There are many prominent examples of artists with autism. However, even when confronted with evidence of these accomplished "autistic savants", pragmatic aesthetic theories cannot adequately account for the work of these accomplished artists as "artists". This article first examines the nature of autism and explores a prominent psychological…

Aesthetics is not a subject usually associated with North Korea in Western scholarship, the usual tropes being autocracy, counterfeiting, drugs, human-rights abuse, famine, nuclear weapons, party-military dictatorship, Stalinism, and totalitarianism. Where the arts are concerned, they are typically seen as crude political propaganda. One British…

The practice of make-believe has traditionally been viewed as valuable by psychologists and philosophers more or less exclusively as a mechanism for social initiation, a tool for everyday problem solving, or a method for children to learn about adult responsibilities. This instrumentalist approach has influenced the development of a wide variety…

The sublime has been a relatively neglected topic in recent work in philosophical aesthetics, with existing discussions confined mainly to problems in Kant's theory. Given the revival of interest in his aesthetic theory and the influence of the Kantian sublime compared to other eighteenth-century accounts, this focus is not surprising. Kant's…

In this article is presented the first translation into English of Lev Vygotsky's text entitled "Contemporary Psychology and Art: Toward a Debate." This text was published in the influential monthly journal Sovietskoe Iskusstvo (Soviet Art) in 1927-1928. Therefore, the translated text presents some of the Vygotsky's seminal thought on aesthetics…

Berys Gaut has recently defended a theory according to which a moral defect of a work of art represents an aesthetic defect of the work itself. This theory, called ethicism, has been criticized by Matthew Kieran, who argued that, on the contrary, in certain cases moral defects can increase the artistic value of artworks. In this essay I clarify…

A clear-cut concept of the aesthetic is elusive. Kant's "Critique of Judgment" presents one of the more comprehensive aesthetic theories from which one can extract a set of features, some of which pertain to aesthetic experience and others to the logical structure of aesthetic judgment. When considered together, however, these features present a…

There are indications of a positive trend in education. International comparative investigations on academic achievement and longitudinal studies on life courses prove the need for and the importance of children's high intellectual knowledge. At the same time, new research initiatives and projects comply with the demand that aesthetic/cultural…

In an interview titled "The Janus-Face of Politicized Art," Jacques Ranciere describes his methodology as follows: "I always try to think in terms of horizontal distributions, combinations between systems of possibilities, not in terms of surface and substratum. Where one searches for the hidden beneath the apparent, a position of…

Monroe C. Beardsley's "Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism," published in 1958 by Harcourt, Brace and World Inc., was a watershed event in the history of analytic aesthetics--a climax of sorts with respect to what preceded it and, at the same time, the opening of a new, more intricately developed and defended research program in…

This essay examines recent arguments for a return to philology as the basis of humanistic inquiry and liberal-arts education. It considers how philology's disciplinary heritage is inflected by economic and racial privileges and explores avenues for the liberation of philology from these legacies. The past and present entanglements of philology and…

The year 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of John Dewey's birth and also the 75th anniversary of the publication of his aesthetic masterpiece "Art as Experience"--a book that has been extremely influential within the field of aesthetics, not only in philosophical aesthetics and aesthetic education but also in the arts themselves. In this essay,…

Both John Dewey and Martin Heidegger thought that art's audience had to take a detour in order to appreciate or understand a work of art. They wrote about this around the same time (mid-1930s) and independently of one another, so this similar circumstance in the history of aesthetics is unusual since they come from very different philosophical…

There is a despondency and desperation about schools, and thereby curriculum, that too often fails to teach for and about something more than narrow, capitalist-driven, techno-rationalist ends. The prevailing educational theory undergirding schools, as well as the conceptualization of curriculum entailed, lacks an aesthetic and spiritual rationale…

In this article, the author attempts to develop a definition of "interactivity" that meets two sometimes incompatible goals: the definition should be in accord with the best intuitions on how the term should be used, and it should usefully differentiate interactivity from related but incompatible concepts with which it is often confused. The…