Kant’s Aesthetics and the Problem of Happiness

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-51
Author(s):  
Jennifer K. Dobe
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Alternative Conception ◽  
The Third ◽  
Psychological Capacity

AbstractKant’s anthropological lectures introduce scepticism about our psychological capacity to experience happiness conceived as gratification or contentment. Aesthetic experience is in a position to inform an alternative conception of happiness that not only is more adequate to the idea of happiness than either gratification or contentment but also may more easily conform to the moral law’s constraints than gratification. As an ‘ideal feeling’, pleasure in beauty serves as a model for how best to enjoy even sensual pleasures and otherwise ‘private’ sensations. In the end, the third Critique suggests that this alternative conception is more ‘appropriate’ to humankind (§60, 5: 355).

Questions about Aesthetic Experience

Projections ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-75
Author(s):  
Paisley Livingston
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Third Culture ◽  
Aesthetic Experiences ◽  
The Third

These brief comments raise some questions about Murray Smith’s remarks, in his new volume Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film, on the nature of aesthetic experience. My questions concern how we might best draw a viable distinction between aesthetic and non-aesthetic experiences and focus in particular on possible links between self-awareness and aesthetic experiences. In sum, I agree with Smith in holding that we should not give up on the notion of aesthetic experience, even though aestheticians continue to disagree regarding even the most basic questions pertaining to its nature.

The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics

2009 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
The Third ◽  
Extensive Survey ◽  
General Overview ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theory Application ◽  
Music Film

The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics looks at a fascinating theme in philosophy and the arts. Leading figures in the field contribute forty-eight articles which detail the theory, application, history, and future of philosophy and all branches of the arts. The first article of the book gives a general overview of the field of philosophical aesthetics in two parts: the first is a quick sketch of the lay of the land, and the second an account of five central problems over the past fifty years. The second article gives an extensive survey of recent work in the history of modern aesthetics, or aesthetic thought from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. There are three main parts to the book. The first part comprises sections dealing with problems in aesthetics, such as expression, fiction or aesthetic experience, considered apart from any particular artform. The second part contains articles on problems in aesthetics as they arise in connection with particular artforms, such as music, film, or dance. The third part addresses relations between aesthetics and other fields of enquiry, and explores viewpoints or concerns complimentary to those prominent in mainstream analytical aesthetics.

THE ‘MILCH-COW STATE’ REVISITED: REPUBLICAN POLITICS IN THE AVEYRON

2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 743-768 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARTIN SIMPSON
Keyword(s):  
Third Republic ◽  
Alternative Conception ◽  
The Third ◽  
Local Services ◽  
Material Benefits ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Impact

This article examines the ‘republicanization’ of the Aveyron under the Third Republic, exploring issues of the practice and meaning of politics in this rural département. I look at the impact of the Republic's efforts to secularize education and ask on what grounds a département that emphatically rejected the secular/anti-clerical programme of the Republic could nonetheless eventually vote republican. This opens up questions of peasant understandings of politics. In particular I refer to the work of P. M. Jones who has written on this area, attributing republican success to the material benefits offered by the ‘milch-cow state’ and forceful administrative intervention. I argue that whilst the action of the Republic was significant, the success of the republicans rested on more than their ability to deliver local services. Republican politics in the Aveyron succeeded in redefining republicanism, arriving at an alternative conception of the Republic that was acceptable to the strongly Catholic and politicized electorate. We need to move away from any ideas of a single opportunist republicanism to realize that there were multiple conceptions of the Republic and a range of local republicanisms forged in relation to the circumstances of the individual French peripheries.

scholarly journals A Husserlian Approach to Aesthetic Experience: Existential Disinterest and Axiological Interest

Phainomenon ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-133
Author(s):  
Claudio Rozzoni
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Aesthetic Judgment ◽  
The Third ◽  
Aesthetic Attitude ◽  
Aesthetic Consideration ◽  
Existential Concerns

Abstract As early as 1905, Husserl made clear that, when it comes to aesthetic consideration, our “interest” is not directed toward the existence of the object as such, but rather toward the object’s way of appearance. Husserl’s famous letter to Hofmannsthal (1907) goes as far as to suggest that any existential concerns are potentially even a menace to the purity of aesthetic experience. This position clearly echoes Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment presented in the third Critique, notably as regards the notion of disinterestedness. However, this is not tantamount to claiming that aesthetic attitude implies the suspension of all interest: this paper aims to show that it would be more appropriate to discuss it in terms of a change of interest: from an existential interest to an axiological one.

