bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Artistic forgery
Authors: Currie Gregory 
Published: September 2018

Forgery in art occurs when something is presented as a work of art with a history it does not actually have. Typically this involves a false claim about the producer’s identity. Forgeries are most usually works in the style of the artist whose work they falsely claim to be, while a forgery that is a copy of an existing work is a fake. Forgery is most common in the visual arts, but is also possible in other arts, such as literature and music.
The main aesthetic problem that forgery poses is that typically no deception is practised concerning what we might call the appearance of the forged object (generalizing from the pictorial case). Thus the forger does not deceive us about the disposition of colours on the canvas, the sequence of musical notes in the score, or the sequence of words in the text. If we adopt the widely held view that aesthetic value is a function of appearance alone, we shall conclude that something’s being a forgery is irrelevant to its aesthetic worth; whatever false beliefs the viewer might be induced to have about the work, those beliefs could not affect an honest judgment of its aesthetic value. But in the art world it is universal practice to condemn forgery. If that practice is to be justified as anything other than artistic snobbery and the protection of prices in the art market, it must be shown that the aesthetic interest of a work is not exhausted by its appearance alone. In fact it can be shown that the aesthetic features of a work often depend on its historical features as well as on its appearance, and that these historical features are likely to be obscured by the deception that forgery involves.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–81)
Authors: Townsend Dabney 
Published: September 2018

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing occupies a central place in eighteenth-century European belles-lettres. He was a significant religious and theological thinker whose work puzzled his contemporaries and still provokes debate. He has been variously called a deist, a concealed theist, a Spinozist–pantheist, a panentheist, and an atheist. He was a significant dramatist whose major works include Minna von Barnhelm, known as the first modern German comedy, and Nathan the Wise, which places Lessing in the tradition of eighteenth-century toleration and humanism. He was an active promoter of the contemporary German theatre and an influential drama critic and theorist. He had broad classical and antiquarian interests. And he has some claims to being one of the early developers, if not a founding father, of the discipline of philosophical aesthetics.
Philosophically, Lessing belongs to the tradition of G.W. von Leibniz and Christian Wolff and was familiar with the post-Wolffian aesthetics being developed by Alexander Baumgarten and his follower Georg Friedrich Meier. Most importantly, perhaps, Lessing was acquainted with Moses Mendelssohn, to whose work his own philosophical writings bear many similarities and who read and commented on Lessing’s aesthetic writings. But Lessing cannot be identified with any of these philosophical sources and influences. His work retains many rationalist presuppositions, but Lessing also consciously sought a more inductive approach. He adhered to neoclassical standards with respect to beauty and the application of rules of art, but severely qualified those standards by justifying them empirically and appealing to emotional effects rather than to ideal forms or Cartesian clarity. Lessing’s aesthetics must be inferred from his work, particularly from his Laocoon, some of the numbers of the Hamburg Dramaturgy, and to a lesser extent from short works such as ‘How the Ancients Represented Death’ and the letter of 26 May 1769 to Friedrich Nikolai. What emerges is a sometimes inconsistent and fragmentary aesthetic, which one might describe as a critical rationalism.
Narrative
Authors: Currie Gregory 
Published: September 2018

Narrative, in its broadest sense, is the means by which a story is told, whether fictional or not, and regardless of medium. Novels, plays, films, historical texts, diaries and newspaper articles focus, in their different ways, on particular people and events and their relations; they are all narratives in the above sense. Accounts of mathematical, physical, economic or legal principles are not. A narrower sense of narrative requires the presence of a narrator mediating between the audience and the action, and contrasts with imitative discourse wherein the action is presented directly, as in drama. The boundary between narration narrowly construed and imitation is disputed, some writers arguing that the imitative (or ‘mimetic’) mode is simply one way of storytelling, and hence counts as a kind of narrative.
Theorists of narrative have mostly concentrated on narratives of the fictional kind and have developed a complex taxonomy of the various narrative devices, some of which are discussed in more detail below. Pressure has been placed on the distinction between historical and fictional narrative by those who believe that history is nothing distinct from the various and conflicting narrative versions we have. It has also been argued that value accrues to an agent’s life and acts when those acts conform to a conception of that life as exemplifying narrative.
Nature, aesthetic appreciation of
Authors: Carlson Allen 
Published: September 2018

