British Society of Aesthetics

Conference Reports

Schopenhauer and the Philosophy of Value

The conference ‘Schopenhauer and the Philosophy of Value’ took place at the University of Southampton on 9–12 July 2007. We had an international line-up, with nine main speakers: David Cartwright (Wisconsin-Whitewater, USA), Paul Guyer (University of Pennsylvania, USA), Matthias Koßler (Johannes-Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany), Alex Neill (Southampton), Bernard Reginster (Brown University, USA), Sandra Lynne Shapshay (Indiana University, USA), Robert Wicks (Auckland, New Zealand), Julian Young (Auckland, New Zealand). In the event, the ninth speaker, Bart Vandenabeele (University of Gent, Belgium), was unable to attend; his paper was read by another participant. Each main presentation was replied to by a commentator, followed by general discussion. 22 people from outside Southampton (7 countries were represented), and 13 Southampton philosophers, attended. 8 of the delegates were postgraduate students.

The aim of the conference was to explore Schopenhauer’s theories of value from a variety of philosophical perspectives, governed by the question whether they stand up better to scrutiny and deserve more prominence than contemporary ethics and aesthetics have tended to give them. There have been many studies of Schopenhauer as a metaphysician, in which role he has commonly been found wanting, and it is arguable that this assessment has obscured the breadth and profundity of Schopenhauer's insights in aesthetics and ethics, which were widely influential in the mid to late nineteenth century, but whose influence since then has all but vanished.

The conference was a lively, well-attended and well-focused occasion. Main speakers were conscientious in taking the stated aims of the conference seriously and addressed issues in Schopenhauer’s aesthetics (disinterestedness, the nature of aesthetic experience, the value of art, natural beauty, and metonymic symbolism) and in his ethics (theory of compassion, selflessness, salvation, pessimism, optimism and death). Connections with earlier and later philosophers (Kant, Schelling, Nietzsche) were also addressed. Such a concentration of papers in these areas (unprecedented in all the participants’ experience) led to a collective deepening of understanding and brought to light many philosophical connections and critical questions. The conference was very positively evaluated by all those who attended. It had the right size and focus of topics to generate real dialogue in an area that remains relatively unexplored, an outcome which the smooth and well organized social arrangments of the conference also encouraged.

Publication of the conference papers is in progress. The European Journal of Philosophy has offered to bring out a special edition of the journal devoted to these papers. Blackwell have expressed interest in publishing the same, with the option of some additional papers, edited by Christopher Janaway and Alex Neill, at a later date.

Alex Neill—Southampton

British Society of Aesthetics Annual Conference 2007

Organised by Ian Ground, Matthew Kieran, Derek Matravers and Carolyn Wilde, The 2007 meeting of the British Society of Aesthetics took place over 7-9th September at St. Edmund Hall—Oxford. The conference was attended by 53 delegates, attracting not only philosophers and graduate students, but also artists, critics, theorists, as well as those with simply a healthy appetite for philosophical aesthetics.

he papers delivered were from a diverse array of perspectives, and on a variety of topics. Historical papers were given by Brent Kalar (New Mexico), who discussed Schiller’s influence on Nietzsche’s aesthetics, and Timothy Lord (Heartland), who presented on Collingwood’s identification of art with an act of imagination.

The visual arts were particularly well represented at this year’s conference. Rob Hopkins (Sheffield) defended the idea that some cases of seeing-in are ‘inflected’, but raised doubts about the importance of the concept. Dawn Phillips (St. Anne’s, Oxford/Warwick) motivated the existence of a ‘photographic event’ by way of allowing photographs sui generis aesthetic value, and Dan Cavedon-Taylor (Birkbeck) defended the epistemic features of digital photography. Especially engaging perspectives on visual art were to be found within the papers given by Tom Lubbock and Wendy Smith. Lubbock, an art critic from theIndependent, discussed the possibility and significance of dividing paintings, as well as literary texts, into quotable “bits”. And Smith, a professional artist, discussed various features of pictures, their signifficance, and how each can be subsumed within the artist’s control.

Ontological concerns were at the forefront of papers by Michael Morris (Sussex) and Stefano Predelli (Nottingham), in the context of representations and musical performances respectively. Music was also the central topic of Chris Stevens’ (Maryland) paper on profundity. Moreover, John Zeimbekis (Grenoble/CNRS Paris) motivated and defended deflationism about aesthetic value, Vincent Bergeron (British Columbia) defended moderate autonomism from the uptake argument, and Matthew Rowe (Open) discussed asymmetries between what artists and philosophers take to be the ‘hard-cases’ for aesthetic theory and definition. Jenefer Robinson (Cincinnati) brought the conference to a close with her paper “Expression and Expressiveness”. Robinson attempted to drive a wedge between the two concepts, and argued for a tight fit between our everyday expression of emotions on the one hand, and the idea of expression in art on the other.

A session was also organised in honour of Ronald Hepburn, previously the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh, on the importance of the aesthetic concept sublimity. Emily Brady (Lancaster) began the session by expounding the concept of the sublime and defended it from various objections about its obsolescence. As well as responding to Brady’s paper, Hepburn captivated the audience with a discussion of his work on the aesthetics of nature, theology, their intersection, and much more besides.

No report on the BSA conference would be complete without acknowledging the good natured and friendly attitude in which the event is hosted.

