Analytic aesthetics and the philosophy of art 1

Stephen Davies, Philosophy, University of Auckland

Important note: This is a final draft and differs from the definitive version,
which is published in K. Becker and I. A. Thomson (eds.), The Cambridge History
of Philosophy, 1945-2015, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 323-333. I
have been assured by the University of Auckland's research office that if they
have made this publicly available then it does not violate the publisher's
copyright rules.

Analytic aesthetics and philosophy of art

Abstract

In the early part of the period the focus was on aesthetic properties, experiences,
and judgments. Aesthetic properties, which could be found in nature and in art,
were conceived of as available directly to perception. The aesthetic attitude was
disinterested and distanced, and approached its object for its own sake alone.
The challenge to these views came on at least three fronts. Beyond close
attention of an ordinary kind, art appreciation does not seem to involve a
distinctive psychological attitude. Artistically important properties are often not
like those traditionally described as aesthetic. Art can be humorous, rebellious,
and ironic and can involve quotation, allusion, and influence. Additionally, many
of the properties significant in art, both for its identity and content, involve
socio- and art-historical relativities. For instance, a work's period and genre can
affect the properties that can be ascribed to it. Accordingly, lookalike artworks
can be very different in their appreciable qualities.
Prominent topics include the definition of art, the ontology of artworks,
interpretation, performance, depiction, expressiveness, fiction, the value of art,
imagination, audience appreciation and emotional response, art and ethics, the
character of individual art forms, and the aesthetics of nature and of the
everyday.
Analytic aesthetics and the philosophy of art 2

Analytic aesthetics and philosophy of art

Let me begin with a complaint

Aristotle, Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein devoted some of their attention to

aesthetics and the philosophy of art. But many analytic philosophers now are
dismissive of the area. For instance, a handbook of contemporary philosophy
(2008) by a leading press does not even contain an entry on the topic. Nor does
an anthology on analytic philosophy (2001). I doubt that this negative attitude is
well founded. Analytic aestheticians grapple with questions as deep and subtle as
any addressed elsewhere in philosophy and its practitioners are as well trained
as are their colleagues in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy,
philosophy of science, and so on. So rich is the range of issues that are
considered by analytic philosophers of art that it is very difficult to list them all
in an entry such as this.

Early in the twentieth century, some major philosophers (think of Bosanquet,

Collingwood, and Dewey, among others) discussed aesthetics. But the logical
positivists, especially A. J. Ayer among Anglophone philosophers, espoused non-
cognitivism about value judgments. If value judgments do not express genuine
propositions, then branches of philosophy that aim to study them must be of
dubious standing. While ethics and political philosophy recovered from this
attack, it is widely thought that aesthetic judgments tend to be much more
subjective. This may have inhibited the rehabilitation of aesthetics and the
philosophy of art, even though they deal with much more than such evaluations
and even if it can be argued that, given their function, such judgments are
sufficiently objective to be useful.

I judge that the area is currently strongest in the UK. There may be more
philosophers interested in the domain in Canada and the US, but they are more
dispersed and outnumbered than their British colleagues. Despite its strong
analytic tradition, aesthetics and the philosophy of art are hardly practiced in
Australia.

Overview: aesthetics versus art

The central concerns in aesthetics in the immediate post-war era followed on

from those apparent earlier in the twentieth century. The authors emphasized
the autonomy and independence of art from the circumstances of its creation
and from practical concerns, and formalism was common. The appreciation of
art was described in terms of the recognition in artworks of their positive
aesthetic properties, such as grace or power. Such properties were available to
suitably skilled observers through direct acquaintance. They supervened on non-
aesthetic, neutrally describable, perceivable features of the work. Accordingly,
any change to a work's appearance could affect its aesthetic character and any
two perceptually indistinguishable works would share their aesthetic character,
whatever differences there were in their respective provenances. Discussion of
the conditions for the proper reception of art were psychologistic, appealing to
the long-favored notion of disinterested attention, for instance.
Analytic aesthetics and the philosophy of art 3

On this account, aesthetics and the philosophy of art are inseparable sides of a
single coin. In this vein, in his landmark Aesthetics (1958), Monroe C. Beardsley
preferred to discuss "aesthetic objects" rather than artworks, though his focus
was on works of art.

