British Society of Aesthetics

Conference Reports

White Rose Aesthetics Conference - The Unity of Imagining

22nd September 2009, University of Sheffield

The first annual White Rose Aesthetics Conference was held at the Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield on Tuesday September 22^nd 2009. The theme of this one day conference was The Unity of Imagining.

Robert Hopkins (Sheffield) began the day by speaking on the topic of 'Imagining the Past'. Hopkins argued that episodic memory is, in key part, a kind of imagining. He defended this account against some obvious objections and explored some of its consequences for the epistemology of episodic memory. In his paper, 'Imaginability: Improbability, Impossibility, and Resistance', Jonathan Ichikawa (Arché, St Andrews) explored connections between phenomena associated with imaginative resistance and certain puzzles about probabilistic reasoning. Kathleen Stock (Sussex) offered a paper entitled ‘What Is the Content of a Mental Image?’ in which she explored the view that mental images represent only appearances or ‘looks’ of objects, and not the objects themselves. Stock persuasively argued that that there are no compelling considerations in favour of such a view. In the final paper of the day, 'Imagine What?: Imaginative Underdetermination and The Task of the Audience', Jonathan Weinberg (Indiana) argued against the widespread view that visual fictions are different from literary fictions in that the former require that we imagine of ourselves that we are seeing the events shown in them. Weinberg made the case that it is better to consider visual imagining as different only in format from literary imagining rather than involving a special viewer-involving content.

More than twenty people attended the conference. They enjoyed vigorous discussion and debate which continued over drinks and dinner. Generous support for the event was provided by the British Society of Aesthetics, the Mind Association, the University of Sheffield, and the University of Leeds.

Rob Hopkins (Sheffield) and Aaron Meskin (Leeds)

International Conference on Music and Morality

London June 15-17, Institute of Musical Research and Institute of Philosophy

Although nowadays many would consider them entirely separate realms, strong links between the moral sphere and musical practice and experience have long been held to exist. Reflecting developments in both musicology and philosophy, the conference organisers felt the time was ripe for a widespread reassessment of the subject. For while the majority of musicologists and composers have long since shelved the unworkable but extraordinarily persistent notion that music cannot sustain meaningful links to anything outside itself, the hegemony of utilitarianism in public conceptions of the moral sphere is fast being supplemented by a growth of moral enquiry only too happy to take its cue from the world of human emotion and experience. Whether the links between them are best characterised in terms of emotional awareness, the manipulation of sensibility, representation, narrative, or more simply with the help of the numerous metaphorical constructions we use to anchor our musical experience to the imaginative and cognitive processes it demands from us - these and other factors, it was felt, should once now be available for discussion together, of course, with the possibility that there is no meaningful link to be uncovered.

Having recruited six very high profile keynote speakers, all representing remarkably different approaches, a call for papers was issued in the autumn of 2008. We received well over 100 proposals for additional papers from a wide range of sources, as well as significant interest in the conference elsewhere. BBC Radio 3 organised a special issue of Music Matters around the conference theme, including a long discussion with three of the keynote speakers (John Deathridge, Deirdre Gribbin and Roger Scruton). In the end, some 34 papers were selected for parallel sessions, leading to a packed conference schedule with a total of 40 addresses. A total of around 90 delegates from over 15 countries attended over the three days, stretching the resources of the Institute of Advanced Study but also making for extremely vibrant and varied discussion.

The theme of the conference was approached from many different angles. Among the keynote speakers, composer Deirdre Gribbin and musicologists John Deathridge and Susan McClary drew on personal experience from which to elaborate their positions. Gribbin argued that composers have a strong duty to write music which reflects the moral and political climate in which they and their listeners live. Susan McClary used her own now legendary gendered analysis of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to illustrate ways in which the "moral force" of music was in many ways inescapable. John Deathridge pursued a more sceptical line, arguing that the trajectory pursued by "art music" in the post-war period has led to a position in which artistic fraudulence is indistinguishable from authenticity, hinting at the moral ramifications of this.

Illustrating his lecture with some fine vocalisations, the philosopher Jerry Levinson explored the moral character expressed in jazz standards. Roger Scruton, by contrast, mostly kept to the classical repertoire, arguing that music can both embody moral character and shape communities of listeners who are open to it. In this way, Scruton argued it is possible to distinguish noble music from ignoble, just as it provides a model for grounding notions of the cultural importance of musical excellence. In an unexpected conference first, Scruton's lecture proved to be his Powerpoint debut. The conference committee do not know if he has revisited the genre.

The line taken by the composer George Benjamin was in many ways the most general of all. In conversation with Guy Dammann, Benjamin argued that although it was not the duty of the composer to try to "engage" in moral and political issues directly - music should not be a form of protest or coercion - the compositional imperative to write music that was both new and, most importantly of all, beautiful is something in itself that may be considered to have a moral extension. This was understood both in the sense of a composer's private moral code but also, and more importantly, in the sense that the experience of profound beauty may itself be one of the things that ignites moral awareness and the sense of our freedom to act.

Much of the success of the conference owed to the quality of the selected papers, and to the liveliness of the discussions following them. It was generally felt that this was an interdisciplinary conference that had enabled the participants to make genuine progress in their research of the central theme, and the atmosphere was particularly positive throughout. In response to one of the papers, for example, a straw poll was arranged to canvas opinion on the question of whether music can lie. Roughly 65% felt that it could and lively debate ensued.

The overwhelming majority of the delegates expressed interest in continuing the discussion in the form of a publication, most probably a collection of selected papers. Barry Smith, Director of the Institute of Philosophy, and Guy Dammann are currently exploring this. We hope to have a proposal ready in the beginning of 2010.

International Conference on Music and Emotion, 2009

31 August - 3 September 2009, Durham University

Organised by Michael Spitzer (Durham University)

As the first interdisciplinary conference on music and emotion to have been organized by a music theorist, this gathering of philosophers, psychologists, engineers, experimental composers, ethnomusicologists, musicologists, and music theorists presented a unique opportunity for theorists to demonstrate the intricate tools of analysis for teasing out a spectrum of moods and shifting emotional states in musical works. In turn, psychologists provided a reality check as to the physiological and cognitive potential of music’s acoustic and gestural signals, and philosophers provided a reality check as to the appropriateness of the linguistic formulations for expressive meanings that theorists and musicologists interpret and attempt to ground in musical structure and form. In the midst of all this scholarly ferment, experimental composers (those who are creating new soundscapes with interactive input from listeners’ physiological responses) demonstrated what is yet possible for music to achieve in the realm of emotion.

A sampling of the large number of sponsors reveals the scope and ambition of this project: SMA, SMT, the British Society of Aesthetics, Durham University, London University’s IMR, Queen’s University in Belfast, Music and Letters, Oxford University Press, Musicon, SEMPRE . . . and the list goes on. Over 150 delegates representing Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australia presented nearly 90 papers in four parallel sessions over four days, coming together for no less than sixteen plenary talks distributed among several of the many disciplines represented.

From the philosophers of music, principal themes included various weightings of arousal and cognitive appraisal (Jenefer Robinson and Derek Matravers), Adorno on mimesis and expression (Max Paddison), the projection of a persona or protagonist or fictive subject (at least for 19th-century music), and the distinction between metaphorical and literal language for music’s expressive states (Nick Zangwill)

From the psychologists of music (including here the bridging music theorist David Huron), topics embraced everything from evolutionary and ethological roots of emotion, to sophisticated dimensional studies of listeners’ categorization of their emotional responses (Roddie Cowie, leader of HUMAINE), subtle cross-modal experiments of the impact of music on perception in other realms, measuring models of entrainment in ensemble performance (Antonio Camurri), imaging mirror neurons in the context of musical expectation (Katie Overy), assessing the emotional effects of music in therapy, and at the end – complementing Patrik Juslin’s opening address on the new paradigm in emotion studies – John Sloboda’s eloquent plea for a new field of study, music in everyday life (note, however, the inherent problem of an individual’s degraded attention to the music’s more subtly expressed aesthetic emotions, if heavily engaged in other activities).

From the music theorists, musicologists, and ethnomusicologists, themes ranged from the analytical (Robert Hatten and Michael Spitzer calibrating emotional expression in Mozart, Barry Cooper on the use of silence in Beethoven) to the cognitive (iconicity and emotive analogues in music), from the study of music and violence (both in art music and in the use of music in society) to the psychoanalytical approach to desire (Stephen Downes and Kenneth Smith on Lacan), and from emotion and rhetoric as projected in performance (John Butt) or as embedded in performance practice (Thérèse de Goede) to the emotional effects of bodily synchronization with groove-based music (Nikki Dibben)

Experimental composers demonstrated the close link between their research and compositional application, involving spectral manipulation (Trevor Wishart) and the kinematic and physiological symptoms of listeners as interactively helping to direct musical events in a live performance realization of a new compositions (Eric Lyons and Ben Knapp). Delegates were recruited as participants in an evening’s demonstration of these creative fusions of science and art. Another example of the conference’s integration of theory and practice was John Butt’s pre-concert talk on the philosophy of time consciousness in Schütz and Bach, prior to taking up the baton to conduct his Dunedin Consort for a splendid evening of music. An extra bonus was an OUP book launch of Juslin and Sloboda’s new Handbook of Music and Emotion, hugely expanded successor to their seminal 2001 volume.

Given the slant of the conference, I will concentrate on the four music theory plenaries. I must confess it was difficult to choose among the concurrent sessions (the book of abstracts is a treasure trove), and I was thus grateful for the numerous plenary gatherings.

Among the plenary talks by music theorists, David Huron’s was the least analytical, but he offered a marvelously cogent argument for a surprising relationship, based on evolutionary, ethological, and physiological evidence, between weeping and laughing. At the root of each is some form fear (including uncertainty, embarrassment, etc.), which, when cognitively appraised as non-threatening, leads to the contrastive reaction of laughter. The goal of his presentation was to demonstrate the importance of this finding for our aesthetic appreciation of so-called negative emotions in music: “in normal circumstances, weeping is a negatively valenced affective state, but in the context of cortical appraisal of innocuousness (such as when listening to music), contrastive affect renders the experience pleasurable. In this, the positive feelings evoked by music-induced weeping have similar underlying mechanisms to laughter.”

Lawrence Zbikowski’s lecture moved up the cognitive scale to explore sonic analogues (iconicity at the diagrammatic level, in Peirce’s terminology) to human processes, focusing on emotion. The neurological evidence, drawn from Barsalou and Damasio, suggests that we construct fragmentary feature maps for each sensory modality, “conjunctive neurons” capture them for future use, and they can be reactivated—either in imagination without stimuli, or in immediate response to similar patterns (as in music’s acoustical signals)—such that we sense almost immediately the analogue with our previously encoded patterns. Thus, if we know the relative frame of experience (e.g., emotional) for those signals, we can have near-immediate access to their specifically encoded emotive patterns. His illustration at the guitar of Sagreras’s “El Colibri” (the hummingbird) demonstrated how music can embody such patterns.

Michael Spitzer’s and my own contributions moved analysis toward center stage, while bringing to bear insights from both philosophical and psychological studies. Michael’s central theme was the power of analysis in tracking emotional change, from the first apprehension of a feeling tone through the traversal of a unique musical form. In his exploration of the Minuet and Trio from Mozart’s Symphony no. 40, he identified vectors of anger (exploding, breakthrough) vs. tenderness (comforting) as conveyed by a range of parameters, including instrumentation, phrasing, and metric structure (with such analogues as metric dissonance conveying cognitive dissonance). His evidence was drawn from Izard and Ackerman’s ethology of emotional behavior, which links basic emotions with behavior in time. Thus, if we can analyze “thwarting” in music, leading to an “explosion,” then that process suggests the emotional behavior associated with “anger.” He also noted the once-removed aesthetic emotion experienced when our appreciation of form displaces the everyday emotion of anger, such that the emotion we actually experience might be a sense of triumph over recalcitrant material.

