LOGOS Research Group in Analytic Philosophy and the Society for Philosophy of Emotion



Location

Zoom (Central European Summer Time)

 

Program

(please, see below for abstracts)


Thursday, 19 May 2022

 
14:00-14:15 Introduction

14:15-15:30 Peter Lamarque (York): Poetry: Experience and Affect

15:35-16:15 Ivan Iyer (Indian Institute of Technology): The Conflicting Interests of the Kantian Sublime: Agitation and Suspension as Disinterested Affect

16:20-17:00 Keren Gorodeisky (Auburn): Aesthetic Agency? The Authority Approach


30 Minute Rest/ Social Time
 

17:30-18:10 Jacopo Frascaroli (York): Aesthetic Experience, Affect and Dis/interestedness: Insights from the Predictive Processing Framework

18:15-18:55 Daan Evers (Groningen): Aesthetic Non-naturalism and Positive Affect

19:00-20:15 Nick Zangwill (London): Disinterestedness: Analysis and Partial Defence

 

 

Friday, 20 May 2022


14:00-15:15 Adriana Clavel-Vázquez (Oxford): Situated affect and the values of art

15:20-16:00 Kris Goffin (Antwerp & KU Leuven): The Teleosemantics of Aesthetic Emotions

16:05-16:45 João Lemos (Lisbon): Propaganda as a Loathsome Art. A Kant-Inspired Account of Propaganda
 

30 Minute Rest/ Social Time


17:15-17:55 Uriah Kriegel (Rice): A Fitting-Attitude Approach to Aesthetic Value?

18:00-18:40 Anthony Öhnström (Uppsala): Examining the Role of Desires in Experiences of Beauty



 

Call for Registration

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Scientific Committee

Aarón Álvarez González (Barcelona)
Tom Cochrane (Flinders)
Filippo Contesi (Barcelona)
Esa Díaz-León (Barcelona)
Manuel García-Carpintero (Barcelona)
Cecilea Mun (Louisville)
David Pineda-Oliva (Girona)
Enrico Terrone (Torino)

Organizer

Aarón Álvarez González (aaron.estribor[at]gmail.com)

Keynote’s Abstracts

Peter Lamarque

 
Of all art forms, lyric poetry seems the most intimately tied to experience and affect. Does a lyric poem not characteristically invite and help to shape an aesthetic experience? And is not affect (emotion) not far behind, both within the poem and in the experience it elicits? But what kind of aesthetic experience is associated with lyric poetry? And what kind of emotions?  Contemplation is certainly involved in the relevant experience, as well as attention to aesthetic qualities, but is it disinterested contemplation? The paper suggests that that is true only for a very narrow range of pleasures afforded by poetry (pleasures based on formal qualities). Otherwise, the aesthetic experience of poetry is not normally disinterested, but deeply implicated in meaning and personal responses. The matter of emotions is complicated. Poems often, of course, arouse deep emotions in readers. But the paper will propose a distinction between expressed and felt emotions, the former properties of a work, the latter responses in a reader. It will be argued that the former have primacy over the latter, at least partly because it is only through the recognition and contemplation of expressed emotions that the felt emotions are given content and life. A simple test for that is that a misunderstanding, or misidentification, of expressed emotions in a poem will directly affect the relevance and adequacy of a reader’s felt emotions. But the recognition and contemplation of expressed emotions is integral to an appropriate aesthetic experience. So aesthetic experience of poetry is linked, even if only indirectly, to the felt emotions of a reader. Thus there cannot be any indissoluble tension between aesthetic experience and affect in poetry.

 

Nick Zangwill


Kant has modest and ambitious claims to make with the idea disinterested pleasure. The modest claim is that all aesthetic pleasure is disinterested. The ambitious claim is that all and only aesthetic pleasure is disinterested. I defend only the modest claim. I initially give a basic explication of what Kant had in mind by the doctrine. I then argue that if aesthetic pleasure were not basically disinterested, aesthetic judgements could not make the normative (or ‘universal’) claim they do. Normativity is essential to aesthetic judgement; it would not be what it is without it. And basic disinterest is essential for normativity. Therefore, we cannot reject basic disinterestedness without rejecting aesthetic judgement altogether. I then distinguish various other notions of disinterest and argue that none of them allow Kant to make his ambitions claim.

