Conference Reports
2011 Annual Meeting of the British Society of Aesthetics
The 2011 Annual Meeting was held at the University of Edinburgh's Old College on September 16 to 18. Fifty-seven papers had been submitted and the program featured fifteen of these, including eight papers authored by postgraduate students. The outstanding postgraduate paper prize was taken home by Kathy Fry, who spoke on "Nietzsche’s Aesthetics of Rhythm: Rethinking the Case of Wagner." Two keynote addresses were delivered: Catherine Wilson's "Grief and the Poet" challenged the fiction-centred paradigm in current philosophy of literature and Rachel Zuckert's "Reid’s Expressivist Aesthetics" offered a sympathetic reading of the aesthetics of that Scottish philosopher. The William Empson Lecture is traditionally given by a non-philosopher. The distinguished art historian Stephen Bann sprinkled his lecture on “The Heroic with the Pastoral: Genre and Philosophy in the Making of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta” with remarks about his own visits to Little Sparta in the early years of its construction. The conference ended with an outing to Little Sparta, where Professor Bann led us on a tour. It began in a downpour and ended with views of the sunlit Pentland Hills.
Dominic McIver Lopes
Professor of Philosophy, University of British Columbia
Music and Philosophy
Study Group
Report, 2010-11
The Royal Musical Association
Music and Philosophy Study Group was established in May, 2010, with the aim of providing a distinctive long-term forum
offering opportunities for those with an interest in music and philosophy to
share and discuss work, in the hope of furthering dialogue in this area.
Specifically, it aims to encourage musicologists, analytical philosophers and
continental philosophers to find out more about each other’s work, and to think
about issues in the philosophy of music and musicology from a variety of
theoretical perspectives.
Meetings and Organisation
The
then Steering Group met on four occasions during the year: August 24, November
10, January 15, and June 30 (just before the inaugural MPSG conference). At
this latter meeting, the Executive Committee was formally elected, which
comprises: Tomas McAuley (Chair), Julian Dodd (Treasurer), Julian Johnson
(Secretary), Nick Zangwill (Communications Officer) and Nanette Nielsen (Events
Co-ordinator).
Website
The
MPSG website (
www.musicandphilosophy.ac.uk) was launched
in November, 2010. The MPSG bi-monthly e-bulletin has also been launched and
currently has 243 subscribers.
Events
1. Symposium: What can science tell us about musical
meaning? (KCL, Nov 10, 2010)
This,
the MPSG’s first event, was a great success. The speakers were Peter Kivy
(Rutgers), Ian Cross (Cambridge), and Max Paddison (Durham). Around 100
delegates attended, and a report is available on the MPSG website (
www.musicandphilosophy.ac.uk/newsandevents/past/sciencemeaning-2010).
2. Inaugural Music and Philosophy Study Group Annual
Conference (KCL, July 1-2, 2011)
This
event was extremely popular, some 162 delegates attending. Keynote sessions
were given by Lydia Goehr (Columbia), Kendall Walton (Michigan) and Gary
Tomlinson (Yale). Other speakers included Malcolm Budd and Aaron Ridley.
Attendees included Paul Boghossian and Roger Scruton. Further details of the
event are found on the MPSG website www.musicandphilosophy.ac.uk/newsandevents/past/conference-2011).
The second annual MPSG conference, again at KCL, is currently being planned.
3. Conference Session: Marking time: on contemporary music
and historical analysis (International Conference for the Society of Music
Analysis (Lancaster, July 28, 2011)
This
group event saw papers given by Anthony Gritten (Middlesex), Bjorn, Heile
(Glasgow), Andy Hamilton (Durham) and George Revill (Open University).
Julian
Dodd (MPSG
Treasurer)
The State of Aesthetics
Institute of Philosophy, London
June 23-24th, 2011
The State of Aesthetics, organised by Gregory Currie
(University of Nottingham), Derek Matravers (Open University), Matthew Kieran
(University of Leeds), Aaron Meskin (University of Leeds), and Margaret Moore
(University of Leeds), took place in London at the Institute of Philosophy on
June 23rd and 24th, 2011.
The aim of the conference was to explore the current state of research
in philosophical aesthetics, focusing on three areas: the relation between
aesthetics and the artworld, the relation between aesthetics and other areas of
philosophy, and the relation between aesthetics and the sciences. The conference began with a general discussion
of these themes, brought into focus by Jerrold Levinson’s paper “Adieu a
l’esthétician?”, which argued that related work in other disciplines does not
obviate the work of the aesthetician. Gregory Currie provided a response
further illustrating some of Levinson’s claims with examples drawn from the
issue of aesthetic testimony.
The papers on the 23rd focused on the relation
between aesthetics and other areas of philosophy, with keynote talks from John
Hyman (Oxford) and Jane Heal (Cambridge).