Since my plenary talk was paired with that of philosopher of music Jenefer Robinson, I chose to frame my contribution along philosophical lines of inquiry. As does Robinson, I outlined the varieties of musical emotional experience (drawing on the analogy with William James’s varieties of religious experience) in order to focus on what I call “aesthetically warranted emotions.” I further focused on “composed expressive trajectories” (my notion of “expressive genre” is a global type, but I concentrated here on smaller phrase trajectories), as interpreted by a stylistically competent listener. Playing my stylistically adequate but rather unmarked rewriting of the opening to the slow movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in F Major, K. 533, I noted how Mozart’s version can be understood as an enhancement of expressive intensity by means of marked tonal events and their rhythmic and phrase-structural consequences. Next, I explored the role of previous emotional experience in helping us gauge the expressive significance of such passages, and whether our response need be fully emotional in order to appreciate composed expressive trajectories. Finally, I conjectured on emergent emotions (compare Spitzer) that may not be isomorphic (compare Zbikowski) with those composed trajectories, but that may nevertheless be considered as aesthetically warranted.

This is a remarkable time to be a music theorist in Great Britain. The profusion of timely conferences is bringing together some of the best minds to ponder issues of performance, tonality, and emotion in music, in addition to the various themes of several innovative study days, and the recently launched summer school in music analysis. These are strong indicators of the success of the Society for Music Analysis and its leadership, which has progressively transformed the musical landscape in Britain. As a North American who is increasingly drawn to these shores, I applaud your efforts, and hope that we can emulate your inspiring model of interdisciplinary cooperation.

Robert Hatten - Indiana University

British Society of Aesthetics Annual Conference 2009

4-6 September 2009, St. Edmund Hall, Oxford

The three-day, 2009 British Society of Aesthetics Annual Conference – organised by Stacie Friend, Ian Ground, Derek Matravers and Aaron Meskin – took place, as before, at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, in the beginning of September. Unlike previous occasions, though, this year’s conference was attended by 73 delegates (a record number) and the graduate papers delivered were twice as many as before.

The conference kicked off with a thought-provoking paper given by David Davies (McGill) on the ontology of art, broadly construed. Informed by examples in which certain works of art are created for specific locations, Davies argued that, since the reception conditions influence the way we, viewers, appreciate the manifest properties of visual artworks, the correct appreciation of some of those works requires acquaintance with the works’ original context (say, the church to which an altarpiece was commissioned). In a similar vein, but in relation to the ontology of architecture, Daniel Barnes (Nottingham) claimed that architecture is a singular, rather than a multiple, art form mainly drawing upon the assumptions that buildings are site-specific and historically-located objects.

Rounding off the first day of conference, Catherine Abell (Macquarie/Manchester) presented on ‘Representation, Expression and Interpretation’ and, followed by Aaron Ridley’s (Southampton) formal commentary, James Shelley (Auburn) presented on ‘Why Aesthetic Judgments Should be True’. Abell sought to understand, based on speech act theory, how works of fiction and non-fiction express mental states and, moreover, what the real aim of both artistic and narrative interpretations should be. In his turn, Shelley attempted to explain why aesthetic valuing is prescriptive and why we should not over-valuate and under-valuate artworks.

Amongst this year’s graduate sessions, two were on historical issues: Ian Blaustein (Boston) presented a paper on Kant’s aesthetics and Bob Mahoney (Southampton) another on Hume’s. Arguing that Hume’s true judge is not ideal, but a character-type instead, Mahoney’s paper was awarded the BSA 2009 Graduate Prize. The other graduate papers were on diverse, though sometimes related, topics. For instance, Louise Hanson (Oxford) addressed the question of whether conceptual artworks are paraphrasable – claiming that, even if that were the case, it would not follow that conceptual art is a redundant project – while Andrew Huddleston (Princeton) raised objections to Noël Carroll’s analogy between engaging with art and having a conversation, concluding that, in a conversation, grasping our interlocutor’s intention should be a point of departure, not a point of arrival. The remaining papers were delivered by Dan Cavedon-Taylor (Birkbeck) on ‘What’s Really Wrong with Photographic Transparency’, Simone Neuber (Tübingen) on ‘An Ordinary Perception Account of Picture Perception and Gombrichian Schemata’, Paloma Atencia (UCL) on ‘Should Imagining Seeing Turn (Moving) Pictures into Fiction?’, and Emily Caddick (Cambridge) on ‘The Real Problem with Fictional Feelings’.

In the afternoon of the second day, Katherine Thomson-Jones (Oberlin) considered the possibility that moving, but not static, cinematic images can produce a sense of movement in the viewers themselves, seeking to explore what sort of imaginings they generate – particularly, when associated with a cinematic narrator – and suggesting, amongst other things, that film may prompt experiential imaginings in a way that other forms of visual art cannot. David Osipovich (Allegheny), in his interesting paper on the art of theatre, sought to identify the conditions in which something counts as a theatrical performance, putting forward two main features of it: liveness and enactment. And Martin Gayford, the art historian and critic who delivered this year’s William Empson Lecture at the BSA conference, dealt with the philosophical question ‘What is a Portrait?’ from the point of view of art history.

The third, final day of conference was opened by Andy Hamilton’s (Durham) discussion about the role of rhythm in music and closed by James Harold’s (Mount Holyoke) subtle reason for why we ought to prefer autonomism over interactionism when evaluating artworks. In between these presentations, there was also time for Dominic McIver Lopes (British Columbia) to persuasively defend the view – subsequently commented by Nick Zangwill (Durham) – according to which, if artistic value is to be distinguished from aesthetic value (i.e., if they are not one and the same thing), there is no such thing as artistic value – or, to paraphrase Lopes, artistic value is nothing but a myth.

Miguel F. dos Santos—St. Andrews

Philosophy & Literature Graduate Conference

Warwick’s Philosophy Department and Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts hosted a graduate conference in Philosophy & Literature on 26 May 2009. We had an excellent day of papers and discussion, moving from the ontology of stories, to Wittgensteinian resoluteness in Kafka, belief in Pratchett and Zizek, the literariness of translation, moral responsibility in Middlemarch, and satire in Musil. Professor John Ferrari gave a stimulating keynote lecture on practices of intimation, in which we manage how others see us, but without using full-blown communication of intentions. He set the tone by showing the opening walk down the street from Saturday Night Fever. Our graduate speakers were Geoff Stevenson (Manchester), Rebecca Schuman (UC-Irvine), Andrew Rayment (Aberystwyth), Paul Morrow (Vanderbilt), Kamila Pacovská (Charles University/Prague), and Sophie Djigo (Université Picardie Jules Verne/Amiens). They not only presented original and challenging work, but engaged with their peers’ research in a wonderfully open and constructive way. We thank our commentators: David Egan, Eileen John, Charlotte Mahoney, Peter Poellner, Merten Reglitz, and Peter Shum, and we also thank our terrific graduate organisers, Daniel McCrea and Karen Simecek. We were very grateful for the BSA’s support—it made a big contribution to the success of the event.

Eileen John—Warwick

New Wave, New Views: Re-visiting the post-punk moment

26 June 2009, University of Leeds

This one day interdisciplinary workshop, organized by Simon Warner (Music, Leeds) and Aaron Meskin (Philosophy, Leeds), explored the aesthetic, cultural and political ideas associated with rock music's new wave and post-punk genres. Warner and Meskin started the day off by briefly introducing some theoretical issues raised by new wave and post-punk. In his keynote address, 'Kids're Forming Bands: Making Meaning in Post-Punk', Theodore Gracyk (Minnesota State University, Moorhead) argued that post-punk was not a stylistic category but rather an artistic movement and then showed how Kant's theory of the fine arts might make sense of some of the best of that movement. Gracyk's talk was followed by two interviews conducted by Warner. First up was a lengthy and wide-ranging discussion with Jon King and Andy Gill-Leeds alumni and key members of the seminal post-punk band Gang of Four. This was followed by an entertaining interview with well-known rock biographer and historian Clinton Heylin (From the Velvets to the Voidoids: A Pre-Punk History of a Post-Punk World and Babylon's Burning: From Punk to Grunge). In the afternoon, the workshop split into two streams for papers from researchers working in a variety of disciplines. One of the highlights of the afternoon was a presentation by Hugo Burnham (New England Institute of Art, Leeds alumnus, and ex-Gang of Four) entitled 'Skinny Ties/Skinny Ideas'. In addition to those already mentioned, the other speakers were David Uskovich (Texas), David Sanjek (Salford), Martin King (Manchester Metropolitan), Peter Webb (Birmingham), Phillip Kiszely (Leeds) and Michael Rose (independent scholar). Meskin chaired a closing session that focused on future directions for research on the workshop's theme.

Approximately forty people attended the workshop. In addition to Leeds funding from the Popular Cultures Research Network, the Centre for Metaphysics and Mind, and the Faculty of Performance, Visual Arts and Communications EKT Fund, the workshop received generous support from the British Society of Aesthetics.

Aaron Meskin—Leeds

Art, Aesthetics and the Sexual

The aim of this two-day conference was to investigate different approaches in philosophical aesthetics to the artistic status and aesthetic dimension of pictures and films with sexual imagery and themes. The speakers and their papers were as follows:

Prepared comments were delivered by Elizabeth Cowie (Kent), Jerrold Levinson (Maryland), Ted Nannicelli (Kent), Elisabeth Schellekens (Durham) and Murray Smith (Kent). The conference concluded with a roundtable discussion led by Hans Maes (Kent). Audio and video recordings of the various sessions will be made available through our website: www.aesthetics-research.org

This is the second conference organized by the Aesthetics Research Group at the University of Kent. The first such conference, titled “Kendall Walton and the Aesthetics of Photography and Film,” was held in November 2007. “Art, Aesthetics and the Sexual” was generously supported by the British Society of Aesthetics, The Mind Association, and the University of Kent (through the Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, the School of Film, Drama & Visual Arts, and the School of European and Culture and Languages).

Hans Maes—University of Kent

The British Society of Aesthetics (North) Conference

The British Society of Aesthetics (North) one-day conference was held at the University of Edinburgh on 24th April 2009. The conference stimulated lively discussion on a range of topics in the arts. John Mullarkey (Dundee) began with ‘The Non-Ontology of the Image: Thinking without Philosophy’, which challenged the illustrative approach to philosophy in film by asking how film thinks and might be a new kind of philosophy. In ‘Toward a Non-Minimalist Account of Aesthetic Experience’, Jerrold Levinson (Maryland) developed an affective-rich account as an alternative to Noël Carroll’s minimalist view of aesthetic experience. Cain Todd (Lancaster) defended a version of the view that we feel genuine emotions in response to fiction in ‘Fiction, Emotion, Form and Content’. Lisa Jones (St Andrews) brought the day to a close with ‘How Robust is the Work of Art’, which considered how much intertextual intervention can take place before the original identity of a literary work is destroyed.

The Society has held ‘northern region’ conferences from time to time over the years, and it is hoped the tradition will continue. This event also brought together staff and postgraduates in philosophical aesthetics with the intention of forming an Aesthetics Research Group north of the border. We’re very grateful to the BSA and the Scots Philosophical Club for making the event possible.