In the Western world, aesthetic appreciation of nature and its philosophical investigation came to fruition in the eighteenth century. During that time, aestheticians made nature the ideal object of aesthetic experience and analysed that experience in terms of disinterestedness, thereby laying the groundwork for understanding the appreciation of nature in terms of the sublime and the picturesque. This philosophical tradition reached its zenith with Kant, while popular aesthetic appreciation of nature continued primarily in terms of the picturesque.
In the late twentieth century, renewed interest in the aesthetics of nature has produced various positions designed to avoid assimilating appreciation of nature with traditional models for aesthetic appreciation of art. Three are especially noteworthy. The first holds that the appreciation of nature is not in fact aesthetic; the second rejects the traditional analysis of aesthetic experience as disinterested, arguing instead that the aesthetic appreciation of nature involves engagement with nature; the third attempts to maintain the traditional analysis, while distinguishing aesthetic appreciation of nature by dependence on scientific knowledge.
These positions have a number of ramifications. In freeing aesthetic appreciation of nature from artistic models, they pave the way for a general environmental aesthetics comparable to other areas of philosophy, such as environmental ethics. Moreover, the significance given to scientific knowledge in the third position both explains the aesthetic appreciation associated with environmentalism and provides aesthetic appreciation of nature with a degree of objectivity that may make aesthetic considerations more effectual in environmental assessment.
Nature, aesthetic appreciation of
Authors: Carlson Allen 
Published: September 2018

In the Western world, aesthetic appreciation of nature and its philosophical investigation came to maturity in the eighteenth century. During that time, aestheticians found in nature an ideal object of aesthetic experience and analysed that experience in terms of disinterestedness, thereby laying the groundwork for understanding the appreciation of nature in terms of the concepts of the sublime and the picturesque. This philosophical tradition culminated with Kant, while popular aesthetic appreciation of nature continued primarily under the influence of the idea of the picturesque.
In the late twentieth century, renewed interest in the aesthetics of nature has produced various positions designed to avoid assimilating appreciation of nature to traditional models for aesthetic appreciation of art. One extreme position holds that the appreciation of nature is not in fact aesthetic, while another rejects the traditional analysis of aesthetic experience as disinterested, arguing instead that the aesthetic appreciation of nature involves engagement with nature. Other positions attempt to maintain much of the traditional conception of the aesthetic, while distinguishing aesthetic appreciation of nature from that of art by appeal to the unique character of the object of appreciation, stressing dimensions such as nature’s capacity for emotional arousal, its mysterious qualities, the role of imagination in its appreciation, the freedom that its appreciation allows, or the dependence of its appreciation on scientific knowledge.
These positions have a number of ramifications. In freeing the aesthetic experience of nature from artistic models, they focus appreciation on the true character of the object of appreciation: nature itself and its properties. This significance given to the character of the object of appreciation secures connections with the appreciation of nature associated with environmentalism. In addition, some of these positions attempt to provide aesthetic appreciation of nature with a degree of objectivity that may make aesthetic considerations more effective in environmental assessment. Moreover, the contemporary work in the aesthetics of nature helps to pave the way for a general environmental aesthetics comparable to other areas of philosophy, such as environmental ethics.
Opera, aesthetics of
Authors: Tanner Michael 
Published: September 2018

Opera, which may be defined as a dramatic action set in large part to music, is an inherently unstable art form, more so than any other. It has been characteristic of its practitioners and critics to call it periodically to order, in idioms which vary but carry much the same message: the music exists to further the drama. This has often been taken to be a matter of settling the priority of two elements: music and text. But in fact three are involved: music, text and plot (or action).
Opera began very abruptly in Northern Italy at the end of the sixteenth century, partly as the result of discussions about its possibility. To begin with, familiar Greek myths were employed, set in the vernacular, with simple accompaniments so that every word could be heard. This led to pre-eminence for the singers and for spectacle. After each wave of excess – vocal prowess, dance interludes, stilted plots and texts, then once again, in the nineteenth century, empty display, and later gargantuan orchestras – there was a movement of revolt. Philosophers rarely took part in these aesthetic disputes, most of them being uninterested in music, and possibly more relevantly, being uninterested in any subject which can only be studied in historical terms. But it is fruitless to think about opera apart from its manifestations; every great operatic composer makes his own treaty between the potentially warring elements, Wagner being the most passionate propagandist for his own conception. In the twentieth century the aesthetics of opera have become pluralistic, as has, to an unprecedented degree, the form itself. The perpetual danger is that opera should degenerate into entertainment, and it is always the same message that recalls it to its original function – one which most spectators and listeners are happy to ignore: opera is a form of drama.
Poetry
Authors: Shusterman Richard M. 
Published: September 2018

