Intersections of Value Art, Nature, and the Everyday

Intersections of Value investigates the universal human need for aesthetic experience. It examines three appreciative contexts where aesthetic value plays a central role: art, nature, and the everyday. However, no important appreciative context or practice is completely centered on a single value. Hence, the book explores the way the aesthetic interacts with moral, cognitive, and functional values in these contexts. The account of aesthetic appreciation is complemented by analyses of the cognitive and ethical value of art, the connection between environmental ethics and aesthetics, and the degree to which the aesthetic value of everyday artefacts derives from their basic practical functions. Robert Stecker devotes special attention to art as an appreciative context because it is an especially rich arena where different values interact. There is an important connection between artistic value and aesthetic value, but it is a mistake to reduce the former to the latter. Rather, artistic value should be seen as complex and pluralistic, composed not only of aesthetic but also ethical, cognitive, and art-historical values.

Robert Stecker, Professor of Philosophy, Central Michigan University

Robert Stecker is Professor of Philosophy at Central Michigan University. He is the author of Artworks: Meaning, Definition, Value (1996), Interpretation and Construction: Art, Speech and the Law (2003), and Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (2010). He is currently co-editor of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

1. Introduction
Part I: Two Kinds of Value: The Aesthetic and The Artistic
2. What is Aesthetic Value?
3. Why Artistic Value is not Aesthetic Value
4. Two Definitions of Artistic Value
Part II: Interacting Values in Art
5. Aesthetic Value, Inversion, and the Ethical Properties of Artworks
6. Literature as Thought
Part III: The Aesthetics of Nature and the Everyday
7. The Fundamental Problem of Environmental Aesthetics
8. Moral norms and Nature Appreciation
9. Artefacts: Function and Appreciation
10. Concluding Remarks