Programme
Derek Matravers (Open University): “On Being Misled by Non-Fiction” Wednesday, 13 October 2021
Karen Simecek (Warwick): “Embodying Words: The Ethics of Voice in Performing Poetry” Wednesday, 03 November 2021
Rob Simpson (UCL): “Experiments in Living, Commercial Entertainment, and Free Speech” Wednesday, 24 November 2021
Greg Currie (York): “Irony: A Sketch of a General Theory” Wednesday, 02 February 2022
Tim Stoll (Birkbeck): “Nietzsche and Aesthetic Distance” Wednesday, 23 February 2022
Peter Lamarque (York): “Literary Form and Moral Outlook” Wednesday, 01 June 2022
Joshua Landy (Stanford): “I’m Like a Helicopter: For a Two-Point Theory of Creative Imagery” Wednesday, 15 June 2022
Emine Hande Tuna (UC Santa Cruz): “Selective and Panoramic Imagining, and Processing Stories” Wednesday, 29 June 2022

Report
After moving online in 2020-21 due to COVID-19, in 2021-22 the Institute of Philosophy London Aesthetics Forum (LAF) returned to its regular series of in-person seminars on topics in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Because of the ongoing uncertainty, we operated with a reduced schedule and invited primarily UK-based speakers, or speakers visiting the UK/Europe.

The LAF aims to provide a lively environment for those already working in aesthetics and philosophy of art, and to foster new interest. LAF events are open to all, both inside and outside the University of London. Audiences tend to be multi-disciplinary, and talks are followed by extended discussion where the philosophical topics raised by the talks are explored in depth from a variety of perspectives. Overall, attendance was lower last year (10-15 on average) though it was higher for some well-known speakers and generally bounced back in the summer.

The LAF now has 1000+ Facebook followers (nearly evenly divided by gender) and 2000+ followers on Twitter, and the website received almost 5000 hits last year (numbers are not exact due to a website crash in December 2021). They continue to post podcasts of their talks on iTunes. Their podcasts enable more people to engage with the Forum, including listeners from outside the UK, and have a very substantial number of monthly downloads.

One of the LAF’s aims is to benefit students who are working in aesthetics or related areas, providing opportunities for graduate researchers to engage with cutting-edge work and meet other academics working in the area. Graduate students in the University of London also play a central role in organising the Forum’s activities, and across 2021-22 this included help on various organisational tasks, as well as participating actively in discussions.

BPA-SWIP Good Practice:
The LAF aims for gender diversity in our talks, but this year there were disproportionately more men (7) than women (2). The original invitation list would have been 6 men and 4 women; however, two women who were scheduled to speak had to drop out fairly late.

Like many other events scheduled to take place during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, ������Ƶ Connections: Conceptual Engineering and Aesthetics took place in 2021. The delay allowed the organisers to run the conference as an online/in-person hybrid event, on 31^st August and 1^st September. Two speakers managed to get to the Cambridge venue – Nadia Mehdi and Esa Díaz-León – while the remaining seven speakers presented over Zoom.

The presentations explored several points of interest connecting conceptual engineering and aesthetics. Matti Eklund (Uppsala) opened the conference by considering whether one might want to engineer ‘alien languages’ – languages with unfamiliar structures – and examining whether work on pictorial and cartographic representation might illuminate the issue. Delia Belleri (Lisbon) then clarified and tackled the ‘implementation challenge’, familiar from recent work on conceptual engineering. After lunch, we had our first two contributed talks. Sai Ying Ng (CUNY) praised morally objectionable artworks, discussing the prospects for engineering objectionable thick ethical concepts, and Elizabeth Cantalamessa (Miami) developed an account of how art can be deployed to implement conceptual revisions. In the final talk of the first day, A.W. Eaton (Chicago) discussed the role of a concept’s function in relation to aesthetic functions, as well as conceptual engineering of the concept art. The day closed with a relaxed conference dinner in central Cambridge.

The second day opened with Herman Cappelen (Hong Kong) arguing that the concept of art is defective and should be abandoned. Esa Díaz-León (Barcelona) then examined the differences between descriptive and ameliorative projects in aesthetics, arguing that both kinds of project must appeal to normative considerations. In our final contributed talk, Nadia Mehdi (Sheffield) discussed various possible reconceptualisations of the concept of beauty. Stacie Friend (Birkbeck) – heroically stepping in for Kendall Walton at the last minute – closed the conference by considering the prospects for Walton’s account of fiction when construed as a theoretical construct ‘Waltfiction’.

