On the Meanings and Implications of Joseph Margolis’ Definition of Art

This paper develops an inquiry into the meanings and implications of Joseph Margolis’ definition of artworks as physically embodied and culturally emergent entities. It starts from the pars destruens of his theory, by comparing two different texts criticizing Morris Weitz’ denial of the possibility to define art. While in an early essay Margolis is ready to accept a constructivistic conception of necessary and sufficient conditions, six decades later he seems to have dropped the attempt to maintain a deflationary version of enabling conditions in view of a more coherent form of contingentism and pluralism. Secondly, the paper focuses on the “generic” character of Margolis’ definition, namely its being too inclusive, insofar as it fits any kind of cultural entity. The author suggests that the first implication of Margolis’ “generic” definition is the idea of continuity between artworks and the things and events of the cultural world. A second implication is that according to Margolis differences between artworks and other things can only be traced a posteriori, by looking at collective practices and at habitual uses of the term. Finally, the author argues that Margolis’ radically historicist and contextualized approach to the arts should be integrated through a coherent historicizing and contextualizing of the very issue of the definition of art. A similar step could have strengthened his transition to a more inclusive philosophy of culture and philosophical anthropology

Aesthetic Disinterest

This entry on "aesthetic disinterest" provides an overview of the origins of the concept and its role in the foundation of aesthetics according to Stolnitz and the following debate on the role of Eighteenth-century British aesthetics, Kant, and Schopenhauer. It also concisely consider some main criticism of the concept in the current debate from the field of institutional theory of art, sociology of art, environmental aesthetics, and evolutionary aesthetics

James on the stream of language: with some remarks on his influence on Wittgenstein

This article supports a reading of the “Stream of Thought” chapter in The Principles of Psychology according to which James was not formulating an idea of linguistic meanings as private feelings occurring within the speaker’s mind, but rather criticizing the habit of basically considering language an association of names, because of the misleading consequence of this assumption for our understanding of thought as primarily resulting from the sum of its discrete parts. James was suggesting the possibility of adopting a different approach to language by considering its continuous, relational or transitive aspects, instead of focusing exclusively on substantive elements. He seems to be inviting his readers to adopt an attitude towards language complementing his own holistic view of thought as continuous and involving relations. The author explores the claim that James was considering two different attitudes towards language (GAVIN, 1992, p. 69): a more critical approach and a disposition that is attentive to the dynamic, contextual and embodied shaping of the meaning of words. This reading is based on and further develops the idea that The Principles had a positive influence on Wittgenstein, rather than a merely critical one—an interpretation supported by a group of recent scholars (BONCOMPAGNI, 2012a, 2012b; GOODMAN, 2002; JACKMAN, 2006, 20017; and SANFELIX-VIDARTE, 2016)

Pragmatist Tools for Exploring the "Fabric of Experience". John Ryder's "Knowledge, Art, and Power. An Outline of a Theory of Practice".

The essay is a critical notice on John Ryder's book, "Knowledge, Art, and Power. An Outline of a Theory of Practice", published by Brill in 2020. Sharing Ryder's cultural naturalism as well as his relational ontology, the author considers some important issues at stake within the volume. A first claim is that Ryder's characterization of the aesthetic should be explicitly connected with affective, qualitative or “esthetic” significances as pervasive features of experienced situations, grounded in the bio-social dependence of human life on the environment. A second suggestion is integrating John Ryder’s conception of the political as a basic feature of experience through an explicit emphasis on the Pragmatists’ thesis of the essentially social character of human life. A final criticism regards Ryder's deflating strategy about the role played by language in human experiencence, denying it to be one of its structural dimensions together with the aesthetic, the cognitive, and the political

