Contemplating Art

by Levinson, Jerrold

• ISBN13: 9780199206179
• ISBN10: 0199206171
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-12-28
• Publisher: Clarendon Press

Summary

Contemplating Art is a compendium of writings from the last ten years by one of the leading figures in aesthetics, Jerrold Levinson. The twenty-four essays range over issues in general aesthetics and those relating to specific arts--in particular music, film, and literature. It will appeal not only to philosophers but also to musicologists, literary theorists, art critics, and reflective lovers of the arts.

Author Biography

Jerrold Levinson is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park. His publications include Music, Art, and Metaphysics (1990), The Pleasures of Aesthetics (1998), and Music in the Moment (1998). He is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (2003) and co-editor of Aesthetic Concepts (2001). He is Past President of the American Society for Aesthetics and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Aesthetics. His work is widely anthologized and translated into various languages.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
Art
The Irreducible Historicality of the Concept of Art	p. 13
Artworks as Artifacts	p. 27
Emotion in Response to Art	p. 38
Elster on Artistic Creativity	p. 56
Music
Sound, Gesture, Space, and the Expression of Emotion in Music	p. 77
Musical Expressiveness as Hearability-as-Expression	p. 91
Nonexistent Artforms and the Case of Visual Music	p. 109
Music as Narrative and Music as Drama	p. 129
Film Music and Narrative Agency	p. 143
Evaluating Music	p. 184
Musical Thinking	p. 209
Musical Chills	p. 220
Pictures
Wollheim on Pictorial Representation	p. 239
What is Erotic Art?	p. 252
Erotic Art and Pornographic Pictures	p. 259
Interpretation
Two Notions of Interpretation	p. 275
Who's Afraid of a Paraphrase?	p. 288
Hypothetical Intentionalism: Statement, Objections, and Replies	p. 302
Aesthetic Properties
Aesthetic Properties, Evaluative Force, and Differences of Sensibility	p. 315
What Are Aesthetic Properties?	p. 336
History
Schopenhauer's Aesthetics	p. 355
Hume's Standard of Taste: The Real Problem	p. 366
Other Matters
The Concept of Humor	p. 389
Intrinsic Value and the Notion of a Life	p. 400
Index	p. 419
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