![Book Review Andrija Filipović, Conditio Ahumana: Immanenece and Ahuman in the Anthropocene Epoch, [Conditio ahumana: imanencija i ahumano u epohi Antropocena]. Loznica: Karpos, 2019](/api/image/getissuecoverimage?id=picture_2019_50168.jpg)
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In an effort to give a historical depth to recent discussions on taste in Aesthetic theory, this paper recovers a 19 th century Hungarian paradigm. While taste first came to the forefront of philosophical reflection with the Enlightenment and especially with Kant, by now there is a growing literature on the survival of that discourse in the first half of the 19 th century. The present author contributed to the research, which tried to show that in Hungary Count István Széchenyi, an influential political reformer, can be regarded as an author, who for socio-political reasons relied heavily on the British discourse of politeness and taste. This paper aims to show that the same discourse lived on and was employed in the second half of the 19 th century in socio-political debates. The example is Baron Zsigmond Kemény, an admirer and follower of Széchenyi, who transformed the discourse into a bourgeois political-educational program.
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This essay begins with some observations on the main features and availability of the aesthetic experience of the night sky to us. In the second part, the aesthetics of the starry sky is interpreted in terms of time experience, complementing the usual approach in terms of immense space. These remarks on this broad and abundant subject can partly be linked to the intellectual historical interpretation of the birth of modern aesthetics, and partly to the vital discourse of environmental aesthetics, which proves that these two approaches can work together and bring to the fore the aesthetic relevance and fruitfulness of this subject.
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The article pays homage to the leading authority of 20 th century Hungarian music aesthetics, József Ujfalussy, by connecting his heritage to more recent research on the problems of musical time and notably to the study pursued by Raymond Monelle. Rather than a perennial invariant, Monelle interpreted musical time as a historically changing phenomenon constituting implicitly the basic levels of musical semantics, as they have developed throughout the Baroque, Classical and Romantic eras. The present study focuses on the last of these paradigms, claiming that the Romantic experience of musical time has dominated both the production and the reception of music culture up to this day. The Romantic musical experience is based on a latent ‘framework contract’ between composition and audience, which drives the meanings attached to the experience of musical temporality. This latent agreement warrants a need for conventional compositional forms and simultaneously the insufficiency thereof.
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In this work I reply to Zoltán Vecsey’s criticisms of the semantic account of fictional names I put forward in Orlando (2017). The main tenet of that proposal is that fictional names refer to individual concepts, which I understand in terms of mental files. In Vecsey (2020), the author presents three main objections: (i) no referential shift can be ascribed to fictional names, (ii) fictional names are supposed to play two conflicting functions, and (iii) the mental file framework is incompatible with an antirealist view of fictional objects. Although the objections are deep and thoughtful, the challenge they involve can be met if certain aspects of the proposal are clarified and developed.
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Jana Sošková, Professor at the University of Prešov, Faculty of Arts, Institute of Aesthetics and Art Culture, is an important scientific personality in Slovakia. In her research, she works within the field of the philosophy and aesthetics of art and has greatly contributed to the development of Slovak aesthetics in the wake of a Kantian-inspired approach to artistic creation and to the problems of contemporary art.
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The paper deals with an analysis of the controversial novel Truismes by Marie Darrieussecq. In this work, the author sensitively maintains an oscillation between the plausibility of truth, hidden behind metaphors and symbols, and the implausibility of the whole story in its individual components. The occurrence of ugliness as a decisive aesthetic dimension is continual, graded into almost all its shapes and forms, until it finally fills in the entire space and time of the fictional story. The astonishing horror of the author’s aesthetic world does not lie in the brutality of the language she uses, but rather in the similarity of the real and the imaginary, in the way she makes cruelty appear visible though the fictional narrative. The paper thus shows that classical aesthetic views fail when used as tools for understanding the nature of the aesthetic world modelled by Darrieussecq.