More than Action and Perception. A Pragmatist View on Sensibility

In this paper, I suggest deriving a conception of human sensibility from John Dewey: more specifically, from his strategy of shifting the field of reference from a representative view of cognition to organic life within an environment. From this point of view, human sensibility can be understood as selective exposure to the environment and an active feeling capacity to discriminate between favourable and noxious aspects by organisms whose primary experience of the surrounding environment is socio-cultural. This happens because of the organic conditions of emphasized dependence from a natural and naturally culturally shared environment characterizing the human form of life. This means that the conception of perception as skilled action involving movements and dynamism from its very beginning – a conception worked out within the enactivist field and independently envisaged by both John Dewey and Maurice Merleau-Ponty – should be integrated. The mutual coordination does not occur between a still eminently sense-oriented perception and movement, but between an affectively oriented perception and movement. Consequently, a fully embodied and embedded conception of sensibility should be assumed as the affective capacity to discriminate living conditions as comfortable or menacing, as friendly, welcoming, annoying or troubling, as good places to live or bad situations to escape from. Roughly speaking, embodiment and affectivity should be assumed as the two intertwining sides of sensibility: in other words, sensibility should be seen as involving "primordial affectivity", which Giovanna Colombetti defines as a necessarily and non-contingent feature permeating the mind. Finally, I argue that we should tackle the issue of the specificity of human sensibility, which is to say its being embedded in a deeply social and cultural-linguistic niche from birth. We should consider the feedback actions or loop effects on pre-verbal animal sensibility exercised by the cultural-linguistic niche in which humans are fortuitously but irreversibly embedded.In this paper, I suggest deriving a conception of human sensibility from John Dewey: more specifically, from his strategy of shifting the field of reference from a representative view of cognition to organic life within an environment. From this point of view, human sensibility can be understood as selective exposure to the environment and an active feeling capacity to discriminate between favourable and noxious aspects by organisms whose primary experience of the surrounding environment is socio-cultural. This happens because of the organic conditions of emphasized dependence from a natural and naturally culturally shared environment characterizing the human form of life. This means that the conception of perception as skilled action involving movements and dynamism from its very beginning - a conception worked out within the enactivist field and independently envisaged by both John Dewey and Maurice Merleau-Ponty - should be integrated.The mutual coordination does not occur between a still eminently senseoriented perception and movement, but between an affectively oriented perception and movement. Consequently, a fully embodied and embedded conception of sensibility should be assumed as the affective capacity to discriminate living conditions as comfortable or menacing, as friendly, welcoming, annoying or troubling, as good places to live or bad situations to escape from. Roughly speaking, embodiment and affectivity should be assumed as the two intertwining sides of sensibility: in other words, sensibility should be seen as involving "primordial affectivity", which Giovanna Colombetti defines as a necessary and non-contingent feature permeating the mind. Finally, I argue that we should tackle the issue of the specificity of human sensibility, which is to say its being embedded in a deeply social and cultural-linguistic niche from birth.We should consider the feedback actions or loop effects on pre-verbal animal sensibility exercised by the cultural-linguistic niche in which humans are fortuitously but irreversibly embedded

Framing Cognition. Dewey's Potential Contributions to Some Enactivist Issues

It is well known that John Dewey was very far from embracing the traditional idea of cognition as something happening inside one's own mind and consisting in a pictorial representation of the alleged purely external reality out there. His position was largely convergent with enactivist accounts of cognition as something based in life and consisting in human actions within a natural environment. The paper considers Dewey's conception of cognition by focusing on its potential contributions to the current debate with enactivism. It claims that Dewey's antisubstantial, continuistic, and emergentistic conception of the mind as a typically human conduct pulls the rug out of the idea of cognition as representation, as well as pushes the current discussion towards a serious reconsideration of representationalist assumptions about conceptuality and language. The paper emphasises that Dewey - differently from enactivists - frames the role of cognition within experience: he argues that cognition concerns those intermediate phases of our experiences of the world which are characterised by an indeterminate or troubled situation, because he claims that human beings' interactions with their own environment are qualitatively richer and broader than cognition, including as they do many different and intertwined modes of experience. Finally, the author suggests that a coherent development of Dewey's lines of thought should avoid rigid distinctions and hierarchies between lower and higher degrees of cognition in humans, which are still maintained in certain forms of radical enactivism. Differently, we should consider the impact of the cultural and broadly linguistic configuration of the human environment even on perception, motor action, and affective sensibility

On the Natural Roots of the "Aesthetic" in John Dewey and William James

This paper focuses on the peculiar meanings of the word “aesthetic” or “esthetic” in Dewey and James, highlighting the continuity between Dewey’s interpretation of the “esthetic” and James’s uses of the term. More importantly, the paper defends the claim that both philosophers attributed a basically naturalistic meaning to “aesthetic/esthetic”: Dewey saw experience as basically esthetically or qualitatively characterized, insofar it is connected to the biological conditions of life in an environment that directly affects the very existence of organisms. James primarily used the term “aesthetic” in connection to pain and pleasure, i.e., to refer to a living being’s physiological predisposition to feel and select certain features of the surrounding world, by assuming specific attitudes toward given situations. Moreover, both authors conceived of the aesthetic in a narrower sense, i.e., in relation to the arts, as the development, enhancement or refinement of the naturally aesthetic features of human experience, denying any a priori distinction between the two spheres. After clarifying the meanings of the word “esthetic” in Dewey’s work in relation to his theory of experience and aesthetic qualities, the paper explores the uses of the word “aesthetic” in James’s texts, particularly with reference to his theory of temperament and his conception of emotions. The last section focuses on the influence exercised on James’s vocabulary by the work of Alexander Bain and suggests the risky yet plausible hypothesis that Edmund Burke’s physiological aesthetics may have played a role in the way James approached the word, although the term “aesthetic” is missing in Burke’s text

Dewey After the End of Art. Evaluating the "Hegelian Permanent Deposit" in Dewey's Aesthetics