Hyman’s talk ‘Art and Reality’ focused on the issue of whether the
technique of painting can and does aim at the uncovering of reality; Heal
extended her work on rationality to issues in aesthetics in ‘The Mind,
‘Rationality’, and Aesthetics’. The papers on the 24th focused on
the remaining two themes, with keynote talks from Ivan Gaskell (Harvard,
History), Diarmuid Costello (Warwick), Chris McManus (UCL, Psychology), and
Matthew Kieran. Gaskell discussed the wide variety of art-related practices in
contemporary China, with an eye to what and who determines an ‘artworld’. McManus presented an overview of his
psychology experiments related to the normativity of aesthetic judgments. In addition to the presentation of research
papers, the conference featured a panel on the teaching of aesthetics, both in
the public school setting (Michael Lacewing, Heythrop) and in art schools
(Matthew Rowe).
The conference was well-attended, with over 60 delegates
representing numerous disciplines and backgrounds. We are grateful to have
received significant financial and administrative support from the Institute of
Philosophy, as well as support from the Universities of Leeds and Nottingham
and the Open University. The conference
also received generous support from the British Society of Aesthetics.
The London Aesthetics Forum
2010-2011 Programme
Now in its fifth year, The London Aesthetics Forum (LAF)
is an ongoing speaker-series in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. It is
sponsored by the British Society of Aesthetics and hosted by the Institute of Philosophy
at the School of Advanced Study, part of the University of London. Over the
course of the 2010-11 academic year the LAF hosted nineteen talks, bringing its
total number of sessions over the past five years to seventy three. Notably,
this year saw the launch of the LAF's official website,
http://londonaestheticsforum.org, from which visitors can sign up to receive its
newsletter as well as view its programmes of talks, pictures and posters. The
website also provides access to hour-length podcasts of recent talks, which are
available via iTunes.
The season began with Peter Lamarque (York) discussing issues in art ontology.
Lamarque, who is well known for his work on this topic as well as his research
on literature and fiction, cast doubt on whether Gérard Genette’s distinction
between two modes of existence of artworks, their ‘immanence’ and
‘transcendence’, is a useful theoretical tool to analyse the ontological status
of art.
Issues in pictorial representation were at the forefront
of four talks this year. Ben Blumson (National University of Singapore) claimed
that on the most plausible account of linguistic compositionality pictures are
also compositional, arguing that the overall depictive content of a picture
depends on the depictive content of its parts. Andrew Inkpin (Eastern Piedmont) argued that the diversity of pictures poses problems for
both Kulvicki’s projectionist account of depiction and Lopes’s recognitional
account. Hans Maes (Kent)
tackled arguments that seek to show an artefact cannot be both art and
pornography, arguing for the existence of pictures that are art despite their
possession of pornographic content. Bence Nanay (Antwerp/Cambridge) sought to
revive a formalist aesthetics for pictures on which one’s aesthetic interest in
a picture is limited to the appreciation of its intrinsic properties, such as
line, shape, colour, tone and volume.
The LAF was especially fortunate this year to host talks
by two of the foremost aestheticians of recent decades, Noël Carroll (CUNY) and
Kendall Walton (Michigan).
Carroll argued that to be in a state of comic amusement is to be in an
emotional state and explored the role of cognition in enabling that state.
Walton discussed the role of understatement and overstatement in underwriting
irony. With the help of Stacie Friend, the LAF’s Faculty Advisor, Carroll’s and
Walton’s visits were made possible by co-funding from Heythrop
College, University of London.
Part of the LAF’s remit is to raise the profile of
aesthetics within the wider philosophical community and to showcase the
enthusiasm that exists for the subject. As part of fulfilling this aim, the LAF
often invites talks by speakers who are best known for their work in other
areas of philosophy. Past speakers at the LAF in this vein include Marie McGinn
(UEA), Michael Martin (UCL), Alva Noë (UC Berkeley), Barry Smith (Birkbeck/IP)
and Paul Snowdon (UCL), to name a few. This year the LAF was very pleased to
host talks by Casey O’Callaghan (Rice) and Tom Stern (UCL). O’Callaghan, who is
renowned for his work on aural perception, argued that arts are ‘multi-modal’
insofar as there are no arts whose appreciation turns upon the exercise of a
single sense modality. Stern, who works primarily in late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century European philosophy, explored reasons why philosophers of
history prefer studying the written word over historical plays and what this
reveals about the nature of history and drama.
The LAF also promotes cross-disciplinary engagement with
aesthetics. This year it hosted talks by three academics whose research spans
philosophy and other humanistic disciplines, such as art-history and
literature. Jason Gaiger (Oxford)
discussed ways in which art-making is a non-conceptual activity. Mariah Loh
(UCL) explored the peculiar affective status of works of horror from the early
modern period. Joshua Landy (Stanford) examined what it means to say that lives
are narratives, literary ones in particular.
The LAF hosted talks on a wide range of other topics:
Catharine Abell (Manchester)
gave an account of the kind of act that authors perform when constructing works
of fiction. Garry Hagberg (Bard) elucidated and developed Wittgenstein’s ideas
about context and relational associations being partly constitutive of
artworks, musical ones in particular. Dominic Lopes (British Columbia) discussed the methods and
platitudes of philosophical aesthetics and the challenges they are posed by
results from social psychology. Andrew McGonigal (Leeds)
argued that we ought to foster and maintain art-world institutions insofar as
they provide the essential means by which we discharge our duties to art.