 

Íngrid Vendrell-Ferran


An important moment of aesthetic appreciation consists in extracting a work’s aesthetic values such as its beauty, banality, sublimity, and so on. In current research, there are different models to explain how aesthetic values are apprehended. On the one hand, some authors argue that appreciation is an intellectual activity. According to this view, any focus on emotions and affects interferes with the aesthetic appreciation of the work and distracts from its aesthetic values. On the other hand, affective views of appreciation attribute the function of grasping the aesthetic values of an artwork to affective states such as emotions or likings. In this paper, I develop an account which can be placed within the group of affective views. I call this model “The Feeling View of  Appreciation”. According to the Feeling View, neither emotions nor likings are able to grasp aesthetic values. In fact, aesthetic values, like any other value, can be grasped only by virtue of our intentional feelings. We feel that the work is beautiful, banal, sublime, and so on. For the Feeling View, while the intellectualist is right in claiming that some affective states might interfere with the act of appreciation, this objection is only valid for emotions and likings, not for intentional feelings. At the same time, unlike the intellectualist, the Feeling View does not condemn the emotions tout court. In fact, it attributes to emotions and likings a positive function in appreciation: they are able to guide perception, attention, imagining, and intentional feeling itself.

 

Adriana Clavel-Vázquez


Art is often taken to promote empathy by expanding our experiences, allowing a deeper access to other minds, and offering what Olivia Bailey calls “humane understanding”, a “direct apprehension of the intelligibility of others’ emotions” (Bailey 2020, 2). For art to afford this understanding at the centre of popular accounts of its ethical and cognitive values, the engagement with artworks needs to involve experiential imagination: an imaginative projection to different circumstances to recreate what it would be like. This paper argues that because emotions and experiential imagination are robustly embodied, perspective-taking exercises are significantly constrained. Art, therefore, cannot offer humane understanding of those differently situated that is meant to motivate empathy and moral concern. There is room, however, for a different kind of understanding of the incommensurability of perspectives that follows from the situated character of our affective life. By highlighting the limits of our own imaginative capacities, the embodied approach can illuminate the role of artworks in bringing forward the need to rely on the second person perspective to gain insight into the minds and experiences of others.

Contributing Speakers’ Abstracts

Ivan Iyer

Disinterest forms one of the core aspects of Kant's theory of pure aesthetic judgment owing to his thesis that it does not serve any ends of the senses or cognitive intellect. This disinterest is accompanied by what he would attribute as the “unpurposive” nature of aesthetic judgments that are singular and conceptually indeterminate. That which is charming or agreeable, according to Kant, would not constitute "pure" aesthetic judgment since these are but affective responses that serve the interests of the senses and therefore do not constitute the dispassionate reflection that is required of authentic aesthetic reflection. Consequently, affect occupies a rather marginalized and largely unarticulated role in Kant’s aesthetics, presenting itself not only as unnecessary but as an obstacle to pure aesthetic judgment.
Yet, it is in Kant's 'Analytic of the Sublime' - where the sublime is described as nothing less than the revelation of the supersensible powers of the faculty of reason - that one finds a resurfacing of affect. While Kant would insist that the true sense of the sublime is ultimately described by an aesthetic self-realization of a morality that is disinterested vis-a-vis sensible experience, he will also identify certain "vigorous" affects as "aesthetically sublime" since they signal nothing less than "a straining" of bodily forces through certain ideas. This training, Kant argues, lends to the mind a certain momentum that is nevertheless without any interest. The sublime character of certain affects, in other words, is on account of an attitude that is disinterested insofar as it is unpurposive. On the other hand, the concept of the sublime itself as aesthetic feeling, is described by a disinterested affect, that is produced by an unresolved "agitation" between contradictory feelings and emotions such as of terror and transcendence.
The Kantian sublime then, which is often articulated as paradigmatic of the faculty of reason and its supersensible moral elevation above the world of sense and affect, is also simultaneously the very  site of an intense affect, as it presents itself in the terms of a conflict of thought. To be sure, unlike the judgment of the beautiful, Kant will argue that the judgment of the sublime is not merely without interest but that it is contrary to every interest of the sense and cognition. Hence, while the experience of the sublime may be disinterested insofar as it is claimed to be fulfilling no purpose other than a subjectively purposive aesthetic judgment, this very disinterest is constituted by a conflict between conflicting affects or interests. In this paper then, I wish to explore the notions of affect in Kant's analytic of the sublime and how they are positioned vis-a-vis the more predominant articulation of the sublime as disinterested aesthetic judgment. I will attempt to argue instead, that rather than occupying the status of either disinterested aesthetic judgment or affect, the Kantian sublime in fact represents an affect produced by a suspension of thought and this is what lends it, its disinterested character. In other words, that the sense of "agitation" produced in the experience of the sublime is the affect that also produces its conceptual indeterminacy and therefore, its disinterested character. Concomitantly and contrary to a popular interpretation of the Kantian sublime, I will argue that it is this agitation as affect that does not merely culminate in the revelation of a supersensible faculty but rather constitutes its character as an unresolved vibration.
I propose to explore this thesis of the Kantian sublime as a disinterested affect both through a reading of Kant's own text and Gilles Deleuze's interpretation of the Kantian sublime as a “discordant concord”, which is a disinterested affect insofar as it represents a subjectively purposive agitation. Through this discussion of the Kantian sublime and the simultaneous roles that it seems to occupy as affect and disinterested judgment, I try to explore the idea of the disinterested affect or conversely, the affect that constitutes disinterested aesthetic judgment. I hope for this discussion to productively contribute towards this seminar in thinking about the relationship between disinterestedness and affect in aesthetic experience.


