Aesthetic Investigations (E-Journal, Dutch Association of Aesthetics)
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Aesthetic Debunking and the Transcendental Argument of the Novel
Get PDFGilbert Plumer has recently argued in his (2017) that psychologically rich novels offer the reader an opportunity to draw a transcendental inference: what seems to us believable about the psychology of the characters, can be inferred to be actually true about real human psychology. We propose, first, to disambiguate a key term of art in Plumer’s argument, “believable”. Given that disambiguation, the empirically contingent nature of one of Plumer’s premises comes into view. We raise two main lines of empirically-motivated debunking arguments against that premise, drawing particularly upon the psychological literatures about processing fluency, and the illusion of explanatory depth. We then conclude with some further implications for naturalistic approaches to aesthetics, and the relevance of such debunking arguments
"Police Adjective" and Attunement to the Significance of Things
Get PDFIn this paper I consider Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective (Romania, 2009) as an instance of a puzzling work of art. Part of what is puzzling about it is the range of extreme responses to it, both positive and negative. I make sense of this puzzlement and try to alleviate it, while considering the film alongside Ludwig Wittgenstein’s arguably puzzling “Lectures on Aesthetics” (from 1938). I use each work to illuminate possible understandings of the other. The upshot is that it is is plausible to regard both as engaged, in part, in preparing us to make sense both of themselves, and then also of other works
The Flesh is Weak. Empathy and Becoming Human in Jonathan Glazer\u27s "Under the Skin"
Get PDFJonathan Glazer’s 2013 film Under the Skin offers an unsettling meditation on humanness through the eyes of an alien predator. This essay reflects on Glazer’s film by drawing it into conversation with the later phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, with Heidegger, Martin Buber, and with a number of earlier Greek thinkers who together point us towards a more complex and shared definition of ‘contemplation’ or theory. The paper asks: do films watch us as much as we watch films?
Through an exploration of the notion of the mask as a means both of disguise and of disclosure, the paper questions to what extent all human relations are masked, screened. So, Glazer’s film can be viewed as an exercise in re-imagining the role of the screen, turning us from viewers to viewed. This implication of the audience in the film’s scope leads to a concluding focus on empathy as the essential sharedness of human (and therefore of cinematic) experience
What They See is What We Get in Film: Reality Tells the Fiction
Get PDFRobert Bresson\u27s cinematography allows him to show the affordances that things and situations have for characters in a film. By intimating these affordances, Bresson authentically presents the affordances as well as the characters. The fact that Bresson views and conceives of his `actors\u27 as models, rather than as malleable actors, illustrates, again, an effort to authentically film real persons in real situations. Recognising people authentically is done in real-life through a reciprocal gaze, which is not automatically available to the camera\u27s lens, an apparatus that does not look back at one. Perhaps, Nuri Bilge Ceylan\u27s approach fits this effort better: not a writing with sounds and images, but an intuitive use of homeliness
Aesthetic Value and Aesthetic Judgment: The Hard Problem for Contemporary Aesthetic Naturalism
No full textContemporary aesthetic naturalism integrates various scientific approaches into the common effort to provide an explanation of the main topics of aesthetics on the basis of empirical methods or in line with available evidence. Although these approaches have recently achieved very relevant empirical and theoretical results, contemporary aesthetic naturalism still does not solve the traditional hard problem of naturalism as such, that is the explanation of value in scientific terms. Firstly, I analyse the possible responses to this hard problem, showing that aesthetic value, particularly in the version of artistic value, remains outside the scope of current empirical approaches to aesthetics. Then I propose that this apparently strong philosophical limitation can be easily reduced to an ordinary epistemological limitation if aesthetic naturalism accepts to improve the interaction with art criticism, the discipline in the humanities characterised by a privileged access to the historical and social reasons that justify aesthetic judgments
Research as Scrutiny. Our most demanding issues are aesthetic issues.
Get PDFCertain art theorists think of what artists do as artistic research. But research is fact- and theory-driven, whereas when a film is being made what directors do is scrutinise what they see happening before their eyes. This scrutiny is guided by aesthetic judgement, individual style, and subjective intuition. It makes good sense to investigate the research that went on before a work was made, and to look at the theoretical implications of that work. But the most important work to be done is our paying attention to the scrutiny that went on during the work\u27s actual creation. The importance and meaning of art are in the artist\u27s scrutiny
"The New World": Heideggerian or Humanist Cinema?
Get PDFI offer a new Heideggerian reading of Terrence Malick’s 2005 film The New World, in the style of film-philosophy, alongside a contrasting Cinematic Humanist encounter. I consider if the former is a theory-involving example of philosophy of film, and whether a positive answer to this question entails the latter must be also. I argue that the whilst both engagements with the film use the work of other philosophers as part of their appreciation, Cinematic Humanism nonetheless remains one of many possible ways of doing philosophy of film without theory. Having compared these two methods, I suggest reasons why there is nonetheless a potentially valuable relation to be had between philosophy of film with and philosophy of film without theory. Close attention is paid to the film throughout
Literature and the Nugget of Knowledge. An Interview with Derek Attridge and Peter Lamarque
Get PDFThe idea of an interview with Peter Lamarque and Derek Attridge on the cognitive value of literary fiction arose in the wake of an aesthetics course on the relation between literature and truth at the University of Antwerp. In Spring 2015 Peter Lamarque contributed to this course with the lecture “The Opacity of Narrative and Fine-grained Reading”. In Spring 2017 Derek Attridge elaborated his view on the relation between literature and truth in his lecture “The Event of Truth : Literature’s Singular Relation to Knowledge”. After each lecture, we had the occasion to discuss with the author the stakes of the debate and we were rapidly convinced by the many points of convergences between their views. We intended to explore these similarities and differences through a face to face interaction and were happy that both philosophers accepted our invitation for an interview. This interview was conducted by Arthur Cools and Leen Verheyen in York on 9 July 2018
Narrative Art as a Route to Self-Knowledge and Self-Development
No full textDebates about whether works of art can serve as a source of knowledge about the world or whether they can promote other-understanding have been common in contemporary aesthetics and philosophy of art. However, little has been written on the effects that art has on cultivating self-knowledge and self-development. While for most of us it seems obvious that art has these effects, little is known about how and why these effects occur. Addressing this issue is the main aim of the present paper. The gist of the argument is that narrative art, understood as a mental simulation gives us a unique opportunity to adopt a dual (first and third) perspective on the self, which is argued recently by psychologists and philosophers of mind to be necessary for obtaining the kind of self-knowledge that leads to self-change
