The Aesthetic Value of the World

Description

In The Aesthetic Value of the World, Tom Cochrane defends Aestheticism, the claim that everything is aesthetically valuable and that a life lived in pursuit of aesthetic value can be a particularly good one. Furthermore, in distilling aesthetic qualities, artists have a special role to play in teaching us to recognize values; a critical component of virtue. Cochrane grounds his account upon an analysis of aesthetic value as 'objectified final value', which is underwritten by an original psychological claim that all aesthetic values are distal versions of practical values. This is followed by systematic accounts of beauty, sublimity, comedy, drama, and tragedy, as well as appendix entries on the cute, the cool, the kitsch, the uncanny, the horrific, the erotic, and the furious. Cover The Aesthetic Value of the World Copyright Contents Acknowledgements Preface List of Figures List of Tables Introduction 0.1 The problem of evil 0.2 Pleasure 0.3 Valuing the world 0.4 The grand moral mission 0.5 The aesthetic response 1: Aesthetic Value 1.1 Practical value 1.2 Disinterestedness 1.3 Objectified final value 1.4 Distal versions 1.5 Essential tensions 1.6 The object 1.7 Joint attention 1.8 The scope of aesthetics 2: The Beautiful 2.1 Initial distinctions 2.2 Form and function 2.3 Processing fluency 2.4 Complexity 2.5 Fitting together 2.6 Beauty in time 2.7 Ugliness 2.8 Difficult beauty 3: The Sublime 3.1 Negative emotion 3.2 Attraction 3.3 Egoistic models The relief model The heroic model 3.4 Non-egoistic models The humble model The admiration model 3.5 The identification model 3.6 Perceiving power 3.7 Re-introducing self-negation 3.8 A common core 4: The Dramatic 4.1 Everyday drama 4.2 Narrative drama 4.3 Musical drama 4.4 Dramatic appearances 4.5 Rich experience 4.6 Attention and flow 4.7 Objectifying drama 4.8 A dramatic life 5: The Tragic 5.1 Tragic fictions 5.2 The cosmic perspective 5.3 Acknowledgement 5.4 The artistic perspective 5.5 Sympathetic value 5.6 Anonymous sufferers 5.7 Bad people 5.8 Sympathetic objects 6: The Comic 6.1 The task 6.2 Defining incongruity 6.3 Amusing incongruities 6.4 Non-seriousness 6.5 Dealing with counter-examples 6.6 Timing 6.7 The value of humour 6.8 Profundity 7: In Defence of Aestheticism 7.1 The value of the world 7.2 Augustine’s Aestheticism 7.3 Nietzsche’s Aestheticism 7.4 The aestheticist attitude 7.5 The positively ugly 7.6 Objectivity 7.7 Selectivity and jadedness 7.8 Passivity 8: The Creation of Art 8.1 A good life 8.2 Inspiration 8.3 Making it personal 8.4 The point of art 8.5 A way of life 8.6 Virtue theory 8.7 The aesthetics of virtue 8.8 The aesthetic society Appendix: Minor Aesthetic Values The cute The cool The kitsch The uncanny The horrific The erotic The furious Bibliography Index