Emily Brady—Edinburgh

A Resource Against the Tedium of Life: Reflecting On the 18th Century Garden

A symposium on gardens and what they meant in the period of Chawton House Library’s collection seemed a natural event for Chawton to host. Rain was forecast on April 7th, the day for which it was arranged, but the rain kept off and the sun shone on all who gathered for a one-day symposium entitled 'A Resource Against the Tedium of Life': Reflecting on the Eighteenth-Century Garden’. The symposium was the first event of the Southampton Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, launched at Chawton last October. It saw experts reflect on conceptions of the eighteenth-century garden in a room from which they could look out at an example - deer, ha-ha and all: the first speaker, David Cooper remarked that he had no need to show us pictures because he could point out of the window. A special feature of the day was a tour of Chawton House’s own landscape garden.

Opening proceedings, Professor John Oldfield, Director of the Southampton Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, stressed the importance of collaboration not only between academic disciplines but also between Chawton House Library and SCECS. Steve Lawrence, Director of CHL, emphasised the new dimension SCECS had added. Admitting he was no more than ‘a slash-and-burn gardener’ himself, Steve praised the title of the symposium 'A Resource against the Tedium of Life' (from Charlotte Smith's 1788 novel Emmeline), as still a true indication of the role gardens may play.

There was not any tedium to be had in the three papers from different disciplines - respectively philosophy, musicology, and literary studies – that formed the core of a day. David Cooper, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Durham, led off with an urbane survey of the ways in which theories of the picturesque attempted to mediate or to reconcile culture and nature. Cooper’s talk showed how the picturesque represented a critique both of the formalism of French gardens, such as that at Versailles, which did not allow for the experience of ‘nature’ and of the ‘improvement’ represented famously by Capability Brown (and satirised by Austen) which failed to epitomise the variety and intricacy of nature. On this account, the kind of managed landscapes that would be described as picturesque might embody what Addison called ‘artificial rudeness’.

The vogue for them was shortlived however: by late in the eighteenth century tourists were deserting the garden for the lakes or the Alps. As often, however, the commonplace histories of different disciplines do not mesh with each other. Stephen Groves, a PhD student in Music at the University of Southampton supervised by Tom Irvine, Deputy Director of SCES, was able to show that the musically eclectic practices of Continental European composers constituted them as a kind of avant garde that the English resisted. Those practices, he told us in a wide-ranging paper entitled ‘Resisting the Picturesque: English musical conservatism and the age of the landscape garden’, have also been described as ‘picturesque’. Groves used musical examples from Haydn’s symphonies and C.P.E. Bach’s keyboard suites to ask both philosophical and historical questions. The philosophical questions were to do with the representational and even narrative possibilities of music, the historical question was essentially why English composers did not employ the ‘picturesque’ resources associated with Austro-Hungarian composers. But did that (much later) descriptive term mean anything when applied to music rather than gardens or pictures? How could music represent the picturesque (or anything else)?

After lunch (of savoury pies and ratatouille provided by the new French chef visiting Chawton) the library displayed some of Chawton’s illustrated books on gardening, landscape architecture, botany and the picturesque. Then June Parkinson, Chair of the Hampshire Gardens Trust (a charity which, as she reminded us, has a 25-year commitment to the house and garden) led us all on what, following Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, she called ‘a rambling fancy’, a tour of the gardens at Chawton. The delegates were shown how the various gardens and other spaces were being restored to the way they were conceived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whilst at the same time the garden is being put to practical use as an educational resource for the children of Chawton Infant School, who are learning to cultivate produce from beds laid in the walled garden.

What Repton called ‘propriety and convenience’ were not then, in the case of Chawton House, antithetical to the aesthetic senses of the garden that had preoccupied the symposium so far. The last paper of the day showed some consequences of such an opposition. In it Stephen Bending, from English at the University of Southampton, explored a range of meanings imposed on women in gardens. The theoretical discourse around landscape gardens tacitly assumed the gardener to be male (women were allowed flower gardens); for men rural retirement could be the means of representing themselves as leisured but not luxurious, thoughtful but not indulgent. As Bending showed us through some revealing case-studies of eighteenth-century women gardeners, things were different for women. Elizabeth Montagu took the opportunity for leisured reflection assumed by her rural retirement but she was not exactly typical because she was fabulously wealthy. Rural retirement for other women was not always such a freely-willed, honorific act as it was for Montagu. More often, as Bending showed from their unpublished letters, rural retirement could be a punishment, sometimes for sexual disgrace. Elizabeth Rowe lamented the lack of visitors, Mary Coke was confined in her Notting Hill home, and Henrietta Knight, Lady Luxborough was aware that the sexual scandal that forced her into retirement would pursue her.

Bending’s talk was a spirited reminder that the fact a garden may be ‘A Resource Against the Tedium of Life' does not mean it is impervious to forces such as gender or economics outside of it. Such reminders showed the value of the day. At conferences people rarely confer, but the format allowed for plenty of discussion from the floor about issues the speakers raised – or failed to raise. The usual knowledgeable questions from a CHL audience made up of 43 delegates from within and outside academe taxed the speakers about gender, about English aesthetic conservatism, what happened to the picturesque and about how gardens were perceived by the person in the garden. At the end, Alex Neill expressed his thanks and that of his co-organizer Stephen Bygrave to Gillian Dow for her work on the logistics of the day. This team from SCECS hopes that the gardens day may prove a model of the small symposium focused on a single important topic and will initiate a series of such interdisciplinary events.

Alex Neill—Southampton

The European Society for Aesthetics Inaugural Conference

4th - 5th April 2009, University of Fribourg, April 4-5, 2009
The inaugural conference of the recently founded European Society for Aesthetics took place in Fribourg, Switzerland over the weekend of April 4-5, 2009. It was generously supported by the British Society of Aesthetics, the University of Fribourg, and conference fee contributions from non-student participants. There were eight invited speakers presenting in eight sessions of an hour and a half each spread equally over the two days. In addition to the invited speakers, there were present 8 members of the ESA executive committee and a further 17 registered delegates from a number of European countries. The countries represented at the conference included: Spain, Switzerland, Italy, The Netherlands, Estonia, the United Kingdom, Finland, Denmark, Norway, France, Slovenia, Germany, the Czech Republic. A list of the speakers and talks, of the ESA executive committee, and of the registered delegates follows at the end of this report.

The chief purpose of the conference was to announce the existence and aims of the ESA to the European philosophical community, and thereby to promote these aims as directly as possible, which include: (i) encouraging an exchange between those pursuing academic research and teaching in aesthetics and the theory of art in all parts of Europe, and in the diverse traditions that European aesthetics involves; (ii) distributing information about the activities of national and regional societies for aesthetics in Europe; (iii) organizing regular international conferences and meetings for the discussion of topics in aesthetics; (iv) the possibility of publishing, or help with the publication of, high quality research in aesthetics done by European researchers.

We feel that, in a number of ways, the conference was a great success in fulfilling its purpose and in meeting these aims. We invited prominent speakers from different European countries, representing different traditions in aesthetics, many of whom also represented the regional/national aesthetics societies within their respective countries. All of the sessions provoked interesting and lengthy discussions on a wide range of issues and enabled the delegates to gain some insight into the work being done in aesthetics in different areas of Europe. At the first Annual General Meeting of the ESA, which occurred on the Saturday evening, all of the above aims and ambitions of the society were discussed, and the executive committee elected. One particular issue which was debated at length concerned the language of the ESA. It was decided that, for practical reasons, English would be the main functioning language of the ESA but that the society’s website would, as far as possible, offer information in as many European languages as were required to reflect events and societies in other European countries. In addition, the possibility was left open of future publications and conference papers being written/presented in languages other than English. There was also discussion concerning the next meeting of the society, which is already at the planning stage.

Finally, we felt that there was ubiquitous goodwill towards the ESA’s existence, a great deal of encouragement and enthusiasm for its aims, and a recognition that it filled an important role in bringing the many different countries, societies and traditions of European aesthetics together under one umbrella forum of discussion.

Cain Todd—Lancaster, Treasurer of the ESA

Philosophy and Film / Film and Philosophy: An interdisciplinary conference

4th - 6th July 2008, Arnolfini, Bristol
Hosted by UWE, Bristol, this three-day international conference, the first of its kind in the UK, was organised by Dr Havi Carel (Philosophy, UWE) and Dr Greg Tuck (Film Studies, UWE). It attracted over 150 delegates, with roughly half coming from the UK and the other half coming from a range of countries including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Cyprus, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Iran, Latvia, Portugal, Spain and the USA. Over the three days the conference program included 32 different panels comprising of 3-4 speakers. Each speaker had twenty minutes to present their paper, with an additional 30-40 minutes for Q&A and general discussion, once the papers have been presented. This enabled a synthetic discussion bringing the different papers together, generating a broader discussion than individual Q&A sessions.

The 32 panels covered a range of topics, such as philosophical approaches to film (phenomenology, analytic philosophy), particular philosophers’ approaches to film (Cavell, Deleuze, Heidegger), individual filmmakers (Hanake, Bergman, Kubrick), the relationship between key philosophical concepts and film (time, personal identity, ethics, embodiment, affect, politics, feminism) as well as philosophical interpretations of key cinematic concepts (editing, acting, genre, sound, music). Overall there were 99 individual presentations, of which 21 were presented by postgraduates, 3 by independent scholars, and 75 speakers were affiliated academics from philosophy and film studies departments, as well as other humanities disciplines. In addition to panel presentations the conference had five plenary speakers (one with a respondent) and a closing roundtable discussion led by the editorial board of film-philosophy.com. Our keynote speakers were:

Stephen Mulhall (Oxford) ‘Film as Philosophy: The Priority of the Particular’

Julian Baggini (editor, The Philosopher’s Magazine) responded to this paper.

Karin Littau (Essex) ‘The Physiology of Momentary Angels: towards Reception Aesthetics of Media’

Vivian Sobchack (UCLA) ‘Fleshing Out the Image: Phenomenology, Pedagogy, and Derek Jarman's Blue’

Robert Sinnerbrink (Macquarie) ‘The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Cinema? Notes towards a Romantic Film-Philosophy’

Catherine Constable (Warwick) ‘Adapting Philosophy: Jean Baudrillard and The Matrix Trilogy’

In addition to the conference presentations we had a special screening of the documentary The Ister ( David Barison & Daniel Ross, Australia, 2004) running over two nights, and throughout the conference there was a continuous screening of a video-art program curated especially for the conference: Species of Spaces.

The feedback from delegates was extremely positive (via feedback forms distributed at the end of the conference) and plans are underway to make the conference an annual event with Dundee hosting the conference in 2009.

A Sense of Wonder: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives, a conference held at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge, June 4-5, 2008

This two-day conference brought together perspectives from several different disciplines on the notion of wonder. On the first day, Marcel van Ackeren (University of Cologne) discussed the Stoic view of wonder and ascribed to them a critique of wonder on the basis of their physics and their view of emotions. Derek Matravers (University of Cambridge/Open University) considered the relationship of affective and cognitive components in wonder in the larger context of a question about the value of wonder. Emmanuel Halais (Université de Picardie Jules Verne) discussed the mystical viewpoint in Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein and the links between them. Mary-Jane Rubenstein (Wesleyan University) talked about the relationship between Heidegger’s problematic political stances and his notion of wonder, arguing that the latter conflicts with the former. David Burrell (Professor Emeritus, University of Notre Dame) considered the notion of religious wonder emerging in the diaries of Etty Hillesum in the context of Charles’ Taylor’s discussion of conversions. The second day started with a paper by Claude-Olivier Doron (Université Paris VII-Denis Diderot), who argued for a description of the use of the microscope in 18th-century science as a practice of wonder. Michel Hulin (Professor Emeritus, Université Paris IV-Sorbonne), speaking after him, presented the conception of wonder that is central to Indian aesthetics, followed by Douglas Hedley (University of Cambridge), who discussed wonder in the context of a question about the relationship between the sublime and the sacred. Sophia Vasalou (University of Cambridge) closed the conference with an overview of the papers and a discussion of some of the main themes.

