The art of being unselfish

Daedalus

Volumn 131, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 57-68

  Nehamas, Alexander ^a  

^a PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 10844261428     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (10)

1. Mary Mothersill, Beauty Restored (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 165
2. David Hume, unlike Kant and Mothersill, believed that "there are certain general principles of approbation and blame" (that the judgment of taste, in Kant's terms, is in fact governed by concepts): "Some particular forms or qualities, from the original structure of the internal fabric, are calculated to please, and others to displease." Faced, then, with the fact of widespread dis agreement, he accounted for it by claiming that "if they fail of their effect in any particular in stance, it is from some apparent defect or im perfection in the organ."
3. See "Of the Standard of Taste," in David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1987), 233.
4. In this, I follow Mothersill, who follows Sue Larson; see Mothersill, Beauty Restored, 343-345.
5. The issue is very complicated, and needs to be discussed in detail. For example, it may be that two vases may be identical in shape but different in color: can't they share some aes thetic features in respect of their shape? There is also an issue whether being indistinguishable is a transitive relation, whether "a is indistin guishable (by A) from b" and "b is indistin guishable (by A) from c" imply that "a is indistinguishable (by A) from c" If it does not, as Nelson Goodman, for example, argued in The Structure of Appearance (Cambridge, Mass.: Har vard University Press., 1951), 230
6. (see also Goodman, Languages of Art [Indianapolis Bobbs Merrill, 1968], 99-112), then none of the prop erties of a can be aesthetic. If, for example, a is P and we suppose that F is aesthetic, then b also is F, since a and b are indistinguishable. But then c is also F, since b and care indistinguish able. In that case, F is not an aesthetic property of a, since it shares it with at least one object from which it is distinguishable. However, De lia Graff has recently argued that the relation is transitive, and, if she is right, this particular problem can be avoided.
7. Graff, "Phenomenal Continua and the Sorites," Mind 110 (440): 2001. But the question is far from settled.
8. Griselda Pollock, "A Tale of Three Women," in Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories (London: Routledge, 1999), 247- The quotation is from p. 294.
9. Quoted in Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, A History of Reading in the West (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 285.
10. G. F. Maine, ed., The Works of Oscar Wilde (London: Collins, 1948), 1040.