Dan Cavedon-Taylor—Birkbeck

Mimesis, Metaphysics, and Make-Believe

The 'Mimesis, Metaphysics and Make-Believe' conference took place June 21-23, 2006 at Devonshire Hall >University of Leeds). The aim of the conference was to bring together leading philosophers to consolidate and develop an understanding of Kendall Walton's work and the significant implications it has across the discipline of philosophy and elsewhere. With respect to this aim, the conference was an unmitigated success. It was attended by a total of sixty four delegates from a variety of countries including the US, UK, Canada, Spain, France, and Sweden. The conference drew upon delegates from a broad range of levels of experience, from various eminent figures (such as the invited speakers) to a large number of postgraduates, and even some undergraduates. There was extensive and active debate during the talks, between the talks and at the end of each day over dinner.

The conference was preceded by a workshop on teaching aesthetics, organised by the Leeds-based Philosophical and Religious Studies Subject Centre (part of the HE Academy), who also sponsored a very fine drinks reception after the first day of the conference. The panel members were Kathleen Stock (Sussex), Derek Matravers (Open University) and Ed Winters (WestDeanCollege). Other conference sponsors included the American Society of Aesthetics, the Analysis Trust, the BritishAcademy, the British Society of Aesthetics, and the Leeds Humanities Research Institute.

The conference itself began with a presentation by Ken Walton which canvassed his current thoughts on issues raised by his research. Over the next three days there were five talks from invited speakers on various themes on or related to Walton's work. Berys Gaut (St. Andrews) spoke on photographic transparency; Shaun Nichols (Arizona) and François Recanati (CNRS, Paris) both spoke about self-imagining; George Wilson (USC) addressed fictional narrators; and Steven Yablo (MIT) discussed pretense and presupposition. In addition, there were two open papers—the first by James Woodbridge (UNLV) and Bradley Armour-Garb (SUNY-Albany) offered a pretense account of propositions, while the second by Catherine Abell (Manchester/Macquarrie) addressed the epistemic value of photography. Papers were followed by brief comments from John Hyman (Oxford), Kathleen Stock (Sussex), Hannah Kim (Washington and Jefferson), David Davies (McGill), David Liggins (Manchester), John Divers (Sheffield), and Aaron Meskin (Leeds). The last day of the conference also included a roundtable discussion on the significance of Walton's work to various areas of philosophy (specifically metaphysics, aesthetics, philosophical psychology and cognitive science). The presenters at this session were Stacie Friend (Birkbeck), Jonathan Weinberg (Indiana), and Mark Eli Kalderon (UCL).

Overall, seventeen postgraduates attended the conference, including many from other departments and other countries (e.g., US, Canada, Sweden). Many postgraduates attended the 2nd Annual CMM Graduate Conference (held in Leeds on June 20) and then stayed on for the three extra days of the Mimesis conference.

Aaron Meskin—Leeds

Depiction: A Conference on the Nature and Value of Pictorial Representation


Hosted by The Philosophy Discipline Area, The University of Manchester.
Friday May 18th and Saturday May 19th, 2007.
The Whitworth Art Gallery, Oxford Road
This conference brought together those contemporary philosophers whose work has most influenced recent debate about depiction, together with other philosophers doing good work this area with the aim of advancing debate about a range of unresolved issues central to an adequate understanding of depiction.
Ten speakers presented papers at the conference. They were:

•Robert Hopkins, The University of Sheffield (invited speaker)
•John Hyman, Oxford University (invited speaker)
•John Kulvicki, Dartmouth College (invited speaker)
•Dominic Lopes, The University of British Columbia (invited speaker)
•David Davies, McGill University
•Bence Nanay, Syracuse University
•Michael Newall, University of Kent
•Malcolm Turvey, Sarah Lawrence College
•Catharine Abell, The University of Manchester/Macquarie University
•Katerina Bantinaki, The University of Manchester

In addition, four speakers commented on papers presented. The commentators included:

•Michal Klincewicz, CUNY Graduate Centre
•Alberto Voltolini, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
•Achim Spelten, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities
•Ben Blumson, Australian National University

The conference attracted twenty-three participants in total, more than half of whom came from institutions outside the UK (from Germany, Italy, Australia, Canada, Spain, and the United States). They included three graduate students and an undergraduate student, and were predominantly philosophers, although they included a small number of philosophically-inclined art historians and film theorists.

This was the first philosophy conference to focus specifically on depiction, and the first time those philosophers who lead contemporary debate on the issue were brought together with the specific aim of discussing depiction. The conference provoked a high standard of debate, which focussed around a number of issues central to an adequate understanding of the nature of depiction, including, in particular:

•The phenomenology of pictorial experience;
•The nature of pictorial reference;
•The role of resemblance in an adequate account of depiction;
•The role of imagination in an adequate account of depiction;
•The relation between visual object recognition and picture interpretation.

While this debate did not conclude with consensus, debate about these topics was nonetheless advanced, as discussion did much to clarify both the key issues of contention, and the different means by which these issues might be resolved. The conference organisers, Katerina Bantinaki and Catharine Abell, are now planning to put together an edited collection of papers, based around those presented at the conference, which will explore in more detail these issues and the various possible routes to their resolution.

Katerina Bantinaki—Manchester


Empathy—An International Interdisciplinary Conference

Empathy—An International Interdisciplinary Conference took place in Fullerton, California at the Fullerton Marriot on June 22nd and 23rd, 2006. The conference was sponsored by California State University-Fullerton, the American Society for Aesthetics, and the British Society of Aesthetics, and was co-hosted by Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie. The goal of the conference was to provide a forum for interdisciplinary scholarly collaboration on questions regarding the nature and significance of empathy. The program covered a broad range of issues and included papers by philosophers, psychologists, and film theorists. Noel Carroll and Kendall Walton were the keynote speakers.