Jerome Pelletier (Institute Nicod) explored the role of simulation in our
processing of fiction. Katherine Thompson-Jones (Oberlin) argued that critical
art-pluralism exerts pressure on invariantism about the relation between the
aesthetic and ethical values of artworks. Nick Zangwill (Durham) motivated an ‘abuse’ theory of
metaphor, on which metaphors exploit and subvert existing linguistic meanings.
The LAF convenes roughly fortnightly, in either Senate or
Stewart House. Speakers are invited to talk for roughly one hour with a second
hour devoted to questions, a format that has enabled in-depth and extensive
discussion. Although primarily designed with philosophers in mind, the LAF
attracts a diverse audience, one that often includes historians, musicologists,
curators, practicing artists and general members of the public.
The LAF is organised by students and
staff from colleges across London.
Aesthetics,
Art, and Pornography: An Interdisciplinary Conference
Three-day
conference at the Institute of Philosophy, London
16–18
June 2011
This conference
brought together philosophers and aestheticians, art historians and film theorists
to investigate the artistic status and aesthetic dimension of pornographic pictures,
films, and literature. The conference attracted a broad audience. There were
over 90 registrations, and among the attendees were philosophers, art and film
historians, students and artists. There were many constructive exchanges
between disciplines: philosophers discovered much about the diverse presence of
pornography in culture, and in turn there was a genuine curiosity about and
engagement with philosophical approaches to the topic from those outside the
discipline. At the same time, substantial philosophical work was done in many
sessions, contributing to the growing philosophical debates around the
aesthetics and ethics of pornography.
Parallel sessions of papers ran through the three
days. The quality of these papers was high, and many provoked valuable
discussion. Book-ending these sessions, and threading between them, were seven
keynote lectures. The first keynote speaker was Elisabeth Schellekens, whose
paper, ‘Taking the Moral View: On Voyeurism in Art’, presented a fascinating
philosophical account of voyeurism in the context of art and film, and set the
tone of productive interdisciplinary exchange for the rest of the conference. Later
that day, the second keynote speaker, film theorist Pamela Church Gibson,
co-presented with the artist Jordan Baseman. Baseman screened his work, Blue Movie, which was accompanied by
audio of Gibson speaking about pornography. The ensuing conversation between
the two, and with the audience, was very lively and wide-ranging.
The next morning, philosopher Stephen Mumford gave a
thoughtful, analytically-minded paper, arguing that pornography is not amenable
to definition. Instead we can identify a specifically pornographic way of
seeing, which can be distinguished from other ways of seeing the naked body
(such as erotic or medical). He was followed that afternoon by eminent art
historian, Martin Kemp, who gave a series of fascinating reflections on the
works he curated in the 2007 exhibition at the Barbican, Seduced: Art an Sex from Antiquity to Now, in the process sketching
his own account of the “elastic” distinction between art and pornography.
The morning of the final day, keynote speaker Jesse
Prinz co-presented with Petra Van Brabandt their paper ‘Why Porn Films Suck’.
Using a range of new counter-examples, mostly from film, they developed a range
of novel criticisms of Jerrold Levinson’s claim that pornography cannot be art.
The conference was closed with a dramatic session featuring the last two
keynote speakers, Levinson and David Davies. Davies presented further testing
criticisms of Levinson’s position, and Levinson gave a reply threaded through
with humour, in which he stood firm against his critics.
We were
also fortunate to have the conference partnered by an excellent
pornography-themed exhibition of contemporary art, Transgression, at Beers Lambert Gallery. The gallery generously
hosted a reception for the conference attendees on the second evening of the
conference, which ran into the exhibition’s private view making for a very
memorable night
We
gratefully acknowledge financial support for the conference from the British
Society of Aesthetics, the American Society for Aesthetics, and the School of Arts
and the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Kent.
Michael Newall, for the Aesthetics Research Group, University of Kent
Fiction on Fiction – Metafictions and
Reflexive Representation: Philosophy, Film, Art, Literature
15-16 April 2011
CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts,
Social Sciences and Humanities), University of Cambridge
This multi-disciplinary conference
focussed on metafiction – taken to cover any fiction which represents itself as
a fiction – and the questions it raises about the nature of fiction. For
example: how should we accommodate metafictions within an account of truth in
fiction? Are there any peculiarities of imaginative or emotional engagement
with metafictions? What are the different metafictional narrative techniques,
and do they all have the same impact on the content of the fiction? What
restrictions does metafiction place on the ontology of fiction and the nature
of fictional characters?
