The British Journal of Aesthetics articles from October 1995

The British Journal of Aesthetics archives from October 1995

The beautiful, the dainty and the dumpy. (man's perception of beauty)
October 1, 1995... How important is beauty? Should judgements of beauty be accorded their traditional pivotal status in aesthetics? Or should they be dethroned from that position? For centuries if not millenia it was assumed that beauty was a central object of...

Artworks and artworlds.
October 1, 1995... According to (at least some versions of) the institutional definition of art, something is an artwork if and only if arthood has been conferred upon it by appropriately qualified members of the artworld.[1] A number of writers have noted the...

Against musical Platonism.
October 1, 1995... I. INTRODUCTION One of the traditional problems in the ontology of works of art pertains to the ontological status of musical works, and in particular to the relationship between a work and its performances. In this paper I discuss and...

Autobiography, allegory, and the construction of self.
October 1, 1995... Recent theories of autobiography have stressed the fictiveness of discourse that purports to describe (the history of) a self. A broadly constructivist view underwrites such theories: autobiographies are not bare chronicles of fact, but the...

The self-conscious spectator.
October 1, 1995... THE VIEWER'S STANCE Play with prepositions is the resort of those who would describe what happens between viewer and painting. Looking at, looking in, looking into, seeing-as, seeing-in, are all familiar phrases in the titles and texts of...

Does aesthetic appreciation of landscapes need to be science-based?
October 1, 1995... I. MYTHS, FOLKLORE, AND NATURAL HISTORY The lava landscapes in Hawaii's Volcanoes National Park are quite aesthetically stimulating. On a memorable evening, I watched, in the twilight, red lava roll down into the ocean. The seashore on which...

Analytic aesthetics and anti-essentialism: a reply to Richard Shusterman.
October 1, 1995... In his recent article 'On Analysing Analytic Aesthetics',[1] which to a large extent is devoted to a criticism of my article 'The Nature and Limits of Analytic Aesthetics',[2] Richard Shusterman takes me to task for 'seriously misconstru[ing]...

The aesthetics of chess: a reply to Ravilious. (C.P. Ravilious)
October 1, 1995... In an interesting discussion of my article 'Chess as an Art Form', C. P. Ravilious[1] claims that I confuse the aesthetic rewards of chess with the satisfaction we take in an exciting, hard fought contest. This alleged failure to distinguish...

Truth, fiction and literature. (reply to Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom's book on aesthetics)
October 1, 1995... One of the most depressing features of the academic study of literature over recent years has been the extent to which it has fallen into the hands of people who are manifestly incompetent to conduct it, who have no respect for the humanist...

Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament.
October 1, 1995... The influence of abstract art in our century has revived an interest in ornament, which had been all but excommunicated by an earlier generation of purists. Oleg Grabar's excellent The Mediation of Ornament, a must reading for aestheticians,...

Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy.
October 1, 1995... Despite the enormous impact of French structuralist and post-structuralist thinking since the 1970s it is still generally the case that the writings of Gilles Deleuze remain relatively unknown. While figures such as Derrida, Lacan and Foucault...

The Contingency of Theory: Pragmatism, Expressivism, and Deconstruction.
October 1, 1995... It has been said that the publication of numerous books about critical theory is a sure sign that theory is no longer a force in literary criticism; theory has stopped or at least slowed down and what takes its place is description or...

Landscape and Power.
October 1, 1995... The difficulty of reviewing a book of essays is that one is tempted to consider each in turn and take issue with the details of each author's argument. Mitchell has helped me to avoid that trap by identifying quite clearly the arguments that...

Organicism in Nineteenth Century Architecture: An Inquiry Into Its Theoretical and Philosophical Background.
October 1, 1995... Throughout this history of Western architecture key thinkers and practitioners have made reference to 'organic' principles evident within acts of bringing fine buildings into being. In the twentieth century such references have become...

The Exile's Return: Toward a Redefinition of Painting for the Post-Modern Era.
October 1, 1995... Arguably the support of public institutions for the so-called 'return to painting' has been more overt and successful in promoting a particular view of contemporary art than had been the case since before the Salon des Refuses of 1863. Until...

Imagination and Time.
October 1, 1995... Nearly twenty years ago Mary Warnock produced a book (hereafter 'the old book') entitled simply Imagination (London: Faber, 1976). Now we have Imagination and Time (hereafter 'the new book'), and anyone familiar with the old book will have a...

Wittgenstein and the Grammar of Literary Experience.
October 1, 1995... This extraordinary book should overturn commonplaces in aesthetics, language philosophy, and literary theory. I know of no other work which has as effectively combined philosophy with literature: Wittgenstein, Davidson and Merleau-Ponty with...

Homo Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age.
October 1, 1995... Luc Ferry's book is concerned with the development of modern subjectivity, or individualism. His general contention is that it is in the history of aesthetics that the formative landmarks of that development are most clearly discernible: that...

The Aesthete in the City: The Philosophy and Practice of American Abstract Painting in the 1980s.
October 1, 1995... Carrier's book contains general theory plus practical criticism. The core of the theory is that we should accept Nietzschean perspectivism and current relativism/pluralism: 'No one, I think, has yet fully worked out the implications of what in...

Aesthetic Knowledge.
October 1, 1995... This is an odd book. To judge by its contents it deals with central problems in contemporary philosophical aesthetics, and does so in an interesting and novel way. The central problem of the book is to arrive at a conception of knowledge in art...

Empathy, Form and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893.
October 1, 1995... Unsurprisingly, the development of beliefs in aesthetics has often been shaped by new ideas in neighbouring disciplines. This reflection is amply confirmed by the six German pieces translated in Empathy, Form and Space, which are all indebted...

Musical Meaning and Expression.
October 1, 1995... Towards the end of the third chapter, on p. 150, comes a sudden ray of sunlight: 'Linguistic metaphor', says Stephen Davies, 'is difficult to analyze; the literature on the subject is enormous. So I take the approach of defending the view I...

Virtue and Taste.
October 1, 1995... There are ten essays in this collection, some about moral philosophy, some about aesthetics, and some which fulfil the promise of the title by examining the relation between the two. Flint Schier, in the opening essay, examines the relation...