Current Edition
Special Issue on Aesthetics and Popular Culture
The first paper in this themed issue on aesthetics and popular culture is an interview with Aaron Meskin (Leeds). As well as writing on traditional issues in aesthetics (e.g., on the definition of the arts, aesthetic testimony, emotions, fiction and imagination) Dr. Meskin has written a number of papers on popular and emerging arts such as comics and videogames. In this interview Dr. Meskin discusses some of the key philosophical issues surrounding these art-forms and the nature of popular art more broadly.
In "What is it like to be John Malkovich?", Tom McClelland, a DPhil student in Philosophy from the University of Sussex, takes up the issue of film as philosophy. McClelland argues in a defence of a moderate position on this subject, and draws out a number of ways in which the film Being John Malkovich philosophises issues of subjectivity and self-hood, relating the film's exploration of these issues to empirical work on the mind.
In "An Asymmetry of Implicit Fictional Narrators in Literature and Film", Mario Slugan, an MA/PhD student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago, questions whether fictional narratives require fictional narrators. In the case of literature, Slugan develops a linguistic version of the 'ontological gap argument' in support of the claim that they do, but denies that filmic fiction requires such narrators.
In "Collingwood on Art, Craft and all that Jazz", Adam Wills, an MPhil student in Philosophy at the University of Warwick, uses jazz improvisation and the creation of electronica music as case studies from which to argue that technique, which is commonly considered craft-like, can be relevant to artistic production.
Vol. 7, No. 2 August 2010: Aesthetics and Popular Culture