Keren Gorodeisky

Engagements with aesthetic value pervade human life. We choose to wear these shoes because they beautifully match the dress; we travel to Petra on account of its beauty, or we love Michaela Cole’s TV show, I May Destroy You, as powerful and deep. Such aesthetic engagements are not merely ubiquitous in human life, but also sometimes momentous, often formative or transformative; crucial for who we are. Everywhere you look, our aesthetic engagements appear to be as significant to our lives as human beings as our theoretical inquiries and practical pursuits, so much so that a life without any aesthetic engagements seems not worth living. But is there anything worthy of the name aesthetic agency? It’d be curious if there weren’t such a thing since agency seems to be at the heart of the human —that which places human beings in the preview of the normative notions of responsibility, praise, blame, criticism, and reactive attitudes—and aesthetic value seems to be a crucial dimension of our humanity Nevertheless, until very recently, there has been virtually no discussion of aesthetic agency. In this paper, I propose that the scarcity of discussions about aesthetic agency until recently is likely explained by the fact that aesthetics has traditionally focused not on action, but on appreciation, while the standard approach to agency in philosophy identifies ‘agency’ with the will, and, more specifically, with the capacity for intentional action. However, I argue, first, that this identification is unfortunate since it fails to do justice to the fact that we standardly attribute beliefs, and conative and affective attitudes that aren’t formed ‘at will,’ including aesthetic appreciation, to people’s agency. We often criticize ourselves and our fellow beings when our (or their) beliefs, emotions, and desires are inapt, and take ourselves and others to be responsible for them. The Practical Approach to agency, which identifies agency with the will, is unfaithful to this phenomenon that shapes our emotional and conative life. Fortunately, I argue further, we need not abide by this Practical Approach, but can develop an alternative: the Authority Approach to rational agency, which does justice to the widespread practice of rationally assessing, reactively responding to, and holding people responsible for non-voluntary attitudes, particularly, I show, for affective attitudes. This is very good news for aesthetics since, I argue additionally, any account of aesthetic agency that accepts the Practical Approach, and focuses on aesthetic actions fails to provide a genuine notion of aesthetic agency. This is because we have no handle on what counts as aesthetic actions independently of these actions’ relation to appreciation: I show that actions are “aesthetic” only derivatively insofar as they center around those that merit (dis)appreciation, understood as an affective, albeit, rational attitude. For this reason, I conclude, we have genuine aesthetic agency only if we can exercise agency in acts of the rational-affective capacity for appreciation, which differs from the will. The Authority Approach allows us to explain how we exercise agency in aesthetically appreciating beauty and art, thus equipping us with a genuine conception of aesthetic agency.
The paper fits the theme of the conference in several ways. First, it focuses on aesthetic appreciation, which, I argue, is a kind of rational feeling: an affective yet rationally responsive attitude. Second, the paper distinguishes between aesthetic appreciation and exercises of the will, like intention and action, and by so doing, points to a difference between aesthetic appreciation and so-called practical stances on the world. Yet, its main argument is that aesthetic appreciation, like other emotions (and beliefs and desires) is no less an exercise of agency than these practical stances are. I argue that human beings are responsible for their acts of aesthetic appreciation (and emotions, beliefs, and desires), not only for practical stances, and are subject to praise, criticism and reactive attitudes on behalf of such affective (and conative, and doxastic) attitudes. If that’s true, then aesthetic appreciation is not disinterested in at least one of the central ways in which this term has been understood (mainly in the 20th century). On the view I defend in the paper, aesthetic appreciation is not characterized by what many 20th century disinterest theorists take it to be characterized by, namely, by a “Felt Freedom. A sense of release from the dominance of some antecedent concerns about past and future” (Monroe Beardsley, The Aesthetic Point of View, p. 288). Rather, though affective, aesthetic appreciation, like other emotions, is an exercise of human agency, for which we are responsible, as well as open to praise, criticism, and reactive attitudes. Aesthetic appreciation is not independent from our everyday concerns, but is a feeling, which, like practical stances and many emotions, is at the center of our normative comportments, responsibilities, concerns, and attachments to one another.