Derek Matravers—Open University/Cambridge

White Rose Aesthetics Forum

The first meeting of the newly established White Rose Aesthetics Forum took place at the Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield on Wednesday October 29th 2008. The Forum has been established by those working in philosophical aesthetics at the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York. (See http://www.shef.ac.uk/philosophy/staff/profiles/wraf.html.) Its purpose is the sharing of work in progress and to encourage collaboration in research between staff and graduates.

Two papers were presented. Dominic Gregory (Sheffield) spoke on ‘Pictures, pictorial contents and vision’, and Alix Cohen (Leeds) gave us ‘Kant on the Ugly’. Both were followed by lively and informed discussion from an audience of over twenty.

Rob Hopkins—Sheffield

Poets Reading Philosophy/Philosophers Reading Poetry

26-28 October 2007
Poets and philosophical thinkers gathered at Warwick for a weekend of poetry and mutual reflection on philosophy and poetry. It was rich and stimulating, and great fun. Everyone seemed ready and eager for conversation, and it ranged widely and provocatively over topics including the philosophical roots of specific poems, how poetic forms manifest processes of thought, the philosophical significance of the lyrical and the musical in poetry, the powers of poetic images and language to evoke spiritual mystery and promise, the importance of imaginative entry into abstract ideas, the poet’s responsibility to the intellectual domains with which she or he engages, and the ethical responsibilities of the poet as a public voice within the civic domain. Some memorable moments: Richard Eldridge provoking intense discussion of how to read a Goethe poem, fierce debate about the centrality of the spoken and heard presence of poetry, and Geoffrey Hill’s comments on all manner of things, including his work as love poetry. One goal of the conference was to set up conditions for conversation between people who in various ways open up interesting relations between poetic and philosophical impulses, and who might not otherwise meet, and they seized the opportunity. Speakers: Lucy Alford, Carole Birkan, Robert Bringhurst, Lachlan Brown, Franklin Bruno, Richard Eldridge, Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, Jorie Graham, Robert Gray, Kevin Hart, Geoffrey Hill, Simon Jarvis, Aine Kelly, John Koethe, Peter Lamarque, Peter Larkin, William Melaney, Alex Pestell, Robin Purves, Mark Rowe, Eirik Steinhoff, Susan Stewart, and Jan Zwicky. We thank the BSA for its support of this event.

Eileen John—Warwick

Modernism and the Emotions

1 June 2007
This workshop took as its guiding assumption the idea that philosophical understanding of emotion benefits from study of the complex treatment of emotion, and affective experience broadly speaking, in literature. Specifically modernist literary fiction often takes affective life as a central problem, an aspect of experience that seems crucial to self-knowledge and orientation in the world, and that yet eludes articulation and transparent connection between context and self. The speakers took off in assorted directions from this guiding assumption. Paul Davies, speaking on ‘Fictional Moods’, explored a new paradigm for understanding the fictional in terms of mood (rather than, say, in relation to imagined content). Michael Bell gave a philosophically inflected account of sentiment and its problematic relation to language, as played out in modernist literature, in ‘Modernism and the Transformation of Sentiment’. Eileen John, focusing on Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, spoke on literary simile and its morally imaginative potential, in ‘Modernism, the Concrete Image, and Moral Imagination’. Peter Poellner, also speaking on Musil, worked with the literary text as a site of exploration for how to conceive of and address fundamental challenges to self, meaning and value in modernity, in ‘Concepts, Emotions, World-Disclosure: The Case of Musil's Man Without Qualities’. The day as a whole provided a lively interplay of philosophical and literary concerns. This was in large part due to the acute and challenging comments from the audience. We thank the BSA for its support of this event.

Eileen John—Warwick

The British Society of Aesthetics Annual Conference 2008

The 2008 Annual British Society of Aesthetics Conference was held at St. Edmund’s Hall, Oxford from 5th to 7th September. Attendance was very good, with 66 delegates attending the conference. Many delegates came from overseas, including delegates from Italy, Crete, New Zealand, India, Germany, Norway, Canada and, of course, the USA. While philosophers constituted the main body of delegates there were also artists and critics amongst those contributing.

The conference opened in style, with Hannah Ginsborg (Berkeley) playing us a few minutes of Louis Armstrong’s West End Blues. Her paper went on to consider the phenomenon of rule following, arguing that Armstrong was disposed to think that he ought to play the piece as he did and was thus following a rule despite the fact that he did not play the piece as written. Ken Wilder (Arts London) followed with an interesting account of frames in painting. He suggested that through clever use of framing and perspective, some paintings can have an effect on the spectator’s space in a similar way to sculpture. Michael Morris (Sussex) raised the problem of the existence of works of art, given that they are open to indefinite reinterpretation and that, so he argued, they are made to be so, before Alexander Nehamas (Princeton) rounded off the day by meditating on the reasons why friendship is so rarely selected as a central theme for artworks.

The second day of the conference was dominated by less established art forms. Berys Gaut (St. Andrews) gave a very interesting analysis of interactive storytelling and computer games. He argued not only that some computer games may indeed be works of art, but also that through their very interactivity they may be able to deliver distinctive aesthetic goods. Douglas Burnham (Staffordshire) and Ole Martin Skilleas (Bergen) suggested that wine could be treated as a genuinely aesthetic object, once we appreciate the sophisticated practices surrounding wine-tasting. Also on the second day were the graduate sessions, where papers were given by Damien Freeman (Magdalene, Cambridge) on ‘Perceiving Emotion in Art’, Margot Strohminger (Sheffield) on ‘Thought Experiments and the Case for Literary Cognitivism’, Dan Cavedon-Taylor (Birkbeck) on ‘Can Photographic Transparency Explain Photographic Realism?’ and the BSA 2008 Graduate Prize Winner Josh Johnston (British Columbia) on ‘Reid and Sibley on Using Aesthetic Adjectives’. The day’s programme was completed by papers from Maria-Jose Alcarez-Leon (Sheffield) arguing against immoralism in art, particularly disagreeing with departing BSA chair Matthew Keiran (for whom an honorary wine reception was held in the evening), and Turner Prize 2009 Judge Jonathan Jones (also of The Guardian).

Daniel Kaufman (Missouri) gave a stirring attack on interpretation in art, delivered with such vehemence that it completely blew away any cobwebs hanging over those who made it to what he called the ‘hangover slot.’ He was followed by Stephen Davies’ (Auckland) discussion of armpits and navels, in defence of the claim that art is not a spandrel. James Hamilton (Kansas) gave an interesting defence of the display theory, against the pretence theory, of theatrical performance, and the programme was concluded, as it began, with the topic of music, with Andrew Kania (Trinity, Texas), winner of the 2008 BSA Essay Prize, giving an account of his essay on ‘The Methodology of Musical Ontology’.

Overall the conference was an excellent event. The programme of talks was varied enough to have something for everyone, yet there managed to be significant connections between several of the papers. Discussions were all conducted in a friendly manner, even when disagreements were quite strong. Thanks then to the organisers, Diarmuid Costello, Ian Ground, Derek Matravers and Carolyn Wilde, who all have good reason to be proud of their efforts.

Bob Mahoney—Southampton

Scruton's Aesthetics

The conference 'Scruton's Aesthetics' took place on the 22nd to the 24th of July 2008 at Durham University. Organised by Andrew Hamilton and Nick Zangwill, the aim of the conference was to explore and assess the contributions to aesthetics of one of philosophy's most prolific thinkers. Unsurprisingly the conference attracted an international audience of delegates.

Never one to shrink from controversy or his own convictions, Scruton's work is always challenging and compelling. This was reflected in the broad range of provocative papers that were delivered and the lively debates which followed. The main sessions revolved around papers given by Gregory Currie (Nottingham) on 'Ironic Pictures', Jerold Levinson (Maryland) on 'The Aesthetic Appreciation of Music', Kathleen Stock (Sussex) on 'Fantasy, Imagination and Art', Peter Lamarque (York) on 'The Disintegration of Aesthetics', Andrew Hamilton (Durham) on 'Scruton's Philosophy of Culture: Elitism, Populism and Classic Art' and David Davies (McGill) on 'Scruton on the Inscrutability of Photographs'. In light of Scruton's particular interest in the aesthetics of music, there was a round table discussion on this topic involving Michael Spitzer (Music, Durham) on 'Scruton's "Hearing As" and Musical Metaphor', Franz Knappik (Munich) on 'Scruton and Wittgenstein on Expression in Music', Nick Zangwill (Durham) on 'Scruton's Musical Experiences' and Daniel Gallagher (Sacred Heart Major Seminary, Detroit) on 'Representational Theory: the true Phantom of the Opera'.

In addition to the main sessions there were sets of parallel sessions which ran throughout the conference and, again, they represented the diverse scope of Scruton's thought. Cain Todd (Lancaster), Deniz Peters (Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics, Graz), Ed Winters (West Dean College), Chris Stevens (Maryland), Katarina Mitcheson (Warwick), Rob Van Gerwen (Utrecht), Rafael De Clercq (Leuven), Mark Dooley (National University of Ireland), Dawn Phillips (Warwick), Hannah McKeown (Chicago), Mark Holt (City University London) and Michael Funk (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven/Lenoir-Rhyne College, North Carolina) spoke variously on wine, conservativism and aesthetics, photography, musical performance, architecture, religion, atonality, imagination, metaphor and taste.

It is appropriate, however, that the final word should go to Roger Scruton himself. In preparation for the conference - and possible criticism - Scruton reviewed his own body of work. In so doing he returned to his earliest writings on aesthetics and the imagination in particular. He found that, despite his lengthy career, he still stood by the views expressed in his early work. Scruton delivered a forceful defence of his early thinking and its continued relevance to contemporary aesthetics. The highlight of the debate which followed was an exchange of opinion between Scruton and Currie concerning a cornerstone of Scruton's thought: the notion and coherency of personality and the ethical import of art to personality’s development. Obviously the issue was not settled but the relevance of Scuton's aesthetics certainly was.

Richard Stopford—Durham

Philosophy and Literature/Literature and Philosophy

The Centre for Literature and Philosophy organized a major conference at the University of Sussex from 12-14 June 2008.

The title, 'Philosophy and Literature/Literature and Philosophy', was deliberately broad in order to encourage a range of contributions on the current state and future prospects of the relation between the two disciplines. In the panel sessions, speakers from different philosophical and literary traditions debated what is fiction, what writers do, how we read and evaluate their work, what we learn from it and what our engagement with literary texts says of us.

Spirited discussion followed the plenary papers. In his opening address, Paul Davies (Sussex) criticized a number of familiar conceptions of literary fiction; Ken Walton (Michigan) offered a sharpened interpretation of his own views on what writers do; Kathleen Scott (Sussex) challenged Walton’s view on imagination and emotion; Alex Duttmann (Goldsmiths) questioned the philosophical uses of literary examples; Stephen Mulhall (Oxford) offered a multi-layered interrogation of humanity and animality; Jonathan Lear (Chicago) offered a provocative interpretation of Plato’s cave; and Nicholas Royle (Sussex) closed the proceedings with an audacious advocacy of the miraculous in philosophy and in literature. Abstracts of panel papers can be found in www.sussex.ac.uk/clp .