After anticipations in the 1960s, and increasingly in later times, this model was
challenged and rejected. The key properties of works of art are often semantic or
representational and do not really correspond to sensuous aesthetic properties
as these were traditionally conceived. Art can be humorous, rebellious, and
ironic for instance; it can involve quotation, allusion, and influence, which are not
features typically associated with the aesthetic. Additionally, many of the
properties significant in art, both for its identity and content, involve socio- and
art-historical relativities. For instance, a work's period and genre can affect the
properties that can be ascribed to it. Accordingly, lookalike artworks could be
very different in their appreciable qualities. What is needed for art appreciation
is not a distinctive psychological state, such as an aesthetic attitude, but regular
attention informed by knowledge of the conventions, practices, and work-
traditions a given piece presupposes and addresses.

In effect, aesthetics and the philosophy of art parted company, though the
separation was often disguised by expanding the notion of the aesthetic to take
in the new kinds of features that are central to artworks' comprehension and
enjoyment. One consequence was the rise of aesthetic theories about the
environment or nature, and how their properties and modes of appreciation
differ from those relevant to art. And the shift from individual psychology to
group histories and social relativities undermined attitudes proclaiming the
eternal objectivity of artistic values, which made space for the development of
feminist perspectives on art, for instance.

In the following history I chronicle how the analytic philosophy of art changed
over the decades and highlight the philosophers whose ideas drove those
modifications. But there are more general trends that can be emphasized here.

In the 1940s, literature and painting were the primary focus for analytic
philosophers of art. Music became equally prominent from the 1980s. But even
in the present, some art forms receive significantly less attention than others.
This remains true of dance, sculpture, poetry, theater, and architecture, for
instance. By contrast, since 2000 much notice has been paid to cinema. This
reflects a greater interest in popular art in general than was apparent in earlier
decades.

Some of the topics that concerned philosophers in the 1940s and 1950s have
remained of great interest, such as questions of definition, ontology, value,
interpretation, and appreciation. Some other debates that flourished earlier
faded from view. Semiotics and symbolism were hot topics in the 1940s and
1950s but are not now covered, or at least not in such terms. Arguments about
whether photography is an art were published in the 1970s and 1980s, but are
Analytic aesthetics and the philosophy of art 4

rarely seen now. Articles on the nature of aesthetic supervenience and on

metaphor are significantly less common than they once were.

Other subject matters are new. This is an inevitable consequence of changes in

art practices—for instance, developments in conceptual art and the postmodern
adoption of appropriation and installation art—and of more general advances in
technology, computing, image processing, and the like. Asking if computers can
make art, or if videogames can be art, was not possible in the 1940s.

An additional consideration draws attention to art-relevant studies in other

disciplines. The attitude of analytic philosophers of art in the 1940s and 50s to
the behaviorist psychology of the time was highly negative. A residue of
skepticism remains to the present, but philosophers' interest in and use of
studies in areas such as cognitive studies on art and neuroaesthetics have
become more common.

Other changes in emphasis may be harder to account for. At the start of our
period there was little consideration of the audience's emotional engagement
with and response to art. The stress was rather on objectivity and "distance." But
from the 1970s and increasingly, the emotions felt by the audience have become
a focus of interest, either because they can be puzzling (as when people claim to
enjoy being frightened by art-horrors) or because they evidence non-
propositional ways of understanding and valuing art.

Some of the changes in the philosophy of art reflect ones common across the
whole discipline. For instance, Handbooks, Companions, and Encyclopedias of
aesthetics, art, and art forms have proliferated since the 1990s, as have
introductory texts, the number of specialist journals, and e-journals.

