Aesthetic Normativity

The normative force of aesthetic perception, deliberation and judgement has been a topic of discussion in philosophy for many centuries: Aristotle writes of the universal elements of aesthetic value; Hume discusses how we can account for wide-spread agreements about taste and establish criteria for aesthetic normativity; and Kant urges us to resolve the Antinomy of Taste and explains why aesthetic judgements “lay claim to universal assent” in terms steeped in his philosophy of mind.

More recently, however, the power of aesthetic normativity has been conceived along more modest lines and explained mainly in terms of emotional responses or preferences determined by our evolutionary past and physiological constitution. To that extent at least, many philosophers have often looked beyond the remit of philosophy to analyse the normativity of aesthetic judgement and value. In contrast, philosophical investigations of moral normativity have continued to develop at a steady pace and to explain such normativity in its own terms.

Have we isolated aesthetic normativity from other forms of normativity to such an extent that we are no longer able to fully understand its grounds and explanatory force? Are we right to have overlooked metaphysical and epistemological connections between aesthetic and moral value, or beauty and goodness, contra Plato, Shaftesbury, Schiller and Kant?

One of the main aims of this conference is to explore the relations between normativity in the philosophy of mind, ethics and aesthetics, hopefully extending to epistemic normativity. In that process we will remind ourselves of the theories developed in the 17th and 18th centuries. Our primary focus, however, will remain on the questions central to current philosophical debates in an attempt to expand the remit of our discussions in aesthetics.

Elisabeth Schellekens Dammann ([email protected])