Papers
The conference papers are only accessible via a password that is available to conference registrants and participants. Click on the titles below to access each participant's paper.
Amy Coplan (Cal State, Fullerton)
Feminist Final Girls: Why Horror Heroines Are Real Women and Not 'Dicks in Drag'
Nicholas Diehl (University of California, Davis)
Madolyn’s Baby and Madolyn’s Banana: Truth and Myth in Fiction in The Departed
The notion that films can do philosophical work in some way has caught the imagination of a number of philosophers in the last decade, and there appear to be a number of different ways that films do philosophical work. One of the appealing aspects of Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, at least for a philosopher, is that the film asks a thoughtful viewer to engage with philosophical questions in a couple of different ways. Most apparently, The Departed presents a world in which almost every character has a double and a dark mood of fatalism covers the proceedings; in such a world, the repeated question “What’s the difference?” takes on a number of meanings and generates a number of philosophical threads of thought. But what has intrigued me most about The Departed is the way in which the film forces a tension between the facts of the fictional world it presents and the storytelling with which it presents the fictional world. Interestingly, reflecting on this tension prompts a certain amount of self- reflection as well. I find that asking questions about the fictional world of The Departed very naturally leads to asking philosophical questions about ourselves and our own prejudices.
Jonathan Friday (Kent University, UK)
The Experience of Stillness and Motion in Still Photography
In a forthcoming paper available in draft form on his website, Kendall Walton explores the experience viewers have of photographs that represent their subject matter in motion, contrasting the features of this experience with that of photographs of static objects. At the heart of his argument is a puzzle, and a solution to it. The puzzle is how to explain how, since photographs representing their subject matter in motion depict momentary states of affairs, viewers can look at this brief moment for a period of time longer than the moment itself. This paper begins by tracing Walton’s arguments about the temporal properties of the experience of photographs depicting static and moving objects, making clear the force of the puzzle he presents and critically discussing his solution to that puzzle. It is argued that the puzzle is more apparent than real, and an alternative account of the experience of photographs depicting their subject matter in motion is provided. Common ground with Walton’s argument is established, however, upon the point that there is an important distinction between viewer’s experience of photographs representing subjects in motion and photographs of static objects.
Ted Gracyk (Minnesota State, Moorhead)
Agreeably Astray: Imagination and Music
Abstract: Philosophy of art is largely a product of the eighteenth century. Throughout that century and into the next, philosophers who addressed the nature of art routinely detoured into a discussion of the essential function to the faculty of imagination. There was wide agreement that the pleasures of art were pleasures of the imagination. This thesis was thought to be especially important for instrumental music. So how does this thesis fare today? Imagination is receiving fresh attention as recent insights from cognitive psychology are applied to the aesthetics of narrative fiction. My paper applies this recent work in "cognitive imagination" to the aesthetics of music. Specifically, I compare two recent attempts to formulate a general theory of the imagination. I argue that some responses to music are best explained by treating imagination as nondoxastic inferential cognition, rather than as mental simulation. I then suggest ways in which the basic features of nondoxastic cognition explain additional features of musical experience.
Matthew Kieran (Leeds University, UK)
Satire and Black Comedy
Aaron Meskin (Leeds University, UK)
What Sort of Art is the Art of the Comic Book?
Not all comics are art. But what about those comics that are art—what sort of art are they? This paper focuses on the relationship between comics and literature. I present arguments that pull in opposing directions—there are considerations that favor treating some comics as literature, yet there are also important differences between comics and standard works of literature. I suggest that the beginning of a solution to this tension is to recognize that comics are a hybrid art form, and I clarify the notion of hybridity that I have in mind. I then briefly turn to the question of whether and why the literary and/or hybrid status of comics matters.
Michael Morgan (Indiana University)
Is Holocaust Film a Genre?
Alex Neill (University of Southampton, UK)
The Atheist's Passion: Religious Music and the Non-Believer
Henry Pratt (Marist College, USA)
Categories and Quality: Towards the Possibility of Legitimate Comparisons of Artworks
Attention to our critical practices reveals that we generally take evaluative comparisons of artworks within fine-grained categories to be legitimate. But some cases are more perplexing: is there any way that we can legitimately compare artworks that have only a very coarse-grained category in common, or that are completely different in category? After criticizing some views that purport to establish restrictions on such comparisons, I suggest that when we consider both the quantitative and the qualitative dimensions of artistic evaluation, we will see that legitimate comparisons, even of very different kinds of artworks, are possible.