Though in what follows I focus on changes and developments in analytic

philosophy of art, one point of constancy is worth stressing. The history of
aesthetics is an ongoing part of the subject matter of aesthetics throughout the
period. As bookends we might mention Beardsley's Aesthetics from Classical
Greece to the Present (1966) and Paul Guyer's three volume A History of Modern
Aesthetics (2014).

Analytic aesthetics and the philosophy of art since 1945

Curt J. Ducasse's Art, the Critics, and You (1948) was a representative work of
aesthetic theory. He emphasized the disinterestedness of the aesthetic stance so
strongly that he insisted that art critics, who earn their living from art, are
incapable of adopting it and, therefore, cannot appreciate art appropriately.

A seminal paper by William Wimsatt and Beardsley was "The Intentional

Fallacy" (1946). They argued that recourse to evidence of poets' intentions
beyond what was manifest in their works was neither appropriate nor necessary
in interpretation. This defense of the autonomy of art from its creator illustrates
another aspect of aesthetic theory.
Analytic aesthetics and the philosophy of art 5

The zenith for the aesthetic theory of art was marked by Beardsley's 1958 book,
Aesthetics, in which he conceived of aesthetics as metacriticism. He defended the
independence of the "aesthetic object" (artwork) from its maker's intentions and
its creative circumstances, considered the ontological relation between aesthetic
objects and their presentations, analyzed expressiveness and representation as
objective, intention-independent features of aesthetic objects, and discussed the
conditions for informed criticism and appreciation, which should concern
themselves only with properties internal to the work.

Beardsley's defense of aesthetic theory is nuanced and subtle. In the first of a

series of papers in 1959, Frank Sibley analyzed "aesthetic concepts" or
properties in a similarly careful manner. These various accounts moved far
beyond the cardinal eighteenth-century aesthetic properties of the beautiful and
sublime to cover a wide range of artistically relevant characteristics, such as
symbolism and expression, and in that way set the stage for the subsequent
blurring of the distinction between aesthetic and artistic properties.

The 1950s also saw a slew of articles arguing against either the possibility of
defining art or the usefulness of the attempt. This was not a reaction to anything
happening within aesthetics, but showed instead the influence of Wittgenstein's
anti-essentialism in Philosophical Investigations (1951). Another widely
discussed notion adopted from that source was that of "seeing as," which was
used repeatedly in the analysis of pictorial depiction and in discussing the
relation between aesthetic features and the properties that ground them. Notes
from Wittgenstein's lectures on aesthetics were published in 1966 and their
influence is often apparent later, for instance in books by Richard Wollheim
(1968), Roger Scruton (1974), Benjamin Tilghman (1984), and Garry Hagberg
(1994).

In an article of 1964, Arthur C. Danto described "the artworld," an historically

structured collection of works, conventions, styles, practices and ideas. Without
knowledge of the "atmosphere of theory" the artworld generates, one cannot
separate artworks, such as Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes, from the non-artworks
they emulate. Similarly, two artworks could be identical in appearance and
nevertheless have different contents, depending on differences in their causal
histories and intentional creation. These conclusions plainly implied that
aesthetic theory cannot account for the identification of art as such and its
differentiation from non-art items.

Two important books were published in 1968, Wollheim's Art and Its Objects and
Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art. As regards aesthetic theory, both books
provided opposition. Wollheim questioned the traditional account of the
aesthetic attitude and also argued that art is essentially historical, by which he
meant that it must be understood in terms of the art-historical context in which
it is produced. Goodman argued that lookalike forgeries differ in their artistic
merit from the originals they impersonate. But what I would emphasize is that
both books explicitly demonstrated the centrality of ontological issues to the
philosophy of art. Wollheim was interested in what kind of objects works of art
are, despite differences between, say, music and painting. He claimed that they
Analytic aesthetics and the philosophy of art 6

are types (as distinct from universals) with physical properties transmitted to
them by their tokens. Goodman, on the other hand, was interested in precisely
that difference. Paintings are autographic, singular artworks; no copy, however
similar, is a genuine instance of the work. Music, by contrast, is an allographic,
multiple art form in which anything that conforms to the work-determining
notation thereby is a genuine instance.

