Journal of Aesthetic & Reconstructive Surgery

Description

Commitment to aesthetic value skepticism runs so deeply and so pervasively that the first step towards a positive proposal must do more than haggle over some premise of skeptical reasoning. Moreover, what needs diagnosis is not only skepticism about aesthetic value in empirical arts studies, because analytic philosophy gave up on aesthetic value in step with the other humanities3 For some time, philosophers had wanted a theory of aesthetic value in service of a theory of art an understanding of aesthetic value that would shed light on the nature and special significance of that enormously broad and varied range of human production.

Philosophical Aesthetics

Until recently, philosophical aesthetics was routinely first order, even as practiced in vastly different ways. Aesthetics came to Kant as a corollary of the project of the critiques, which turned out to require an account of pleasure in relation to empirical judgment, which delivered an account of aesthetic pleasure. Philosophers take sly pride in Kant having accomplished so much while knowing next to nothing about art the foils are Hume and Hegel, both able critics. Recent analytic aesthetics has favored the method of testing theoretical hypotheses against intuitive counterexamples. Since judgments made in the context of an artistic practice are theory-laden, philosophers who are competent participants in a practice can detect in their own judgments the echoes of the theory that is implicit in the practice.6 When Noel Carroll writes that a comprehensive theory of art must accommodate the facts as finds them revealed in our practices, he sees philosophers as mulling over the practices as participant-observers. Notice how these two otherwise rather different first-order approaches make it entirely optional for philosophers to consult empirical arts studies. They have all too often exercised the option.

In line with a trend across analytic philosophy, second-order philosophical aesthetics is becoming more common, and has been formally defended as a worthy enterprise. Aesthetics done by second-order philosophers indirectly attends to artistic and aesthetic phenomena by directly attending to how those phenomena figure in hypotheses and explanations of empirical scholarship. Often the go-to first-order disciplines are the brain and behavioral sciences, especially psychology and neuroscience, but anthropology, sociology, and historical arts studies also headline. Jenefer Robinson understands the nature and significance of art emotion as a psychological phenomenon, Stephen Davies views art and aesthetic response as they figure in evolutionary explanations and Lydia Goehr considers the concept of the musical work as it plays out in the history of nineteenth century European art music. Here second-order philosophy stands in relation to empirical arts studies: it takes its cue from scholarship outside philosophy.

Second-order philosophy is by no means a repeater device that parrots back the conception of a phenomenon to which first-order scholars give voice. The idea is not to look up the declarations of first-order scholars about, say, the nature of musical works and then call it a day. Instead, the philosopher examines musicological hypotheses and explanations that refer to musical works and then posits musical works as items having the very features they need to have for the hypotheses and explanations to succeed. Proceeding in this way can, in principle, deliver an account of musical works that surprises first-order scholars or contradicts their declared outlook. Perhaps, for example, musicologists regard musical works as abstract instructions for performance, but musicological explanations need works to be changing historical individuals, like biological species. Meta-level thinking need not and indeed should not take ground-level thinking at face value; it is done well when done critically.

Migration and Refugee Hood

Migration and refugee hood are planetary levels in which labour conditions, levels of precariousness and the relation to landscapes are connected. Planetary, here, refers not only to the coexistence of various interconnected scales on the earth but also to a contemporary spatial approach to the world and the shared effects of climate change and ecological catastrophes. Uneven neoliberal urban transformation leading to spatial segregation among vulnerable communities, the colonial extraction of landscapes, the use of chemicals in agricultural lands that often lead to the depopulation of villages and civil wars these are examples of structural violence that harm the most vulnerable migrant communities. Policies on migrants, border politics, and surveillance infrastructures are also becoming more severe under the states of exception of the Covid-19 epidemic. Not only nation-states but any hegemonic mechanism establishes severe territorialization that the most vulnerable people suffer from. Planetary co-existence is often explained through the debate of the Anthropocene. According to this, humans are perceived as the primary agents shaping the planet, through their extraction of natural resources and their territorialization of other humans and non-humans alike, and climate change and extinction are some of the outcomes. As Dipesh Chakrabarty explains about the Anthropogenic Even though it refers to a new period in the planets geological history and therefore to geological time, the term anthropogenic was used from its very inception as a measure not of geological time but of the extent of human impact on the planet. The human impact has a planetary scale of the extraction of landscapes that can be explained from slavery and European hegemonic colonial histories. For centuries, colonial and capitalist history has been operating through segregation and the discrimination of race, gender, and labour in indigenous lands. Nowadays, the formation of social inequalities at a planetary level increases food insecurity, the contamination of natural resources, and the lack of housing in the migrant landscapes. One of the best examples of a description of this narrative can be found in Amitav Ghoshs novel Gun Island. In the novel, the reader follows Bangladeshi refugees who have to leave the Sundarbans region because of a lack of livestock in the delta between India and Bangladesh as the water is being contaminated by industry and the soil is being washed away by floods. As they have no jobs and no means to sustain their lives anymore they begin a refugee odyssey to Europe by attempting to cross the Mediterranean sea. The two migrants cross the borders of Turkey and Africa in the hands of human traffickers and face many obstacles. Throughout the trajectory of refugee hood, the novel covers many geographies and territories, from the Indian delta to the Iraqi-Turkey border, to Africa and to the Mediterranean, with the two Sundarbanis navigating through chat messages, phone locations, and online thresholds.