Jacopo Frascaroli

In recent years, a new theory known as Predictive Processing (PP) has taken hold in the sciences of mind and life. Originally conceived as a general theory of brain function, PP has proven to have enormous explanatory reach and is now increasingly seen as a potential unifying principle underlying “perception, action, reason, attention, emotion, learning” (Clark 2015) and even, according to the advocates of its most general formulation, life and sentience as such (Friston 2013). More recently, PP has been at the centre of a fruitful dialogue between philosophers, art historians, psychologists and cognitive scientists interested in the arts and aesthetics. A growing literature is pointing to ways in which PP may unify different art forms under a common analytical framework, and offer a fresh take on vexed questions in aesthetics such as the nature of aesthetic pleasure, the role of affect in aesthetic experience, and the cognitive value of art. In this talk, I will present the PP story about aesthetics and highlight the many important implications it could have for our understanding of the relationship between aesthetic experience, affect, and (dis)interestedness.
A brief summary of the PP picture of cognition will be in order. The core assumption of PP is that agents like us come to have a grip on their environment by embodying (i.e. instantiating in their brain structures and dynamics) a probabilistic model of their world, and constantly testing this model against the incoming sensory stimulations. The model is partly shaped by natural selection and partly by experience, and defines what an agent expects to perceive, the sets of “priors” that it uses to formulate predictions about the incoming sensory stimulations. When a prediction fails to explain a certain pattern of stimulations, a “prediction error” is generated. This prediction error is then used to recruit new and better guesses and, if all goes well, an explanation is found and the agent experiences a progressive reduction in prediction error as the model that it embodies becomes tuned to the statistical regularities of its environment. In this way, by constantly minimising the divergence between what it predicts and what it receives from the senses, the agent maintains a viable exchange with its world. PP has a complex story to tell about how this process of prediction error minimization is implemented hierarchically in the brain, but we won’t need to go into it. Suffice to notice that to reduce prediction error is for the agent an existential imperative. For PP proponents, the agent is a “self-evidencing” creature, an embodied model of its world constantly searching for evidence for its own validity (Hohwy 2016). To minimise prediction error means therefore to maximise the evidence for the model that the agent is embodying, i.e. the evidence for the agent’s own existence. Given this existential imperative, PP proponents have often claimed that cognition is intrinsically affective. In particular, an increase in prediction error will be marked by negative affect, and, by contrast, a reduction in prediction error will be marked by a pleasurable affective response. In other words, in PP affect signals whether the organism is making progress or regress in predicting its environment, which in the long run translates in proper functioning of the processes of life (Van de Cruys 2017). The PP story about art stems naturally from these theoretical premises. According to the advocates of this story, successful artworks provide us with just this kind of experience: a pleasurable reduction in prediction error. They do so by first violating some predictions of our probabilistic model and then allowing us to accommodate this violation, making us experience repeated cycles of prediction error minimization that are lived as an intellectual and existential conquest. This intuition has already been fruitfully applied to the study of several artforms, including visual art (Van de Cruys & Wagemans 2011), music (Koelsh et al. 2019), literature (Kukkonen 2020), cinema (Miller et al. forth) and games (Andersen & Roepstorff forth.), and could well lead to the development of a new major approach to art and aesthetics.
For what interests us here, the PP account of cognition and its more recent applications to the arts suggest an articulated picture of the interrelations between affect, interest and aesthetic experience. On the one hand, the PP story seems to confirm the constitutive role played by affect in aesthetic experience, and, contemporarily, to refute the idea of a disinterested engagement with the arts. According to PP, cognition is always intrinsically affective and deeply interested, courtesy our existence as biological agents. As an (extensible) model of its environment, the agent is always searching for self-confirmation, and the arts provide exemplary instances of just this kind of experience. On the other hand, however, to see our engagement with the arts as existentially interested in such fashion is not to deny its gratuitousness and its character of activity done “for its own sake”. Quite on the contrary, in light of PP, cognition on the whole acquires the traits of an intrinsically-motivated activity, whose sole aim is to perpetuate itself. The arts would then be particularly refined instances of the need of each cognitive agent to perpetuate its own activity as a thinking and living creature.
In the talk, I will examine these complex and apparently contradictory implications suggested by the PP story about aesthetics. The upshot will be a picture that reconcile some long-standing intuitions about art, affect and interest and reformulates the philosophical discussion on these topics in a way that makes it amenable to inform and be informed by the acquisitions of cutting-edge cognitive science.