Discussions of ontology—of the nature of artworks and the manner of their

existence—have been a constantly fertile field in the philosophy of art, but the
following decade was dominated by the issue of art's definition. George Dickie
produced a series of articles (1962-66) debunking the aesthetic theory of art and
its appreciation before laying the ground for his institutional theory, which
achieved its book-length form in 1974. Arthood is the status of candidate for
appreciation conferred on an artifact by some person (usually the artist) acting
on behalf of the informal institution of the artworld. (Terry Diffey [1969]
produced a similar theory, but thought the status was conferred by the public of
the "republic of art".) So, arthood was held to be a matter of social recognition
rather than a consequence of possessing aesthetic or any other features.

This controversial theory attracted a great deal of attention. Against it, Beardsley
(in a paper of 1983, published after his death) defended the view that something
is an artwork if it is intended to be capable of affording a significant aesthetic
experience. So, whereas Dickie was a proceduralist, Beardsley was a functionalist
(S. Davies 1991), and the ensuing debate was drawn on those lines. Dickie placed
the weight on authority, Beardsley on skill. And while Dickie was keen to
enfranchise anti-aesthetic art, readymades, and the like, Beardsley was eager to
exclude them from the realm of art proper. Dickie proposed a major revision of
his view in 1984, stressing more the mutual dependence of artwork, artist, public,
and artworld.

Beginning in the 1970s and extending over the following decades, Allen Carlson
and Arnold Berleant wrote about the aesthetic appreciation of nature and of the
environment, contrasting this with approaches to the enjoyment of art. This
research program later culminated in books (Carlson 2000, Berleant 2002),
alongside which Malcolm Budd's The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature (2002)
should be ranged. Work in this sub-area continues to be widely pursued.

A key article of 1970 was "Categories of Art" by Kendall L. Walton who argued
that a work's properties, including its expressive character, depend on its
category or genre. Otherwise identical works belonging to categories in which
different features are variable could display different artistic characteristics as a
result. This has proved to be a key argument for contextualism and against pure
aestheticism. Other significant works of the period were Alan Tormey's The
Concept of Expression (1971), which mounted a powerful attack against the
widely held Romantic conception according to which the work of art expresses
and clarifies the artist's state of mind, and Guy Sircello's A New Theory of Beauty
(1975), which provided an adverbial analysis of beauty attributions.
Analytic aesthetics and the philosophy of art 7

An article of 1974 by Colin Radford asked why we feel sorry for fictional
characters when we know they do not exist and so do not suffer their fates. This
rekindled an old debate that continues unabated today. Another old paradox that
considered why we apparently enjoy tragedies has also been revived, along with
ones about fear (Walton in an article of 1978), horror (Carroll 1990, Freeland
2002), and disgust (Korsmeyer 2011). And there is the question about how we
can re-experience suspense when confronting a work we have already
encountered (Carroll 1995).

Drawing on several of his articles from the 1970s, Danto developed his position
in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), which undoubtedly became
the philosophy of art's book of the decade. Whether something can become an
artwork, he suggested, depends on when and by whom it is offered.
Rauschenberg can create an artwork by painting his bed where Da Vinci cannot.
It was the historical task of art to develop to a point where it can mimic mere
real things, thereby posing the question why one is an artwork and the other not.
(Plainly this is not a distinction an aestheticist about art can explain.) In a later
book, Danto (1986) argued that, by reaching the point where it provoked that
question, art had discharged its historical task. Freed from this burden, anything
could become art, but there could no longer be progress in art.

Meanwhile, the project of definition continued, with recursive structures

defining art (now) in relation to art (past) becoming popular, although the
protagonists (Levinson 1979 and in subsequent papers; Carroll in an article of
1988; Carney in a paper of 1991 and subsequently) disagreed about the specific
nature of the art-defining relation.