This article explores the significance of Hegel’s aesthetic lectures for Dewey’s approach to the arts. Although over the last two decades some brilliant studies have been published on the “permanent deposit” of Hegel in Dewey’s mature thought, the aesthetic dimension of Dewey’s engagement with Hegel’s heritage has not yet been investigated. This inquiry will be developed on a theoretical level as well as on the basis of a recent discovery: in Dewey’s Correspondence traces have been found of a lecture on Hegel’s Aesthetics delivered in 1891 within a summer school run by a scholar close to the so-called St. Louis Hegelians. Dewey’s deep and long-standing acquaintance with Hegel’s Aesthetics supports the claim that in his mature book, Art as Experience, he originally appropriated some Hegelian insights. First, Dewey shared Hegel’s strong anti-dualistic and anti-autonomistic conception of the arts, resisting post-Kantian sirens that favored instead an interpretation of art as a separate realm from ordinary reality. Second, they basically converged on an idea of the arts as inherently social activities as well as crucial contributions to the shaping of cultures and civilizations, based on the proximity of the arts to the sensitive nature of man. Third, this article argues that an original re-consideration of Hegel’s thesis of the so-called “end of art” played a crucial role in the formulation of Dewey’s criticism of the arts and of the role of aesthetic experience in contemporary society. The author suggests that we read Dewey’s criticism of the removal of fine art “from the scope of the common or community life” (LW 10, 12) in light of Hegel’s insight that the experience of the arts as something with which believers or citizens can immediately identify belongs to an irretrievable past.This article explores the significance of Hegel's aesthetic lectures for Dewey's approach to the arts. Although over the last two decades some brilliant studies have been published on the “permanent deposit” of Hegel in Dewey's mature thought, the aesthetic dimension of Dewey's engagement with Hegel's heritage has not yet been investigated. This inquiry will be developed on a theoretical level as well as on the basis of a recent discovery: in Dewey's Correspondence traces have been found of a lecture on Hegel's Aesthetics delivered in 1891 within a summer school run by a scholar close to the so-called St. Louis Hegelians. Dewey's deep and long-standing acquaintance with Hegel's Aesthetics supports the claim that in his mature book, Art as Experience, he originally appropriated some Hegelian insights. First, Dewey shared Hegel's strong anti-dualistic and anti-autonomistic conception of the arts, resisting post-Kantian sirens that favored instead an interpretation of art as a separate realm from ordinary reality. Second, they basically converged on an idea of the arts as inherently social activities as well as crucial contributions to the shaping of cultures and civilizations, based on the proximity of the arts to the sensitive nature of man. Third, this article argues that an original re-consideration of Hegel's thesis of the so-called “end of art” played a crucial role in the formulation of Dewey's criticism of the arts and of the role of aesthetic experience in contemporary society. The author suggests that we read Dewey's criticism of the removal of fine art “from the scope of the common or community life” (lw 10, 12) in light of Hegel's insight that the experience of the arts as something with which believers or citizens can immediately identify belongs to an irretrievable past

A Pragmatist Approach

In this paper, we provide a pragmatist conceptualization of affective habits as relatively flexible ways of channeling affectivity. Our proposal, grounded in a conception of sensibility and habits derived from John Dewey, suggests understanding affective scaffoldings in a novel and broader sense by re-orienting the debate from objects to interactions. We claim that habits play a positive role in supporting and orienting human sensibility, allowing us to avoid any residue of dualism between internalist and externalist conceptions of affectivity. We provide pragmatist tools for understanding the environment's role in shaping our feelings, emotions, moods, and affective behaviors. However, we contend that in addition to environment, the continuous and recursive affective transaction between agent and environment (both natural and cultural) are also crucially involved. We claim that habits are transformative, which is especially evident when we consider that emotions are often the result of a crisis in habitual behavior and successively play a role in prompting changes of habits. The final upshot is a conceptualization of affective habits as pervasive tools for feelings that scaffold human conduct as well as key features in the transformation of behaviors

Affective Scaffoldings as Habits: A Pragmatist Approach

In this paper, we provide a pragmatist conceptualization of affective habits as relatively flexible ways of channeling affectivity. Our proposal, grounded in a conception of sensibility and habits derived from John Dewey, suggests understanding affective scaffoldings in a novel and broader sense by re-orienting the debate from objects to interactions. We claim that habits play a positive role in supporting and orienting human sensibility, allowing us to avoid any residue of dualism between internalist and externalist conceptions of affectivity. We provide pragmatist tools for understanding the environment's role in shaping our feelings, emotions, moods, and affective behaviors. However, we contend that in addition to environment, the continuous and recursive affective transaction between agent and environment (both natural and cultural) are also crucially involved. We claim that habits are transformative, which is especially evident when we consider that emotions are often the result of a crisis in habitual behavior and successively play a role in prompting changes of habits. The final upshot is a conceptualization of affective habits as pervasive tools for feelings that scaffold human conduct as well as key features in the transformation of behavior