Professor Sonia Sedivy: Aesthetic Properties and Philosophy of Perception

Greg on Sedivy: "Sonia Sedivy works on the philosophy of art and the philosophy of perception. She is a professor in the department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. Her work is particularly informed by Wittgenstein and the work of John McDowell. In 2014 she published  Beauty and the End of Art: Wittgenstein, Plurality, and Perception (Bloomsbury)."

 

Talk abstract: Can we see aesthetic properties of artworks that depend on the historical category to which a work belongs?  I argue that we can.  Some recent discussions in the debate over what properties we can see or visually experience consider aesthetic properties.  I pose a more specific question – whether we see aesthetic properties that depend on the historical category to which a work belongs.  I focus only on some aesthetic properties of artworks – those that would typically be considered perceptible.  The central task of the paper is to argue that experience of some aesthetic properties of artworks requires grasp of the historical categories on which those properties depend and to show how this makes a difference for explaining perception.  The paper’s specific aim is to challenge two influential relational theories of perception, by Charles Travis (2004) and John Campbell (2002), that explain perception in terms of an ‘acquaintance-like’ relation that is independent of what one understands.  I use Kendall Walton (1970) and Arthur Danto’s (1981) arguments for the historical nature of artworks and at least some of their aesthetic properties to suggest that if these views are on the right track, then the approaches from Travis (2004) and Campbell (2002) cannot explain experience of such historical aesthetic properties.  This serves the more general aim of bringing aesthetics to the table in theories of visual perception by showing how specific argumentation for the historical nature of art and some aesthetic properties is relevant for evaluating some theories of perception and can provide counterexamples to them.