In ‘Pictures of Pictures, Stories
about Stories, Imaginings about Imaginings’, Kendall Walton (Michigan) proposed
that certain fictions about fictions are among counterexamples to the view he put
forward in Mimesis as Make-Believe
and elsewhere: that what is fictional is what is to be imagined by those who
engage with the work. He argued that thinking in terms of multiple imaginary
worlds associated with the same fictional work provides a way to capture such
cases. In ‘Transparency and Reflexivity in Film’, Murray Smith (Kent) argued
that we cannot sufficiently distinguish reflexive from realist or mainstream
films by saying that the latter are transparent and the former are not. In
‘Metafiction and the Passage of Time’, Mark Currie (Queen Mary, London)
identified and explicated distinctive temporal features of metafictional
literary works. In ‘Making Sense of Metafiction’, Emily Caddick (Cambridge)
discussed whether metafictional works have fictional truths which distinguish
them from non-metafictional works, and argued that the apparently paradoxical
results of some metafictions can be accommodated without saying they have
impossible content. In ‘(Why) Is Fiction-Making Necessary?’, Ruth Ronen (Tel
Aviv) proposed a view of the relationship between understanding fictions and
discovering truths about the actual world. In ‘Fiction, Metafiction and
Studying Prehistory’, Christopher Chippindale (Cambridge) discussed what is in
common between constructing fictions and constructing theories about
prehistoric artefacts, and what ultimately sets the two apart. In ‘The Art of
Projectionism: Shadowing the Third Man, Shadowing the Past’, Frederick Baker
(Cambridge/St Pölten) discussed the making of, and techniques involved in, his
metafictional film Shadowing the Third
Man. In ‘What Can Be Known? (Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 1927): Thinking in
Fiction’, Patricia Waugh (Durham) gave an account of the contribution made by
the novel genre to our ways of understanding the world and, in particular,
others’ minds and experiences. She also discussed what this means for the
future of metafiction.
Four
graduate papers were selected from submissions. They focussed on: (1)
metafiction in children’s literature – Julie Barton, East Anglia: ‘The True
Tale of the Fictive Author: Metafiction and Lemony Snicket’; (2) fictions which
include other fictions, and what they reveal about the nature of fictional
characters – Gerald Marsh, Arizona State: ‘Fiction in Fiction’; (3) a
possible-worlds account of metafiction in drama – Samir Taleeb, Exeter: ‘The
“play-within-play” in Renaissance Drama: Fictional Frames and Boundaries in
Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy’; (4)
degrees of reflexivity in pictures – Thomas Arnold, Heidelberg: ‘Fiction,
Metafiction and Immersion in Pictorial Representation’.
The
conference brought together work on the nature of fiction within Philosophy and
work on metafiction in other disciplines such as English and Film, with the aim
that work in one discipline might generate ideas within others. Whilst the
speakers considered a range of issues concerning metafiction, common themes
emerged, helping to reveal how accounts from different disciplines could fit
together to provide a fuller picture of how metafiction works. The question and discussion sessions after the
papers were productive and interesting, and many delegates, as well as speakers, commented
that the multi-disciplinary approach had been profitable. The conference had 57
participants in all.
I would like to thank the British Society of
Aesthetics, the Aristotelian Society, CRASSH, and the Faculty of Philosophy/School
of Arts and Humanities, University of Cambridge for financial support.
Emily Caddick, University of Cambridge
European Society for Aesthetics Annual Conference
University of Grenoble April
18-20, 2011
Co-organised
with John Zeimbekis and as assistant at the University of Grenoble, this
conference was smaller than the previous year’s very large conference in Udine,
and comprised around 40 delegates from over 20 different countries, with 23
presentations and 4 plenary sessions by the invited speakers: Roger
Pouivet (Nancy)
Josef Füchtl (Amsterdam), Christel Fricke
(Oslo), Gerard Vilar (Barcelona). The conference had no particular theme, but
sessions were organised according to a number of themes, including:
‘Expression’; ‘Images’; ‘Architecture’; ‘Aesthetic Appreciation’. There was, in
accordance with the ESA’s aims, a good balance of representatives from the
‘continental’ and ‘analytic’ traditions, and the conference was deemed a great
success by all. The Annual General Meeting discussed future funding sources and
confirmed that the next 3 annual conferences would take place as follows:
2012: Guimares (Portugal)
2013: Prague (Czech Republic)
2014: Amsterdam (Netherlands)
Cain Todd
ESA Treasurer
Art, Aesthetics and the Sciences
One-day graduate conference, Department of Philosophy, University of
Nottingham
Monday 16th May
This conference, organised by the University of Nottingham and the
University of Leeds in association with the AHRC funded project ‘Method in
Philosophical Aesthetics: the Challenge from the Sciences’, provided an
opportunity for graduate students to present and discuss high quality work in
aesthetics, based on empirical investigation and guided by developments in the
sciences.