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This paper presents the work of philosopher Susanne Langer and argues that her conceptualization of the human mind can provide psychoanalysts with a unique framework with which to theoretically combine interpretive and biological approaches to their work. Langer’s earlier work in the philosophy of symbols directs her investigation into the biological sciences along the lines of sentience and imagination, which in turn become the cornerstones of her theory of mind. Langer’s understanding of the continuing transformation of affect into language is a decisive contribution yet to be built upon by others.
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Kopčáková, S. (2020) Aktuálne otázky hudobnej estetiky 20.a 21. storočia. Prešov: Prešovská univerzita v Prešove, 225 s.,ISBN 978-80-555-2522-8.
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Focusing on the modern conceptions in aesthetics and philosophy of art, this study addresses the dichotomy between beautiful and sublime. The way this relationship is understood plays a crucial role in classifying the sublime into moral, religious or aesthetic types of sublime, as well as in determining the way that natural objects or artistic artifacts generate the experience of the sublime in the contemplative subject. According to Hartmann, the aesthetics of the sublime is incorporated in the aesthetics of the beautiful for, in what is strictly related to art, beauty remains the central category, the sublime in it making it even more profound and enchanting. Finally, following Schiller’s account on this issue, our study emphasizes the need of both beauty and sublime in a one’s life, especially in nowadays when beauty seems to be everywhere, but the frequency of the experience of the sublime appears to be declining.
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This introduction presents the main motivations behind the special issue on Everyday Aesthetics: European Perspectives. The idea has been to invite authors to reflect how European and Europe-inspired thinking has affected and developed further the field of Everyday Aesthetics. The articles of the special issue are presented through their main themes and how they contribute to the contemporary discussions of the field.
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Collecting goes beyond art collecting and seems to meet a more general need. Although it originally aided survival and has predecessors in the animal world, the gesture of collecting has complex motivations. After exploring the collector’s psychology and the behavioural differences between collectors and spectators, this paper analyses the logic of collecting and its principles: order, variation, attractive and meaningful display, the control of contingency, processuality and growth, seriality, and limitation. Finally, the paradoxical attempt to collect non-collectibles, such as gods, clouds or human relations will be shown to illustrate a para-aesthetics of collecting which ranges from the poetics of everyday life to aestheticism.
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What is the role of aesthetics, everyday aesthetics in particular, in processes of solving social problems? Many if not most social problems arise from and affect our daily lives. As far as these problems contain aesthetic aspects, these typically are also of an everyday kind. In this paper, I address the relations between social problems and everyday aesthetics in five sections. I will start by briefly describing what I mean by social problems. Second, I will outline what solving such problems means. Then, I will move on to defining aesthetics for the purposes of this article. Fourth, I will focus on the main question, the potential role of everyday aesthetics in solving social problems. Lastly, I will drill down a bit deeper into my own experiences in this matter in order to concretize the general points and give examples stemming from my working life.
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Our aesthetic practices, by which we aim for better well-being, are intertwined with fostering sustainability. This article focuses on Yuriko Saito’s aesthetics of sustainability, an idea denoting a new kind of aesthetic sensibility informed by and featuring both environmental and cultural sustainability. Saito’s idea is based on our aesthetic relationship with everyday experiences. In this article, I defend the idea, on the one hand, by considering the immanence of change as a sense of contemporary everydayness and, on the other hand, by regarding mindfulness as a practice. Situating the discussion in the European context emphasises the aesthetics of sustainability as a sustainability transformation, that is, an ongoing societal change powered by the continuous cultivation of aesthetic sensibility.
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Mental file theory has recently attracted growing interest among philosophers of mind and philosophers of language. Some experts are of the opinion that the insights of file theory may also be helpful in understanding the problems of fictionality. Orlando (2017) offered a specific version of fictional file theory to which she added later certain clarifications and corrections. In this paper I will first try to show that while Orlando’s updated account of fiction is original and inspirative, it still suffers from some problems. Then I briefly delineate an alternative view, which is linguistic rather than mentalistic in its orientation. But, instead of arguing for the superiority of that view, I will conclude that the main challenge for the theory of fiction is to find an explanatory level where the mental and linguistic aspects of artworks can be treated simultaneously.
