Aesthetic judgements, artworks and functional beauty

Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 56, Issue 223, 2006, Pages 224-241

  Davies, Stephen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND   (New Zealand)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949294309     PISSN: 00318094     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9213.2006.00439.x     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. See L. Shiner, The Invention of Art: a Cultural History (Chicago UP, 2001), pp. 75-151
2. For critical discussion of such claims, see N. Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford UP, 1998), pp. 15-109
3. For representative exchanges on the distinction between free and dependent beauty, see R. Wicks, 'Dependent Beauty as the Appreciation of Teleological Style', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 55 (1997), pp. 387-400
4. and 'Can Tattooed Faces be Beautiful? Limits on the Restriction of Forms in Dependent Beauty', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 57 (1999), pp. 361-3
5. P. Guyer, 'Dependent Beauty Revisited: a Reply to Wicks', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 57 (1999), pp. 357-61
6. R. Lorand, 'Free and Dependent Beauty: a Puzzling Issue', British Journal of Aesthetics, 29 (1989), pp. 32-40
7. and 'On "Free and Dependent Beauty" - a Rejoinder', British Journal of Aesthetics, 32 (1992), pp. 250-3
8. R. Stecker, 'Lorand and Kant on Free and Dependent Beauty', British Journal of Aesthetics, 30 (1990), pp. 71-4
9. D. Crawford, Kant's Aesthetic Theory (Wisconsin UP, 1974)
10. E. Schaper, 'Free and Dependent Beauty', in her Studies in Kant's Aesthetics (Edinburgh UP, 1979), pp. 78-98
11. G. Scarre, 'Kant on Free and Dependent Beauty', British Journal of Aesthetics, 21 (1981), pp. 351-62
12. D. Dutton, 'Kant and the Conditions of Artistic Beauty', British Journal of Aesthetics, 34 (1994), pp. 226-41
13. P. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge UP, 1997)
14. and 'Free and Adherent Beauty: a Modest Proposal', British Journal of Aesthetics, 42 (2002), pp. 357-66
15. M.M. Eaton, 'Kantian and Contextual Beauty', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 57 (1999), pp. 11-15
16. H. Allison, Kant's Theory of Taste (Cambridge UP, 2001)
17. P. Mallaband, 'Understanding Kant's Distinction between Free and Dependent Beauty', The Philosophical Quarterly, 52 (2002), pp. 66-81
18. N. McAdoo, 'Kant and the Problem of Dependent Beauty', Kant-Studien, 93 (2002), pp. 444-52
19. See J. Stolnitz, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art Criticism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960)
20. See F. Sibley, 'Aesthetic Concepts', Philosophical Review, 68 (1959), pp. 421-50
21. See M.C. Beardsley, Aesthetics (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1958), pp. 457-60
22. See, e.g., G. Dickie, 'The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude', American Philosophical Quarterly, 1 (1964), pp. 56-65
23. A.C. Danto, 'The Artworld', Journal of Philosophy, 61 (1964), pp. 571-84
24. and 'Artworks and Real Things', Theoria, 39 (1973), pp. 1-17
25. K.L. Walton, 'Categories of Art', Philosophical Review, 79 (1970), pp. 334-67
26. J. Margolis, 'Works of Art as Physically Embodied and Culturally Emergent Entities', British Journal of Aesthetics, 14 (1974), pp. 187-96
27. Moves are under way to rehabilitate the aesthetic: see A.H. Goldman, 'Aesthetic Qualities and Aesthetic Value', Journal of Philosophy, 87 (1990), pp. 23-37
28. N. Zangwill, The Metaphysics of Beauty (Cornell UP, 1995)
29. K.M. Higgins, 'Whatever Happened to Beauty? a Response to Danto', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 54 (1996), pp. 281-4
30. P.Z. Brand, 'Beauty Matters', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 57 (1999), pp. 1-10
31. N. Carroll, 'Art and the Domain of the Aesthetic', British Journal of Aesthetics, 40 (2000), pp. 191-208
32. and 'Aesthetic Experience: a Question of Content', in M. Kieran (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 69-96
33. J.C. Anderson, 'Aesthetic Concepts of Art', in N. Carroll (ed.), Theories of Art Today (Wisconsin UP, 2000), pp. 65-92
34. J. Shelley, 'The Problem of Non-Perceptual Art', British Journal of Aesthetics, 43 (2003), pp. 363-78
35. G. Iseminger, The Aesthetic Function of Art (Cornell UP, 2004)
36. and 'The Aesthetic State of Mind', in Kieran (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, pp. 99-110. Sometimes this involves a significant departure from the eighteenth-century models with which theorizing about the aesthetic began
37. 'Pleasure' might not be the best term. There is disagreement among aestheticians over whether that notion is adequate to capture the life-enhancing, identity-defining value of aesthetic experience: cf. M. Budd, The Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry, and Music (London: Penguin, 1995)
38. J. Levinson, The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Cornell UP, 1996), pp. 3-24
39. R.A. Sharpe, 'The Empiricist Theory of Artistic Value', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 58 (2000), pp. 321-32
40. There are reservations about whether the concept is sufficiently compatible with that of understanding, as the cognitive appreciation of art must require: see Stecker, Interpretation and Construction: Art, Speech, and the Law (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 34-7. These are issues I cannot address here. I stick with the present formulation, though it stands in need of development and refinement before it could be accepted as accounting adequately for the main function of Western high art
41. The functions of natural or living things are best characterized as their roles in ecological or biological systems: see R. Cummins, 'Functional Analysis', Journal of Philosophy, 72 (1975), pp. 741-64. These natural or biological functions should be distinguished from structural norms, which are the ones I refer to here. It is the biological function of spermatozoa to fertilize ova, but the vast majority of them never do so, whereas the vast majority of them do conform to the structural norm for their type
42. Zangwill, 'Beauty', in J. Levinson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford UP, 2003), pp. 325-43, at p. 333
43. F. Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (London: Dutton, 1883)
44. See D.M. Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating (New York: Basic Books, 1994)
45. N. Etcoff, Survival of the Prettiest: the Science of Beauty (New York: Doubleday, 1999)
46. See D.E. Berlyne, Aesthetics and Psychobiology (New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1971)
47. C. Martindale, 'The Evolution of Italian Painting: a Quantitative Investigation of Trends in Style and Content from the Gothic to Rococo Styles', Donardo, 19 (1986), pp. 217-22
48. V.S. Ramachandran and W. Hirstein, 'The Science of Art: a Neurological Theory of Aesthetic Experience', Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6, June-July (1999), pp. 15-51. To my mind, psychologists too readily equate beauty with sexual attractiveness, but the mechanisms they describe do seem to underpin the structuring of many preferences, including aesthetic ones
49. The view presented here develops ideas introduced in my 'First Art and Art's Definition', Southern Journal of Philosophy, 35 (1997), pp. 19-34
50. and 'Non-Western Art and Art's Definition', in Carroll (ed.), Theories of Art Today, pp. 199-216
51. L. Tillinghast, 'Essence and Anti-Essentialism about Art', British Journal of Aesthetics, 44 (2004), pp. 167-83, at p. 177
52. cf. her 'The Classificatory Sense of "Art"', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 61 (2003), pp. 133-48, at pp. 142-3
53. E. Dissanayake, What is Art For? (Washington UP, 1988), pp. 74-106, 132-66