The keynote address ‘Seeing with Feeling’ was given by Jesse Prinz
(Graduate Centre: City University of New York) who argued that a certain kind
of emotional affect is crucial to aesthetic perception and evaluation. Prinz
went on to address work in cognitive science which suggests that emotions can
influence perception and presented an account of how such findings can be
applied to our perception of art works and other objects of aesthetic
appreciation. In addition to the keynote address three graduate papers
(selected via blind review) were presented. The first of these ‘Divergence and
Evidence: A Lesson from Faultless Disagreement’, presented by James Andow
(University of Nottingham), explored the attempts made by various accounts of
the semantics of aesthetic judgement to explain (or explain away) our
intuitions concerning faultless disagreement. Andow argued that a successful
account of faultless disagreement in the aesthetics case could have important
implications for other areas of philosophy (and in particular for how we should
respond to empirical evidence of diverging cross-cultural intuitions in
epistemology). A reply was given by Carl Baker (University of Leeds). Noah
Friedman-Biglin’s (University of St Andrews) paper ‘Aesthetic
Properties of Mathematical Objects’
offered an account, and vindication, of the practice of making evaluative aesthetic
judgements (concerning e.g. beauty and elegance) of mathematical objects such
as proofs and theorems. Friedman-Biglin outlined four aesthetic properties which
he argued we can legitimately attributed to mathematical objects. A response to
the paper was given by Levno Plato (University of Leeds). The final paper of
the day ‘Aesthetic Cognition, Analogy, and Cognitive
Science’ was presented by William York a cognitive
science student from Indiana University. York’s paper argued that, contrary to
a prevalent view, our capacity for aesthetic thought and experience is not
peripheral to a scientific understanding of the mind but rather pivotal to such
an understanding. York went on to explore efforts to map certain aspects of our
aesthetic cognition (particularly as applied to analogy) using computer models.
A response to the paper was given by Andrew Hirst (University of Nottingham).
We thank all the speakers and respondents for their contributions.
All of the papers were well received and the discussions which followed
were lively and thought provoking (aided by the insightful contributions of our
graduate commentators). We were particularly pleased with the range of topics covered
in the papers and with the breadth of concerns addressed. All of the papers
presented addressed important issues in aesthetics but these were also related
to wider debates in philosophy and elsewhere. The conference was attended by
more than twenty delegates, both staff and postgraduates.
This conference was made possible by generous support from the AHRC, the
Analysis Trust, the Aristotelian Society and the British Society of Aesthetics.
Royal Musical Association
Music and Philosophy Study Group
Inaugural Conference
Department of Music, King’s College
London, 1st – 2nd July
The optional theme for the Music and Philosophy Study
Group’s first annual conference was Opera and Philosophy. The event
opened with an introductory greeting from Nanette Nielsen, followed by a lively
panel discussion to identify challenges presented by the meeting of
disciplines. It was noted that disagreement between musicologists and
philosophers when discussing common topics of interest, such as musical value,
meaning, emotional content, ontology, language, aesthetic experience, morality
and ethics, often arises from methodological discrepancies. With reference to
this, Tomas McAuley’s address quoted Garry Hagberg in asserting the importance
of listening to each other.
The conference then continued
with a series of parallel sessions over the two days, interspersed by keynote
speeches from Gary Tomlinson, Kendall Walton and Lydia Goehr.
Wagner’s operas proved to be a popular
topic. Golan Gur’s paper explored Franz Brendel’s historicist theories of art,
which drew on Hegelian ideas of evolving self-awareness, in order to suggest
that Wagner initiated a new model for composers by merging philosophy with
artistic creation. By bringing together art and philosophy, Gur argued in line
with Brendel, that Wagner’s operas signify a pivotal development in the history
of music: they mark the beginning of a new era.
Gary Tomlinson’s keynote speech
‘Unthinking Wagnerism’ also picked up on the idea of Wagner as an innovator.
This project extended Tomlinson’s earlier ideas with regards to conceiving
music as a means of accessing other realms of thinking. With considerable
reference to biological explanations, Tomlinson argued that the totalising
effect of Wagner’s music did not induce a passive audience. Rather, the
‘narcotic’ upon ‘interpretants’ is in fact a symptom of their increased
participation with the musical stimulus. Wagner’s operas created a new scale of
semiotic activity and listening experience.
Richard Bell’s paper and the
collaborative presentation from David Levy and Julian Young focused more on
philosophical and religious issues raised in Wagner’s work. Bell suggested that
the composer’s arguments in paragraphs 2-4 of Religion and Art could shed light on Kundry’s conversion in Parsifal. Levy and Young on the other
hand set out to defend Wagner against the criticisms made by Nietzsche and
Adorno, with regards to his operas being ‘decadent,’ ‘tyrannical,’ flawed on
formal grounds and ‘nurturing life denial’. Their paper generated a lively
discussion from the audience concerning the question of whether Wagner’s Tristan advocates a ‘will to death’ or
redemption through love.
The themes of musical expression,
emotion and meaning also received due attention over the course of the
conference.
The ability of music to express
what is beyond the grasp of language was emphasised in Barry Stocker’s paper,
which discussed Kierkegaard’s reception of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Roger Scruton pointed out that it is through the
immediacy of the music in Mozart that we feel a sense of the Don’s seductive
power. Mark Berry further stressed this expressive capacity. In his analysis of
Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, Berry
argued that music is able to give artistic representation to an unknowable
Divinity through virtue of its abstract nature.
In other sessions, however,
delegates explored the potential of utilising various linguistic methods of
analysis in order to elucidate meaning in music. Robert Samuels proposed the
idea of mapping a musical flow to a narrative model, whilst Karen Simecek
insightfully suggested that the way we experience meaning in music may be
similar to how we engage with, and respond to, lyrical poetry.
Kathryn Whitney’s
lecture-performance towards the end of the conference featured a
‘mini-concert’ and provided a refreshing reminder of the experience of
live music. Her engaging presentation investigated the ontology of
‘liveness’ from the perspective of performers, as opposed to that of listeners.