Katerina Deligiorgi—Sussex

Schopenhauer and the Philosophy of Value

The conference ‘Schopenhauer and the Philosophy of Value’ took place at the University of Southampton on 9–12 July 2007. We had an international line-up, with nine main speakers: David Cartwright (Wisconsin-Whitewater, USA), Paul Guyer (University of Pennsylvania, USA), Matthias Koßler (Johannes-Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany), Alex Neill (Southampton), Bernard Reginster (Brown University, USA), Sandra Lynne Shapshay (Indiana University, USA), Robert Wicks (Auckland, New Zealand), Julian Young (Auckland, New Zealand). In the event, the ninth speaker, Bart Vandenabeele (University of Gent, Belgium), was unable to attend; his paper was read by another participant. Each main presentation was replied to by a commentator, followed by general discussion. 22 people from outside Southampton (7 countries were represented), and 13 Southampton philosophers, attended. 8 of the delegates were postgraduate students.

The aim of the conference was to explore Schopenhauer’s theories of value from a variety of philosophical perspectives, governed by the question whether they stand up better to scrutiny and deserve more prominence than contemporary ethics and aesthetics have tended to give them. There have been many studies of Schopenhauer as a metaphysician, in which role he has commonly been found wanting, and it is arguable that this assessment has obscured the breadth and profundity of Schopenhauer's insights in aesthetics and ethics, which were widely influential in the mid to late nineteenth century, but whose influence since then has all but vanished.

The conference was a lively, well-attended and well-focused occasion. Main speakers were conscientious in taking the stated aims of the conference seriously and addressed issues in Schopenhauer’s aesthetics (disinterestedness, the nature of aesthetic experience, the value of art, natural beauty, and metonymic symbolism) and in his ethics (theory of compassion, selflessness, salvation, pessimism, optimism and death). Connections with earlier and later philosophers (Kant, Schelling, Nietzsche) were also addressed. Such a concentration of papers in these areas (unprecedented in all the participants’ experience) led to a collective deepening of understanding and brought to light many philosophical connections and critical questions. The conference was very positively evaluated by all those who attended. It had the right size and focus of topics to generate real dialogue in an area that remains relatively unexplored, an outcome which the smooth and well organized social arrangments of the conference also encouraged.

Publication of the conference papers is in progress. The European Journal of Philosophy has offered to bring out a special edition of the journal devoted to these papers. Blackwell have expressed interest in publishing the same, with the option of some additional papers, edited by Christopher Janaway and Alex Neill, at a later date.

Alex Neill—Southampton

British Society of Aesthetics Annual Conference 2007

Organised by Ian Ground, Matthew Kieran, Derek Matravers and Carolyn Wilde, The 2007 meeting of the British Society of Aesthetics took place over 7-9^th September at St. Edmund Hall—Oxford. The conference was attended by 53 delegates, attracting not only philosophers and graduate students, but also artists, critics, theorists, as well as those with simply a healthy appetite for philosophical aesthetics.

The papers delivered were from a diverse array of perspectives, and on a variety of topics. Historical papers were given by Brent Kalar (New Mexico), who discussed Schiller’s influence on Nietzsche’s aesthetics, and Timothy Lord (Heartland), who presented on Collingwood’s identification of art with an act of imagination.

The visual arts were particularly well represented at this year’s conference. Rob Hopkins (Sheffield) defended the idea that some cases of seeing-in are ‘inflected’, but raised doubts about the importance of the concept. Dawn Phillips (St. Anne’s, Oxford/Warwick) motivated the existence of a ‘photographic event’ by way of allowing photographs sui generis aesthetic value, and Dan Cavedon-Taylor (Birkbeck) defended the epistemic features of digital photography. Especially engaging perspectives on visual art were to be found within the papers given by Tom Lubbock and Wendy Smith. Lubbock, an art critic from theIndependent, discussed the possibility and significance of dividing paintings, as well as literary texts, into quotable “bits”. And Smith, a professional artist, discussed various features of pictures, their signifficance, and how each can be subsumed within the artist’s control.

Ontological concerns were at the forefront of papers by Michael Morris (Sussex) and Stefano Predelli (Nottingham), in the context of representations and musical performances respectively. Music was also the central topic of Chris Stevens’ (Maryland) paper on profundity. Moreover, John Zeimbekis (Grenoble/CNRS Paris) motivated and defended deflationism about aesthetic value, Vincent Bergeron (British Columbia) defended moderate autonomism from the uptake argument, and Matthew Rowe (Open) discussed asymmetries between what artists and philosophers take to be the ‘hard-cases’ for aesthetic theory and definition. Jenefer Robinson (Cincinnati) brought the conference to a close with her paper “Expression and Expressiveness”. Robinson attempted to drive a wedge between the two concepts, and argued for a tight fit between our everyday expression of emotions on the one hand, and the idea of expression in art on the other.

A session was also organised in honour of Ronald Hepburn, previously the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh, on the importance of the aesthetic concept sublimity. Emily Brady (Lancaster) began the session by expounding the concept of the sublime and defended it from various objections about its obsolescence. As well as responding to Brady’s paper, Hepburn captivated the audience with a discussion of his work on the aesthetics of nature, theology, their intersection, and much more besides.

No report on the BSA conference would be complete without acknowledging the good natured and friendly attitude in which the event is hosted.

Dan Cavedon-Taylor—Birkbeck

Artist and Object Postgraduate Conference in Aesthetics

Department of Philosophy, University of Nottingham Friday 23rd February 2007 The conference took place at the University of Nottingham and was supported by the Analysis Trust and the British Society of Aesthetics. Under the general heading of Artist and Object, the conference aimed to explore current research concerning the activities of artists, the interpretation of artworks and the ontological status of artworks.

The day began with a paper from our invited speaker, Peter Goldie, who sketched a virtue theory of art. This provoked discussion about the connection between aesthetics and ethics in terms of a goal of human flourishing. Matthew Rowe then presented a complex and focused discussion of Stecker's disjunctive definition of art. Coffee and pastries were then consumed with glee as the philosophical discussion continued. A fierce debate about the relative merits, and epistemic authority of digital versus film photography broke out following Dan Cavedon-Taylor's paper, before a buffet lunch and some academic networking.

After lunch we were treated to rumination on the relation between artworks and their accompanying texts, in which Rod Simcox questioned whether they should be treated as open to philosophical criticism. Angharad Shaw treated us to a paper about non-perceptual aesthetic properties in avant-garde artworks, which led to broad and passionate discussions about the status of aesthetic properties in general. Following tea, Anil Gomes finished the conference with a talk on the role of aesthetic experience, suggesting that aesthetic concepts can be directly gained from aesthetic experiences. Delegates then moved on to a local pub to continue discussion. With around twenty five delegates in attendance, the day stimulated discussion across the field of aesthetics, providing researchers and interested parties alike to explore ideas. The sessions were efficiently chaired by members of Nottingham philosophy department, ensuring that everything moved smoothly and in a timely fashion. Three of the five graduate papers presented have subsequently been published in the Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics.

Daniel Barnes and Tom Cochrane—Nottingham

Mimesis, Metaphysics, and Make-Believe

The 'Mimesis, Metaphysics and Make-Believe' conference took place on June 21-23, 2006 at Devonshire Hall (University of Leeds). The aim of the conference was to bring together leading philosophers to consolidate and develop an understanding of Kendall Walton's work and the significant implications it has across the discipline of philosophy and elsewhere. With respect to this aim, the conference was an unmitigated success. It was attended by a total of sixty four delegates from a variety of countries including the US, UK, Canada, Spain, France, and Sweden. The conference drew upon delegates from a broad range of levels of experience, from various eminent figures (such as the invited speakers) to a large number of postgraduates, and even some undergraduates. There was extensive and active debate during the talks, between the talks and at the end of each day over dinner.

The conference was preceded by a workshop on teaching aesthetics, organised by the Leeds-based Philosophical and Religious Studies Subject Centre (part of the HE Academy), who also sponsored a very fine drinks reception after the first day of the conference. The panel members were Kathleen Stock (Sussex), Derek Matravers (Open University) and Ed Winters (WestDeanCollege). Other conference sponsors included the American Society of Aesthetics, the Analysis Trust, the BritishAcademy, the British Society of Aesthetics, and the Leeds Humanities Research Institute.

The conference itself began with a presentation by Ken Walton which canvassed his current thoughts on issues raised by his research. Over the next three days there were five talks from invited speakers on various themes on or related to Walton's work. Berys Gaut (St. Andrews) spoke on photographic transparency; Shaun Nichols (Arizona) and François Recanati (CNRS, Paris) both spoke about self-imagining; George Wilson (USC) addressed fictional narrators; and Steven Yablo (MIT) discussed pretense and presupposition. In addition, there were two open papers—the first by James Woodbridge (UNLV) and Bradley Armour-Garb (SUNY-Albany) offered a pretense account of propositions, while the second by Catherine Abell (Manchester/Macquarrie) addressed the epistemic value of photography. Papers were followed by brief comments from John Hyman (Oxford), Kathleen Stock (Sussex), Hannah Kim (Washington and Jefferson), David Davies (McGill), David Liggins (Manchester), John Divers (Sheffield), and Aaron Meskin (Leeds). The last day of the conference also included a roundtable discussion on the significance of Walton's work to various areas of philosophy (specifically metaphysics, aesthetics, philosophical psychology and cognitive science). The presenters at this session were Stacie Friend (Birkbeck), Jonathan Weinberg (Indiana), and Mark Eli Kalderon (UCL).

Overall, seventeen postgraduates attended the conference, including many from other departments and other countries (e.g., US, Canada, Sweden). Many postgraduates attended the 2^nd Annual CMM Graduate Conference (held in Leeds on June 20) and then stayed on for the three extra days of the Mimesis conference.

Aaron Meskin—Leeds

Depiction: A Conference on the Nature and Value of Pictorial Representation

Hosted by The Philosophy Discipline Area, The University of Manchester.
Friday May 18th and Saturday May 19th, 2007.
The Whitworth Art Gallery, Oxford Road
This conference brought together those contemporary philosophers whose work has most influenced recent debate about depiction, together with other philosophers doing good work this area with the aim of advancing debate about a range of unresolved issues central to an adequate understanding of depiction.
Ten speakers presented papers at the conference. They were:

•Robert Hopkins, The University of Sheffield (invited speaker)
•John Hyman, Oxford University (invited speaker)
•John Kulvicki, Dartmouth College (invited speaker)
•Dominic Lopes, The University of British Columbia (invited speaker)
•David Davies, McGill University
•Bence Nanay, Syracuse University
•Michael Newall, University of Kent
•Malcolm Turvey, Sarah Lawrence College
•Catharine Abell, The University of Manchester/Macquarie University
•Katerina Bantinaki, The University of Manchester

In addition, four speakers commented on papers presented. The commentators included:

•Michal Klincewicz, CUNY Graduate Centre
•Alberto Voltolini, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
•Achim Spelten, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities
•Ben Blumson, Australian National University

The conference attracted twenty-three participants in total, more than half of whom came from institutions outside the UK (from Germany, Italy, Australia, Canada, Spain, and the United States). They included three graduate students and an undergraduate student, and were predominantly philosophers, although they included a small number of philosophically-inclined art historians and film theorists.