Daan Evers

The idea that some aesthetic judgements are typically based on a pleasurable experience is widespread. It is especially plausible in the case of beauty. Setting aside cases of testimony, it is unclear how you might acquire beliefs about beauty without being positively affected. It is
also hard to imagine hedonically challenged communities who either develop a concept of
beauty or readily apply it.
I will consider whether nonnaturalists about beauty can explain this phenomenon. Nonnaturalism is a form of realism according to which beauty is an irreducible property unlike those studied by the natural and social sciences. The fact that judgements of beauty appear to be based on a pleasurable experience is a problem for nonnaturalists. After all, we do not typically base judgements about abstract objects on pleasure either, and abstract objects appear to be essentially non-natural.
Nick Zangwill (2005) suggests that the problem can be solved:

‘we can see that in general there is nothing suspect about a range of judgements that are grounded on experiences, since we make judgements about the external world on the basis of perceptual experience. Perceptual experience is experience with representational content, and our beliefs about physical reality are grounded in or rationally caused by such experiences. A realist view of aesthetics would be analogous in that we judge on the basis of experience.’

(p. 66)

In order to assess this idea, we need to make some distinctions. We can either say that the hedonic tone of the experience is itself the representation of something as, for instance, beautiful. Or we can say that aesthetic pleasure involves a representation of beauty, but that this representation does not consist in the hedonic tone of the experience. I will argue that either option is problematic.
If hedonic tone is itself the representation of something as beautiful, then we can ask how it gets to do this. We don’t seem to represent any other abstract features through hedonic aspects of experience and, in general, it seems reasonable to ask how it is possible that some mode of experience involves representations of particular things. In the case of sense perception, an answer is available: sense perception involves representations of objects in our environment at least in part because those objects causally affect our senses. But non-naturalists do not believe that aesthetic properties are causally effective. So they cannot say that hedonic tone represents beauty because of a causal link between the two. Nor would the causal efficacy of beauty explain why hedonic tone in particular should be the vehiclethrough which we end up representing it. So this does not seem promising.
Let us then turn to the idea that aesthetic pleasure involves a representation of aesthetic properties, but that hedonic tone is not what does the representing. In that case, unless there is some link between hedonic tone and whatever is the representation of beauty in aesthetic pleasure, it remains mysterious why judgements of beauty would typically be based on aesthetic pleasure (rather than some other mode of experience or thought process).
In addition to this dilemma, the paper considers a few other options for aesthetic nonnaturalists. It concludes that nonnaturalists have difficulty explaining why judgements of beauty appear to be based on aesthetic pleasure. The content of the paper is most closely related to the question whether affect is indeed central to aesthetic judgement. It explores some implications of this idea for a certain form of realism about aesthetic judgement.


