. Also called philosophy of art. Roughly, that branch of philosophy concerned with the creation, value and experience of art and the analysis and solution of problems relating to these. The primary topic is the appreciation of art, and major problems centre on what makes something a work of art. Must it exhibit certain formal e.g. geometrical, properties (formalism), or express certain emotions, attitudes, etc. (expressionism), or do other things? What in fact is the role of pleasure and emotion, and are special types of them involved? Is there a special kind of value involved? Does the work of art embody special properties, like beauty, sublimity, prettiness, and if so, how are these related to its other properties? How relevant are the object’s function, the context of production and the artist’s intentions? Does it matter how a work was produced, whether difficulties had to be overcome, and whether it was a forgery? These latter questions, involving the artist, are balanced by questions about the appreciation of beauty, and other qualities, in nature, and how this relates to appreciation of art.
Many problems in aesthetics are parallel to problems in ethics. How are aesthetic terms and judgments to be analysed? Can such judgments be true or false, and how, if at all, can they be justified? Are there objective canons of taste? The relations between art and morality are especially relevant in literature, which can portray moral situations, and which has, like other arts, moral or psychological effects. Questions about the moral justification of producing works of art belong to ethics. Aesthetics, however, can ask whether a work’s moral or psychological content is relevant to its aesthetic merit, and whether any subject-matters, such as pornography, are intrinsically inimical to aesthetic merit. Further questions cover the relations of art to wit and humour.
Metaphysical issues arise over the nature of a work of art. Is it a UNIVERSAL, or a paradigm, or a particular object, or is the answer different for different arts? Must a work of art be unique, or could it be created independently by different artists? And how is a work of art related to performances of it, where these are relevant? Philosophy of mind introduces questions about emotion, enjoyment, etc., and also about imitation or representation in the various arts: e.g. to what extent does fiction ‘imitate’ life? Fiction also raisesquestions of meaning and reference, which involve philosophy of language. What am I referring to when I mention Mr Pickwick? Can statements in fiction be true or false? Other questions concern phrases like ‘merry tune’, ‘imaginative portrait’: are the adjectives being used literally here?
Judgments on particular works of art do not properly belong to aesthetics, but general questions, like those about the ‘golden section’, concerning ways of achieving aesthetic value, may. It is, however, no longer as obvious as it once seemed that positions on general aesthetic theory and judgments on particular works are independent of each other. (Cf. ETHICS for some considerations analogous to those in this paragraph.
Aesthetics also discusses various aesthetic values, such as beauty, asking, e.g. how central it really is.
M.Budd, Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry and Music, Lane (Penguin), 1995. (General discussion of nature of aesthetic value, and of problems arising in these three arts. Cf. also his Music and the Emotions, Routledge, 1985, which claims music is autonomous and its value must be intrinsic, while no satisfactory relation between it and the emotions has yet been proposed.)
E.F.Carritt, The Theory of Beauty, 1914. (Introduction from point of view of what makes something a work of art.)
W.Charlton, Aesthetics: An Introduction, Hutchinson, 1970. (General introduction, with some emphasis on metaphysical issues.)
R.G.Collingwood, The Principles of Art, Clarendon, 1938.
E.H.Gombrich, Art and Illusion, Phaidon, 1960. (Emphasizes problems about representation.)
*J.Hospers (ed.), Introductory Readings in Aesthetics, Free Press, 1969. (Aimed at non-philosophers.)
D.Hume, ‘Of the standard of taste’, 1757, reprinted in his Essays Literary, Moral and Political, Routledge, n.d. (Applies his general philosophical outlook to aesthetics. Useful also for comparison with his ethics).
I.Kant, Critique of Judgment, 1790. (Kant’s main work on aesthetics. See part 1, § 16, for distinction between two kinds of beauty, ‘free’ and ‘dependent’.)
C.Radford, ‘Fakes’, Mind, 1978. (Relevance of forgery.)
R.L.Saw, Aesthetics: An Introduction, Macmillan, 1972. (Rather discursive. Emphasizes more purely aesthetic issues.)
K.L.Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundation of the Representational Arts, Harvard UP, 1990. (Aims to bring under one focus aesthetic, metaphysical and semantic problems about representation. For a summary by Walton, followed by discussions and his reply, see Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1991, pp. 379–431, and also R.Moran, ‘The expression of feeling in imagination’, Philosophical Review, 1994.
R.Wollheim, Art and its Objects, Cambridge UP, 1968, 2nd edn with additions, 1980.
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