Book Reviews

livingston, paisley and carl plantinga, eds. The

Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film.
New York: Routledge, 2009, xx + 672 pp., $190.00
cloth.
This large book is the first major attempt to introduce a variety of readers to the scope and nature of
the relatively new field of philosophy and film. The
editors say that their aim was to build a bridge between philosophers working in this area and film students and scholars with theoretical or philosophical
inclinations (p. xxix). While no one book about this
rapidly burgeoning field can be altogether comprehensive, this volume does manage to cover an impressive range of topics and issues within a manageable
structure. After a brief preface, it is divided into four
sections. Part I, Issues and Concepts, is the longest,
with twenty-six chapters ranging almost literally from
A to Z: from Acting and Authorship to Style and Violence. Part II, Authors and Trends, includes seventeen chapters, mostly on individual film theorists such
as Arnheim, Bazin, Mitry, and Eisenstein, but also
treats such topics as cognitive theory, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and semiotics or semiology. Part
III, Genres and Other Types, is briefer, with six
chapters covering subjects such as film documentary,
horror, and pornography. Part IV, Film as Philosophy, with eleven chapters, devotes some discussion
to specific directors, such as Ingmar Bergmann and
Andrei Tarkovsky, some to broader issues, such as
skepticism or morality, and others to individual films,
such as Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997) and Memento
(Christopher Nolan, 2000).
One might quibble with aspects of this organization. Parts III and IV are idiosyncratically selective
and, as the editors note at the outset, may represent the availability of suitable authors as much as
the importance of the topics. Thus one might name
philosophical directors who could have been included, such as Kieslowski, Kurosawa, Fassbinder,
or Godard. Again, in covering film genKaurismaki,
res, why select horror and pornography but not the

Western, melodrama, or film noir? Still, overall this

is an ambitious and useful volume. It features an impressive list of contributors ranging from the most
well-established authorities to an excellent group of
younger scholars working now in this field.
Generally, Livingston and Plantingas editorial approach seems grounded within analytic aesthetics,
but they still have included attention to the more
continental trends that have figured so importantly
into philosophical discussion of films, such as psychoanalysis, semiotics, and phenomenology. The book is
admirably international in the sense of including articles on European directors and theorists as well as articles by many writers whose primary language is not
English. For example, there is a very useful overview
of the influential Dogme 95 school by Mette Hjort as
Balint

well as a discussion of Tarkovsky by Andras

Kovacs.
Again, one might wish for discussion of a
few more international topics, say, major European
trends such as Italian neorealism or French and German New Wave. There could also have been some
attention to the nature or significance of more recent popular international styles such as anime, Bollywood, and Hong Kong action cinema.
Many authors represented in the volume do a
nice job of summarizing ideas that they have developed elsewhere in book-length treatments: for
Carrolls and David Bordwells artiexample, Noel
cles on narrative and cognitivism, respectively, Jeff
Smiths on film music, Thomas Wartenbergs on film
as philosophy, Stephen Princes on violence, and Carl
Plantingas entries on documentary and emotion.
A few standout articles by established scholars are
those by Berys Gaut on digital cinema and Deborah
Knight on tragedy and comedy. Gaut discusses four
key issues that arise given the distinct nature of digital versus analogue cinema. These include questions
about realism and about authorship. On the realism issue, Gaut provides a helpful distinction among
five variants of a realist thesis, concluding that digital cinema can offer greater appearances of realism
while at the same time leaving us in doubt about the

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68:3 Summer 2010

c 2010 The American Society for Aesthetics


302
evidential status of images seen on-screen. Concerning authorship, Gaut highlights the greater possibilities of collaboration in digital cinema (such as the role
of an actor whose voice or even bodily movements
are employed in creation of a digital character).
In her article, Deborah Knight draws on Northrop
Fryes classic Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1957) to distinguish several master
genres, including not only tragedy and comedy but
also romance and irony or satire. She questions
the long-established philosophical and artistic preference for tragedy over comedy due to its alleged
greater moral seriousness, expressing doubts about
whether authors of tragedies necessarily adopt a
so-called tragic worldview. She provides an insightful reading of Alfred Hitchcocks Vertigo (1958) as
a sample film tragedy. However, drawing on some
of Stanley Cavells work, Knight also proposes that
comedies such as the Hollywood remarriage comedies from the 1930s and 1940s can also offer viewers
valuable insights into characters self-recognition and
self-understanding.
The number of articles in this Routledge Companion from a newer generation of contributors portends
a bright future for work at the intersection of philosophy and film studies. (Indeed, given the explosion
of articles, books, and even journals in the field, philosophy and film must be said to be the most lively
field in aesthetics today.) Aaron Smuts neatly lays
out issues that have arisen concerning the definition
of horror and diverse explanations of its appeal. Amy
Coplan provides an especially helpful map to current
debates in Empathy and Character Engagement,
detailing both psychoanalytic and more cognitivist,
empirically inclined approaches, with a lengthy bibli Carography. Jonathan Frome, in his article on Noel
roll, summarizes the authors groundbreaking contributions to the field of philosophy and film, including
his attacks on Grand Theory, critique of essentialism, and positive accounts of film comprehension and
emotional response to film. Angela Currans article
on Bertolt Brecht represents a significant amount
of new research, since Brecht is commonly considered to have been more engaged with theater than
with film. Curran describes his role as a screenwriter
and his work on the anticapitalist film Kuhle Wampe:
To Whom Does the World Belong? (Slatan Dudow,
1932). She argues that Brecht still has much to offer
contemporary philosophers of film, for example, in
his rejection of empathy (especially in light of recent
attention to this issue in philosophical aesthetics).
Brechts views on this topic are complex, shifting, and
subject to misinterpretation, and Curran sorts them
out and shows interesting possibilities in her account
of the potentially educative role of viewer emotions
in response to either drama or film.
The extended discussions of individual directors
are often also illuminating. David Daviess entry