Kris Goffin

Aesthetic emotions give rise to a particular puzzle. Emotions are said to depend on one's interests, goals, desires, and cares. Aesthetic pleasure, on the other hand, is said to be “disinterested”, which on some interpretations implies that aesthetic pleasure does not depend on one”s interests, goals, desires, and cares. If one understands aesthetic pleasure as a kind of emotion, then one has to face this contradiction. I want to focus on aesthetic emotions which represent aesthetic properties. Recently, some have argued that the experience of aesthetic properties such as elegance, beauty and gracefulness have an emotional or affective component (Bergqvist & Cowan 2018, Goffin 2019). The experiential representation of aesthetic properties would thus be similar to the experiential representation of emotive properties. Experiencing elegance, for instance, is said to be similar to fearfully experiencing the frightening.
One can criticise these emotional theories of aesthetic property representation by putting forward the aforementioned contradiction. Emotions depend on one's interests, goals, desires, and cares. Aesthetic pleasure is supposed to be disinterested. If aesthetic pleasure is constitutive of the experience of aesthetic properties, then it becomes hard to understand aesthetic pleasure as a kind of emotion. The aforementioned emotional account of aesthetic property representation seemingly leads to a contradiction. One possible response to this worry would be to simply reject the notion of disinterestedness. Dewey (1934), for instance, rejects the notion of disinterestedness and argues that aesthetic pleasure involves a kind of desire satisfaction. However, this account is unattractive as it is unclear which desire would be satisfied. There is no satisfactory account of what the aesthetic desire would entail. Since it is such a controversial statement the burden of proof lies with the one who rejects disinterestedness. I will propose two alternative solutions. Consequently, I will argue that the second solution is more informative and thus preferable.
The first proposal is inspired by Gorodeisky’s (2019, 2021) recent series of articles in which she defends a specific version of the fitting attitude theory of aesthetic value. One can apply this idea to aesthetic properties. One can think of aesthetic properties as “fitting” or “meriting” a certain emotional attitude. Instead of thinking that some kind of desire is satisfied, one can think of the normativity of aesthetic emotions in terms of fittingness. One can thus define aesthetic emotions without reference to goals, desires, cares or interests. I propose a different solution. It is said that emotions are based on “goals”. These goals, I will argue, should not be understood as desire-like states. One can think of these goals as describing biological functions. For instance, “staying safe” is the goal on which fear is based. This is, however, not to be understood as a desire but rather as the biological function of fear. I am inspired by Matthen (2017) in specifying the relevant “function” here. Matthen argues that the function of aesthetic pleasure is motivating, facilitating and optimising the contemplation of a particular object. I will develop a teleosemantic account of mental representation, inspired by Dretske (1986), to specify the link between function and mental representation. I can thus provide a teleosemantic account of experiential aesthetic property representation. This teleosemantic account is compatible with the idea of disinterestedness, as aesthetic emotion is, according to this theory, not based on “desires”. Consequently, it is outside of the realm of “reasons”, so I will argue. The teleosemantic account, I will argu, is more plausible than Dewey’s radical rejection of disinterestedness and it is also more informative than the fitting attitude account. The fitting attitude account is circular: experiences are defined as those mental states that fit aesthetic properties, while aesthetic properties are defined as those properties that fit certain experiences. One can argue that this is still an informative circularity. The teleosemantic account, however, provides a more detailed description of the experience and of the aesthetic properties. Both are described as grounded in a particular function. Aesthetic emotion is that which tracks those objects that satisfy this function. Aesthetic properties are defined as functional properties: they describe a functional role.