Whitney’s clear presentation incorporated animated diagrams and an ‘equation’ in
order to explain, and capture, all of the elements that together constitute the
unfolding of a song in performance. Whitney’s research seeks to grasp something
that is part of what she does as a performer that she has not seen addressed.
In the final keynote speech, Lydia
Goehr sought to investigate the symbolism of an anecdote about a painting of
the Red Sea by uncovering its associative history. This trope, which appears as
Marcel’s painting of the Red Sea in Puccini’s
La Bohème, appears to highlight a
persistent tension between art and commerce.
In the closing plenary session,
Kendall Walton noted the impressive size and diversity of the group who had attended
this inaugural conference. Throughout there was a high level of involvement in
the discussions of papers, with many pertinent points made and questions
raised.
There was a general consensus
that the way forward would be to recognise and investigate the discrepancies
between approaches. Other suggestions for ways forward were: for musicians to
engage more with philosophy, for analytical philosophy to deal with
contemporary music and also for the divide between analytical and continental
schools of thought to be addressed.
Overall the event was successful
in its aims to open up discussion and demonstrated that while
cross-disciplinary relations could be challenging, the relationship between
music and philosophy is not dull! Many thanks go to the organisers,
participants and King’s College London who will be hosting next year’s
conference.
Prasanthi Matharu, Goldsmiths
College, University of London
The Acknowledgment of
the Aesthetic
A One-Day Symposium
at The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh
Monday, 20 June 2011
For Stanley
Cavell, works of art carry particular possibilities of knowledge; they afford
an “intimacy” with existence. Offering Cavell’s central ideas of acknowledgment
and intimacy as starting points, this one-day symposium opened to central
questions of knowledge and the art-world: Is there a form of knowledge that
only artworks can provide? Might artworks address the epistemological in a
unique way? How, if at all, might “knowing-through-art” speak to the
traditional problems of other-mind and other-world scepticism? Positioning
itself at the intersection of aesthetics and epistemology, this one-day
symposium encompassed the epistemological power of the visual as well as the
literary arts. Given Cavell’s career-long engagement with Film Studies, with
painting and photography, as well as with poetry, drama and fiction, he was an
ideal figure to get the conversation moving.
Mark Rowe (Philosophy, University of East Anglia) began the
conference with his paper, “Is Literature Intrinsically Conservative?”. Drawing
on Hazlitt and Trilling, Rowe argued that although literature can play a role
in prompting sympathy, it cannot make its distinctive powers responsive to
universal reason. Perhaps counter-intuitively, it is to conservative views of
morality to which we must turn to find a perspectival ethics congenial to
literature’s method and outlook. Rowe’s comprehensive paper inspired an
energizing question session. Rowe was followed by Diarmuid Costello
(Philosophy, University of Warwick)
who considered the relation between Cavell’s conception of an artistic medium
and Rosalind Krauss’s account of artists in the ‘post-medium condition’.
Costello’s conclusion – that Krauss’s appeal to Cavell to underwrite her claims
about artists ‘inventing’ or ‘re-inventing’ their own medium is ultimately
flawed – prompted lively debate among members of the symposium audience.
Following a coffee break, Nadine
Boljkovac (York University, Canada)
turned to Chris Marker’s La Jetée in
support of her paper, ‘Deleuze and the Ethics of Cinema’. Moving between
Marker’s oeuvre and the philosophies of Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari, Boljkovac examined the peculiar ability of the filmic medium to
explore ideas of personal identity, visceral encounter and non-chronological
‘past-future’ time. Boljkovac’s evocative paper was followed by Nicole
Hall-Elfick (Philosophy, University of Edinburgh)
and ‘Acknowledging Aesthetic Perception’. Hall-Elfick drew on the example of a
sand dollar – passed around among the symposium participants – to consider the
aesthetic richness of perceptual experience. Drawing on Frank Sibley and
Kendall Walton, among others, Hall-Elfick’s paper brought a welcome analytic
perspective to the day’s events.
Following lunch, Áine Kelly
(IASH, Edinburgh) returned to Cavell to focus specifically on his engagements
with the dance routines of Fred Astaire. In the ensuing roundtable discussion,
Kelly’s paper encouraged a broader consideration of Cavell’s place in
aesthetics and in the university. A lively debate, chaired by the IASH
Director, Susan Manning, explored areas of the aesthetic not explicitly
‘acknowledged’ in the symposium papers.
The conference was attended by
twenty five people, with researchers and graduate students from Philosophy, Art
History, Architecture, English Literature and Music. Further reflecting the
inter-disciplinary nature of the conference, there was a notable presence from Edinburgh
College of Art.
I would like to thank Edinburgh’s
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and the British Society of
Aesthetics, both of whom provided generous grants and made the conference
possible. Special thanks go to Professor Susan Manning, for her guidance and
advice, and to Anthea Taylor and Donald Ferguson for administrative and
technical support.