Nicholas Wolterstorff's Works and Worlds of Art (1980) developed the idea of
works of art as norm kinds intimately embedded in socio-historical practices.
Joseph Margolis (1980) described art as "culturally emergent." An alternative
ontology (Currie 1988) characterized works of art as all multiple in principle and
as action types rather than as objects or event-specifications. As well, the period
saw the first release of English translations of earlier work by Roman Ingarden
on the nature of literary works and of musical works. A focus of debate
throughout the decade was the musical work (in classical music). Contextualists
(such as Jerrold Levinson) argued that these were created through acts of
indication and possessed their instrumentation essentially, whereas Platonists
(such as Peter Kivy) argued that they existed eternally as abstracta that were
discovered and that their orchestration was incidental to their identities.

Another musical topic familiar to musicologists, psychologists and philosophers,

that of the musical expression of emotion, was also to the fore at this time.
Previously, in an influential book, Susanne Langer (1942) had argued that music
is a presentational symbol of the general form of feeling. (She extended that
thesis to all the arts in Feeling and Form of 1953.) In the 1980s and later it was
argued (by Kivy and S. Davies) that music is expressive by virtue of recalling
recognizably expressive human behaviors in the contour of its movement and
the pattern of the waxing and waning of its tensions.
Analytic aesthetics and the philosophy of art 8

A significant monograph of the time was Wollheim's Painting as an Art (1987).

Among other matters, this included discussion of "seeing in," a simultaneously
twofold experience of a painting as a marked surface and as a depicted content
which allows the observer to adopt both internal and external perspectives on
the work. Also noteworthy was his interest in probing both the artist's and the
viewer's mind and psychology and how the former conveys his or her intentions
to the latter.

1987 also saw Flint Schier's analysis of pictorial depiction in Deeper into Pictures.
He rejected resemblance and syntactic accounts of representation in favor of the
view that a system is naturally depictive if, on the basis of recognizing what one
picture is of, the viewer can go on to interpret other pictures in that system. A
similar account was subsequently produced by Dominic McIvor Lopes (1996).
Resemblance is a phenomenal by-product of recognition, not its basis, and
pictures involve the same recognitional capacities as the perception of non-
representations does. A rival account is due to Robert Hopkins (1998), who
analyses depiction as depending on perceived resemblance between a thing's
outline shape as perceived from a fixed point of view and the design surface of
the picture.

More recent work on depiction includes John Kulvicki's On Images (2006), which
is as much concerned with graphs and maps as with art pictures, John Hyman's
The Objective Eye (2006), which exams the objective principles (of shape, relative
size, occlusion, and color) governing pictorial depiction, and Cynthia Freeland's
Portraits and Persons (2010), which analyses portraiture. Lopes (2005) devoted
a book to the evaluation of pictorial art.

The late 1980s and 90s saw a number of monographs on fiction and literature:
David Novitz 1987, Peter McCormick 1988, Gregory Currie 1990, Margolis 1992
and 1995, Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugon Olsen 1994, Susan Feagin 1996,
Lamarque 1996. These sometimes covered topics in philosophical logic about the
nature of fiction, but also focused on the nature of narrative, literary
interpretation and criticism, the emotional response to literature, and the like.

The most discussed book of the 1990s, Kendall L. Walton's Mimesis as Make-
Believe (1990) built on his earlier work on fiction and imagination, applying
these fruitfully to a wide range of topics including those just mentioned above.
Walton's key insight was that art centrally involves the imaginative engagement
of its audience. This does not come down to the familiar claim that it takes
imagination to enter into the fictional (or virtual or abstract) world of the work.
The point rather was that the audience plays an imaginative game (the rules of
which are prescribed by the artwork's creator and the conventions of genre, etc.)
in which the artwork serves as a prop. In other words, the audience, not just the
work, operates under the scope of the fictional operator, and the work's fictional
worlds are nested within this broader one.