On June 22nd, the morning session included papers by Derek Matravers (“Empathy and Knowledge”), Heather Battaly (“Empathy: Virtue or Skill?”), and Noel Carroll (“Solidarity”). The afternoon session featured papers by Amy Coplan (“Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects”), Peter Goldie (“Anti-empathy”), and Martin Hoffman (“Empathy, Justice, and the Law”). On June 23rd, the three morning session papers were given by Jesse Prinz (“Is Empathy Necessary for Morality?”), Murray Smith (“Five Problems for Empathy”), and Kendall Walton (“In Alien Shoes”). The final session included papers by Stephen Davies (“Infectious Music: Music Listener Emotional Contagion”), Gregory Currie (“Empathy, Imitation, and Joint Attention”), and E. Ann Kaplan (“Vicarious Trauma or ‘Empty’ Empathy?—Images of Catastrophe in the Public Sphere”).

The conference was enormously successful. It drew 150 attendees from all over the United States many of whom actively engaged the speakers in discussion. There was a great deal of productive scholarly exchange and throughout the conference, the speakers referred to each other’s papers and positions. The session chairs (Tobyn De Marco, Wayne Wright, Graham McFee, Rochelle Green, Susan Feagin, Dan Flory, Judy Miles, Robert Davis, William Seeley, Brian Keeley, and Renae Bredin) ensured that all of the sessions ran smoothly and on time and made significant contributions to the discussions.

Amy Coplan—Fullerton


The British Society of Aesthetics Annual Conference 2006

8-10th September, St. Edmund Hall, Oxford.
As a newcomer to aesthetics, and first-timer at BSA’s annual conference, I wasn’t sure what to expect from my weekend at St. Edmunds. Now, looking forward to next year’s event, I can eagerly expect a very interesting, very professional, and very fun weekend. For a lowly postgrad like myself, approachability is everything at a conference, so I’m delighted to say that the BSA excelled here. On arrival and throughout the weekend, everyone was smiling, chatting, and introducing one another – all obviously just very happy to be there.

The good impression continued as the talks started with Stacie Friend’s ‘Fiction in Practice’. This was a clear, straightforward and persuasive consideration of the different ways to understand the difference between fiction and non-fiction, and when and why the difference is significant. Dan Cavedon-Taylor’s ‘The Causal Exclusion Problem in Aesthetics’ was another especially interesting paper, addressing the problem of how supervenient aesthetic concepts like beauty, harmony, and balance can be causal. It was a shame that as this was one of two parallel talks, not everyone could attend.
Metaphysical issues arose again later that day with Dan Kaufman’s ‘Interpretation and Identity in the Arts’. With reference first to Christus’ Lamentations and Rogier’s Descent from the Cross, and second to Christus’ and Van Eyck’s Last Judgment, Dan considered the senses in which two paintings can be said to be the same. This especially, but also most of the other papers given, provoked lively and enthusiastic discussion. The questions and comments throughout the week stood out for me as being offered in a very positive, constructive spirit, and it was surely a mark of the quality of both papers and discussion that there was always much more to be said than time allowed.

This positive, fun social atmosphere was, no doubt, in part due to the BSA’s organization team of natural born entertainment officers. I suggest to both non-aestheticians, and even non-philosophers, that this alone makes the BSA’s annual well worth conference-crashing.

Hannah Edwards—University of Bristol

Mind, Art, and Beauty

University of Leeds
24-25 August 2006

Mind, Art, and Beauty took place at the University of Leeds on 24-25 August. The conference brought together a number of scholars working at the intersections of philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, and philosophical aesthetics.

Andrew McGonigal (Leeds) began the conference on Thursday afternoon with a paper entitled ‘Art, Beauty, and Character’ in which he argued for the relevance of moral character to the evaluation of art, in the context of a broadly virtue theoretic conception of artistic value. Rob Hopkins (Sheffield) offered a novel account of the epistemic status of aesthetic testimony in his ‘What Is Wrong with Aesthetic Testimony?’. And Chris Bartel (KCL) explored the importance of psychological work on tonality for accounts of musical understanding in his 'Can Musical Understanding Be Grounded in the Phenomenology of Musical Experience?'. Matthew Kieran arranged for an enjoyable evening in Leeds city centre on Thursday night.

Friday’s session began with a paper by Jonathan Weinberg (Indiana). In his 'Imagination, Genre, Thought-Experiment', he argued that philosophical thought-experiments could be productively thought of as belonging to a genre of their own. Eileen John (Warwick) made a case for the importance of disinterestedness and ownership to aesthetic experience in her 'Beauty and Disinterested Ownership'. Anthony Everett (Bristol) closed out the conference with ‘Boxes, Codes, and the Imagination’, in which he made a strong case for the importance of distinguishing some oft-confused sorts of imagining.

Approximately twenty-five people attended the conference which was held in the comfortable and pleasant facilities of the Leeds Humanities Research Institute.

We are grateful to the British Society of Aesthetics, the Department of Philosophy at Leeds, and the Leeds Humanities Research Institute for their support.

Aaron Meskin—Leeds


Conference on The Imagination and Thought Experiments

University of Bristol
12-13th May 2006

A mini-conference and workshop on the imagination and thought experiments was held at the University of Bristol on 12-13th May 2006. The aim of the meeting was to bring together some of the leading young philosophers doing work in this area in a relaxed setting that would allow for the informal exchange of ideas and discussion of methodologies.

he proceedings were opened by Mike Beaney (York) who presented “The Imaginary Nature of Imagining” followed by Aaron Meskin (Leeds) who presented “The Cognitive Architecture of Imaginative Resistance.” The following day Jonathan Weinberg (Indiana University) presented “The Imagination/Supposition Distinction,” Kathleen Stock (Sussex) presented “Imagination and Motivation,” Robert Hopkins (Sheffield) presented “Imagination and Observation,” and Stacie Friend (Birkbeck) presented “Imaginary Fictions.” The proceedings were concluded by Gregory Currie (Nottingham) who presented “Irony and the Imagination.”

