentations; a brief description of the proposed paper (approx. 3 pages, double-spaced, max 1,000 words); and one letter of recommendation. Colleagues are invited to submit proposals by January 31, 2018. Please send abstracts by e-mail to Francesca Saggini: [email protected], ccing into the conversation Alberta Boschi [email protected] . If your email programme supports the delivery receipt option we encourage you to request delivery receipt. We will attempt to notify all correspondents before February 28, 2018 regarding the status of their submission

Peter Kivy's book offers a rigorous and witty defence of musical formalism. It is a pleasure to read. He defends a position of 'enhanced formalism', according to which 'absolute music' is expressive without being expressive of. This implies that one does not need to look beyond music's ...

Is it ever morally wrong for a consumer to imagine something immoral? Brandon Cooke has recently argued that it cannot be. On Cooke's account, fictive imagining is immune to moral criticism because such cases of imagining do not amount to the consumer's endorsement of the immoral content, nor do they imply that the authors of such fictions necessarily endorse their contents. We argue against Cooke that in fact fictively imagining something immoral can be morally blameworthy for the consumer, specifically in cases where fictive imagining is engaged in the service of immoral desires. Taking one potent case-namely, rape-fantasy pornography-we argue that the proper engagement with pornography requires the engagement of the consumer's desires, and that consumers often engage with works of pornography as a way of 'trying on' desires. Insofar as it is morally wrong to desire something immoral, then it is also morally wrong to cultivate an immoral desire; and for some consumers, fictive imagining is a means of cultivating immoral desires. In this restricted sense, we argue that it can be morally wrong for a consumer to engage in fictively imagining immoral things.

Originally published in: Hörcher, Ferenc: Esztétikai gondolkodás a felvilágosodás korában (1650-1800): Az ízlésesztétika paradigmája
(Aesthetic Thought in the Age of Enlightenment (1650-1800): the Paradigm of the Aesthetics of  Taste
Budapest: Gondolat, 2013.

Most pedig, Palemon, arról az írásmódról kell szólnunk, mely mind közül a legkiválóbb és legnagyszerûbb modor, és mely a nemes, fennkölt és széles körû szellemet jellemzi. Mindebbôl könnyedén kitalálhattad, hogy a Fenségesre gondolok, és netán azt feleled, hogy a feladat igencsak nehéz. Ezt elismerem, különösképpen, ha meggondolom, hogy már van egy nagyszerû szerzônk e tárgyban, aki kiállta az idôk próbáját, és aki, a legtöbbek szerint, ki is merítette a kérdést. -Mégis, van mit felhoznom elbizakodottságom védelmében, mert úgy vélem, annak tûnhet e vállalkozás, ha nem is a te szemedben, hanem azokéban, "qui redit ad fastus, et virtutem astimat annis". Mert bár jóllehet, Longinosz A FENSÉGRÔL címet adta értekezésének, bárki, aki a mû egészére tekint, észre fogja venni, hogy a szerzô nem szorítkozik egyetlen, partikuláris írásmód puszta magyarázatára. Bizonyos részek a figuratív, mások a patetikus 2 stílussal foglalkoznak, és megint mások azzal, melyet szerintem helyesen nevezhetünk fenségesnek. -Azonban a munka nagy része inkább az írás általában vett tökéletességére vonatkozik, mintsem annak egy adott válfajára vagy fajtájára.

Impressions of Hume presents new essays from leading scholars in different philosophical, historiographical, and literary traditions to which Hume made defining contributions. Hume has made a variety of impressions on these different areas; his writings, philosophical and otherwise, may indeed be read in a number of different ways. For example, they can be taken as transparent vehicles for philosophical intuitions, problems, and arguments that are still at the centre of philosophical reflection today. On the other hand, there are readings which are interested in locating Hume's views against the background of concerns, debates and discussions of Hume's own time. And this is not all. Hume's texts may be read as highly sophisticated literary-cum-philosophical creations: in such cases, the reader's attention tends to be directed at issues of genre and persuasive strategies rather than on argument. Or they may be regarded as moments in the construction of the ideology of modernity, and as contributions to the legitimation of a given social order. As the true classics that they are, Hume's works are typical 'open texts', which present their readers of all provenances with a bounty of materials and inspirations. It is the editors' conviction that the borders between these approaches are far from neat; and that as much cross-fertilization as possible is to be promoted. Impressions of Hume amply demonstrates the rewards of such an approach.

MY CRITICISM of Kant's distinction between two kinds of beauty1 may have given the impression that I underestimate Kant's aesthetics or fail to see its merit. For what my opinion is worth, I would like to correct this impression: my criticism stems from the desire to retain the core of ...

begins his rich and fascinating paper 'The Perception of Music: Sources of Significance' (BJA 49, 257-275) by noting that we 'can experience music as sad, as exuberant, as somber. We can experience it as expressing immensity, identification with the rest of humanity, or gratitude.' This is interesting in that it claims that we not only hear music as expressing various properties and emotions, but that we hear music as having some of those properties and emotions. (We not only hear music as expressing sadness but as (being) sad.

Luciano Anceschi, em estudo célebre sobre a estética do empirismo clássico 1 , ressalta a influência de Locke sobre o pensamento do crítico e ensaísta inglês Joseph Addison. Segundo o especialista, Addison seria lockeano não só no que tange à sua apropriação peculiar da distinção entre wit e judgment, como também em sua teoria da imaginação, apresentada ao leitor no conhecido periódico inglês The Spectator. A crer em Anceschi, ainda que de maneira pouco sistemática e um tanto dispersa, Addison teria aplicado o método e alguns conceitos de Locke aos objetos da estética, por isso seria, precisamente, um "discípulo" do filósofo.

With Prof Gabriele Mras, co-editor (Routledge, 2016). Richard Wollheim famously tried to found a theory of pictorial representation on the notion of seeing-in, or earlier, seeing-as (which we call both indifferently aspect-perception). The notion or cluster of notions captured Wittgenstein's attention throughout his philosophical life, especially towards its end. What exactly is the role and status of aspect-perception? Is it unusual, or is it in some sense present in all seeing? Can Wittgenstein's ruminations illuminate Wollheim's approach, or do they show what is wrong with it? If the latter, can the substance of Wollheim's ideas be saved? In the book, these questions and related ones are addressed in papers by: Avner Baz, Charles Travis, Richard Heinrich, Hanjo Glock,Garry Hagberg, Joachim Schulte, Fabian Dorsch, David Hills, Volker Munz, Michael Levine, Gabriele Mras. and myself. Table of Contents: Introduction and Acknowledgements Part I Wittgenstein and Seeing-...