This was the first philosophy conference to focus specifically on depiction, and the first time those philosophers who lead contemporary debate on the issue were brought together with the specific aim of discussing depiction. The conference provoked a high standard of debate, which focussed around a number of issues central to an adequate understanding of the nature of depiction, including, in particular:

•The phenomenology of pictorial experience;
•The nature of pictorial reference;
•The role of resemblance in an adequate account of depiction;
•The role of imagination in an adequate account of depiction;
•The relation between visual object recognition and picture interpretation.

While this debate did not conclude with consensus, debate about these topics was nonetheless advanced, as discussion did much to clarify both the key issues of contention, and the different means by which these issues might be resolved. The conference organisers, Katerina Bantinaki and Catharine Abell, are now planning to put together an edited collection of papers, based around those presented at the conference, which will explore in more detail these issues and the various possible routes to their resolution.

Katerina Bantinaki—Manchester

Empathy—An International Interdisciplinary Conference

Empathy—An International Interdisciplinary Conference took place in Fullerton, California at the Fullerton Marriot on June 22nd and 23rd, 2006. The conference was sponsored by California State University-Fullerton, the American Society for Aesthetics, and the British Society of Aesthetics, and was co-hosted by Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie. The goal of the conference was to provide a forum for interdisciplinary scholarly collaboration on questions regarding the nature and significance of empathy. The program covered a broad range of issues and included papers by philosophers, psychologists, and film theorists. Noel Carroll and Kendall Walton were the keynote speakers.

On June 22nd, the morning session included papers by Derek Matravers (“Empathy and Knowledge”), Heather Battaly (“Empathy: Virtue or Skill?”), and Noel Carroll (“Solidarity”). The afternoon session featured papers by Amy Coplan (“Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects”), Peter Goldie (“Anti-empathy”), and Martin Hoffman (“Empathy, Justice, and the Law”). On June 23rd, the three morning session papers were given by Jesse Prinz (“Is Empathy Necessary for Morality?”), Murray Smith (“Five Problems for Empathy”), and Kendall Walton (“In Alien Shoes”). The final session included papers by Stephen Davies (“Infectious Music: Music Listener Emotional Contagion”), Gregory Currie (“Empathy, Imitation, and Joint Attention”), and E. Ann Kaplan (“Vicarious Trauma or ‘Empty’ Empathy?—Images of Catastrophe in the Public Sphere”).

The conference was enormously successful. It drew 150 attendees from all over the United States many of whom actively engaged the speakers in discussion. There was a great deal of productive scholarly exchange and throughout the conference, the speakers referred to each other’s papers and positions. The session chairs (Tobyn De Marco, Wayne Wright, Graham McFee, Rochelle Green, Susan Feagin, Dan Flory, Judy Miles, Robert Davis, William Seeley, Brian Keeley, and Renae Bredin) ensured that all of the sessions ran smoothly and on time and made significant contributions to the discussions.

Amy Coplan—Fullerton

The British Society of Aesthetics Annual Conference 2006

8-10th September, St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. As a newcomer to aesthetics, and first-timer at BSA’s annual conference, I wasn’t sure what to expect from my weekend at St. Edmunds. Now, looking forward to next year’s event, I can eagerly expect a very interesting, very professional, and very fun weekend. For a lowly postgrad like myself, approachability is everything at a conference, so I’m delighted to say that the BSA excelled here. On arrival and throughout the weekend, everyone was smiling, chatting, and introducing one another – all obviously just very happy to be there.

The good impression continued as the talks started with Stacie Friend’s ‘Fiction in Practice’. This was a clear, straightforward and persuasive consideration of the different ways to understand the difference between fiction and non-fiction, and when and why the difference is significant. Dan Cavedon-Taylor’s ‘The Causal Exclusion Problem in Aesthetics’ was another especially interesting paper, addressing the problem of how supervenient aesthetic concepts like beauty, harmony, and balance can be causal. It was a shame that as this was one of two parallel talks, not everyone could attend.

Metaphysical issues arose again later that day with Dan Kaufman’s ‘Interpretation and Identity in the Arts’. With reference first to Christus’ Lamentations and Rogier’s Descent from the Cross, and second to Christus’ and Van Eyck’s Last Judgment, Dan considered the senses in which two paintings can be said to be the same. This especially, but also most of the other papers given, provoked lively and enthusiastic discussion. The questions and comments throughout the week stood out for me as being offered in a very positive, constructive spirit, and it was surely a mark of the quality of both papers and discussion that there was always much more to be said than time allowed.

This positive, fun social atmosphere was, no doubt, in part due to the BSA’s organization team of natural born entertainment officers. I suggest to both non-aestheticians, and even non-philosophers, that this alone makes the BSA’s annual well worth conference-crashing.

Hannah Edwards—Bristol

Mind, Art, and Beauty

University of Leeds
24-25 August 2006

Mind, Art, and Beauty took place at the University of Leeds on 24-25 August. The conference brought together a number of scholars working at the intersections of philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, and philosophical aesthetics.

Andrew McGonigal (Leeds) began the conference on Thursday afternoon with a paper entitled ‘Art, Beauty, and Character’ in which he argued for the relevance of moral character to the evaluation of art, in the context of a broadly virtue theoretic conception of artistic value. Rob Hopkins (Sheffield) offered a novel account of the epistemic status of aesthetic testimony in his ‘What Is Wrong with Aesthetic Testimony?’. And Chris Bartel (KCL) explored the importance of psychological work on tonality for accounts of musical understanding in his 'Can Musical Understanding Be Grounded in the Phenomenology of Musical Experience?'. Matthew Kieran arranged for an enjoyable evening in Leeds city centre on Thursday night.

Friday’s session began with a paper by Jonathan Weinberg (Indiana). In his 'Imagination, Genre, Thought-Experiment', he argued that philosophical thought-experiments could be productively thought of as belonging to a genre of their own. Eileen John (Warwick) made a case for the importance of disinterestedness and ownership to aesthetic experience in her 'Beauty and Disinterested Ownership'. Anthony Everett (Bristol) closed out the conference with ‘Boxes, Codes, and the Imagination’, in which he made a strong case for the importance of distinguishing some oft-confused sorts of imagining.

Approximately twenty-five people attended the conference which was held in the comfortable and pleasant facilities of the Leeds Humanities Research Institute.

We are grateful to the British Society of Aesthetics, the Department of Philosophy at Leeds, and the Leeds Humanities Research Institute for their support.

Aaron Meskin—Leeds

Conference on The Imagination and Thought Experiments

University of Bristol
12-13th May 2006

A mini-conference and workshop on the imagination and thought experiments was held at the University of Bristol on 12-13th May 2006. The aim of the meeting was to bring together some of the leading young philosophers doing work in this area in a relaxed setting that would allow for the informal exchange of ideas and discussion of methodologies.

he proceedings were opened by Mike Beaney (York) who presented “The Imaginary Nature of Imagining” followed by Aaron Meskin (Leeds) who presented “The Cognitive Architecture of Imaginative Resistance.” The following day Jonathan Weinberg (Indiana University) presented “The Imagination/Supposition Distinction,” Kathleen Stock (Sussex) presented “Imagination and Motivation,” Robert Hopkins (Sheffield) presented “Imagination and Observation,” and Stacie Friend (Birkbeck) presented “Imaginary Fictions.” The proceedings were concluded by Gregory Currie (Nottingham) who presented “Irony and the Imagination.”

In addition to the speakers around 30 other people attended various sessions during the conference. The organizers were happy to find that many of these were postgraduate and undergraduate students who actively participated in the conference and were able to meet and talk with the speakers in the informal context provided.

We are grateful to The British Society of Aesthetics, The Aristotelian Society, and BIRTHA, for their generous support.

Anthony Everett and Finn Spicer—Bristol

Mind and Music Roundtable

Columbia University
4-5 March 2006

The Mind and Music Roundtable was held in the philosophy building of Columbia University on 4-5 March 2006. Opening comments were given by Lydia Goehr (Columbia). On 4 March, our first talk was given by Michael Luntley (Warwick) who gave an account of musical expectation along the lines of Leonard Meyer to account for the phenomenally salient features of perceptual experience. Commentators on Michael’s paper were Joseph Dubiel (Columbia) and Sean D. Kelly (Princeton). Following that was a talk by Robert Kraut (Ohio State) on whether emotion is a feature of the content of music. Commentators were Jonathan Neufeld (Vanderbilt) and York Gunther (California State). Our last session of the day was scheduled as a talk to be given by Mark DeBellis (Columbia) on the content of musical perception and its relation to musical understanding. However, Mark was unable to attend the conference due to personal circumstances. His paper was read out by Joseph Dubiel (Columbia). Commentators were Christopher Bartel (King’s College London) and Diana Raffman (Toronto).

On the second day, our first talk was given by Fred Lerdahl (Columbia) in which he presented some recent research that he had been undertaking with psychologist Carol Krumhansl on the perceptual salience of tonal motion and harmonic force. Commentators were Renee Timmers (King’s College London) and John Halle (Yale). Our final talk of the day, and of the conference, was given by Christopher Peacocke (Columbia). Christopher argued that what it is to hear music as expressing emotion can be cashed out as a metaphorical way of hearing “as if”. Christopher’s respondent was Paul Boghossian (NYU).
Attendance of the conference is estimated at 90, which includes speakers and commentators. The aim of the conference was to provide a forum for discussion of music and its relation to debates concerning perception and concerning the emotions in the philosophy of mind. The conference was highly successful, which is evident in that many of the participants had expressed great interest in repeating the conference again in the following year. A publication on the topic is also being planned. The conference was generously funded by the British Society of Aesthetics, as well as other funding bodies, which allowed us to subsidise some of the travel and accommodation costs for our speakers and commentators.

Aesthetics, Culture and Society

Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
The University of Edinburgh
14 March 2006

This one-day Conference, organised by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, brought together five speakers from different disciplines to consider various aspects of “Aesthetics, Culture and Society”. The morning session was devoted to discussion of contemporary implications and applications of the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The principal speaker was Professor Tony Bennett (Director of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change and Professor of Sociology at The Open University) whose paper "Habitus clivé: the dispersed self and the politics of taste," introduced some theoretical implications of a national survey on Education and Cultural Preferences funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. Bourdieu has played a significant role in reception studies in suggesting that our relations to texts - whether visual, literary, or auditory - are mediated via class-based habitus that provide unified and unifying principles of taste that are manifest across the full range of an individual's cultural interests. Yet Bourdieu claimed that his own habitus was a divided or cleft one as a consequence of the conflicting experiences arising from his social mobility. Based on the recent findings of the ESRC survey, Professor Bennett’s paper suggested that such a divided habitus is the rule rather than the exception, and that the notion of a unified habitus - which plays a central role in Bourdieu's sociology of consumption - is unsustainable. Drawing on the work of Bernard Lahire, he argued that Bourdieu was able to produce a unity for different class habitus only by either ignoring the evidence from empirical surveys which suggest the existence of significant intra-individual variations in taste or discounting such evidence through the deployment of structural principles of causality which transform them into mere variations of a common underlying structure. Bennett illustrated the significance of alternative ways of interpreting such surveys by reviewing the significant dissonances in the tastes of individuals and the much greater degree of shared tastes across class boundaries that are evident in the 2003-4 national survey of cultural tastes, knowledge and participation in contemporary Britain. This data was used to argue that Bourdieu's interpretation of Kantian aesthetics and the role it plays in his separation of taste into a working class taste for the necessary and the disinterestedness of bourgeois taste is an a-historical reading of Kant's work that neglects its role in relation to later programmes of liberal government that aimed to transform cultural institutions into civic technologies that would incorporate the working classes into practices of self government.