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Uncanny valley (不 気 味 の 谷 ) is a notion introduced by the Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori in 1970. The basic claim of his hypothesis states that the anthropomorphic machines cause uncanny effect due to their imperfect resemblance to the human. Humanoids seem almost like people, but exactly the distance of this almost provokes hot debates. There are two trends in robotics, animation, architecture, and computer games. The first trend seeks to overcome the uncanny valley, constructing such an incredible machine that perfectly mimics human actions. The second trend – Masahiro Mori takes this side – consciously constructs non- anthropomorphic machines. The machine’s appearance, structure, shape, proportion of the parts, and motion must be visibly different from the human ones. The term uncanny valley appears in a European context soon after its introduction, due to Jasia Reichardt’s translation in 1978. She is an art critic and curator who is interested in the role of cybernetics in art. The joint between the uncanny valley in robotics and the legacy of Freud and Jentsch is established with this translation at the intersection point between aesthetics and science. This link opens new fields to theoretical and aesthetic imagination.
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I consider and support two claims about aesthetic experience: 1) that it involves encounters with a reality that is not conceptualized via such encounters; 2) that it can generate ruptures in established norms or in the production of shared worlds. This thesis is developed in the teeth of contemporary rationalist inhumanisms that draw on Nelson Goodman’s cognitivist aesthetics and his irrealist account of ‘worldmaking’ to translate the logical insights of inferentialism (or conceptual role semantics) into an aesthetics oriented towards concept-laden practices and their revision through the techniques of experimental art. I employ Derrida’s iterability argument to show that inferentialism presupposes a realist metaphysics that treats repetition and event individuation as independent of constitutive rules, conceptual schemes or ‘world versions’; indicating one way in which aesthetic material remains outside of, even recalcitrant to, the conceptual order. The aesthetic implications of this metaphysics of undecidable events are further explored by considering Jean-Pierre Caron’s recent discussion of Henry Flynt’s idea of ‘constitutive dissociations’ and, finally, the concept as, ambivalently, victim or suicide in the experimental horror of Gary Shipley’s novel Warewolff! and my own Snuff Memories.
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The following paper draws upon a formerly published paper of mine (Krátky, 2021) where text perception was analysed from the perspective of the recipient. As its logical continuation and completion, this paper deals with the author’s viewpoint in the process. Various related aspects are identified, observed and studied, such as the ‘author’s strategy’, the evaluation of the recipient, the intended goals, as well as other important factors that influence the final text. Special attention is paid to all such aspects of communication pragmatism that are reflected by the author’s (more or less controlled) deviations from the norm, aptly made to achieve communication goals. Within this framework, the study strives to show the different roles that the factor termed ‘expectation violation’ takes on when strategically applied by the author in the process of text creation. To support this description, numerous observations by authors such as Grice, Burgoon, Gombrich, Iser etc. are employed. By tackling the author’s viewpoint on text creation, a claim is advanced concerning the plausibility of certain conclusions, theories and, possibly, laws, by virtue of the identification and observation of selected multi-domain principles, phenomena and tendencies.
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The objective of this article resides primarily in the clarification of the notion of aura, as it is described in Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. This clarification will afterwards be considered as a basis for a possible classification of works of art, according to the presence or absence of aura they manifest. In order to do so, we will proceed with an interrogation concerning the current status of art, by analyzing the implications that artistic reproduction has for the development of artistic perception or reception. By distinguishing between manual and technical reproduction of artworks, we will postulate the possibility of auratic presence in the first case. Therefore, if the result of a manual reproduction is indeed susceptible of this kind of presence, we have to analyze the reasons for which technical reproduction cannot accomplish this task and furthermore, we have to establish if this failure to do so constitutes as a cause for the fragile status of art in today’s cultural pulse.
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