In addition to the speakers around 30 other people attended various sessions during the conference. The organizers were happy to find that many of these were postgraduate and undergraduate students who actively participated in the conference and were able to meet and talk with the speakers in the informal context provided.

We are grateful to The British Society of Aesthetics, The Aristotelian Society, and BIRTHA, for their generous support.

Anthony Everett and Finn Spicer–Bristol



Mind and Music Roundtable

Columbia University
4-5 March 2006

The Mind and Music Roundtable was held in the philosophy building of Columbia University on 4-5 March 2006. Opening comments were given by Lydia Goehr (Columbia). On 4 March, our first talk was given by Michael Luntley (Warwick) who gave an account of musical expectation along the lines of Leonard Meyer to account for the phenomenally salient features of perceptual experience. Commentators on Michael’s paper were Joseph Dubiel (Columbia) and Sean D. Kelly (Princeton). Following that was a talk by Robert Kraut (Ohio State) on whether emotion is a feature of the content of music. Commentators were Jonathan Neufeld (Vanderbilt) and York Gunther (California State). Our last session of the day was scheduled as a talk to be given by Mark DeBellis (Columbia) on the content of musical perception and its relation to musical understanding. However, Mark was unable to attend the conference due to personal circumstances. His paper was read out by Joseph Dubiel (Columbia). Commentators were Christopher Bartel (King’s College London) and Diana Raffman (Toronto).

On the second day, our first talk was given by Fred Lerdahl (Columbia) in which he presented some recent research that he had been undertaking with psychologist Carol Krumhansl on the perceptual salience of tonal motion and harmonic force. Commentators were Renee Timmers (King’s College London) and John Halle (Yale). Our final talk of the day, and of the conference, was given by Christopher Peacocke (Columbia). Christopher argued that what it is to hear music as expressing emotion can be cashed out as a metaphorical way of hearing “as if”. Christopher’s respondent was Paul Boghossian (NYU).
Attendance of the conference is estimated at 90, which includes speakers and commentators. The aim of the conference was to provide a forum for discussion of music and its relation to debates concerning perception and concerning the emotions in the philosophy of mind. The conference was highly successful, which is evident in that many of the participants had expressed great interest in repeating the conference again in the following year. A publication on the topic is also being planned. The conference was generously funded by the British Society of Aesthetics, as well as other funding bodies, which allowed us to subsidise some of the travel and accommodation costs for our speakers and commentators.



Aesthetics, Culture and Society

Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
The University of Edinburgh
14 March 2006

This one-day Conference, organised by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, brought together five speakers from different disciplines to consider various aspects of “Aesthetics, Culture and Society”. The morning session was devoted to discussion of contemporary implications and applications of the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The principal speaker was Professor Tony Bennett (Director of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change and Professor of Sociology at The Open University) whose paper "Habitus clivé: the dispersed self and the politics of taste," introduced some theoretical implications of a national survey on Education and Cultural Preferences funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. Bourdieu has played a significant role in reception studies in suggesting that our relations to texts - whether visual, literary, or auditory - are mediated via class-based habitus that provide unified and unifying principles of taste that are manifest across the full range of an individual's cultural interests. Yet Bourdieu claimed that his own habitus was a divided or cleft one as a consequence of the conflicting experiences arising from his social mobility. Based on the recent findings of the ESRC survey, Professor Bennett’s paper suggested that such a divided habitus is the rule rather than the exception, and that the notion of a unified habitus - which plays a central role in Bourdieu's sociology of consumption - is unsustainable. Drawing on the work of Bernard Lahire, he argued that Bourdieu was able to produce a unity for different class habitus only by either ignoring the evidence from empirical surveys which suggest the existence of significant intra-individual variations in taste or discounting such evidence through the deployment of structural principles of causality which transform them into mere variations of a common underlying structure. Bennett illustrated the significance of alternative ways of interpreting such surveys by reviewing the significant dissonances in the tastes of individuals and the much greater degree of shared tastes across class boundaries that are evident in the 2003-4 national survey of cultural tastes, knowledge and participation in contemporary Britain. This data was used to argue that Bourdieu's interpretation of Kantian aesthetics and the role it plays in his separation of taste into a working class taste for the necessary and the disinterestedness of bourgeois taste is an a-historical reading of Kant's work that neglects its role in relation to later programmes of liberal government that aimed to transform cultural institutions into civic technologies that would incorporate the working classes into practices of self government.

In his paper on "Digitizing Bourdieu; music, technology, production" Dr. Nick Prior (Sociology Department, The University of Edinburgh) discussed Bourdieu's increasingly problematic take on culture technologies and their impact on consumption/use. This was framed by a sympathetic but critical application of Bourdieu to contemporary digital culture, with particular reference to the case of ‘Glitch’ music, which he argued opens up a series of challenges to the Bourdieu problematic and is a good test of his applicability to the contemporary cultural terrain. The participants were delighted and enlightened to hear some fascinating illustrative examples of ‘Glitch’. In the final session of the morning, Professor Ian Buchanan (University of Cardiff) spoke on: “A Taste for War”, in which from a politically-engaged Cultural Studies perspective he addressed the implications of the ‘coalition of the willing’ embroiled in a war that is supposedly bringing democracy to the Middle-East and, as an added bonus, making it safe for Wal-Mart. He posed the provocative question of to what extent it may be said to ‘quench a taste for war’.