British Society of the History of Philosophy conference
The Annual Conference of the British Society for the History
of Philosophy conference took place at the University of Sussex on the 29th-31st
March 2011. The theme was the Enlightenment. Distinguished speakers included
Helga Varden on Kant’s moral philosophy, Quentin Skinner on liberty in the
English Enlightenment, Knud Haakonssen, and
James Harris on method in the history of philosophy, and Jonathan Friday
on Hume and Smith on the sublime of character. There were a number of submitted
papers as well. Conference dinner at a French restaurant in Brighton was a
convivial occasion. The organisers are very grateful to the British Society of
Aesthetics for funding Dr Friday’s attendance at the conference.
Aesthetic
Autonomy and Heteronomy
One-day conference, Department of Philosophy, University
of York, Wednesday 2nd February
This conference was an inter-disciplinary examination of the
relationship between aesthetic autonomy and heteronomy. The remit was
intentionally kept broad, in order to allow for consideration of both artistic
autonomy and the autonomy of aesthetic
judgments. The conference was intended to present work from not only a variety
of traditions in Philosophy, but also from a variety of academic disciplines.
Anneliese Monseré
(Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Ghent University) began the conference with
her graduate paper 'Aesthetic Autonomy, Aesthetics and the Definition of Art'
arguing, against Kant's idea of 'free beauty', that the aesthetic is in fact partly
constituted by the extra-aesthetic. This was followed by Peter Lamarque's
(Philosophy, York University) paper 'Political Embeddedness and Artistic
Autonomy: Jacques-Louis David as a Test Case'. In what was received by many of
the attendees as an exciting elaboration of his aesthetic philosophy, Professor
Lamarque delivered an intriguing examination of the relationship between
aesthetic and historical properties, using The Death of Marat as an
exemplar. Following a brief tea break, Jason Gaiger (Art History, Oxford
University) presented on 'A conflict of values: on the concept of autonomy in
the visual arts'. Using several visual examples, an illuminating consideration
of the development of the concept of autonomy in the visual arts was given,
with an intriguing consideration of Theodor Adorno towards the close. Theodor
Adorno appeared again, as the focus of Max Paddison's (Music, Durham
University) paper 'The Autonomy of Music as Critical Self-Reflection'. Just as
Jason Gaiger provided welcome discussion of aesthetics from the perspective of
the visual arts, Max Paddison presented the problem of autonomy as expressed in
the context of music. Working with Theodor Adorno's conception of form and
content, Max presented a fascinating illustration of the development and
problematic of aesthetic autonomy in the context of music. This was followed by
the final graduate paper, delivered by Richard Stopford (Philosophy, Durham
University). His paper 'Unlikely Alliances: Adorno and Heil on the Metaphysics
of Art and Autonomy', sought to posit artworks as being constituted by the
extra-aesthetic. As the title suggests, this was also from the context of
Adorno's philosophy – however, Adorno's account was wedded to Heil's
metaphysics in an attempt to posit the artwork as ontologically constituted by
extra-aesthetic relations. Andy Hamilton (Philosophy, Durham University)
presented an examination of 'The Autonomy of Architecture'. Roger Scruton's
conception of architecture and architectural vernacular came in for extended
criticism. Closing the conference, Gordon Finlayson (Philosophy, University of
Sussex) presented his paper 'The Artwork and the Promesse du Bonheur in
Adorno's Aesthetic Theory'. Adorno's claim that art presents a 'promise of
happiness' under changed social conditions was lucidly unpacked and explained
with reference to Adorno's general conception of the artwork.
The conference was attended by over thirty people, the
make-up of which also reflected the inter-disciplinary nature of the
conference, with attendees from Philosophy, Art History, English and Music
departments. The lively debate which took place during the conference, lunch
and wine reception suggests that fruitful links between disciplines were made.
I would like to thank York Humanities Research Council,
British Society of Aesthetics and Analysis Trust, all of whom provided generous
grants and made the conference possible. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Dr
James Clarke for his guidance and advice, and Brendan Harrington, who provided
invaluable assistance on the day.
Owen Hulatt
Touched: Philosophy Meets Art
One-day
conference organised by the Philosophy Department, University of Liverpool and
Liverpool Biennial 2010: TOUCHED
Victoria Galleries and Museum, Liverpool, 19th November 2010
The conference was devoted to the discussion of philosophical questions
prompted by Liverpool Biennial’s 2010 theme TOUCHED: Are we touched by Art? How
do works of art transform the way we understand and form our identities? Do art
festivals such as the Biennial prompt personal, cultural, and social change?
