Category Archives: Aesthetics

Frank Allen: “The Other JQ: The Jazz Question”

Posted on August 17, 2018 by Max West

At Counter-Currents, Frank Allen has a very good essay on “The Other JQ: The Jazz Question”. As a big jazz fan myself (especially the harder East Coast style), I found this to be a very good orientation of the contours … Continue reading →

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The School of Arthur Danto

Posted on November 16, 2013 by Max West

In “The School of Arthur Danto”, Crispin Sartwell opines on the late Arthur Danto’s very influential philosophical aesthetics. (I never really warmed to Danto’s “institutional theory of art”, which surfs a bit too closely to relativism for my tastes.) Sartwell … Continue reading →

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Arthur Danto

Posted on October 28, 2013 by Max West

Arthur Danto, arguably the most influential philosopher of aesthetics of the last 50 years, has died at the age of 89. His approach to aesthetics took a Wittgensteinian turn, one which straddled the fence with relativism: In a 1964 essay … Continue reading →

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Art and the Ineffable

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Max West

Can great art, tapping into the deepest recesses of our collective psyches, serve up objective correlatives of the ‘ineffable’? The so-called ineffability question in philosophical aesthetics – can art convey or communicate ‘knowledge’ of a different kind than scientific (or … Continue reading →

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