In the afternoon session Dr. Peter de Bolla (Faculty of English, University of Cambridge) spoke on pre-Kantian aesthetics. His paper "From Passions to Affects in the work of Francis Hutcheson" considered the invention of the concept of aesthetic affect and its subsequent fate in our understanding of artworks as cognitive structures. The final paper by Dr. Simon Malpas (English Literature, The University of Edinburgh), on "The Necessity of the Transcendental: Kantian Aesthetics and Contemporary Criticism” argued that since Immanuel Kant's philosophy introduced the notion of transcendental critique, aesthetics has occupied a complex and often problematical position between knowledge and ethics. In the light of Kant's philosophy, writers such as Theodor Adorno argue that, experienced aesthetically, 'art negates the categorical determinations stamped on the empirical world and yet harbors what is empirically existing in its own substance', thereby opening experience to critique. Dr Malpas’s paper explored the ways in which contemporary criticism might be able to mobilise this tension within the artwork in order to think the social and political value of artistic presentation in a manner different from more established historicist or ethical modes of criticism.

The Conference stimulated lively debate among the interdisciplinary audience which included staff and postgraduate students from the Universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen, and the Glasgow School of Art, as well as the University of Edinburgh and a number of the international Research Fellows from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.
The Institute is most grateful to the British Society of Aesthetics for its sponsorship of the event.


Art After the End of Art

London School of Economics, organised by Naked Punch Review with the support of the British Society of Aesthetics, The London Consortium, and The Forum for European Philosophy.

With the publication of his 1964 article ‘The Artworld’ in The Journal of Philosophy Arthur C. Danto heralded the end of art’s previously inextricable relationship with aesthetics. For a conference dedicated to the assessment of aesthetics’ survival today he is not, therefore, the most likely of campaigners. Yet Danto has never been a doomsayer; his end is not a death. Indeed, since his all-important encounter with the Brillo boxes of Andy Warhol, Danto’s project has been one that elaborates a theory of art effectively reborn by his declaration of independence from the bedevilment of aesthetics. For his first trip to London in over 20 years Danto, who is the Emeritus Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, took the opportunity to reconsider his Pop art point of departure and adjudge the legacy of rescinding the rule of Clement Greenberg and Kantian aesthetics.

Drawing its subject from the title of his1997 book Art after the End of Art, the day-long conference sought to consider Danto’s work not ‘as a closed body within/about which we would have to talk but as a starting-point and a reservoir of potentialities’. Richard Shusterman, Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, began the day with his critique of ‘disinterested’ aesthetics via a consideration of the erotic arts of China and India. Citing Michel Foucault as the only Western philosopher to acknowledge the proximity of the sexual subject to the aesthetics of existence – even Nietzsche denied that sexual activity could be pretty – his analysis of works including the Karma Sutra demonstrated that aesthetic prudishness was a peculiarly Western trait. Nicolas Vieillescazes’ ‘The Return of the Hegelian Repressed’ tracked the recent re-emergence of Hegel back to Danto himself, while Jean-Pierre Cometti, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Aix-Marseille, attempted to define an aesthetics of ‘usage’ in order to break the ontology of the art object.

If, for Danto, it was the sight of red swirls on white packing boxes in an Upper East Side gallery that put ‘the boundary between the art world and reality in philosophical receivership’ in 1964, it was down to him to reappraise the importance of aesthetics to contemporary art today. Over 40 years later Danto remains secure in his rejection of ‘universality’ and ‘beauty’, yet he does not junk aesthetics with the force he once did. Finding a new interest in what he terms ‘internal beauty’ – that is, beauty that contributes to the work’s meaning – the day culminated in some form of reconciliation, if not with Greenberg then perhaps with Immanuel Kant. But the champion of the day was Hegel; indeed for Danto if beauty is not internal, it is effectively meaningless, the beauty of Marat being integral to the politics of Jacques-Louis David’s painting. Whether a Hegelian aesthetics of meaning has the ability to crack the timeworn teaser of form versus content remains for Danto to demonstrate.

Belinda Bowring



Interdisciplinary Seminar: Philosophy and Theory of the Visual Arts

29 April-17 June 2005

The interdisciplinary research seminar ‘Philosophy and Theory of the Visual Arts’ (organised by Katerina Reed-Tsocha and John Hyman) took place at Trinity College Oxford in Trinity Term 2005. The seminar aims to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue between philosophy and art history, and speakers were asked to present a paper on a topic that would be of interest to both disciplines. This year’s speakers were: Prof. James Elkins (Cork), Prof. Martin Kemp (Oxford), Dr Simon Glendinning (LSE), Dr Nick Zangwill (Oxford), Prof. Robert Hopkins (Sheffield), Prof. Lydia Goehr (Columbia), Prof. Margaret Iversen (Essex), and Prof. Paul Smith (Warwick). The seminar was attended by audiences of up to 75, students (undergraduate and graduate) and senior staff from a number of Departments (Philosophy, History of Art, English, Ruskin School of Art), as well as a few BSA members. The seminar was made possible thanks to the generous support of the BSA, and received additional funding from the Faculty of History and the Faculty of Philosophy.