Two book-length discussions of the value of art appeared in 1995. Malcolm

Budd's maintained that an artwork is valuable as art if it is such that the
experience it offers is intrinsically valuable, and it is valuable to the degree that
Analytic aesthetics and the philosophy of art 9

this experience is intrinsically valuable. He applied this view in more concrete

terms to pictures, poetry and music. Alan H. Goldman's position was that artistic
value resides in the satisfaction that attends exercizing different mental
capacities operating together to appreciate the rich relational properties of
artworks. In 2001, James O. Young wrote on the value of art as a source of
knowledge.

Feminist discussions of art that challenged patriarchal assumptions about the

universal objectivity and the apolitical nature of the art canon also rose to
prominence in the 1990s. Such concerns featured in a special number of Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism in 1990 and in collections (1993, 1995) edited by
Hilde Hein and Carolyn Korsmeyer and by Peggy Zeglin Brand and Korsmeyer.
Korsmeyer's Gender and Aesthetics (2004) is also noteworthy.

As regards the definition of art, Robert Stecker's Artworks: Definition, Meaning,

Value (1997) was representative in offering a hybrid, disjunctive definition. (It
had become widely accepted that there was no one way in which artworks
qualified for their status as art.) He claims (roughly) that an item is an artwork at
time t if and only it is in one of the central art forms at t and is intended to fulfill a
function art has at t, or it is an artifact that achieves excellence in fulfilling such a
function. As its title suggests, the book also delved into issues of interpretation
and value that, as we have noted, were preoccupations of the time. Meanwhile,
the art-status and meaning of gardens was explored in monographs by Mara
Miller (1993) and Stephanie Ross (1998).

A number of books (Kivy 1990, Higgins 1991, S. Davies 1994, Levinson 1997,
Matravers 1998) debated the understanding and appreciation of art music and
the manner of its expressiveness. Ontological issues were discussed by Lydia
Goehr (1992). But at this time there was a shift away from classical music to the
distinctive features of other kinds, such as rock (Gracyk 1996, 2001, 2007) and
jazz (in a series of papers spanning the 1990s and 2000s by Lee B. Brown, for
instance) as well as consideration of the performer's, not only the listener's,
perspective (Godlovitch 1998). This broadening of interest called for ontologies
that considered electronic music, works for playback issued on disks, studio
modifications, and the like (S. Davies 2001).

Works on the performing arts in general were by Paul Thom (1993) and David
Davies (2011) and on theater were by J. R. Hamilton (2008) and Paul Woodruff
(2008).

Many of these same topics received book-length treatments in the new

millennium: literature and its interpretation (Krausz 2000, Stecker 2003, Kivy
2006, D. Davies 2007, Lamarque 2009 and 2014, Currie 2010, Goldman 2013,
Matravers 2014); the role of intention (Livingston 2005); musical expressiveness
and the idea that literature can provide an education of the readers' emotions as
they evolve in the process of reading the work (Robinson 2005); the nature of
music (R. A. Sharpe 2000, A. Hamilton 2007, C. O. Nussbaum 2007, Young 2014);
and the ontology of art (D. Davies 2003, Lamarque 2010).
Analytic aesthetics and the philosophy of art 10

Cluster theories of art, according to which various combinations from a set of

features can be sufficient for something's being art, became popular. Not only did
the protagonists differ over which features belonged in the set but also over
whether the project was an attempt at definition or not. In several articles, Berys
Gaut characterized the approach as anti-essentialist, whereas Denis Dutton
(2009) regarded his version as a definition. (Certainly, the cluster theory departs
from a classical model of definition requiring necessary conditions that are
jointly sufficient, but so do recursive and disjunctive definitions.) In 2014, Lopes
argued that art can be defined as the sum of the art forms, with the analytic focus
falling now on what makes something an art form.

