A new issue of the Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics has just been published: pjaesthetics.org.
This issue features two of the strongest papers from the British Society of Aesthetics first postgraduate conference, Interact!
The abstracts for the two articles are as follows:
(1) Wink, Wink, Nudge, Nudge?
Dieter Declercq
In this article, I set out to investigate how comics employ visuals in ironic communication. I aim to contribute to debates on the nature and success of visual irony indicators. I will argue that comics are a suitable medium for successful ironic communication, exactly because they “give images and text equal ontological priority” (Wartenberg, 2014, p. 101). This argument problematizes some aspects of the commonly accepted intuition that visual media are poorly equipped to convey communicative irony.
(2) On the Differences Between Categories of Artworks and Nature
Mami Aota
This paper critiques Allen Carlson’s attempt to explain the aesthetic appreciation of nature and art in a single theory called ‘Unified Aesthetics’. Carlson claims that we make appropriate aesthetic judgments of natural objects (or phenomena) only when we appreciate them under the correct categories, based on common sense and scientific knowledge. However, Carlson’s adaptation faces two problems. I argue that Unified Aesthetics fails because categories of art and those of nature are different in terms of their origins and function.
We do hope that the members of the philosophical aesthetics community will enjoy reading these papers.
All the best,
Shelby Moser & Ryan Doran
The Editors of the PJA