Nature, aesthetic appreciation of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen Carlson
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Ethics ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Western World ◽  
Aesthetic Appreciation ◽  
Ideal Object ◽  
The Third ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Aesthetic

In the Western world, aesthetic appreciation of nature and its philosophical investigation came to fruition in the eighteenth century. During that time, aestheticians made nature the ideal object of aesthetic experience and analysed that experience in terms of disinterestedness, thereby laying the groundwork for understanding the appreciation of nature in terms of the sublime and the picturesque. This philosophical tradition reached its zenith with Kant, while popular aesthetic appreciation of nature continued primarily in terms of the picturesque. In the late twentieth century, renewed interest in the aesthetics of nature has produced various positions designed to avoid assimilating appreciation of nature with traditional models for aesthetic appreciation of art. Three are especially noteworthy. The first holds that the appreciation of nature is not in fact aesthetic; the second rejects the traditional analysis of aesthetic experience as disinterested, arguing instead that the aesthetic appreciation of nature involves engagement with nature; the third attempts to maintain the traditional analysis, while distinguishing aesthetic appreciation of nature by dependence on scientific knowledge. These positions have a number of ramifications. In freeing aesthetic appreciation of nature from artistic models, they pave the way for a general environmental aesthetics comparable to other areas of philosophy, such as environmental ethics. Moreover, the significance given to scientific knowledge in the third position both explains the aesthetic appreciation associated with environmentalism and provides aesthetic appreciation of nature with a degree of objectivity that may make aesthetic considerations more effectual in environmental assessment.

Reconceptualizing the Organism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel J. Nicholson
Keyword(s):  
Alternative Conception ◽  
Living Systems ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Equilibrium Thermodynamics ◽  
The Third ◽  
Biological Ontology ◽  
Flowing Stream ◽  
Non Equilibrium

This chapter draws on insights from non-equilibrium thermodynamics to demonstrate the ontological inadequacy of the machine conception of the organism. The thermodynamic character of living systems underlies the importance of metabolism and calls for the adoption of a processual view, exemplified by the Heraclitean metaphor of the stream of life. This alternative conception is explored in its various historical formulations, and the extent to which it captures the nature of living systems is examined. Next, the chapter considers the metaphysical implications of reconceptualizing the organism from complex machine to flowing stream. What do we learn when we reject the mechanical and embrace the processual? Three key lessons for biological ontology are identified. The first is that activity is a necessary condition for existence. The second is that persistence is grounded in the continuous self-maintenance of form. And the third is that order does not entail design.

Literature as Thought

2019 ◽  
pp. 81-100
Author(s):  
Robert Stecker
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Cognitive Value ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Aesthetic

This chapter has three main aims. The first is to argue for a modest view of the cognitive value of fiction in the context of the arts. This view asserts that we acquire from such works new conceptions or hypotheses that we then can test in the actual world. The second aim concerns the interaction of values. The claim we will make is that the kind of cognitive value typically possessed by representational art arises through the aesthetic experience of the work. The third aim is to argue against both more ambitious and more skeptical views about the cognitive value of fiction in art.

scholarly journals Film, Art, and the Third Culture

Projections ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-136
Author(s):  
Murray Smith
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Niche Construction ◽  
Extended Mind ◽  
Third Culture ◽  
Ordinary Experience ◽  
Embodied Simulation ◽  
The Third ◽  
Naturalistic Methodology ◽  
Similarity And Difference ◽  
The Relationship

In this article, I reply to the eleven commentaries on Film, Art, and the Third Culture gathered here, organizing my responses thematically and seeking to find points of similarity and difference among the commentators as well as with my own perspective. I address arguments on embodied simulation; the analogy between films and dreams; aesthetic experience and the “expansion” of ordinary experience; the relationships between culture and cognition and between fiction and emotion; theories of the extended mind and of niche construction; the place of neuroscience in aesthetics; and the relationship between naturalism and normativity. I conclude with some reflections on naturalistic methodology.

scholarly journals Subversive Humor as Art and the Art of Subversive Humor

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-180
Author(s):  
Chris A. Kramer
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Emotional Response ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Consciousness Raising ◽  
The Real ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
The Third ◽  
Narrative Thought

Abstract This article investigates the relationships between forms of humor that conjure up possible worlds and real-world social critiques. The first part of the article will argue that subversive humor, which is from or on behalf of historically and continually marginalized communities, constitutes a kind of aesthetic experience that can elicit enjoyment even in adversarial audiences. The second part will be a connecting piece, arguing that subversive humor can be constructed as brief narrative thought experiments that employ the use of fictionalized scenarios to facilitate an open, playful attitude, encouraging a space for collaborative interpretation. This interaction between humorist and audience is an aesthetic experience that is enjoyable in and of itself, as the feelings of mirth are intrinsically valuable. But connected to the “Ha-ha!” experience of these sorts of humorous creations is an “Aha!” or potentially revelatory experience that is a mixture of cognitive comprehension and motivated (emotional) response. The third part of the article will attempt to go beyond the consciousness-raising element with an account of how such possible worlds created in the realm of imagination through subversive humor can bleed into the real world of flesh and blood people. Finally, an example of subversive humor will be analysed.

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