Dr Katerina Reed-Tsocha—Trinity College Oxford


Art and Embodiment

The COGS (Centre for Research in Cognitive Science) Symposium “Art, Body, Embodiment” was held at the University of Sussex on March 14-5, in the Brighton and Sussex Medical School Building lecture hall. On the first day speakers included Dr. Michael Wheeler (Stirling) who spoke on “Body-Art and Robotics”, Dr. Rachel Jones (Dundee) who spoke on “Art, Body, Body-Art”; both drew on the examples from the work of performance artist Stelarc to discuss the fluctuating boundaries between body and world in the panel, “Body-Art, Robotics, Cyborgs.” Professors Tony Nutall (Oxford) and Brian Cummings (Sussex) in the second panel, “Embodiment and Narrative”, spoke on “The Defeat of Mind by Body” and “The Body and Creation”, respectively, the former looking at Sterne’s TristramShandy and the latter Milton’s “Paradise Lost”. The Panel on “Interactive Art” included Professor Roy Ascott (Bristol) speaking on “Moistmedia, the Three VRs, and the Terminal Body” and Professor Maggie Boden (Sussex) on “Interactivity and Aesthetics”, looking for innovative ways to extend aesthetic appreciation and evaluation to virtual works of art.
The second day began with the panel “Embodiment and Philosophy.” The first talk, “Lending One’s Body to the World”, by Dr. Michael Morris (Sussex), was on Merleau-Ponty’s essay “Eye and Mind” and the second talk, “The Art and Science of Embodied Phenomenology” was given by Dr. Ron Chrisley (Sussex), who looked at the ways phenomenology in art can assist cognitive science. The second panel, “The Ways of the Hand” contained two contrasting papers: the first, “Dance, the Brain and the Hands” by the neuroscientist Professor Patrick Haggard (UCL) and the second, “The Writing Hand”, presented by the novelist and academic Professor Gabriel Josipovici (Sussex). The contrast resulted in a lively discussion. The third panel of the day, “Metaphor and the Body” included Dr. Vyv Evans (Sussex) who spoke on cognitive linguistics in his paper, “Bodily Metaphor in Literature” and myself (Sussex) on “The Embodied Poetics of Madeline Gins and Arakawa”. The final panel was on “Embodiment and Music” and included Dr. Nicholas Till (Sussex) who examined the ways the body has been repressed in music in his paper, “The Musical Body in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, and Professor David Osmond-Smith (Sussex) who kindly agreed to fill in at the last minute, after the original speaker cancelled. His provocative paper, “Iconicity and the Body”, examined his notion of “depleted isomorphs” and argued that the mode of depletion is a necessary mode in the appropriation of art.
In the evening the conference moved to the Sussex Arts Club in Brighon to host a lecture by the Electronic artist, Paul Granjon, who presented examples of his extremely humorous and entertaining, intentionally low-tech robot art. This included confused and crying robots, reconfigured, tampered Tamagosi toys and a karate-kicking tree robot (which of course, only kicked Paul Granjon).

It was a well-attended event, with 70 speakers and participants in total. The aim was to present a forum for interdisciplinary discussion and debate around the notion of “embodiment.” A publication of the proceedings is being planned. We would like to thank the British Society of Aesthetics for their generous contribution in making this Symposium possible.
Christina Makris

"Character and Imagination"
University of Sheffield, 29 January 2005
The conference opened at 10.30 with an enlightening paper by Gregory Currie, ‘Narrative and the Representation and Expression of Character’, in which he investigated the role of character in directing the development of the initial situation towards a particular outcome. This was followed by Nafsika Athanassoulis’s paper ‘Getting It Wrong: The Role of Imagination in Character Development’, in which she proposed that the imagination is a crucial ingredient in our awareness of the ethical aspects of situations. After a break for lunch, Peter Goldie also investigated the notion of moral perception. He was concerned to make sense of McDowell’s idea that one’s awareness of the moral aspects of situations is literally a part of the way one sees the situation, not inferred on the basis of perception. Robert Hopkins followed this discussion by considering the role of affective response in imaginative experience, and the related issue of whether one can learn from imagination how one feels about the imagined object.
Each talk lasted 30-40 minutes, and was followed by discussion of 40-50 minutes. There were 25 participants of the whole conference, with a further 10 people selecting papers to attend. Together with the close relations between the talks, this resulted in the discussions being very lively and tightly focused on a few issues central to the understanding of character. These discussions continued in the bar, and then at a restaurant afterwards.
Many participants said that they had found the conference very beneficial, including the three postgraduate students working in this area who attended and were awarded travel bursaries. We are very grateful to the British Society for Aesthetics for the funding.
Jonathan Webber and Robert Hopkins, 8 February 2005
"On Sensibility"
“On Sensibility” took place at the University of Dundee on April 24th and 25th, 2004. Organised by the Philosophy Department, the conference brought together international artists and philosophers who seek to explore the status that sensibility has been ascribed in recent European Philosophy, and the role that sensibility plays within the constitution of thought.
The Conference brought together 10 speakers over a two-day period. The Keynote Speaker was Daniel Smith, from Purdue University (USA). Other speakers and/or performers included Louise Reynolds (Philosophy, Staffordshire University), Claire Colebrook (English, Edinburgh University), James Williams ( Philosophy, Dundee University), Artillery (Performance Artists, Arhus, Denmark), Aislinn O’Donnell (Philosophy, Dundee University), Laura Hengehold (Philosophy, Case Western University, Cleveland, USA), Moira Scott (Landscape Artist, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee). As Robin Durie (Peninsular Medical School) had to cancel at the last minute, the conference organizer, Valentine Moulard (Philosophy, Dundee University) filled in for him.
Registration was free and open to anyone interested. The total number of participants reached 25. Those participants included students and faculty from several universities in the UK.
Overall, the conference was very successful in creating a space for genuine exchange between artists and philosophers, practice and theory, centering on themes such as representation and figuration, memory, temporality, sensation, creativity, as well as issues of sexual difference and the political role of thought and art.
Valentine Moulard