João Lemos  

In an often neglected section of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (§53) Kant criticizes rhetoric, as the art of the orator, for being “a deceitful art, which understands how to move people, like machines, to a judgment in important matters which must lose all weight for them in calm reflection” (CPJ, 5: 328n). Such criticism might have some important implications that Kant does not explicitly considers. First, the art of the orator might not be a beautiful art. Although Kant includes it in his experiment of comparing the aesthetic value of the beautiful arts with each other, it seems that the products of the art of the orator attempt at leaving no room for a crucial feature of Kant’s conception of a judgment of taste, namely the freedom of the imagination. If this is so, then such products cannot be beautiful, for one cannot take a disinterested pleasure in them. The second implication concerns our response to the products of the art of the orator. This is the crucial focus of my paper. I claim that the proper response to rhetorical speeches is a ‘strange sensation’ that Kant mentions only once in his third Critique, namely Ekel (loathing, disgust) (CPJ, 5: 312). I start by spelling out Kant’s sole reference to loathing/disgust in the third Critique, in §48, and by presenting the art of the orator as a loathsome/disgusting art: rhetorical speeches make use of deceit (beautiful illusion, artful trickery) in order to impose the enjoyment. I go on to argue that, although Kant suggests that it is impossible for rhetorical speeches to be taken as beautiful, resisting or not resisting to aesthetically appreciating them is ultimately up to one: one might notice that a speaker is trying to rob one of one’s freedom, and still one may accept being engaged. I conclude by arguing that rather than being precluded from aesthetically appreciating rhetorical speeches, it is the case that we ought to preclude ourselves from doing so. Some difficulties arise once one considers propaganda as a paradigm case of the art of the orator, and therefore as a loathsome/disgusting art. Why is it so? Is deceit (beautiful illusion, artful trickery) an exclusive feature of propaganda? Is loathsomeness a feature of propaganda only? Why do the products of propaganda arouse such a strange sensation (Ekel, loathing, disgust) whereas other products do not – or why do the former arouse it in a way that the latter do not? Should an embellished, persuasive conference paper supporting Kant’s categorical imperative arouse Ekel? In my Kant-inspired paper, I hold that there is a feature of propaganda that makes it particularly loathsome/disgusting, namely proactive impertinence: not only does propaganda aim at persuading one by means of deceit (beautiful illusion, artful trickery); it takes the initiative of chasing one until one is persuaded. Since this means that propaganda does its best in order to rob one of one’s freedom, one ought to be loath to aesthetically appreciate it, one ought to be disgusted at it, one ought to feel Ekel.


Uriah Kriegel 

It is a noteworthy disanalogy between contemporary ethics and aesthetics that the fitting-attitude account of value, so prominent in contemporary ethics, sees very little play in aesthetics. The aim of this paper is to articulate what a fitting-attitude-style account of aesthetic value would look like, by way of preparing the ground for a proper evaluation of the approach’s theoretical merit. In the bulk of the paper, I sketch possible fitting-attitude-style accounts of four putative aesthetic values – the beautiful, the sublime, the powerful, and the compelling – in terms of the fittingness of four corresponding affective experiences, which I call delight, awe, being moved, and fascination. I close with preliminary discussion of how the notion of fittingness might be understood in the present context.
*
In contemporary ethical theory, one of the most prominent approaches to value is the so-called fitting-attitude account. Roughly, the idea is that for x to be (ethically) valuable is for it to be fitting to have a pro attitude toward x (and for y to be disvaluable is for it to be fitting to have a con attitude toward y). It is natural to suppose that for most accounts of ethical value a structurally parallel account of aesthetic value is available (even if the dialectical pressures in each field surely differ, resulting in different distributions of plausibility across logical space). Interestingly, however, there is to my knowledge no sustained development of a fitting-attitude-style approach to aesthetic value in contemporary aesthetics. In this paper, I propose to explore what such an account would look like.
It is not the paper’s primary aim to argue for the fitting attitude account of aesthetic value. Before we can evaluate a given account of aesthetic value, we first have to clearly articulate what the account is. Since the kind of account of aesthetic value I have in mind has not received a sustained articulation in the extant literature, the primary aim of the paper is to get clear on what such an account would might look like. Thus this paper proposes to advance our understanding, primarily, not by convincing us of a particular thesis, but by shedding light on an otherwise ill-lit neighborhood of logical space. Still, our discussion will suggest that an account of aesthetic value patterned after the fitting-attitude account of value in ethics could provide a unified and stable account of aesthetic value, an account which might therefore merit closer critical attention.
Historically, discussions of aesthetic value have centered on the notion of beauty. And beauty is surely a paradigmatic aesthetic value. However, a central theme of contemporary aesthetics, especially following Sibley, is an almost dizzying pluralism about aesthetic values, sometimes joined to a de-emphasis on beauty. There is no need for us to take a stance on the question of pluralism vs. monism about aesthetic value. A fitting-attitude-style account of aesthetic value should be able to roll with either view, and it would be a dialectical strike against it if it were compatible only with one. Accordingly, in this paper I start by sketching a fitting-attitude-style account of beauty, but then proceed to present possible such accounts of three other aesthetic values – the sublime, the powerful, and the compelling (I explain what I have in mind in each case) – while leaving it open how they relate to beauty, ultimately so to speak.
In each case, I identify a specific affective experience undergoing which could plausibly seen as the fitting reaction to objects we want to designate as aesthetically valuable. More specifically, I argue for the following four theses: the beautiful is that by which it is fitting to be delighted; the sublime is that by which it is fitting to be awed; the powerful is that by which it is fitting to be moved; the compelling is that by which it is fitting to be fascinated. In each case, I offer a phenomenological portrait of the relevant affect. The portrait is not supposed to be exhaustive, but only to be sufficiently textured to focus the reader’s mind on the right experience.
I close with a discussion of the linchpin notion of fittingness as it plays out in the present theoretical context. The hope is that by the end of the paper we would have a reasonably clear grasp of the general shape of a fitting-attitude-style approach to aesthetic value, enabling two types of subsequent inquiry: first, the elaboration of the general framework, both through refinement of the accounts sketched here of beauty, sublimity, etc. and through application to further aesthetic values beyond the ones discussed here; second, the critical evaluation of the plausibility of the resulting individual accounts, and the framework as a whole.  
 

