Volume 17, Number 1
Issue date: January 2016
Submission deadline: September 30, 2015
Editor: Robert Fudge (Weber State University)
Contemporary analytic philosophers typically treat ethics and aesthetics as largely distinct areas of concern. This contrasts with much of the history of Western philosophy, which assumes a close relation between them. The ancient Greeks, for example, employed the term kalokagathia to refer to that which is beautiful-and-good, reflecting Plato’s identification of the two. As secular ethics emerged during the early modern period, philosophers frequently appealed to the notion of the beautiful soul to help answer the question “Why be moral?” in the absence of divine sanction. More recently (see, for example, Levinson and Brady, Ethics and Aesthetics: Essays at the Intersection, 2001), philosophers have again begun to explore how the fields of ethics and aesthetics might inform one another. This volume seeks to build on this history.
Essays in Philosophy invites the submission of papers that explore some aspect of the relations and distinctions between ethics and aesthetics. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
· The beautiful soul
· The aesthetic morality of Shaftsbury/Hutcheson/Smith/Hume/etc.
· The Greek notion of kalokagathia
· The moral implications of Kant’s On the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime
· The megalopsychos and übermensch as moral/aesthetic ideals
· The relations between moral and aesthetic judgments
· The aesthetic/moral dimensions of dignity
· The aesthetic/moral dimensions of disgust
· The moral duties surrounding harmless offenses
· The philosophical implications of the neuroscience of moral and aesthetic judgments
· The aesthetic implications of immoral art
All submissions should be sent to the general editor via email: boersema@pacificu.edu