London Aesthetics conference - 'The Value of Aesthetic Experience'
Report on Graduate Conference held at Senate House, University of London on June 11 2004.
The conference was a student-led initiative, the idea for which was inspired by Prof. Richard Shusterman’s article ‘The End of Aesthetic Experience’ and recent work that has been published on the topic of aesthetic experience. The British Society of Aesthetics and the Analysis Trust kindly offered to fund the conference and Prof. Richard Shusterman (Temple) and Dr. Paul Davies (Sussex) both agreed to be the conference’s keynote speakers. Many graduate papers from the US and Europe were submitted for presentation, out of which four papers were chosen.
Theday was divided into six sessions. The first session of the morning, was a paper given by Dr. Paul Davies (Sussex) ‘On Beautiful Art’ which, despite students’ well-known incapacity to get up early in the morning, was very well attended. Their effort was well rewarded though. Davies’ paper, which discussed the Kantian notion of the beautiful in art and nature and the mutual dependence of our experience of art and the beautiful, proved to be very interesting and stimulated lots of discussion in the question period afterwards (chaired by Dr. Derek Matravers (Open)). Davies’ session was followed by the first graduate paper of the day, given by Julie Kuhlken (Middlesex), ‘Exclusively for Everyone’. Kuhlken’s paper addressed the difficulty of the notion of aesthetic experience being both ‘exclusive’ in the sense that it is often very subjective and personal and yet also ‘for everyone’ in the sense that we can share and agree about the experience. The next graduate paper was presented by Patrycja Kasynska (Oxford) on the value of Kant’s conception of aesthetic experience, focusing particularly on Hannah Arendt’s work on Kant and its political implications. After lunch, Allison Mitchell (Warwick) presented her paper on ‘‘Consciousness Duplication’ and our capacity to learn from Literary Fictions’. Mitchell wanted to fill in the ‘explanatory gap’ in theories on moral knowledge and literature such as that of Martha Nussbaum. The final graduate paper of the day was on the subject of the aesthetic appreciation of nature. In this paper, Christian Denker (Paris-1) discussed the German philosopher, Martin Seel’s work on the connection between the aesthetic appreciation of nature and an ethical life. To complete the day, Prof. Richard Shusterman took to the lecturn. Shusterman told the delegates that it had been over 15 years since he had last been to the UK. Having completed his DPhil at Oxford as well as having one of his first papers published in the British Journal of Aesthetics, he described the trip as something of a ‘homecoming’. The main thrust (if you’ll excuse the pun) of Shusterman’s paper was to query and challenge the exclusion of sexual experience from aesthetic experience in mainstream philosophical aesthetics. This theme was consistent with Shusterman’s general project which queries the exclusion of popular art and activities connected to the body (such as tattooing and yoga) from the aesthetic domain. In the discussion afterwards (chaired by Dr. Matthew Kieran (Leeds)), Prof. Anthony Savile (King’s College) asked the final and penetrating question, quoting De Quincey, as to whether murder could ever be considered a fine art. On this provocative note, and with murder and sex on our minds, the conference ended and everyone was invited to a drink at a local Dickensian pub.
The conference was very well-attended and brought together not only philosophy postgraduates and academics but also practitioners and students in the fine arts. Many delegates commented on how much they had enjoyed the day and requested that there be more themed conferences in aesthetics. As a result of this interest, Richard Shusterman andI are now planning to publish an edited collection of essays on the topic of aesthetic experience. Congratulations to Allison Mitchell who was awarded the BSA essay prize for her excellent paper. Many thanks to the speakers, delegates and my fellow postgrads in London for their warm help and support.
To read the graduate papers presented at the conference click on this link: conference papers.
Adele Tomlin.

British Society of Aesthetics Northern Region Meeting
The revival of the northern region meetings of the BSA took place on Weds. 9th June at the University of Leeds. The day consisted of 4 papers. Julian Dodd from Manchester University kicked off with a discussion of the view of art, articulated by Greg Currie and David Davies, that artworks are to be ontologically identified as actions. Andrew Hamilton from Durham University considered just what it is for a musical work to be a work of music, as opposed to a work just using sound. Jenefer Robinson, from the University of Cincinnati, argued that the nature and role of emotional responses is essential to understanding classic nineteenth century literature and Andrew McGonigal, from the University of Leeds, considered the autonomy of aesthetic judgement. It was a small meeting but all agreed it was fun and worthwhile. The revival will continue with another meeting planned within the next 6 months or so. Many thanks to all the speakers and those who attended.
Matthew Kieran.