In his paper on "Digitizing Bourdieu; music, technology, production" Dr. Nick Prior (Sociology Department, The University of Edinburgh) discussed Bourdieu's increasingly problematic take on culture technologies and their impact on consumption/use. This was framed by a sympathetic but critical application of Bourdieu to contemporary digital culture, with particular reference to the case of ‘Glitch’ music, which he argued opens up a series of challenges to the Bourdieu problematic and is a good test of his applicability to the contemporary cultural terrain. The participants were delighted and enlightened to hear some fascinating illustrative examples of ‘Glitch’. In the final session of the morning, Professor Ian Buchanan (University of Cardiff) spoke on: “A Taste for War”, in which from a politically-engaged Cultural Studies perspective he addressed the implications of the ‘coalition of the willing’ embroiled in a war that is supposedly bringing democracy to the Middle-East and, as an added bonus, making it safe for Wal-Mart. He posed the provocative question of to what extent it may be said to ‘quench a taste for war’.

In the afternoon session Dr. Peter de Bolla (Faculty of English, University of Cambridge) spoke on pre-Kantian aesthetics. His paper "From Passions to Affects in the work of Francis Hutcheson" considered the invention of the concept of aesthetic affect and its subsequent fate in our understanding of artworks as cognitive structures. The final paper by Dr. Simon Malpas (English Literature, The University of Edinburgh), on "The Necessity of the Transcendental: Kantian Aesthetics and Contemporary Criticism” argued that since Immanuel Kant's philosophy introduced the notion of transcendental critique, aesthetics has occupied a complex and often problematical position between knowledge and ethics. In the light of Kant's philosophy, writers such as Theodor Adorno argue that, experienced aesthetically, 'art negates the categorical determinations stamped on the empirical world and yet harbors what is empirically existing in its own substance', thereby opening experience to critique. Dr Malpas’s paper explored the ways in which contemporary criticism might be able to mobilise this tension within the artwork in order to think the social and political value of artistic presentation in a manner different from more established historicist or ethical modes of criticism.

The Conference stimulated lively debate among the interdisciplinary audience which included staff and postgraduate students from the Universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen, and the Glasgow School of Art, as well as the University of Edinburgh and a number of the international Research Fellows from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.
The Institute is most grateful to the British Society of Aesthetics for its sponsorship of the event.

Art After the End of Art

London School of Economics, organised by Naked Punch Review with the support of the British Society of Aesthetics, The London Consortium, and The Forum for European Philosophy.

With the publication of his 1964 article ‘The Artworld’ in The Journal of Philosophy Arthur C. Danto heralded the end of art’s previously inextricable relationship with aesthetics. For a conference dedicated to the assessment of aesthetics’ survival today he is not, therefore, the most likely of campaigners. Yet Danto has never been a doomsayer; his end is not a death. Indeed, since his all-important encounter with the Brillo boxes of Andy Warhol, Danto’s project has been one that elaborates a theory of art effectively reborn by his declaration of independence from the bedevilment of aesthetics. For his first trip to London in over 20 years Danto, who is the Emeritus Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, took the opportunity to reconsider his Pop art point of departure and adjudge the legacy of rescinding the rule of Clement Greenberg and Kantian aesthetics.

Drawing its subject from the title of his1997 book Art after the End of Art, the day-long conference sought to consider Danto’s work not ‘as a closed body within/about which we would have to talk but as a starting-point and a reservoir of potentialities’. Richard Shusterman, Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, began the day with his critique of ‘disinterested’ aesthetics via a consideration of the erotic arts of China and India. Citing Michel Foucault as the only Western philosopher to acknowledge the proximity of the sexual subject to the aesthetics of existence – even Nietzsche denied that sexual activity could be pretty – his analysis of works including the Karma Sutra demonstrated that aesthetic prudishness was a peculiarly Western trait. Nicolas Vieillescazes’ ‘The Return of the Hegelian Repressed’ tracked the recent re-emergence of Hegel back to Danto himself, while Jean-Pierre Cometti, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Aix-Marseille, attempted to define an aesthetics of ‘usage’ in order to break the ontology of the art object.

If, for Danto, it was the sight of red swirls on white packing boxes in an Upper East Side gallery that put ‘the boundary between the art world and reality in philosophical receivership’ in 1964, it was down to him to reappraise the importance of aesthetics to contemporary art today. Over 40 years later Danto remains secure in his rejection of ‘universality’ and ‘beauty’, yet he does not junk aesthetics with the force he once did. Finding a new interest in what he terms ‘internal beauty’ – that is, beauty that contributes to the work’s meaning – the day culminated in some form of reconciliation, if not with Greenberg then perhaps with Immanuel Kant. But the champion of the day was Hegel; indeed for Danto if beauty is not internal, it is effectively meaningless, the beauty of Marat being integral to the politics of Jacques-Louis David’s painting. Whether a Hegelian aesthetics of meaning has the ability to crack the timeworn teaser of form versus content remains for Danto to demonstrate.

Belinda Bowring—London Consortium

Interdisciplinary Seminar: Philosophy and Theory of the Visual Arts

29 April-17 June 2005

The interdisciplinary research seminar ‘Philosophy and Theory of the Visual Arts’ (organised by Katerina Reed-Tsocha and John Hyman) took place at Trinity College Oxford in Trinity Term 2005. The seminar aims to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue between philosophy and art history, and speakers were asked to present a paper on a topic that would be of interest to both disciplines. This year’s speakers were: Prof. James Elkins (Cork), Prof. Martin Kemp (Oxford), Dr Simon Glendinning (LSE), Dr Nick Zangwill (Oxford), Prof. Robert Hopkins (Sheffield), Prof. Lydia Goehr (Columbia), Prof. Margaret Iversen (Essex), and Prof. Paul Smith (Warwick). The seminar was attended by audiences of up to 75, students (undergraduate and graduate) and senior staff from a number of Departments (Philosophy, History of Art, English, Ruskin School of Art), as well as a few BSA members. The seminar was made possible thanks to the generous support of the BSA, and received additional funding from the Faculty of History and the Faculty of Philosophy.

Dr Katerina Reed-Tsocha—Trinity College, Oxford

Art and Embodiment

The COGS (Centre for Research in Cognitive Science) Symposium “Art, Body, Embodiment” was held at the University of Sussex on March 14-5, in the Brighton and Sussex Medical School Building lecture hall. On the first day speakers included Dr. Michael Wheeler (Stirling) who spoke on “Body-Art and Robotics”, Dr. Rachel Jones (Dundee) who spoke on “Art, Body, Body-Art”; both drew on the examples from the work of performance artist Stelarc to discuss the fluctuating boundaries between body and world in the panel, “Body-Art, Robotics, Cyborgs.” Professors Tony Nutall (Oxford) and Brian Cummings (Sussex) in the second panel, “Embodiment and Narrative”, spoke on “The Defeat of Mind by Body” and “The Body and Creation”, respectively, the former looking at Sterne’s TristramShandy and the latter Milton’s “Paradise Lost”. The Panel on “Interactive Art” included Professor Roy Ascott (Bristol) speaking on “Moistmedia, the Three VRs, and the Terminal Body” and Professor Maggie Boden (Sussex) on “Interactivity and Aesthetics”, looking for innovative ways to extend aesthetic appreciation and evaluation to virtual works of art.

The second day began with the panel “Embodiment and Philosophy.” The first talk, “Lending One’s Body to the World”, by Dr. Michael Morris (Sussex), was on Merleau-Ponty’s essay “Eye and Mind” and the second talk, “The Art and Science of Embodied Phenomenology” was given by Dr. Ron Chrisley (Sussex), who looked at the ways phenomenology in art can assist cognitive science. The second panel, “The Ways of the Hand” contained two contrasting papers: the first, “Dance, the Brain and the Hands” by the neuroscientist Professor Patrick Haggard (UCL) and the second, “The Writing Hand”, presented by the novelist and academic Professor Gabriel Josipovici (Sussex). The contrast resulted in a lively discussion. The third panel of the day, “Metaphor and the Body” included Dr. Vyv Evans (Sussex) who spoke on cognitive linguistics in his paper, “Bodily Metaphor in Literature” and myself (Sussex) on “The Embodied Poetics of Madeline Gins and Arakawa”. The final panel was on “Embodiment and Music” and included Dr. Nicholas Till (Sussex) who examined the ways the body has been repressed in music in his paper, “The Musical Body in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, and Professor David Osmond-Smith (Sussex) who kindly agreed to fill in at the last minute, after the original speaker cancelled. His provocative paper, “Iconicity and the Body”, examined his notion of “depleted isomorphs” and argued that the mode of depletion is a necessary mode in the appropriation of art.

In the evening the conference moved to the Sussex Arts Club in Brighon to host a lecture by the Electronic artist, Paul Granjon, who presented examples of his extremely humorous and entertaining, intentionally low-tech robot art. This included confused and crying robots, reconfigured, tampered Tamagosi toys and a karate-kicking tree robot (which of course, only kicked Paul Granjon).

It was a well-attended event, with 70 speakers and participants in total. The aim was to present a forum for interdisciplinary discussion and debate around the notion of “embodiment.” A publication of the proceedings is being planned. We would like to thank the British Society of Aesthetics for their generous contribution in making this Symposium possible.

Christina Makris—Sussex

Character and Imagination

University of Sheffield, 29 January 2005
The conference opened at 10.30 with an enlightening paper by Gregory Currie, ‘Narrative and the Representation and Expression of Character’, in which he investigated the role of character in directing the development of the initial situation towards a particular outcome. This was followed by Nafsika Athanassoulis’s paper ‘Getting It Wrong: The Role of Imagination in Character Development’, in which she proposed that the imagination is a crucial ingredient in our awareness of the ethical aspects of situations. After a break for lunch, Peter Goldie also investigated the notion of moral perception. He was concerned to make sense of McDowell’s idea that one’s awareness of the moral aspects of situations is literally a part of the way one sees the situation, not inferred on the basis of perception. Robert Hopkins followed this discussion by considering the role of affective response in imaginative experience, and the related issue of whether one can learn from imagination how one feels about the imagined object.

Each talk lasted 30-40 minutes, and was followed by discussion of 40-50 minutes. There were 25 participants of the whole conference, with a further 10 people selecting papers to attend. Together with the close relations between the talks, this resulted in the discussions being very lively and tightly focused on a few issues central to the understanding of character. These discussions continued in the bar, and then at a restaurant afterwards.

Many participants said that they had found the conference very beneficial, including the three postgraduate students working in this area who attended and were awarded travel bursaries. We are very grateful to the British Society for Aesthetics for the funding.

Jonathan Webber and Robert Hopkins—Sheffield

On Sensibility

“On Sensibility” took place at the University of Dundee on April 24th and 25th, 2004. Organised by the Philosophy Department, the conference brought together international artists and philosophers who seek to explore the status that sensibility has been ascribed in recent European Philosophy, and the role that sensibility plays within the constitution of thought.

The Conference brought together 10 speakers over a two-day period. The Keynote Speaker was Daniel Smith, from Purdue University (USA). Other speakers and/or performers included Louise Reynolds (Philosophy, Staffordshire University), Claire Colebrook (English, Edinburgh University), James Williams ( Philosophy, Dundee University), Artillery (Performance Artists, Arhus, Denmark), Aislinn O’Donnell (Philosophy, Dundee University), Laura Hengehold (Philosophy, Case Western University, Cleveland, USA), Moira Scott (Landscape Artist, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee). As Robin Durie (Peninsular Medical School) had to cancel at the last minute, the conference organizer, Valentine Moulard (Philosophy, Dundee University) filled in for him.