There was an expansion of the definitional focus. Already in 1998 Noël Carroll
had offered a detailed definition, ontology, and defense of mass art. Other topics
covered later included videogames as art (Tavinor 2009), computer art (Lopes
2010), and comics as art (various by Meskin). Among the broader issues debated
was whether art is a Western invention of the eighteenth century (Shiner 2001)
or is ancient and universal (Freeland 2001, Dutton 2009, S. Davies 2012).
Meanwhile, the applicability of aesthetic judgments and standards was
broadened to take in somaesthetics and bodily aesthetics (various by
Shusterman, a 2016 collection edited by Irvin), and for food (Korsmeyer 1999),
wine (collections edited by Allhoff and Draper 2007 and by B. C. Smith 2007, and
a book by Todd 2011) and whiskey (a collection edited by Allhoff, Adams, and
MacLean 2009). Paul C. Taylor's Black is Beautiful (2016) focused on the
aesthetics of race.

After the pioneering work of Stanley Cavell, Carroll (1996, 1998, 2007, 2013) led
the way in discussing the philosophy of film. Since 2000 the output and range of
issues covered has been huge. Notable monographs include Gaut's The
Philosophy of Cinematic Art (2010) and Ted Nannicelli's A Philosophy of the
Screenplay (2013). A book series, philosophers on film, contains edited
collections of essays, with each volume devoted to a different film. One line in the
philosophy of film looks specifically at the idea that some films are a way of
doing philosophy (Wartenberg 2006, Livingston 2009).

Though connections between art and ethics have been considered since the
Greeks, and earlier works in our period are R. W. Beardsmore's Art and Morality
(1971), as well as books by Martha Nussbaum (1990 and 1996), Benjamin
Tilghman (1991), Frank Palmer (1992), David Novitz (1992), David Parker
(1995), and Colin McGinn (1997), great interest has been shown in the topic in
recent years. Noteworthy monographs are Gaut's Art, Emotion, and Ethics (2005),
Matthew Kieran's Revealing Art (2005), James O. Young's Cultural Appropriation
and the Arts (2007), Elisabeth Schellekens' Aesthetics and Morality (2007),
Richard Eldridge's Literature, Life, and Modernity (2008), and Wolterstorff's Art
Rethought (2015). They consider such topics as the interaction of ethical and
aesthetic value, what art can teach us about morality, and the moral significance
of ways of engaging with art. Two sub-themes are worth noting: the idea of
virtue in aesthetics (various by Goldie) and pornography (a 2013 collection
edited by Maes and a book by C. O. Nussbaum 2015).
Analytic aesthetics and the philosophy of art 11

Analytic philosophers have extended the repertoire of philosophy of art in new

directions with monographs on topics rarely considered prior to 2000. These
included conceptual art (Goldie and Schellekens 2009), the aesthetics of the
everyday (Saito 2007, Leddy 2011), humor (Cohen 1999, Morreal 2009, Carroll
2014), and art and evolution (Currie and Ravenscroft 2002, Dutton 2009, S.
Davies 2012). Research in psychology of art and neuroaesthetics grew
considerably and philosophers reviewed and applied these developments
(Currie 2004, Higgins 2011, Nanay 2016, and in collections edited by Schellekens
and Goldie 2009 and by Currie and others 2014), though some philosophers (e.g.,
Noë 2015) remained skeptical that work in this area has much to contribute to
philosophy of art and aesthetics.

In the previous account I have described the eclipse in analytic philosophy of art
of one primary model, aesthetic theory, by another, which is more contextual,
historical, and social. But some (e.g., Iseminger 2004) have tried to modify their
account of the aesthetic to accommodate more recent insights, while others (e.g.,
Zangwill 2007) have defended the traditional account. And beauty has again
come into favor as a subject for analysis (with books by Zangwill 2001, Nehamas
2007, Scruton 2009).1

Stephen Davies

1 With thanks to Susan Feagin, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Kathleen Higgins, Peter

Lamarque, and James O. Young.