Aaron Ridley (University of Southampton, UK)
Collingwood on Art and Craft: the Real Distinction
Michael Rings (Indiana University)
Covering “My Way”: Generic Resetting in Rock Cover Versions
The Sex Pistols cover Sinatra’s classic “My Way” as a punk rock rant. The Pet Shop Boys transform Elvis Presley’s country ballad “Always On My Mind” into a thumping piece of synth-pop. The group Nouvelle Vague specializes in performing ‘80’s new wave hits in the style of bossa nova. All of these examples demonstrate a musical practice I have dubbed “generic resetting”: the covering of a song in a genre other than that in which it appeared in its original recorded version. This is a fairly widespread practice within the rock music tradition (even more so in recent years), and has been deployed in service of a wide array of artistic stratagems, from the ridiculous to the sublime. What is it about hearing a familiar song “dressed up” in the clothes of a new genre that captures the interest of musicians and listeners alike? In my paper I offer a theory of generic resetting that I hope will provide at least the beginning of an answer to this question. Along the way, I hope to show that an inquiry into this practice serves to illuminate some interesting aspects of the rock music making tradition.
Tiger Roholt (Indiana University of Pennsylvania)
A Phenomenological Criticism of Diana Raffman's Account of Musical Nuance
Musical nuances—a.k.a. expressive variations—are pitches and time-values that are not captured in standard music notation; an example of a nuance is an A-natural that is slightly raised but not raised enough to be perceived as an A-sharp. The standard cognitivist view of nuances is Diana Raffman's; she takes nuances to be detectable but she claims that they are ineffable due to our inability to perceive them categorially. In this paper, I argue against this ineffability claim and the underlying phenomenology. I sketch an alternative view that presents nuances as gestaltembeddedperceptual properties (in doing so, I draw upon a non-musical example from Maurice Merleau-Ponty). The import of this criticism is that accepting an inadequate characterization of musical nuances will lead us to misdescribe them in performances and recordings; this is especially important in genres where recordings and performances carry significant weight, such as contemporary popular music. (This paper's considerations are relevant to characterizing the subtle perceptual properties in aesthetic experiences of other kinds of artworks but I do not consider other cases here.)
Sandy Shapshay (Indiana University)
A Genre that Really Matters: Schopenhauer on the Ethical Significance of Tragedy
Joshua Shaw (Penn State, Erie)
Video Games, Play, and the Games as Art Debate
The popularity of video games has steadily increased over the thirty- odd years of their existence. So far, however, they have received little attention from philosophers of art. One exception is Aaron Smuts, who persuasively argues in “Are Video Games Art?” that “by any major definition of art many modern video games should be considered art.” My aim is to defend Smuts's conclusion against critics whom he does not discuss in his essay. Smuts's audience is the philosophy of art community. There is an ongoing debate, however, among game theorists and designers over whether video games should be considered art, and the skeptics seem to have the upper hand. Many argue that it is misleading to associate video games with narrative. Video games are, first and foremost, games; they consist primarily of simulations and rule-based formal systems. Skeptics argue that the relationship between a player and a game differs from that between a reader/viewer of literature, film, or theater, and the affective responses that typify this relationship are too limited for games to qualify as art. I argue against this view in my paper. In particular, I argue that cognitive processes I associate with “play” are a necessary aspect of interacting with a game but that “play” is compatible with a broad range of affective response. Thus at least some games can elicit the range and depth of emotional response that would make it legitimate to consider them art.
Rachel Zuckert (Northwestern University, USA)
Herder's Aesthetics of Sculpture
In this paper, I discuss a little known treatment of sculpture in the history of aesthetics, which attempts to argue that sculpture has its own norms and provides its own type of aesthetic experience, by contrast to painting: that of Johann Gottfried Herder, in his work, "Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion's Creative Dream." Herder argues that sculpture is a distinctive artform because it is directed towards, and appreciated by, the sense of touch, rather than vision. I shall suggest that Herder's attempt to *define* sculpture as an artform by reference to the sense of touch is not successful, but that his arguments are useful for making salient distinctive aspects of (some) experience of sculpture, making connections between aesthetic theory and art critical discourse, and providing grounds for the articulation of an embodied aesthetics.
