Given at a symposium on environmental aesthetics in China and the West.

Environmental concerns have a global scope, yet different cultural traditions, philosophical cultures, and conditions of life influence the way we understand experience and environment. A similar understanding of the central ideas is needed for cooperative action on environmental issues to be effective. The first part of this essay is conceptual…[Read more]

Aesthetics is fundamentally a theory of sensible experience. Its scope has expanded greatly from centering on the arts and scenic nature to the full range of appreciative experience. Expanding the range of aesthetics raises challenging questions about the experience of appreciation. Traditional accounts are inadequate to identify and illuminate…[Read more]

The idea of environment as an all-inclusive context is central to an ecological understanding. In such a conception, humans are wholly interdependent with natural forces and other organic and inorganic objects, and this applies to urban environments as well as to so-called natural ones. Further, introducing an aesthetic dimension into an…[Read more]

This essay discusses dance film and video dance. The first was born of the manifold possibilities of chemical technology, while the second exploits the rich resources of digital technology and its freedom from material constraints. Now wholly in digital form, both technologies offer new possibilities for the dance arts by developing and enhancing…[Read more]

As the range of the aesthetic has expanded to cover not only a wider range of objects and situations of daily life but to encompass the negative. This includes terrorism, whose aesthetic impact is central to its use as a political tactic. The complex of positive and negative aesthetic values in terrorism are explored, introducing the concept of…[Read more]

Aesthetic engagement is the central concept of an aesthetic theory that came as an alternative to the aesthetic disinterestedness of traditional aesthetics. It emerged in response to developments in the contemporary arts that emphasized the direct involvement of an active appreciator in the art object, overcoming the customary separation between…[Read more]

This article examines the implications for aesthetic theory of using music as a model. It pursues the question of what would follow from using music as the paradigm of art in general. How would we project an aesthetics, so to say, if we used music as our model by beginning and ending with the perceptual experience of music? This would lead to…[Read more]

Thoreau’s descriptions of natural phenomena display the care and acuteness of scientific observation, and this may have overshadowed recognition of his aesthetic sensibility. The perceptual details of Thoreau’s observations are pervaded by a sensitive appreciation of natural beauty. Moreover, the aesthetic in his account consists not only in the…[Read more]

Ecology has become a popular conceptual model in numerous fields of inquiry and it seems especially appropriate for environmental philosophy. Apart from its literal employment in biology, ecology has served as a useful metaphor that captures the interdependence of factors in a field of research. At the same time as ecology is suggestive, it…[Read more]

This essay traces the steps to a social aesthetics. I begin by affirming the central place of sense experience for aesthetics and its refinement in the perceptual acuity of a developed sensibility. This leads to associating aesthetic appreciation with such perceptual experience. Rejecting the identification of disinterestedness with such…[Read more]

A discussion on various theories of art and a proposal that these theories are a surrogate for aesthetic experience.

The Cartesian method is an admirable instance of the constant endeavor of philosophy to cut through received opinion by deliberately establishing a sounder basis for belief through specifying its grounds more completely. In this, Descartes is part of the great tradition of reconstructive analysis from Socrates, through Kant, to Dewey. That…[Read more]

The business practices of multinational corporations raise many provocative moral issues and offer a touchstone for some fundamental ethical concepts. This essay identifies a wide range of problems but centers on the matter of consistency in corporate policy between foreign and domestic practices and the kind of generality of standards that is…[Read more]

Introduction to a collection of essays that were the result of a series of seminars that took place between 1977-1980 on “Value Decisions in Business Management.”

A discussion/ response/ critique of “Art and Its Spectators,” (JAAC, XLV/1 (Fall 1886), 5-17), by David Carrier.

While this essay does not deal explicitly with the relation between eastern and western aesthetics, its choice of theme seizes on a dimension of art which, perhaps more than any other, spans both traditions. Indeed intuition, as it is developed in the discussion that follows, can be taken as the characteristic feature of much oriental art,…[Read more]

The aesthetic analysis of everyday life has developed an important body of work whose significance extends beyond the academy. Because of its ubiquity in experience, aesthetic sensibility has many manifestations, both overt and concealed. This paper examines some largely hidden ways in which taste and aesthetic judgment, which are manifested in…[Read more]