Early Career Work in Progress Seminar (Tuesday - Week 1, TT26)
Tuesday 28 April, 4.30pm - 6:00pm
Ryle Room (20.339), Schwarzman Centre
Jeremy Page (Queen's College): 'What is it to be responsive to aesthetic value?'
Abstract: Systematic approaches to theorizing the aesthetic domain are built on the claim that there is some ideal form of responsiveness to aesthetic value in relation to which we can understand the nature of the aesthetic more generally (Gorodeisky 2021, Shelley 2025, Kriegel 2022). It is widely accepted that the form of engagement constitutive of aesthetic responsiveness is motivationally 'self-sustaining' (e.g. Kant 1790). Pleasure theory and aesthetic hedonism are orthodox views of aesthetic responsiveness that move from the observation that pleasant engagement is motivationally self-sustaining, to the conclusion that a particular kind of pleasant engagement is identical with aesthetic responsiveness. They characterize aesthetic value – as well as aesthetic appreciation, aesthetic normativity, aesthetic judgement, and more – in relation to the aesthetic pleasure response that is identical with aesthetic responsiveness. Pleasant engagement is not the only form of motivationally self-sustaining engagement, however. Another is engagement characterized by a certain kind of erotic curiosity (Dover 2023). I develop a "cognitivist" account on which aesthetically responsive engagement is an exploratory form of engagement with an object that is dynamically guided by the object and geared towards nothing other than making intelligible why the object is such as to merit our engaging with it on its own terms and for its own sake (i.e. by a particular kind of curious engagement). I argue that this account is more parsimonious than its hedonic rivals and show that hedonic accounts cannot explain the self-sustaining nature of responsive engagement without collapsing into cognitivism. This opens up a new mode of understanding the aesthetic more generally.
Registration: If you do not hold a university card, please contact the seminar convenor or admin@philosophy.ox.ac.uk at least two working days before a seminar to register your attendance.
