Conversations on Art and Aesthetics

What is art? What counts as an aesthetic experience? Does art have to beautiful? Can one reasonably dispute about taste? What is the relation between aesthetic and moral evaluations? How to interpret a work of art? Can we learn anything from literature, film or opera? What is sentimentality? What is irony? How to think philosophically about architecture, dance, or sculpture? What makes something a great portrait? Is music representational or abstract? Why do we feel terrified when we watch a horror movie even though we know it to be fictional?

In Conversations on Art and Aesthetics, Hans Maes discusses these and other key questions in aesthetics with ten world-leading philosophers of art: Noel Carroll, Gregory Currie, Arthur Danto, Cynthia Freeland, Paul Guyer, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Jerrold Levinson, Jenefer Robinson, Roger Scruton, and Kendall Walton.

The exchanges are direct, open, and sharp, and give a clear account of these thinkers' core ideas and intellectual development. They also offer new insights into, and a deeper understanding of, contemporary issues in the philosophy of art.

Hans Maes, University of Kent

Hans Maes is Senior Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Art and Director of the Aesthetics Research Centre at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He has authored papers on a variety of subjects in aesthetics, including the role of intention in the interpretation of art, the notion of free beauty, and the relation between art and pornography. In 2010 he was elected President of the Dutch Society for Aesthetics. He is the editor of Art and Pornography: Philosophical Essays with Jerrold Levinson (OUP, 2012)