Though poetry today seems a relatively marginal topic in philosophy, it was crucial for philosophy’s own initial self-definition. In ancient Greece, poetry was revered as the authoritative expression of sacred myth and traditional wisdom. With Socrates and Plato, philosophy began by distinguishing itself from poetry as a new, superior form of knowledge which could provide better guidance for life and even superior pleasure. Just as the sophists were attacked for relativism and deception, so were poets stridently criticized for irrationality and falsehood. For Plato, not only did poetry stem from and appeal to the emotional, unreasoning aspects of human nature; it was also far removed from truth, being only an imitation of our world of appearances which itself was but an imitation of the real world of ideas or forms. He therefore insisted that poets be banished from his ideal state because they threatened its proper governance by reason and philosophy.
Subsequent philosophy of poetry has been devoted to overcoming Plato’s condemnatory theory, while tending to confirm philosophy’s superiority. This task, begun by Aristotle, was for a long time pursued primarily under Plato’s general model of poetry (and indeed all art) as imitation or mimesis. The main strategy here was to argue that what poetry imitates or represents is more than mere superficial appearance, but rather general essences or the ideas themselves. For such theories, poetry’s relation to truth is crucial. Other theories were later developed that preferred to define and justify poetry in terms of formal properties or expression, or its distinctively beneficial effects on its audience. These strategies became increasingly influential from the time of Romanticism, but can be traced back to more ancient sources.
The vast majority of theories follow Plato in treating poetry as a distinct domain, separate from and subordinate to philosophy. But since Romanticism, some have argued for the essential unity of these two enterprises. Great philosophy is here seen as the poetic creation of new ways of thinking and new forms of language, while the role of poetry as uniting and gathering things together so that the truth and presence of being shines forth.
Feminist aesthetics
Authors: Korsmeyer Carolyn 
Published: September 2018

Feminist perspectives in aesthetics and philosophy of art have emerged not only from the discipline of philosophy but also from cognate fields such as literary theory, film studies and art history. Like other feminist philosophy, feminist aesthetics is founded upon critiques of fundamental assumptions that have traditionally governed this area of study. Such staple concepts as aesthetic value, disinterested attention, aesthetic perception and fine art have been analysed for biased perspectives that explicitly or covertly favour masculine gender.
Gender bias has been located, for example, in theories of aesthetic attention and appreciation. Feminist analyses have speculated that the traditional, ideal, ‘disinterested’ aesthetic perceiver covertly stands in a position of masculine privilege encouraging desire and control of the object of contemplation. Calling attention to the masculine position of the perceiver goes hand in hand with analyses of visual arts and literature that focus on their representations of gender – formalist interpretive methods that ignore the portrayal of women and sexuality have been especially criticized. The paucity of female artists on lists of acknowledged geniuses and the relative absence of their work from canons of art has occasioned speculation that the concept of art itself is biased in so far as it excludes the creations of most women.
Feminist analyses stress the social contexts within which theories develop. Not only do concepts basic to aesthetics manifest ideas about gender that derive from formative traditions, but notions of beauty and art are themselves influential components of culture and contribute to the shape and perpetuation of gender roles.
Environmental aesthetics
Authors: Carlson Allen 
Published: September 2018

Environmental aesthetics is one of the major new areas of aesthetics to have emerged in the last part of the twentieth century. It focuses on philosophical issues concerning appreciation of the world at large as it is constituted not simply by particular objects but also by environments themselves. In this way environmental aesthetics goes beyond the appreciation of art to the aesthetic appreciation of both natural and human environments.
The development of environmental aesthetics has been influenced by eighteenth-century landscape aesthetics as well as by two recent factors: the exclusive focus of twentieth-century philosophical aesthetics on art and the public concern for the aesthetic condition of environments that developed in the second half of that century.
Both factors have broadened the scope of environmental aesthetics beyond that of traditional aesthetics, and both have helped to set the central philosophical issues of the field, which are due in large measure to the differences between the nature of the object of appreciation of environmental aesthetics, the world at large, and the nature of art. These differences are so marked that environmental aesthetics must begin with most basic questions, such as ‘what’ and ‘how’ to appreciate.
These questions have generated a number of different philosophical positions, which are typically classified as either noncognitive or cognitive approaches. Positions of the first type stress various kinds of emotional and feeling-related states and responses, which are taken to be the more noncognitive dimensions of aesthetic experience. By contrast, positions of the second type contend that appreciation must be guided by the nature of objects of appreciation and thus that knowledge about their origins, types and properties is necessary for serious, appropriate aesthetic appreciation.
Each of these two kinds of approach has certain strengths and weaknesses. However, recent work in environmental aesthetics, especially in the aesthetics of human environments and everyday life, demonstrates that although different in emphasis, they are not in direct conflict. When conjoined, they advocate bringing together feeling and knowing, which is the core of serious aesthetic experience and which, when achieved in aesthetic appreciation of different environments of the world at large, demonstrates just how rewarding such appreciation can be.
South Slavs, philosophy of
Authors: Lazovic Zivan , Pavkovic Aleksandar 
Published: September 2018

