British Society of Aesthetics

The December 2009 issue of the PJA features an invited paper by Dr. Emily Brady of the University of Edinburgh on the aesthetic appreciation of animals. Brady argues that we aesthetically appreciate animals for more than just their ‘functional beauty’, as suggested by Glen Parsons, and discusses a range of ways in which we take an aesthetic interest in animals for their expressive properties, focussing on wild animals and birds in particular. Anthony Brandon, an MA student and the University of Manchester, takes up the question of whether our responses to fiction consist in real emotions, given that we do not believe in the existence of such entities. Brandon argues that it is problematic to hold that this is the case and defends a Waltonian view of our responses to fictional entities as ‘quasi-emotions.’ The contribution by Marianne LeNabat, a PhD candidate at The New School for Social Research in New York, explores the relationship between the aesthetic appreciation of artefactual and natural beauty. Through a discussion of Kant’s Third Critique and Dale Chihuly's work, The Nature of Glass, LeNabat argues for the thesis that appreciation of artefactual and natural beauty inflects one another. Kantian themes also feature in G. Anthony Bruno's paper "Aesthetic Value, Intersubjectivity and the Absolute Conception of the World." Bruno, a PhD student from the University of Toronto, examines what kind of conception of reality we should adopt if we take aesthetic judgements to be intersubjective (rather than objective or subjective), arguing, contra McDowell, that only an indeterminate absolute conception of reality can underwrite the validity of such judgements.