Anthony Öhnström 

Recently, Kant's concept of aesthetic disinterestedness has been called into question (see Nehamas 2007, Riggle 2016). These texts expand the notion of beauty as to make room for the subject's personal preferences, wants, needs and values. But whilst they - especially taken together – provide much insight into the ways in which experiences of beauty are interested, the core relationship between beauty and the subject’s desires remains unclear. I have therefore developed a theoretical account of how desires are integral to the ways in which people experience beauty. Central to my thesis is the rejection of the idea that people experience beauty as a mere sensation. Rather, I argue from the position that beauty is experienced as a proper emotion (i.e. as a complex emotional process, composed of a network of distinct and related components). I build my theory on the basis of Jenefer Robinson’s paper “Emotion, Judgement, and Desire” which, like my thesis, is specifically concerned with the evaluative component of emotions. Her suggestion is that the subject's emotional evaluation of objects are coloured and informed by a set of desires held by people prior to their emotional experiences. I expand her theory by suggesting that such desires initiate a second distinct type of desire, that is also part of the evaluative component of emotions. The core of my thesis is my assertion that Riggle’s and Nehamas’ writings can be used to substantiate my distinction between primary desires and response desires. With reference to Riggle’s writings, I develop a view of primary desires as deeply held desires that are directed, in terms of their intentionality, towards the subject’s self-affirming and life-affirming values. I argue that people are predisposed to seek out experiences of beauty because of their primary desires. The reason being that perceptual properties of beautiful objects “reflect” the life and self-affirming values to which primary desires are directed. With regard to Nehamas’ notion of people wanting to possess beautiful objects, I suggest that response desires are initiated by the subject recognising beautiful objects as “speaking to” their primary desires. As in, when someone perceives perceptual qualities that reflect their life and self affirming values, they respond by developing response desires towards the object. I argue that such response desires, in so far as beauty is concerned, is manifested in a want to prolong the emotional experiences of beauty. Moreover, I suggest that by satisfying them, the subject continuously develops new response desires towards the beautiful object. Response desires are therefore integral to the subject asserting the values that they recognise in beautiful objects. Ultimately, this paper defends the view that the emotion constituting people’s experiences of beauty features two types of desire. Moreover, I state that it is the interplay between them that constitute the ways in which experiences of beauty are “interested”, as explained by Nehamas and Riggle. Because (i) it is primary desires that determine which kind of perceptual qualities that the subject is drawn to and (ii) it is response desires that make the subject interested in the existence of the object. Furthermore, in constructing my argument I indicate that my thesis approaches solutions to a variety issues that have long plagued philosophical theorising on beauty. Firstly, it gives us reason to understand knowledge as mental discoveries insinuating the subject that their emotion of beauty is appropriate, which in turn motivates them to continue their engagement with the beautiful object. Secondly, I suggest that the pleasure that we normally associate with beauty can be explained as the satisfaction of the subject’s response desires, and that this is important because, contrary to Kantian notions of disinterestedness, it suggests that the pleasure a person derives from beauty is directly tied to to their engagement with the beautiful object.