2025/01/20 by Keith Chan · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Neuroscience · Psychology · #Aesthetic Perception and Analysis #Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics #Philosophy and Theoretical Science
paper · doi:10.1093/aesthj/ayae045
openalex publication_date 2025/01/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
In Essays on Beauty & the Arts (2023) (‘Essays’), Dominic McIver Lopes has unearthed something of a champion for his ongoing mission to rejuvenate analytic aesthetics. ‘The history of analytic aesthetics’, Lopes declares, ‘is dominated by writing on Kant and, to a lesser extent, David Hume. … We badly need to excavate alternatives to the tradition of Hume and Kant’ (p. xvi). As tall of an order this already is, the height of Lopes’s hopes for Bolzano appears to reach further still—‘Perhaps Bolzano can do for aesthetics what Mill and Kant do for ethics’ (p. xxv). While the jury is still out on whether Bolzano can fill those shoes, what is clear is that Lopes succeeds at making a tantalizing case on Bolzano’s behalf. On the one hand, Bolzano’s remarkable affinity with contemporary strands of thought speaks for itself. Despite writing from the nineteenth-century, Bolzano predicted abstract paintings that would only debut in the late twentieth-century (p. xxvi). He even anticipated that paintings composed of ‘uniform fields of color could not succeed unless they also evoked some intellectual content’ (p. 23). Furthermore, his inclusion of philosophy (p. 100), speeches, and parades (p. 130) in his taxonomy of fine arts puts him out of step even with today’s mainstream, as ‘debates still rage about what activities or practices count as arts: Photography? Video games? … Food?’ (p. 5).