Publications
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In Existential Aesthetics, edited by Antony Aumann and Hans Maes (London: Bloomsbury Academic)
When faced with sudden public tragedies, wars, or pandemics we often feel like we are suddenly ‘living through history.’ In this paper, I attempt to understand what might meant when we issue such a statement, and how aesthetic artifacts are often central to helping us express these abrupt shift in experience. I claim that we experience the present as history when we become aware of the ways our intersecting interpretations of the past and future shape what we take to be meaningful in the present. Looking at philosophical accounts of memorial art, I argue that these help us to understand how aesthetic objects play an important role in helping us to record and share this change in existential outlook.
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Co-Authored with Karen Simecek and Andrew Cooper
The Journal of Philosophy of Education
In this article we examine the potential of writing and performing poetry to empower young people from marginalized backgrounds to participate in the political life of their communities. Our method combines philosophical analysis with the design and implementation of a poetry workshop in Coventry. Drawing on Cavell’s notion of ‘acknowledgement’, we begin with a philosophical account of the pedagogy that informed the workshop’s design. We then explore how this account informed implementation of the workshop. Finally, we present the results. To unpack the significance of our findings, we examine two poems performed by young people at the project’s concluding event. On empirical and philosophical grounds, we argue that writing and performing poetry can play a role in political education, for it opens space for what we call ‘the acknowledgement of voice’.
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Synthese
Published Version (Open Access)
Within the philosophy of art, aesthetic cognitivists aim to understand how artworks can improve our epistemic standing and how this affects our grasp of their artistic value. Social epistemologists have argued that we often improve our epistemic standing by depending upon the cognitive agency of others. Drawing upon these arguments, I argue that accounting for varieties of social epistemic and zetetic dependency is sometimes integral to explaining epistemic and artistic achievements within the arts. I demonstrate this by showing how inquiry in the arts can be a collective endeavour pursued by many different parties, from the creators of art to its audiences to those who mediate between artists and appreciators. I conclude by outlining several new directions of study that a thoroughly social approach to aesthetic cognitivism can open.
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Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics
Published Version (Open Access)
Contemporary art is a category that can admit art made in any medium, form, genre, and style. However, this unprecedented heterogeneity can make it difficult to understand what makes contemporary art distinct from other kinds of art. In this article, I aim to provide an account of what makes art contemporary. I develop my position by focussing on philosophy of contemporary art emerging from the so-called analytic tradition. I argue that though these philosophers have reckoned with many of the puzzles posed by contemporary art’s heterogeneity, they fail to provide compelling theories of what makes art contemporary. In response, I propose that the best way to understand what makes an artwork contemporary is by understanding how it attempts to grapple with the issues of its own historical condition of ‘contemporaneity.’
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The British Journal of Aesthetics
Published Version (Open Access)
After viewing a painting, reading a novel, or seeing a film, audiences often feel that they improve their cognitive standing on the world beyond the canvas, page, or screen. To learn from art in this way, I argue, audiences must employ high degrees of epistemic autonomy and creativity, engaging in a process I call ‘insight through art’. Some have worried that insight through art uses audience achievements to explain an artwork’s cognitive and artistic value, thereby failing to properly appreciate the cognitive and artistic achievements of artists. I move against this worry by arguing that in order to learn via insight through art, audiences must collaborate with artists, sharing the labour and credit for the cognitive achievements they co-produce. I claim this co-productive outlook reveals that our appreciation of art’s cognitive and artistic value involves far more audience participation than has hitherto been realized.
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The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
Published Version (Open Access)
Activist artists often face a difficult question: is striving to change the world undermined when pursued through difficult and experimental artistic means? Looking closely at Adrian Piper's Four Intruders plus Alarm Systems (1980), I consider why this is an important concern for activist art, and assess three different responses in relation to Piper’s work. What I call the conciliatory stance recommends that when activist artists encounter misunderstanding, they should downplay their experimental artistry in favor of fitting their work to their audience's appreciative capacities. What I call the steadfast stance recommends that activist artists have reason to use their privilege of artistic exceptionalism to challenge their audience's expectations, even if this leads to misunderstanding. I argue that a middle position that I call liberal conciliation best balances the demands for actual change placed on activism and the experimental means that artists bring to activism.
In Progress
Please email for drafts
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Aesthetic cognitivists argue that there is a close relation between an artwork’s cognitive value and its aesthetic value. Typically, they achieve this by demonstrating how experiencing the aesthetic features of an artwork alters our understanding of a particular aspect of the world. In this article, I argue that, due to the collaborative nature of inquiry in the arts, artworks often prompt audiences to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of their own acts of inquiring. I provide an account of how one can aesthetically experience their own cognitive agency, and I demonstrate how clarifying this aspect of art appreciation can help us better grasp the value of artworks.
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Co-Authored with Hans Maes
Philosophers regularly study philosophical issues raised by the arts. They also sometimes propose that artworks can do philosophy. However, philosophers have not questioned how exactly philosophy might directly help artists create art. We call this ‘philosophy for the arts’, and in this article we aim to give an outline of what this intellectual and practical project might look like, how it might relate to other kinds of philosophical engagement with art, and how it can reveal tacit assumptions guiding the standard methods of philosophical engagement with art.
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Many people think that art delivers us philosophical insights. In this article, I advance a novel way to articulate this idea. I propose that artists and audiences often seem to be interested in coming to better understand broad topics and subject matters. This requires them to see the connections between their commitments and to wield them to improve their epistemic standing. Philosophers call this holistic, active kind of epistemic achievement ‘objectual understanding.’ However, I argue that audiences can’t just acquire understanding from art; rather, art encourages them to understand the world for themselves. I argue that this gives us a new way to see how art can be philosophical. I claim that the epistemic goal of philosophy is not just to learn other people’s theories, but to get others to engage in the activity of reasoning for themselves to improve their objectual understanding of philosophical topics. Given art’s capacity to encourage active inquiry, we should assess its philosophical value not by its ability to convey theories to us, but rather its ability to get us to engage in the activity of philosophising.
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When making aesthetic judgements, we often describe the objects of our judgements using terms like ‘nostalgic’, ‘fashionable’, ‘unfashionable’, ‘anachronistic’, ‘retro’, ‘vintage’, ‘futuristic’, ‘progressive’, ‘traditional’, ‘urgent’, ‘timely’, ‘topical’, and ‘timeless.’ I argue that these terms constitute a distinct class of aesthetic concepts. When we use these terms, we do more than just express the sensory and affective impact of an artifact. We also issue a judgement on the particular interpretation of the relationship between past, present, and future that we take the artifact to express: what I call its ‘historicity.’ In some cases, I claim we also reach for these terms to express a comparison between the historicity the artifact expresses and our own sense of our place in history. When we enter into debates with others about whether or not an artifact is fashionable, nostalgic, or timeless, and whether it should be praised or criticised for being so, I claim that we are engaging in an aesthetic discourse with a hitherto overlooked existential urgency. We are doing nothing less than trying to take a stand on the meaningfulness of history.
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Across our lives, we often cultivate deep aesthetic enthusiasm for objects for only a short time, then move on permanently. Call these ‘transient tastes.’ This article questions whether actively pursuing transience is consistent with pursuing aesthetic value. I propose that there is a strong preference in theories of aesthetic value for preferring stability over transience. Against this, I make the case for actively pursuing transience, arguing that it is a remedy to the alienating effects of timelessness and a route to grasping many under-appreciated goods of aesthetic life.