Nietzsche, Art and Aesthetics
Report on International Conference held at University of Warwick, September 12-14, 2003.
The conference was held under the auspices of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society and Warwick's Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature. It brought together scholars and researchers on Nietzsche from around the world, with over 100 delegates in attendance from the UK, North America, continental Europe, and Brazil. The conference was divided into plenary and parallel sessions over three days. There were seven plenary sessions featuring presentations by Aaron Ridley (Soton), Beatrice Han-Pile (Essex), Robert Gooding-Williams (Northwestern), Gary Shapiro (Richmond), Daniel Conway (Penn State), David Cooper (Durham), and Nuno Nabais (Lisbon). There was six parallel sessions with each session containing five slots of two presentations, thus totalling approximately 60 papers. Topics included: the relation between science and art and between politics and art in Nietzsche; Nietzsche and moderntiy and postmodernity; Nietzsche and Kant on taste and temporal aesthetics; the aesthetics of the will to power; the category of the tragic; meteorological aesthetics in Nietzsche; Nietzsche and surrealism; Nietzsche and Wagner; the Uebermensch; Nietzsche and Heidegger on art and truth; Nietzsche and de Chirico; Nietzsche and Plato; Nietzsche and Rilke; Nietzsche and music; Nietzsche and dance, and so on. A vast range of topics was featured and the high quality of the papers presented in the parallel sessions was commented upon by a significant number of delegates.
There were two plenary sessions on the first day of the conference (Friday). In the opening plenary session Aaron Ridley addressed the issue of 'Art and Freedom' in Nietzsche and sought to defend an 'ethical' over a 'metaphysical' reading of the topic of freedom in Nietzsche. The talk touched upon a theme that was to dominate the conference in both the parallel sessions and the remaining plenary sessions, namely, the extent to which Nietzsche's thinking on artistic creativity could be usefully deployed as a model for ethico-existential freedom. Nietzsche'c conception of freedom, like his conception of art, was argued to be of a complex kind with stress placed on the importance of constraint, law, and rule. Ridley's talk generated an interesting discussion on the legitimacy of drawing a distinction between the ethical and the metaphysical in Nietzsche. It was clear that those coming from a continental training had a different appreciation of this issue to those coming from an analytical one. The next plenary session featured a paper by Beatrice Han-Pile on The Birth of Tragedy which tried to show that at work in Nietzsche's first published text are two highly different metaphysics, a Schopenhauerean one and a non-Schopenhaurean one. For Han-Pile it is the fact that there are two incompatible metaphysics at work in the text - one of transcendence and releasement from the pain of an individuated existence, one of immanence and joy in the pain of individuation – that can best explain the intricate and contradictory character of the Birth. This presentation generated a lively discussion as to whether this identification of two metaphysics in Nietzsche's text was sustainable and did indeed provide the best means for understanding its complex character. On the Saturday there were three plenary sessions by North American Nietzsche-scholars. Robert Gooding-Williams addressed the issue of an aesthetics of 'receptivity' in Nietzsche, dealing with the question of self and other by linking Nietzsche with Kant on the one hand and with the work of Stanley Cavell on the other. He showed extracts from a film of Fred Astaire which enabled him to address the question of the 'other', and our receptivity to it, in terms of questions of racial identity. It was an ambitious paper that was met with a lively set of questions; the problem with it was that Nietzsche's own aesthetics got a little buried under the weight of the large canvas that was covered. Gary Shapiro attempted something novel with a paper on 'geo-aesthetics' and 'geo-politics' in Nietzsche. His chief inspiration for attempting such a paper came from the notion of geo-philosophy articulated by Deleuze and Guattari in their last collaborative text, What is Philosophy? (1991). Shapiro was attempting to shift attention away from an aesthetics of interiority in Nietzsche - in which questions of subject and object and of self and other are made prominent - to one which stressed the importance of exterior forces, rhythms, and affects in Nietzsche's attempt to articulate a new Dionysian aesthetic of the world and its cosmogenetic forces. Although the paper was not fully worked out, it was full of tantalising insights. In the final plenary session Daniel Conway gave a presentation on 'the art of predation' in Nietzsche, focusing attention on the figure of the 'blond beast' and on 'animality' in general in the text On the Genealogy of Morality. It made for a provocative paper and was followed by a lively discussion with questions focused on the figure of the animal and of animality in Nietzsche and how this informed his conception of the aesthetic (including the categories of the beautiful and the sublime). On Sunday there were two further plenaries. David Cooper spoke on 'The Artist's Life', examining with care and precision the details of Nietzsche's principal conceptions of the artist and focusing on questions of the genius and exemplarity. In the question period that followed discussion focused on the normative or prescriptive nature of Nietzsche's model of a creative life and on how this could be justified. In the final plenary session Nuno Nabais spoke on 'cruelty and sublimity' in Nietzsche, in which he sought to raise some important questions concerning an aesthetics of pain and pleasure in Nietzsche. The talk was a wide-ranging one which also offered valuable insights into how the 'new Nietzsches' found in the likes of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida could be best understood and appraised by viewing them in the light of this theme or problematic. Nabais argued that Deleuze and Derrida's apprecation of pain and pleasure in Nietzsche was mediated by their respective readings of Artaud. The discussion that followed was, once again, a lively one with questions focused on the accuracy of the reading of Nietzsche offered and of the other key figure discussed in the paper which was Deleuze.
The conference was very well-attended and offered a comprehensive treatment of the topic of Nietzsche on art and his relation to aesthetics. It is hoped that an edited volume of essays featuring a selection of the papers from the conference will be published in the not too distant future.
Keith Ansell Pearson

Aesthetics from an Analytic Point of View
‘Aesthetics from an Analytic Point of View’, generously funded by the Society, among other bodies, was held at the Chancellor’s Conference Centre, University of Manchester from May 23-25, 2003. The aim of the conference was to provide a forum for various distinguished invited and submitted papers to be given on a range of topics of current interest to analytic aestheticians. Speakers bravely rose above the hideous decor of the conference room to give some excellent papers. Participants included Jerrold Levinson, Sebastian Gardiner, Michael Morris, Derek Matravers, Stefano Predelli, Peter Lamaque, Robert Stecker, Nick Zangwill, Paul Boghossian, and Rob Hopkins. Topics discussed included: the expressive properties of music, the ontological status of art, the nature of aesthetic properties, the relation between interpretation and intention, and the origins and status of the analytic tradition in aesthetics. Discussion was lively, both during sessions and in the bar afterwards. The Society’s grant to the conference was very welcome, since in particular it enabled the organisers to subsidise several student aestheticians who otherwise might not have been able to attend, and whose presence was a great asset to the life of the conference.
Kathleen Stock