By Pierre Bourdieu (London: Routledge, 2010), xxx + 607 pp. £15.99 paper. A combination of social theory, statistical data, illustrations, and interviews, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judg...

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

Knowledge and the Flow of Information.

In this paper I propose that only part of our experience of events, and products in particular, should be coined aesthetic. This part, the aesthetic experience, is restricted to the (dis)pleasure that results from sensory perception. The main part of the paper is devoted to explaining why we experience certain things as gratifying to our senses. Following thinking in evolutionary psychology, it is argued that we aesthetically prefer environmental patterns and features that are beneficial for the development of the senses’ functioning and our survival in general. Four general principles of aesthetic pleasure, operating across the senses, can be explained on the basis of such argumentation: (1) maximum effect for minimum means, (2) unity in variety, (3) most advanced, yet acceptable, and (4) optimal match.

Design aesthetics: principles of pleasure in design

In \"The Company We Keep\", Wayne C. Booth argues for the relocation of ethics to the center of our engagement with literature. But the questions he asks are not confined to morality. Returning ethics to its root sense, Booth proposes that the ethical critic will be interested in any effect on the ethos, the total character or quality of tellers and listeners. Ethical criticism will risk talking about the quality of this particular encounter with this particular work. Yet it will give up the old hope for definitive judgments of 'good' work and 'bad'. Rather it will be a conversation about many kinds of personal and social goods that fictions can serve or destroy. While not ignoring the consequences for conduct of engaging with powerful stories, it will attend to that more immediate topic, What happens to us as we read? Who am I, during the hours of reading or listening? What is the quality of the life I lead in the company of these would-be friends? Through a wide variety of periods and genres and scores of particular works, Booth pursues various metaphors for such engagements: 'friendship with books', 'the exchange of gifts', 'the colonizing of worlds', 'the constitution of commonwealths'. He concludes with extended explorations of the ethical powers and potential dangers of works by Rabelais, D. H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, and Mark Twain.

The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction

Organizational research has long focused on the instrumental sphere with its questions of efficiency and effectiveness and in recent decades there has been interest in the moral sphere with its questions of ethics. Within the last decade there has also emerged a field that draws on the aesthetic sphere of our existence in organizations. In this review we look at the field of organizational aesthetics in terms of content and method, suggesting four broad categories of organizational aesthetics research: intellectual analysis of instrumental issues, artistic form used to look at instrumental issues, intellectual analysis of aesthetic issues, and artistic form used to look at aesthetic issues. We then suggest how organizational scholars might pursue artistic aesthetic organizational research.

Finding Form: Looking at the Field of Organizational Aesthetics

If good taste is a virtue, then an account of good taste might be modelled on existing accounts of moral or epistemic virtue. One good reason to develop such an account is that it helps solve otherwise intractable problems in aesthetics. This paper proposes an alternative to neo-Aristotelian models of good taste. It then contrasts the neo-Aristotelian models with the proposed model, assessing them for their potential to contend with otherwise intractable problems in aesthetics.

II—Dominic McIver Lopes: Virtues of Art: Good Taste

Knowing Through Art- Knowing Content in the Visual Arts- Pictures, Knowledge, and Power: The Case of T J Clark- Narrating the Truth (More or Less)- Fiction and Psychological Insight- Art and Modal Knowledge- Charley's World: Narratives of Aesthetic Experience- Knowing About Art- Really Bad Taste- Solving the Puzzle of Aesthetic Testimony- Critical Compatibilism- Critical Reasoning and Critical Perception

Knowing art : essays in aesthetics and epistemology

Shikinen Sengu and the Ontology of Architecture in Japan

A theory of aesthetic value should explain the performance of aesthetic experts, for aesthetic experts are agents who track aesthetic value. Aesthetic empiricism, the theory that an item's aesthetic value is its power to yield aesthetic pleasure, suggests that aesthetic experts are best at locating aesthetic pleasure, especially given aesthetic internalism, the view that aesthetic reasons always have motivating force. Problems with empiricism and internalism open the door to an alternative. Aesthetic experts perform a range of actions not aimed at pleasure. Yet their reasons for acting are aesthetic. Since aesthetic values figure in aesthetic reasons, we can read a nonempiricist theory of aesthetic value off aesthetic experts’ reasons for acting

Aesthetic Experts, Guides to Value

Four Arts of Photography explores the history of photography through the lens of philosophy and proposes a new scholarly understanding of the art form for the 21 st century. • Re-examines the history of art photography through four major photographic movements and with case studies of representative images • Employs a top-down, theory to case approach, as well as a bottom-up, case to theory approach • Advances a new theory regarding the nature of photography that is grounded in technology but doesn’t place it in opposition to painting • Includes commentaries by two leading philosophers of photography, Diarmuid Costello and Cynthia A. Freeland

Dominic McIver Lopes

Papers

II—Dominic McIver Lopes: Virtues of Art: Good Taste

Knowing art : essays in aesthetics and epistemology

Shikinen Sengu and the Ontology of Architecture in Japan

Aesthetic Experts, Guides to Value

Four Arts of Photography: An Essay in Philosophy