Notes on the History of Aesthetics

[reason.on]

I've been doing a bit of reading online about the history of aesthetics and ran across this passage, which I can't resist posting as a wry post-script to my discussion with Ellen on unicorns. As a side benefit, the full article is a decent overview of many of the theories of aesthetics that have been considered over the years.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/a/aestheti.htm

There are philosophical questions [..raised] with respect to the representation of objects, because of the problematic nature of fictions. There are three broad categories of object which might be represented: individuals which exist, like Napoleon; types of thing which exist, like kangaroos; and things which do not exist, like Mr. Pickwick, and unicorns. Goodman's account of representation easily allowed for the first two categories, since, if depictions are like names, the first two categories of painting compare, respectively, with the relations between the proper name "Napoleon" and the person Napoleon, and the common name "kangaroo" and the various kangaroos. Some philosophers would think that the third category was as easily accommodated, but Goodman, being an Empiricist (and so concerned with the extensional world), was only prepared to countenance existent objects. So for him pictures of fictions did not denote or represent anything; instead, they were just patterns of various sorts. Pictures of unicorns were just shapes, for Goodman, which meant that he saw the description "picture of a unicorn" as unarticulated into parts. What he preferred to call a "unicorn-picture" was merely a design with certain named shapes within it. One needs to allow there are "intensional" objects as well as extensional ones before one can construe "picture of a unicorn' as parallel to "picture of a kangaroo." By contrast with Goodman, Scruton is one philosopher more happy with this kind of construal. It is a construal generally more congenial to Idealists, and to Realists of various persuasions, than to Empiricists.

RCR

P.S. I'm not sure why, but hyperbolic disdain seems best expressed in French, no?

Edited February 10, 2007 by R. Christian Ross

[Dragonfly]

P.S. I'm not sure why, but hyperbolic disdain seems best expressed in French, no?

But it should be "bêtes noires".