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Kant’s concern for the universal validity of aesthetic judgment turns on its providing a needed bridge between our understanding of the world as governed by mechanical laws and our ability freely to realize our true humanity. That obliges us to find beauty in nature that is expressive of our ethical and moral values. It shapes the way we should understand aesthetic judgment itself.

RésuméNous écartons ici deux tentatives visant à rendre compte de l'irrationalité de l'action akratique au sein du système de Spinoza: celle contenue dans Spinoza mâme et une seconde toute récente, due à della Rocca, qui prétend parler au nom de Spinoza. Nous traçons à larges traits une troisième voie, laquelle n'st pas manifestement en porte-à-faux avec les principes de la psychologie morale de Spinoza. Cette tentative tourne autour d'une conception du conatus intégrant un élément normatif et subjectif, soit le besoin de former un moi structuré de façon stable. Sans ce dernier, le plus grand bien que les humains soient susceptibles d'atteindre, l'acquiescientia in se ipso, serait en fait irréalisable. Concevoir ainsi le conatus donne la latitude dont Spinoza a besoin pour représenter le désir irrésistible que conçoit Médée pour Jason comme contre-conatif et celle dont Médée a besoin pour en être elle-même pleinement consciente.

(1) If Shaftesbury is to be seen as the doyen of modern aesthetics, his most valuable legacy to us may not so much be his viewing aesthetic response as a sui generis disinterested delight as his insistence on its turning ‘wholly on [experience of] what is exterior and foreign to ourselves’. Not that we cannot experience ourselves, or what is our own, as a source of such admiration. Rather our responses, favourable or no, are improperly grounded in any essentially reflexive, or first-personal, ways of taking what engages us. The suggestion is tested against the case of Narcissus. (2) Glauser interestingly emphasizes Shaftesbury’s neo-Platonic conception of a hierarchy of aesthetic experience that culminates in the joyful contemplation of God. That hierarchy must be something that is less unitary and systematic than Shaftesbury himself had supposed, even when his emphasis on the tie between aesthetic pleasure and contemplative experience is allowed to extend beyond perception and to encompass episodes of thought itself.

How are the beautiful and the good related? A popular answer to this ancient question takes it that to call something beautiful is just to bring it under the most general term of favourable aesthetic assessment and that since the good is in general what we reflectively want then, crudely put, the beautiful is the good's aesthetic dimension. Following this train of thought, we avoid the suggestion that there is any intimate connection between the beautiful and some more narrowly conceived moral or ethical good, since that is, again crudely put, restricted to the good's practical dimension, a dimension supposedly alien to aesthetic concerns.

L'A. propose un rapprochement entre l'esthetique designant la problematique philosophique de l'art en general, et de la relation entre les objets naturels et les artefacts en particulier, d'une part, et le naturalisme considere comme programme litteraire et comme effet artistique, d'autre part. Interrogeant le rapport entre naturalisme et scientisme du point de vue des proprietes des objets, l'A. envisage une reforme du naturalisme litteraire qui lui permette de se distinguer du realisme en explorant des situations humaines et affectives imaginaires.

This paper discusses the motivation underlying an instrumentalist conception of the retrieval of a literary narrative from the text that presents it. Focusing on the version of the doctrine recently advanced in Gregory Currie (1993), it argues that the advantages instrumentalism claims over the realism it seeks to displace are uncertainly based and cannot be made good. What would be needed to overcome obvious difficulties in its initial formulation would be a principled veil of ignorance occluding the actual author's mind from the competent reader. The imposition of such a veil cannot be adequately motivated. In consequence, the scepticism instrumentalism generates about criticism's traditional aspirations to objectivity in the form of uniquely correct reconstructions of its canonical narrative texts is found wanting. The literary nature of the narratives in which we have most interest itself imports an aesthetic norm of unity into their interpretation, and it thereby privileges a notion of successful understanding that is committed to the goal of uniquely correct retrieval.