Overall, the talks displayed the promise of further, in-depth explorations of the connections between conceptual engineering and aesthetics. As a domain-general methodology, there is of course something to be gained by applying conceptual engineering to aesthetic problems, but the talks also highlighted the unique insights that aesthetic theorising can bring to the study and application of conceptual engineering.

One positive consequence of going hybrid is that we were able to record most of the presentations. At the time of writing this report, we are working away to get these ready for online publication. Once online, you’ll be able to relive your favourite talks time and time again!

Thanks go to the ������Ƶ and The Open University for supporting this conference, to the venue (Fitzwilliam College in Cambridge) for their flexibility and help in running the conference, to Venue Audio Visual for making the conference hybrid, and to all of the speakers and delegates who made the conference a success.

The Diversity Reading List (DRL) has produced and released three Reading Group Blueprints in aesthetics as part of the second release of the project in June 2022. You can find further details on the overall Blueprint project on the DRL .

Blueprint 1: Immoral Monuments and the Commemoration Debate
By Ten-Herng Lai

This Blueprint covers 12 weeks of content and is rated as ‘easy-intermediate’ on the DRL difficulty scale. You can find it published on their website, along with a downloadable PDF .

Blueprint 2: Mestizaje, Race, and Aesthetics in Latin America
By Adriana Clavel-Vázquez

This Blueprint covers 9 weeks of content and is rated as ‘intermediate-hard’ on the DRL difficulty scale. You can find it published on their website, along with a downloadable PDF .

Blueprint 3: Class, Status, and Aesthetics
By Quentin Pharr and Clotilde Torregrossa

This Blueprint covers 7 weeks of content and is rated as ‘easy-intermediate’ on the DRL difficulty scale. You can find it published on their website, along with a downloadable PDF .

Last year’s RMA Music & Philosophy conference included a diverse range of topics, spanning from Aesthetics, Ontology, and Epistemology, via Performance Studies and Philosophy, Theorie(s) of Music, History of Ideas, Eco-Musicology and -Philosophy, toward sessions that zoomed in on the works of chosen philosophers such as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, or on philosophical schools such as Poststructuralism. The conference welcomed international presenters from various academic backgrounds, in order to build a discursive bridge between the disciplinary shores of Music History, Analysis, and Performance, and those of Analytical Philosophy, Aesthetics, and the History of Ideas.

The international scope of the contributions disclosed the vast scholarly interest and relevance of bringing Music-related disciplines and Analytical as well as Continental Philosophy into a productive dialogue with each other, aiming to bridge the sometimes uncompromising juxtaposition of Music, History and Philosophy: (Music-)Historical disciplines often show reluctance to entertain Philosophy’s alleged tendency towards conceptual universalism, and dismiss its disciplinary programme, which aims to clearly analyse and define the use of language and concepts, as impractical. While on the other hand, some philosophers accuse historical disciplines of particularism, given that their claims are significantly determined by the narrow choice of a specific time and place. Thus, one of the main successes of the conference was an overall constructive atmosphere in which disciplinary and scholarly variety informed each other productively.

This joint venture between Music and Philosophy departments was pointedly described by the organising committee in their opening remarks: Philosophy can help to clearly define and lay out theoretical terminology; the epistemic framework through which musical works and their historical manifestations can be (re-)interpreted and (re-)investigated, and the ways in which past claims can be critically rethought, which leads to new questions and fresh perspectives in historical or systematic Musicology, Music Analysis or Performance Studies.

The cross-disciplinary atmosphere of the conference can be exemplified by the panel “Theories of Music in History”, which touched upon the contradictions of St Augustine’s reciprocal relationship between the human soul and the divine in musical experience (Migle Miliunaite); the Arabic philosopher Al-Fārābī’s Neo-Aristotelian reflections on music as a science and ethical as well as political dimensions of composition (Daniel Regnier); via Francesco Antonio Calegari’s and Giuseppe Tartini’s specific type of reasoning as ‘musical inference’ exemplified by the rule of the octave (Roberta Vidic); towards Rafael Echevarria’s contribution, in which he attempted to overcome the contemporary dichotomy between an historical comparative approach in musical form, which explains developments in formal practice in relationship to their historical heritage, and contextual approaches, which explain formal particularities against the background of reconstructed musical practice at a given time and place. The diverse range of theoretical writings contributed either to the re-encounter with historical treatises or to critical engagement with current music theories regarding the reshaping of the theoretical terminology with which current scholarship engages with music as a critical object of discourse.