It may seem, especially in times
of economic hardship, that art is either a needless expense or justifiable only
in terms of social utility; yet aesthetic appreciation—be it of fine art or
everyday activities—still matters to people. This was the starting point of Matthew
Kieran’s paper “The Resonances of Art”, in which he argued for an appropriate
equilibrium with regard to our judgements about art, one that balances the
personal, local, and universal resonances that art can have for us. Revisiting
the nature of aesthetic judgment and the ‘ideal critic’, Derek Matravers, in
his “Touching and Understanding”, concentrated on the question ‘What is it to
be touched by a work of art?’ and argued for a conception of ‘understanding’
that would properly accommodate our contingent selves. Panayiota
Vassilopoulou’s paper, “The Self as a Work of Art in Progress”, discussed the
role of artistic creativity as a medium for attaining knowledge of oneself and supported
the view that art transforms the way we understand and construct our personal
identity and self. Is such creativity in art a rational
or irrational capacity? Berys Gaut, in his “Creativity and Irrationality”,
investigated this long-standing debate in the attempt to determine which of
these two competing views is correct. Peter Osborne’s paper entitled “Out of
Touch? Philosophy and Contemporary Art”, raised the question whether aesthetics
is the proper form of discourse through which philosophy can investigate
contemporary art. In particular, he discussed whether a phenomenological
approach is the most appropriate philosophical problematic through which to
approach contemporary art, with which, in his view, philosophy seems to be ‘out
of touch’. Sue Golding, brought together contemporary art with continental
philosophy in a lecture/installation/poetic, entitled: “Tactile Philosophy:
From Ars Scientifica to Ars Erotica”. In absolute darkness, with her voice
amplified through a microphone, she explored the event of synthetic life
(creating life in a laboratory) on aesthetics, sensuality, and science. The
audience was encouraged to visualize or construct through listening, a
philosophical narrative that would amalgamate the speaker’s/author’s assertions
with one’s own resonances – and fears – of what it means to be human, sensuous
and ‘alive’ in our digital, mediated age.
The conference brought together
scholars working on Aesthetics and Art Theory from different historical and
theoretical perspectives; the papers and the dialogue that followed allowed for
interesting points of agreement and disagreement to be identified and shared by
an audience of around 100 participants, including both academic and non
academic-related delegates, such as artists, representatives of UK leading
cultural institutions, students in local schools and other members of the
general public. The conference provided an excellent opportunity to promote the
value and impact of philosophy and aesthetic experience in a way that made both
Art and Philosophy accessible to a wider audience.
We hope that this conference will
help establish a long-term collaboration with future Biennials and we are
grateful to the British Society of Aesthetics, the Mind Association, the Forum
for European Philosophy, the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and the School of
Arts, University of Liverpool, for their financial support with this endeavour.
This funding made it possible to also offer twelve bursaries to postgraduate
students studying in the UK and abroad in order to attend the conference. We
would also like to thank the group of student volunteers (Stephanie Benetua,
Vassilis Dretakis, Thomas Dukes, Stephanie Keenlyside, Samantha Mcguire and
Lina Zuppke,) for their help with the conference and for filming and editing a
short video, which serves as an archive for the event and contains footage from
the papers as well as interviews of speakers and members of the audience.
The video, a link to which is
embedded in Uol websites,
http://www.liv.ac.uk/philosophy/events/conferences/Philosophy_Meets_Art/index.htm http://www.liv.ac.uk/philosophy/
may also be accessed through:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_Gc_xKbEQI
Dr
Panayiota Vassilopoulou, Conference
Organiser
Philosophy
Department, University of Liverpool
Literature, History, Cognition
One-day workshop, Department of Philosophy, University of Nottingham
Wednesday 19th May
This workshop examined the idea that what we today call ‘literature’ (a relatively recent category), has served in the past and continues to serve not simply as an object of knowledge, but as an instrument for the production of knowledge.
The perspective of the conference was historical in at least three senses: (1) It considered the historical contingency of ‘literature’, and in particular the boundaries between literature and philosophy; (2) it investigated the possibility of applying knowledge derived from contemporary cognitive research to interpreting texts from the recent and distant pasts; (3) it examined whether literature might be a vehicle for trans-historical moral reflection.
The conference, sponsored by the Departments of Philosophy and French at the University of Nottingham, brought together scholars from several countries working in diverse fields, including two working with Professor Terence Cave (St John’s College, Oxford), winner of the 2009 Balzan Prize for Literature, in his ongoing project on Literature and Cognition. Professor Cave attended and gave a summing up at the end of the day.
Gregory Currie (Philosophy, Nottingham), in a paper called ‘Trilling, Leavis, Nussbaum: three critics and the mind in literature’, considered the idea that the best in literature is that which helps us understand the realities of moral choice. He offered reasons for being sceptical of this idea. James Helgeson (French, Nottingham) spoke on ‘Perennial problems and cognitive approaches’. Starting from a passage in Michel de Montaigne in which he indirectly encourages his reader to observe the visual distortion obtained by pressing on the eye, Helgeson made make some preliminary remarks about whether contemporary work on perception and cognition might nuance our understanding of historicism. Karin Kukkonenn (Oxford) spoke on ‘Poetic Justice and its Functions in the Reading Process: A Cognitive Exploration’. She examined the role of the idea of poetic justice in the unfolding of plot and the representation of fictional minds. Patrizia Lombardo (Geneva) spoke on ‘Hazlitt and Stendhal: Literature as the art of making conjectures’, asking whether literature improve our understanding of emotional life? Olivia Smith (Oxford), in ‘John Locke’s ‘chiming’ thought’, considered Locke’s account of the disabling effect of ‘chiming’ scraps of poetry lodged in the mind.
The meeting was attended by 25 delegates, from a number of different academic disciplines.
We are grateful to the British Society of Aesthetics, the Balzan Foundation, and the University of Nottingham for financial support.
Greg Currie, University of Nottingham