6-7 June 2025

Workshop report

This workshop consisted of two days of terrific talks, commentaries, and discussion, all questioning the mutual significance of aesthetically focused activity and human community. The notion of ‘taste’ was less prominent than the notion of aesthetic community, though traditional issues concerning the intersubjective validity of and bases for aesthetic judgement were addressed. Because each paper was distinctively rich, it is not possible to summarise ‘the gist’ of the workshop; imagine the array of papers that allowed us to consider flamenco, birthday parties, the oeuvre of sculptor Stephan Balkenhol, World Wrestling Entertainment, and neo-realism in film.

However, at least the following large concerns were threaded through the discussion:

  • how aesthetic modes of presentation and activity can affirm more-than-aesthetic values and can build meaning and relationship;
  • that aesthetic communities simultaneously include and exclude, with consideration of the ethical significance of these functions;
  • the public nature of aesthetic and artistic objects of attention and their potential to give us access to reality, perhaps even access to the reality of other consciousnesses;
  • the intersecting and differing roles of reasons and norms for conversation within aesthetic communities;
  • the role of art in destabilizing community;
  • the nature of aesthetic values themselves (e.g., human beauty, literary aesthetic value, whether reality itself is essentially beautiful).

To provide one taste of what went on: the workshop began with a talk on celebration by Auburn’s Zach Weinstein. Weinstein proposed that celebrations are sensuous expressions of values, showing a human impulse to work against nihilism. Comments from Karen Simecek differentiated appreciation from celebration and explored the difficulty of ‘official celebrations’. This session set the tone for the two days: let’s look afresh at how people discover, affirm, express, diverge on and communicate about things of value, using aesthetic means of all kinds.

The workshop brought a wonderful set of colleagues from Auburn University to the U.K. (and many thanks to Auburn’s Philosophy Department for their generous support). It also gave some relative ‘old-hands’ (Costello, Gorodeisky, Hamawaki, John, MacDowell, Shelley, Simecek) the benefit of deep and challenging conversation with earlier-career researchers Clara Campuzano Gómez, Elizabeth Cantalamessa, Francesca D’Alessandris, John Dyck, Alice Harberd, Joseph Kassman-Tod, Eliza Little, and Zach Weinstein. The audience of Warwick students, colleagues, and guests from other universities added greatly to the liveliness and scope of discussion.

There was a slight balance of women over men on the programme (8 out of 15 speakers); this was achieved without trying, in a sense, as it resulted in part from anonymous review of submitted abstracts. We are extremely grateful to the BSA for making this event possible.