An Old Dog Rants Backwards: 1

Those familiar with my more general views will be unsurprised to find me ranting about the need to find philosophical room for the normative, as well as the causal. In this respect, this typical thread in my ranting aligns in effect with two points made by Frege (1984 p. 351) in noting that “[e]rror and superstition have causes just as much as correct cognition.”  Now, it seems to me that in the fairly recent past there has arisen a new way of making a similar mistake

The Friends of Jones\u27 Paintings: A Case of Explanation in the Republic of Art

All too often the agenda for discussion of institutional accounts of art has been set by George Dickie\u27s (putative) institutional definition of art. To offer a new beginning, the paper addresses the question of explanation with an institutional framework modeled as Terry Diffey’s Republic of Art. In exploring the argumentative resources here, it meets the objection that institutionalism cannot explore the case of so-called ‘first art’: objects created before the concept art came into being. In particular, the paper uses an example to consider how disputes within the Republic might be resolved through rational means, while still maintaining the institutional character of such discussions. For we need not assume that institutionalism has no mechanisms for rational self-correction nor that one, timeless resolution is always possible. Instead, we can find rational activity in the disputes among art critics, as well as contrasting their (broadly contemporary) perspective on the case with the detachment of the (philosophical) aesthetician

On the category of 'the aesthetic'

Those contrasting our appreciation of art (as artistic appreciation) with our appreciation of the other occasions when grace, line, elegance, and so on — or their opposites — (as aesthetic appreciation) typically give much fuller accounts of art-based cases, even though it is recognized that many artworks, although not all, could be perceived — that is, mis-perceived — as objects of aesthetic appreciation. Moreover, here, ascriptions of ‘the aesthetic’ typically reflect the claim to positive aesthetic value, rather than the ‘even-handed’ version described in philosophy, giving weight to ugliness. Such a positive conception is well-exemplified in the philosophy of sport, when the attempt to describe a purist conception of sports spectatorship — one devoted to the sport, but without allegiance to any team — presents that purist as “… enjoying sport for its purely positive and aesthetic aspects” (Mumford, 2012 p. 18): that is, the conception of such spectatorship is as directed to the aesthetic. In part, the argument there seems to assume, mistakenly, that what is not appreciated purposively (for sport, in terms of winning and losing) is thereby appreciated aesthetically.            But here, following a hint from Austin (1979 p. 180), it is urged that the term “aesthetic” is used in such contexts ‘to rule out the suggestion of some or all of its recognized antitheses’: here, in particular, aesthetic interest is contrasted with, and feeds of, purposive interest. In recognizing this is a typical feature of uses of the term “aesthetic” one has an explanation of previous failures to provide an account of aesthetic appreciation at the same level of comprehensiveness as that offered for artistic appreciation: references to the aesthetic are contextualized to the particular antithetical notion being rejected on that occasion. And that was a feature implicitly recognized in the argument identified above, even if then falsely generalized. Yet there is really not just one contrast here: different antithetical terms may be invoked on different occasions. In this sense, aesthetic judgement is context-dependent or occasion-sensitive (see Travis, 2008 esp. pp. 150-160). And that is what grounds the general difficulty for dealing broadly (and briefly) with the category of the aesthetic

What Ever Happened to Anti-Essentialism?

How should one explain the relative disappearance of a major preoccupation of English-speaking Analytical Philosophy in the late 1950s/early 1960s: an anti-essentialist response to the question, ‘What is art?’, typified in papers by Kennick and Weitz? Minimally, anti-essentialism denies the widely-held assumption that something must be in common between all the instances where (in our case) the term “[fine] art” or the concept art is rightly ascribed, in virtue of which all are called ‘art’; a stronger version urges that, in fact, there is no essence to (our example) art

Ask me if I am okay: COVID-19 and the psychological and social impact of long-term shielding experiences of people with sickle cell disorders and their care givers

This pilot mixed methods study wanted to understand the psychological impact, as well as the social needs, of people with sickle cell disorders (SCD) who had been identified as ‘extremely clinically vulnerable’ by the government and had been asked to ‘shield’ at home from the 23rd of March 2020, to when shielding was officially lifted, on the 31st of March 2021. We were also interested in how parents who had SCD and parents of children with the condition were coping. We found that throughout the pandemic, while people’s very basic social needs were being met, their psychological health needs were not

Brownian motors: noisy transport far from equilibrium

Transport phenomena in spatially periodic systems far from thermal equilibrium are considered. The main emphasize is put on directed transport in so-called Brownian motors (ratchets), i.e. a dissipative dynamics in the presence of thermal noise and some prototypical perturbation that drives the system out of equilibrium without introducing a priori an obvious bias into one or the other direction of motion. Symmetry conditions for the appearance (or not) of directed current, its inversion upon variation of certain parameters, and quantitative theoretical predictions for specific models are reviewed as well as a wide variety of experimental realizations and biological applications, especially the modeling of molecular motors. Extensions include quantum mechanical and collective effects, Hamiltonian ratchets, the influence of spatial disorder, and diffusive transport.Comment: Revised version (Aug. 2001), accepted for publication in Physics Report