Keynote Speakers

The conference was framed by three keynote lectures, which contributed equally, but in different ways, to the interdisciplinary atmosphere. Professor Andy Hamilton’s keynote “Jazz as Classical Music” addressed the question of how Jazz can be defined as a non-popular and therefore serious ‘art music’ independently from improvisation as its essential generic characteristic. Hamilton’s suggestion served a two-fold aim: Firstly, defending the genre from prejudiced assumptions that deny the genre’s status as a true art form due to improvisation being its essential characteristic, and to Adornian reservations that Jazz lacks the status of an autonomous art form because of its commercial conditioning. Secondly, Hamilton defended the concept of “classical art music” from post-modern critiques as being an inherently elitist category, while marshalling his view that it represents a standard of taste independent of underlying hegemonic power structures. However, it remained questionable whether it is or why it should be necessary and valuable to construe an objective or rather neutral understanding of “classical art music” in order to aesthetically value Jazz as an art form in its own right, and, even if such a neutral understanding could be defined, why it would be still a useful category to hold on to, despite its problematic reception and cultural-political connotations.

The second keynote speaker, Professor Ana Maria Ochoa, who spoke on “Extractivism and Sound Technologies in Ethnographic Media”, contributed with her ethnographic and archival study of Latin American media to pressing issues of the decolonial project against the background of climate change and globalisation. Ochoa’s keynote therefore extended the growing interest in Eco-Musicology, as well as the environmental study group’s session on “Music, Philosophy and Environment”, which investigated the urgent subject of how the climate crisis affects human practices such as art and music within its changing social, economic and political frameworks, and how the humanities can find answers to the socio-political uncertainties arising from this.

The conference was rounded off with Professor Cécile Malaspina’s keynote “The Contemporary Resonance of Hecuba”, which aimed towards a positive understanding of the category and the phenomenon of noise and its epistemic underpinnings. In order to overcome the dialectics between resonance and noise, harmony and disharmony, order and chaos, universality and particularity, Malaspina argued that these opposites determine each other as two sides of the same coin: Even if an explosion is perceived by a spectator or listener as an unpleasant disruption, which causes disorder, instability, and even shapes a traumatic experience, the phenomenon in- itself and its fundamental physical laws are constituted by resonant frequencies. Thereby, the final keynote does not merely point towards Kant’s transcendental subject and the gap between noumenon and phenomenon; being and experience, or ontology and aesthesis, but rather to the reciprocal conditioning of resonance and noise: without the former, the latter could not be constituted, and without the latter, the former could not sensually or intellectually grasped and re- interpreted anew.

The final keynote lecture summarises pointedly the above-mentioned relevance of the conference: Universality and Particularity, Philosophy and (Music-)Historical subjects, must engage, interact, and inform each other productively: a joint venture that leads to the discovery of new problems which continuously reshape the categories through which music, as an object of discourse and academic engagement, is understood anew. The annual conference of the RMA M&P Study group thereby represented a uniquely open space for such a fruitful exchange.

Sponsored by the ������Ƶ and the Centre for Philosophy and Art, the workshop challenged researchers to discuss concepts of public art, public space, memorialisation, and monumentality. In the course of two days, we welcomed 50 participants from different academic backgrounds and 11 conference presentations. The programme included a very diverse range of talks, which brought to light various aspects of what makes an artwork public. In their talks, the speakers often complemented philosophical insights with contributions from art history and social sciences, while the final talk, by the street artist Carleen de Sözer, introduced a fresh perspective into what it means to make public art.   

Several speakers discussed the ways in which public art represents certain communities and contributes to the construction of collective identities and narratives. Based on her ethnographic work, Sreelakshmi Santhini Bahuleyan (Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati) critically examined the representation of migrant farming communities in Kerala in C. F. John’s project Let Me Come to Your Wound, Heal Myself (2020). Whereas Sreelakashmi Santhini Bahuleyan praised this project for combating geographical exclusion and elitism in the access to the arts, Alfred Archer (Tilburg University) argued that public art can also contribute to the marginalisation of specific communities by consigning them to the past and rejecting their continued relevance in a modern world, pointing as examples to representations of industrial workers and Native Americans.