Registration was free and open to anyone interested. The total number of participants reached 25. Those participants included students and faculty from several universities in the UK.

Overall, the conference was very successful in creating a space for genuine exchange between artists and philosophers, practice and theory, centering on themes such as representation and figuration, memory, temporality, sensation, creativity, as well as issues of sexual difference and the political role of thought and art.

Valentine Moulard—Dundee

The Value of Aesthetic Experience Postgraduate Conference

Report on Graduate Conference held at Senate House, University of London on June 11 2004.
The conference was a student-led initiative, the idea for which was inspired by Prof. Richard Shusterman’s article ‘The End of Aesthetic Experience’ and recent work that has been published on the topic of aesthetic experience. The British Society of Aesthetics and the Analysis Trust kindly offered to fund the conference and Prof. Richard Shusterman (Temple) and Dr. Paul Davies (Sussex) both agreed to be the conference’s keynote speakers. Many graduate papers from the US and Europe were submitted for presentation, out of which four papers were chosen.

Theday was divided into six sessions. The first session of the morning, was a paper given by Dr. Paul Davies (Sussex) ‘On Beautiful Art’ which, despite students’ well-known incapacity to get up early in the morning, was very well attended. Their effort was well rewarded though. Davies’ paper, which discussed the Kantian notion of the beautiful in art and nature and the mutual dependence of our experience of art and the beautiful, proved to be very interesting and stimulated lots of discussion in the question period afterwards (chaired by Dr. Derek Matravers (Open)). Davies’ session was followed by the first graduate paper of the day, given by Julie Kuhlken (Middlesex), ‘Exclusively for Everyone’. Kuhlken’s paper addressed the difficulty of the notion of aesthetic experience being both ‘exclusive’ in the sense that it is often very subjective and personal and yet also ‘for everyone’ in the sense that we can share and agree about the experience. The next graduate paper was presented by Patrycja Kasynska (Oxford) on the value of Kant’s conception of aesthetic experience, focusing particularly on Hannah Arendt’s work on Kant and its political implications. After lunch, Allison Mitchell (Warwick) presented her paper on ‘‘Consciousness Duplication’ and our capacity to learn from Literary Fictions’. Mitchell wanted to fill in the ‘explanatory gap’ in theories on moral knowledge and literature such as that of Martha Nussbaum. The final graduate paper of the day was on the subject of the aesthetic appreciation of nature. In this paper, Christian Denker (Paris-1) discussed the German philosopher, Martin Seel’s work on the connection between the aesthetic appreciation of nature and an ethical life. To complete the day, Prof. Richard Shusterman took to the lecturn. Shusterman told the delegates that it had been over 15 years since he had last been to the UK. Having completed his DPhil at Oxford as well as having one of his first papers published in the British Journal of Aesthetics, he described the trip as something of a ‘homecoming’. The main thrust (if you’ll excuse the pun) of Shusterman’s paper was to query and challenge the exclusion of sexual experience from aesthetic experience in mainstream philosophical aesthetics. This theme was consistent with Shusterman’s general project which queries the exclusion of popular art and activities connected to the body (such as tattooing and yoga) from the aesthetic domain. In the discussion afterwards (chaired by Dr. Matthew Kieran (Leeds)), Prof. Anthony Savile (King’s College) asked the final and penetrating question, quoting De Quincey, as to whether murder could ever be considered a fine art. On this provocative note, and with murder and sex on our minds, the conference ended and everyone was invited to a drink at a local Dickensian pub.

The conference was very well-attended and brought together not only philosophy postgraduates and academics but also practitioners and students in the fine arts. Many delegates commented on how much they had enjoyed the day and requested that there be more themed conferences in aesthetics. As a result of this interest, Richard Shusterman andI are now planning to publish an edited collection of essays on the topic of aesthetic experience. Congratulations to Allison Mitchell who was awarded the BSA essay prize for her excellent paper. Many thanks to the speakers, delegates and my fellow postgrads in London for their warm help and support.

To read the graduate papers presented at the conference click on this link: conference papers.

Adele Tomlin—King's College London

British Society of Aesthetics Northern Region Meeting

The revival of the northern region meetings of the BSA took place on Weds. 9th June at the University of Leeds. The day consisted of 4 papers. Julian Dodd from Manchester University kicked off with a discussion of the view of art, articulated by Greg Currie and David Davies, that artworks are to be ontologically identified as actions. Andrew Hamilton from Durham University considered just what it is for a musical work to be a work of music, as opposed to a work just using sound. Jenefer Robinson, from the University of Cincinnati, argued that the nature and role of emotional responses is essential to understanding classic nineteenth century literature and Andrew McGonigal, from the University of Leeds, considered the autonomy of aesthetic judgement. It was a small meeting but all agreed it was fun and worthwhile. The revival will continue with another meeting planned within the next 6 months or so. Many thanks to all the speakers and those who attended.

Matthew Kieran—Leeds.

Nietzsche, Art and Aesthetics

Report on International Conference held at University of Warwick, September 12-14, 2003.
The conference was held under the auspices of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society and Warwick's Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature. It brought together scholars and researchers on Nietzsche from around the world, with over 100 delegates in attendance from the UK, North America, continental Europe, and Brazil. The conference was divided into plenary and parallel sessions over three days. There were seven plenary sessions featuring presentations by Aaron Ridley (Soton), Beatrice Han-Pile (Essex), Robert Gooding-Williams (Northwestern), Gary Shapiro (Richmond), Daniel Conway (Penn State), David Cooper (Durham), and Nuno Nabais (Lisbon). There was six parallel sessions with each session containing five slots of two presentations, thus totalling approximately 60 papers. Topics included: the relation between science and art and between politics and art in Nietzsche; Nietzsche and moderntiy and postmodernity; Nietzsche and Kant on taste and temporal aesthetics; the aesthetics of the will to power; the category of the tragic; meteorological aesthetics in Nietzsche; Nietzsche and surrealism; Nietzsche and Wagner; the Uebermensch; Nietzsche and Heidegger on art and truth; Nietzsche and de Chirico; Nietzsche and Plato; Nietzsche and Rilke; Nietzsche and music; Nietzsche and dance, and so on. A vast range of topics was featured and the high quality of the papers presented in the parallel sessions was commented upon by a significant number of delegates.

There were two plenary sessions on the first day of the conference (Friday). In the opening plenary session Aaron Ridley addressed the issue of 'Art and Freedom' in Nietzsche and sought to defend an 'ethical' over a 'metaphysical' reading of the topic of freedom in Nietzsche. The talk touched upon a theme that was to dominate the conference in both the parallel sessions and the remaining plenary sessions, namely, the extent to which Nietzsche's thinking on artistic creativity could be usefully deployed as a model for ethico-existential freedom. Nietzsche'c conception of freedom, like his conception of art, was argued to be of a complex kind with stress placed on the importance of constraint, law, and rule. Ridley's talk generated an interesting discussion on the legitimacy of drawing a distinction between the ethical and the metaphysical in Nietzsche. It was clear that those coming from a continental training had a different appreciation of this issue to those coming from an analytical one. The next plenary session featured a paper by Beatrice Han-Pile on The Birth of Tragedy which tried to show that at work in Nietzsche's first published text are two highly different metaphysics, a Schopenhauerean one and a non-Schopenhaurean one. For Han-Pile it is the fact that there are two incompatible metaphysics at work in the text - one of transcendence and releasement from the pain of an individuated existence, one of immanence and joy in the pain of individuation – that can best explain the intricate and contradictory character of the Birth. This presentation generated a lively discussion as to whether this identification of two metaphysics in Nietzsche's text was sustainable and did indeed provide the best means for understanding its complex character. On the Saturday there were three plenary sessions by North American Nietzsche-scholars. Robert Gooding-Williams addressed the issue of an aesthetics of 'receptivity' in Nietzsche, dealing with the question of self and other by linking Nietzsche with Kant on the one hand and with the work of Stanley Cavell on the other. He showed extracts from a film of Fred Astaire which enabled him to address the question of the 'other', and our receptivity to it, in terms of questions of racial identity. It was an ambitious paper that was met with a lively set of questions; the problem with it was that Nietzsche's own aesthetics got a little buried under the weight of the large canvas that was covered. Gary Shapiro attempted something novel with a paper on 'geo-aesthetics' and 'geo-politics' in Nietzsche. His chief inspiration for attempting such a paper came from the notion of geo-philosophy articulated by Deleuze and Guattari in their last collaborative text, What is Philosophy? (1991). Shapiro was attempting to shift attention away from an aesthetics of interiority in Nietzsche - in which questions of subject and object and of self and other are made prominent - to one which stressed the importance of exterior forces, rhythms, and affects in Nietzsche's attempt to articulate a new Dionysian aesthetic of the world and its cosmogenetic forces. Although the paper was not fully worked out, it was full of tantalising insights. In the final plenary session Daniel Conway gave a presentation on 'the art of predation' in Nietzsche, focusing attention on the figure of the 'blond beast' and on 'animality' in general in the text On the Genealogy of Morality. It made for a provocative paper and was followed by a lively discussion with questions focused on the figure of the animal and of animality in Nietzsche and how this informed his conception of the aesthetic (including the categories of the beautiful and the sublime). On Sunday there were two further plenaries. David Cooper spoke on 'The Artist's Life', examining with care and precision the details of Nietzsche's principal conceptions of the artist and focusing on questions of the genius and exemplarity. In the question period that followed discussion focused on the normative or prescriptive nature of Nietzsche's model of a creative life and on how this could be justified. In the final plenary session Nuno Nabais spoke on 'cruelty and sublimity' in Nietzsche, in which he sought to raise some important questions concerning an aesthetics of pain and pleasure in Nietzsche. The talk was a wide-ranging one which also offered valuable insights into how the 'new Nietzsches' found in the likes of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida could be best understood and appraised by viewing them in the light of this theme or problematic. Nabais argued that Deleuze and Derrida's apprecation of pain and pleasure in Nietzsche was mediated by their respective readings of Artaud. The discussion that followed was, once again, a lively one with questions focused on the accuracy of the reading of Nietzsche offered and of the other key figure discussed in the paper which was Deleuze.

The conference was very well-attended and offered a comprehensive treatment of the topic of Nietzsche on art and his relation to aesthetics. It is hoped that an edited volume of essays featuring a selection of the papers from the conference will be published in the not too distant future.

Keith Ansell Pearson—Warwick

Aesthetics from an Analytic Point of View

‘Aesthetics from an Analytic Point of View’, generously funded by the Society, among other bodies, was held at the Chancellor’s Conference Centre, University of Manchester from May 23-25, 2003. The aim of the conference was to provide a forum for various distinguished invited and submitted papers to be given on a range of topics of current interest to analytic aestheticians. Speakers bravely rose above the hideous decor of the conference room to give some excellent papers. Participants included Jerrold Levinson, Sebastian Gardiner, Michael Morris, Derek Matravers, Stefano Predelli, Peter Lamaque, Robert Stecker, Nick Zangwill, Paul Boghossian, and Rob Hopkins. Topics discussed included: the expressive properties of music, the ontological status of art, the nature of aesthetic properties, the relation between interpretation and intention, and the origins and status of the analytic tradition in aesthetics. Discussion was lively, both during sessions and in the bar afterwards. The Society’s grant to the conference was very welcome, since in particular it enabled the organisers to subsidise several student aestheticians who otherwise might not have been able to attend, and whose presence was a great asset to the life of the conference.

Kathleen Stock—Sussex