In The Test of Time I endorsed what then seemed a decidedly old-fashioned view about the interpretation of works of art. I The view was, crudely put, that correct understanding and identification of a painting or a poem cannot be detached from reference to its author's mind, and that in the kind of ideal case around which the theory of art has to be constructed, it will be wrong to think of the work as liable to interpretative change over time or as admitting to interpretations not coincident with its maker's. Evidently, the resulting view privileges historical understanding of art and is most exigent in regard to the art we have inherited from the past. It is a view to which both Hume and Kant, to name no others, lent their voices. Even so, the position is not to everyone's taste, and while nothing will move determined reformists, as I shall call opponents of tradition, it would be pleasing to find additional means of swaying the undecided. The argument takes this form: I start by drawing attention to a way of talking we have about a number of the arts that looks well entrenched and at first sight somewhat paradoxical. So, it is a practice that requires interpretation. Not only interpretation, but also explanation. We do not just want to understand it without incoherence, we also want to know what might make it rational given our firm attachment to it. I go on to argue that no rival to the historicist position on interpretation can provide an answer, and also that the psychologized, artist-oriented version of historicism I favored is peculiarly apt to do so. Finally, against this background I briefly discuss two recent manifestations of the revisionist stance.

One of the several points at which Leibniz’s metaphysics appears to lose contact with common sense and verge on fantasy is where he says that living things such as men or fishes or plants never truly die but are in their way no less eternal than those simple substances that are the fundamental monads of his system (e.g., Monadology §76). Here I shall argue that, appearances to the contrary, it is plain enough why he thinks this and also that, strange as it may seem, comparatively little emendation to his way of thinking is needed before we find an interesting convergence between his way of understanding the natural world and our own.

This book presents the central arguments of three of literature's classic texts, Lessing's "Laocoon", Kant's "Critique of Judgment" and Schiller's "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man". It concentrates on Lessing's defence of medium-constrained canons of judgment, on Kant's search for a rational connection between our subjectively based evidence for aesthetic judgments and the actual content of those judgments, and on Schiller's anti-formalist account of beauty and its place in men's moral development. In each case exposition is conducted hand-in-hand with detailed and textually-based philosophical development and evaluation of its themes. The aim of the book is to enable students of aesthetics to get as much out of the subject's canonical texts as they have to offer, to perceive them in the most generous light possible and to demonstrate how detailed scrutiny of classic texts may assist the development of their readers' own views about issues with which they themselves will be engaged quite apart from any concern they may have with the history of ideas.

Recent approaches to scepticism have followed a pattern which Descartes was the first modern to outline with anything approaching clarity. He is not often given credit for the best of his insights here largely because they are obscured by misleading theological assumptions, yet once these assumptions are removed we should be impressed by the subtle ring of the underlying account of rational belief. To demonstrate these claims the first section of this essay discusses the irrelevance of Descartes’ theology to his epistemology — the misère of the title — the second, devoted to the grandeur, expounds his operative theory of reasonable belief, and the remainder applies this theory to Descartes’ original sceptical problem and offers some comment both on its strength and its weakness.Descartes is less careful than he might be in formulating the exact form of the most general sceptical doubt that he aims to rebut. On some occasions he appears to be asking the question (1) and, on others, the question (2).

By "The Art of Apelles" I mean the art for which Apelles is most famous, that of representing things in pigments on flat surfaces. Arts are differentiated and defined largely by their products. In what follows I shall use the word "picture" for the products of the art of Apelles-and not, say, for abstract or non-representational paintings. I shall try to say what it is for one thing to be a picture of another and what the word "picture" means in this slightly restricted but quite common use. Pictures seem to have affinities on the one hand with verbal descriptions and on the other with such things as imitations, forgeries, toys, impostors, artificial limbs and decoy ducks. Some theories of what a picture is exploit the first set of affinities and some the second. I start by considering two well known theories, one of each sort. Although both may be said to derive from Wittgenstein, the first receives its fullest development in Prof. Nelson Goodman's The Languages of Art and the second in Mr Roger Scruton's Art and Imagination. The second theory seems to me nearer the mark. One advantage it has over the first is that it allows for the obvious fact that a picture must in some degree resemble what it depicts. But Scruton's version is open to fatal objections. Hence I go on to offer an alternative version, a salient point in which is that the notion of a picture is, in a sense I try to explain, a formal concept. The works of Apelles included: a portrait of Philip of Macedon; a picture of Aphrodite rising from the sea and wringing out her hair; and a picture of Calumny, preceded by Envy, Intrigue and Deception, and followed by Repentance and Truth, dragging her victim before a man with large ears, attended by Ignorance and Superstition. Since all these works have been lost they will do conveniently as examples.

Does Leibniz really worst Locke in respect of innate ideas, as is frequently supposed, or does Locke emerge more or less whole from their epistemological dispute? I shall here argue that Leibniz does far less well than we might like to believe and that his substantive proposals, where not entirely innocuous, contain little that would appeal to anyone interested in a modern form of the innateness thesis.