Corpus evidence — top 10 passages

Most-relevant passages from the entire indexed corpus (67,286 paragraph chunks across YouTube transcripts, PubMed, arXiv, archive.org, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, OpenAlex, and more) ranked by semantic similarity (bge-small-en-v1.5).

1. 01 · blog0.788

   Since the critical principle expressed in premise 1 is open to counter-example, no matter what property we substitute for p, Isenberg concludes that we cannot plausibly interpret the critic as arguing for her verdict. Rather than defend the principle expressed in premise 1, Davies and Bender both posit alternative principles, consistent with the fact that no property is good-making in all artworks, which they ascribe to the critic. Davies proposes that we interpret the critic as arguing deductively from principles relativized to artistic type, that is, from principles holding that artworks of …

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/the-concept-of-the-aesthetic.md

2. 02 · blog0.784

   It is not difficult to find fault with these simple definitions. For example, possessing representational, expressive, and formal properties cannot be sufficient conditions, since, obviously, instructional manuals are representations, but not typically artworks, human faces and gestures have expressive properties without being works of art, and both natural objects and artifacts produced solely for homely utilitarian purposes have formal properties but are not artworks. The ease of these dismissals, though, serves as a reminder of the fact that classical definitions of art are significantly le…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/the-definition-of-art.md

3. 03 · blog0.781

   But since traditional metaphysics and epistemology are prime instances of language gone on conceptually confused holiday, definitions of art share in the conceptual confusions of traditional philosophy (Tilghman 1984). A third sort of argument, more historically inflected than the first, takes off from an influential study by the historian of philosophy Paul Kristeller, in which he argued that the modern system of the five major arts [painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and music] which underlies all modern aesthetics … is of comparatively recent origin and did not assume definite shape…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/the-definition-of-art.md

4. 04 · blog0.779

   In keeping with the conception of philosophy mentioned above, aesthetics was thought of as meta-criticism. “There would be no problems of aesthetics”, Beardsley says, “if no one ever talked about works of art…. We can’t do aesthetics until we have some critical statements to work on” ( Aesth: 1, 4]). Aesthetics is concerned with “the nature and basis of criticism,… just as criticism itself is concerned with works of art” ( Aesth: 6). The then-current and still widespread view that philosophy is a second-order, meta-level, and essentially linguistic activity, taking as its object of study the p…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/beardsley-s-aesthetics.md

5. 05 · blog0.778

   Both are the source of their own normativity, without being subject to any external law. Given that, they are appropriate for approximating the Absolute insofar as this approximation must be non-determining (applying no conditions), but normatively governed rather than arbitrary. Following Kant’s account of the genius, the romantics developed an understanding of the artist as, on the one hand, original and imaginative (rather than submitting to any law of nature or principle borrowed from the tradition of art), and, on the other hand, receptive to nature: “Every good poem must be wholly intent…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/19th-century-romantic-aesthetics.md

6. 06 · blog0.778

   The point is not that works of art never display any of these features; the point is that some works of art involve none of them, without its detracting from their status as art. Therefore the essence of art cannot have to do with any features correctly treated by a theory of craft. A pure case might be the poet for whom the poem simply comes to mind, unbidden, without its being written down or even said aloud. There is no distinction to be drawn between planning and execution in such a case, and none between actions as means and actions as ends. (If the poet had in mind something analogous to…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/collingwood-s-aesthetics.md

7. 07 · blog0.777

   It may seem odd to quote Aquinas at such length in an essay devoted to Aristotle’s categories, but I have done so for two reasons. First, as Ackrill’s and Furth’s comments illustrate, Aristotle’s scheme has been severely criticized by scholars and philosophers alike. Aquinas’s comments about quality, however, show that in the hands of a truly talented interpreter — and there certainly has been no interpreter of Aristotle greater than Aquinas — many of the criticisms can be met. Second, and more importantly, the attention that Aquinas gives to the category of quality is indicative of one of the…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/aristotle-s-categories.md

8. 08 · blog0.777

   Critics, like farmers and art suppliers, do very well without ontological inquiries; ontological questions don’t lurk in the background, waiting to be asked. In short, Beardsley’s meta-philosophical view that aesthetics is meta-criticism is underdetermined by the reasons that he advances for it, inaccurate or correct only if the term “meta-criticism” is stretched beyond its usual bounds, and belied to some extent by Beardsley’s own philosophic practice. All of that is not to deny, however, that a great deal of aesthetics can be profitably viewed as meta-critical, as a critical examination and …

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/beardsley-s-aesthetics.md

9. 09 · blog0.776

   Should the artwork be harmed, the being of the correlative is unaffected. Gadamer’s presentational aesthetics is, by contrast, in this regard profoundly anti-Platonic and anti-Kantian: for Gadamer a work’s disappearance diminishes the reality of that which presents itself through it. Although subject-matters transcend the individual works which embody them, they do not exist apart from their historical embodiments. Moreover, unlike Platonic forms, subject-matters do not transcend history but mutate and develop ever new permutations. Any diminishment of art diminishes the historical effectivene…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/gadamer-s-aesthetics.md

10. 10 · blog0.775

    ( NE IX 9.1170a8–11) The virtuous person rejoices in someone else’s performing a morally good act thanks to her knowledge of what virtue consists in. The pleasurable experience a musician gets from music is primarily a sensory one linked to her faculty of hearing, to be sure, but also derives, as in the case of morality, from her musical knowledge. In other words, having experience and knowledge of music, or any kind of art, allows one to be a good judge of music, or any kind of art —that is to say what we would call a person of “aesthetic” taste. The goal of building and transmitting such kno…

    blog/plato-stanford-edu/aristotle-s-aesthetics.md