Noting that in many cases death is a contested political terrain, Michael Cholbi (University of Edinburgh) explored the difficulties surrounding the memorialisation of the Covid dead and examined the US AIDS memorial quilt as an example of a work that succeeds in fostering ‘affective solidarity’ among the living and the dead, a species of solidarity rooted in recognition of shared vulnerability to death and bodily catastrophes. Focusing on Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s art interventions, Cristina Parapar (Sorbonne University) proposed an interpretation of public art as a form of ‘relational aesthetics’ (Nicolas Bourriaud) that contributes to the symbolic construction of public space as an ‘agonistic space’ (Chantal Mouffe), where competing political projects clash.

Addressing the problem of the persistence of public art through time, Jakub Stejskal (Masaryk University) defined the goals of monumentality, taking as a starting point the artist’s intent to make a work whose public significance perseveres beyond its immediate context, across vast stretches of time. While Jakub Stejskal focused on the durability of public art, Chong-Ming Lim (Nanyang Technological University) examined is accessibility, exploring the relation between public art and the right to the city. Sailee Khurjekar (Birkbeck University) shifted the perspective from the adult observer to that of the child, questioning the risks and benefits of exposing children to works of public art, while Adam Woodcox (Southern Alberta Institute of Technology) defended the extension of the concept of ‘public space’ to include digital artworks, presenting Reddit’s 2017 and 2022 project Place as an example of a digital artwork grounded on a network of communication and collaboration within and between online communities.

The keynote speeches helped to broaden the debate, with Vid Simoniti (University of Liverpool) exploring the way in which artworks that do not conventionally fit into the category of ‘public art’ can, nonetheless, serve as allegories of public life, while Sarah Hegenbart (Technical University of Munich) enquired if collectives can constitute aesthetic forms, focusing on the contemporary art exhibition Document fifteen. Finally, the street artist Carleen de Sözer closed the workshop with a talk about her personal experience of using the street as a canvas and the way in which local communities and surroundings interact with her work.

The organisers:
Beatriz Rodrigues (King’s College London)
Colette Olive (King’s College London)

BPA/SWiP statement:
The organisers were committed, throughout the workshop, to achieve gender parity and diversity amongst the speakers, which resulted in the following distribution:

• Of the 11 speakers, 5 (45%) were women.
• Of the 3 keynote speakers, 2 (66%) were women.
• Of the 11 speakers, at least 4 (36%) were from a BAME background.
• Of the 11 speakers, 3 (27%) were graduate students.  

Social epistemology and aesthetics deal with similar kinds of issues when it comes to how groups and multi-member institutions might arrive at collective judgments, acquire collective knowledge or justified beliefs, deal with disagreement, and more. And yet, despite their similarities, social epistemologists have largely overlooked the contributions that aestheticians have made to related lines of inquiry. But, likewise, aestheticians have also not fully utilised the contributions of social epistemologists, even though their work will almost certainly provide, among other things, fresh perspectives on issues of peer disagreement, how an artist’s and an audience’s socio-epistemic context might play a role in their relations, the nature of aesthetic testimony, and even the role of knowledge- and culture-bearing social institutions such as museums in determining what counts as art. So, with so much to offer to each other, our aim in organising this conference was to bring together leading researchers in social epistemology and aesthetics in order to explore the intersections of their work and build new paths of research.

The conference hosted a total of eight speakers, who engaged with the following themes:

Rebecca Wallbank (Uppsala): Trust and the Real Problem of Aesthetic Testimony����
Thi Nguyen (Utah): Art as a Shelter from Science
Claire Field (Stirling): Aesthetic Recklessness
Sandy Goldberg (Northwestern/St Andrews): Social Expectations in Epistemology and Aesthetics
Alessandra Tanesini (Cardiff): Scaffolding Knowledge and Ignorance
Rachel Fraser (Oxford): Aesthetic Injustice
Ian Kidd (Nottingham): Vices, Myopia and Experiences of Beauty
Paul C. Taylor (Vanderbilt): What Beauty Knows: Aesthetics, Resistance, and Epistemic Injustice (online)����

BPA-SWiP Statement
This event was free to access and streamed to our online audience via Microsoft Teams. It featured speakers from all professional levels, including two early career researchers. 50% of the speakers at this event were women.