Philosophy as a distinct intellectual activity emerged in the coastal towns of the Adriatic during the Renaissance. Philosophers from this area wrote in Latin and taught philosophy in Italy, Germany and Austria. The first popular philosophical works in the vernacular did not appear until late in the eighteenth century, and it was almost one hundred years later that the first chairs in logic and philosophy were founded in the universities. Academic philosophy, usually derived from German or British models, was thus brought into the intellectual life of South Slavs. Local academic philosophers, mostly educated in Germany, brought home a variety of philosophical approaches, and by the early twentieth century many schools of thought flourished: Neo-Kantianism flourished in Beograd, while Neo-Thomism was particularly strong in Ljubljana and Zagreb (until 1941 the Meinongian phenomenological approach also flourished in Ljubljana). In their quest for originality, local philosophers constructed various eclectic philosophical systems.
The Soviet Marxism-Leninism, imposed in all Yugoslav universities after 1945, was replaced in the late 1950s by a Neo-Marxist approach based on the concept of praxis. This was a concept of a purposeful human activity which, among other things, results in social change (for example, the development of socialism). These Neo-Marxists engaged in vigorous debates on the nature of truth and knowledge, on human freedom, alienation, socialism and humanism as well as on social and political issues. Their work reached an international audience through the international journal Praxis, published in Zagreb, and through their international summer school of philosophy at Korčula. As their support for the Yugoslav communist regime turned into open criticism, the regime halted the publication of Praxis and in 1974 forced the Beograd Neo-Marxists from their teaching posts.
The Neo-Marxist interest in non-Marxist philosophy facilitated the reception of various non-Marxist approaches. From the early 1960s, existentialism, structuralism, hermeneutics and phenomenology – in particular the philosophy of Heidegger – exerted considerable influence on Neo-Marxists as well as on philosophers who had gradually abandoned this approach. In the early 1970s, a younger generation of thinkers in Beograd, Zagreb, Ljubljana and Zadar developed an interest in analytic philosophy. Since that time no approach or trend in philosophy has emerged as the dominant one in any of the academic centres in the countries which were formerly part of Yugoslavia.
Being
Authors: Okrent Mark 
Published: September 2018

Although ‘being’ has frequently been treated as a name for a property or special sort of entity, it is generally recognized that it is neither. Therefore, questions concerning being should not be understood as asking about the nature of some object or the character of some property. Rather, such questions raise a variety of problems concerning which sorts of entities there are, what one is saying when one says that some entity is, and the necessary conditions on thinking of an entity as something which is.
At least four distinct questions concerning being have emerged in the history of philosophy: (1) Which things are there? (2) What is it to be? (3) Is it ever appropriate to treat ‘is’ as a predicate, and, if not, how should it be understood? (alternatively, is existence a property?) (4) How is it possible to intend that something is? Twentieth-century discussions of being in the analytic tradition have focused on the first and third questions. Work in the German tradition, especially that of Martin Heidegger, has emphasized the fourth.
Communicative rationality
Authors: Dews Peter 
Published: September 2018

The concept of ‘communicative rationality’ is primarily associated with the work of the philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas. According to Habermas, communication through language necessarily involves the raising of ‘validity-claims’ (distinguished as ‘truth’, ‘rightness’ and ‘sincerity’), the status of which, when contested, can ultimately only be resolved through discussion. Habermas further contends that speakers of a language possess an implicit knowledge of the conditions under which such discussion would produce an objectively correct result, and these he has spelled out in terms of the features of an egalitarian ‘ideal speech situation’. Communicative rationality refers to the capacity to engage in argumentation under conditions approximating to this ideal situation (‘discourse’, in Habermas’ terminology), with the aim of achieving consensus.
Habermas relies on the concept of communicative rationality to argue that democratic forms of social organization express more than simply the preferences of a particular cultural and political tradition. In his view, we cannot even understand a speech-act without taking a stance towards the validity-claim it raises, and this stance in turn anticipates the unconstrained discussion which would resolve the status of the claim. Social and political arrangements which inhibit such discussion can therefore be criticized from a standpoint which does not depend on any specific value-commitments, since for Habermas achieving agreement (Verständigung) is a ‘telos’ or goal which is internal to human language as such. A similar philosophical programme has also been developed by Karl-Otto Apel, who lays more stress on the ‘transcendental’ features of the argumentation involved.