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

on Terrence Malick surveys existing accounts of
the philosophical concerns of this enigmatic directors films. These range from Heideggerian ones in
which Nature is portrayed as indifferent or cruel to
more spiritual accounts of Malicks Edenic vision.
Davies calls Malicks films polysemic and identifies
different levels on which they present meaning. The
director undermines viewer expectations of the genres in which his films appear to be set. Questions of
meaning are intertwined with problems of ascertaining intention due to the directors distinctive style, for
example, his use of voice-overs susceptible to ambiguous readings. These voice-overs also can offer
perspectives distinct from those of the characters in
the narrative. Davies reads the films as offering a
deep view of embodied agency.
A few articles in the book are less useful than they
might have been because they remain too uncritical of the material they address. Examples here are
the chapters by William Rothman on Cavell and by
Ronald Bogue on Gilles Deleuze. Rothman begins,
for example, by asserting that Cavells writings on
film are capable of helping academic film study free
itself from unquestioned doctrines of film studies
(p. 344). This assertion might have been accurate in
reference to the time at which Cavell was first writing
on film, say, in The World Viewed: Reflections on the
Ontology of Film (Harvard University Press, 1979),
but can hardly be said to hold today, given the multitude of criticisms of standard film theory, by, for
example, the authors in Carroll and Bordwells anthology Post-Theory (University of Wisconsin Press,
1996). Rothman explains that in his book Pursuits of
Happiness (Harvard University Press, 1981), Cavell
explored ways in which films can express truths about
the human condition: in particular, about overcoming skepticism. But rather than summarizing the concerns of the book in terms of Cavells own framework, as Rothman does here, it would have been
more helpful to assess its significance in relation to
competing theories of, say, gender and film spectatorship. Cavell emphasized how films depicted the bodies of male actors like Cary Grant or Gary Cooper,
arguing that they fostered emotional responses of
desire from both audience members and the female
protagonists in those films. This reading ran directly
counter to the dominant tendency of the period (early
1980s) to construe films as invariably evincing the
so-called male gaze. Cavells usefulness for feminist
and gender studies has been brought out by scholars
like Marian Keane in various articles such as Whos
Silencing Whom? (Film and Philosophy 2 [1995]:
111118). Some discussion of such issues would seem
appropriate, but Rothmans only references beyond
Cavell are to Andre Bazin, Frye, and Henry David
Thoreau.
The problem of insularity is worse in the case
of Bogues article on Deleuze. Admittedly, Deleuze

Book Reviews
would be difficult for anyone to do justice to in
an attempt at clear exposition, but this article at
times makes his labyrinthine theory sound like a parody of French philosophy at its worst. Bogue highlights Bergsons influence on Deleuze and the importance of time consciousness for both thinkers. For
Deleuze, human experience includes perception images, movement images, and affection images, each of
which can be associated with a type of cinematic shot
(long shot, medium, and close-up). However, this
simple start is soon muddied, since it turns out that
all three types of original images can, in fact, be associated with each of the three types of shot, and then
there are three additional movement-images and
each type can be viewed in three ways. The assiduous
reader trying to keep track of these groupings is likely
to give up in despair when told by Bogue that Deleuze
was rather casual about his taxonomy. Movementimages supposedly relate to the open Whole, which
seems to amount to the environment, roughly speaking; but then a whole new sort of image appears:
the time-image, which is itself multiply subdivided.
And Deleuze supposedly develops and explains his
ideas about the forms of time by taking an idea from
Leibniz which he modifies via Borges (p. 373),
a description that is entirely unhelpful. But the articles main problem is that Bogue never describes any
valuable upshot for film from Deleuzes byzantine
analyses. Instead, he merely asserts that his taxonomy of images provides a single and original philosophical context for conceptualizing cinematic practice (p. 376), claiming that film critics have been able
to use Deleuzes theories to provide useful accounts
of a variety of genres, including various commercial
films, horror, and cinema about national identity. This
nine-page article needed both more useful examples
and a heavier hand in the editing.
Vivian Sobchaks article on Phenomenology is
a good model of how such an article should be
done. She provides an excellent introduction to the
phenomenological method as described by Husserl,
leading into an assessment of its usefulness for film
through discussion of an extended example, Derek
Jarmans final film Blue (1993), made when the
filmmaker was dying of AIDS and losing his sight
(p. 437). This is followed by a brief summary of
Merleau-Pontys contributions to phenomenology,
together with a description of the filmologie movement launched in France in the 1940s and influential
through the 1960s, which had various important adherents, including Bazin. Phenomenology more or
less disappeared from film studies until a resurgence
in the 1990s with books like Alan Casebiers Film
and Phenomenology (Cambridge University Press,
1991) and Sobchaks own The Address of the Eye
(Princeton University Press, 1992). Despite being an
involved participant in this field, Sobchak is able to

303
render a very clear and insightful historical overview
that mentions the contributions of others and indicates the range of material encompassed by various
studies sharing this approach.
In a volume that covers so much it might seem
unfair to wish for more, but I do think that some
important medium-related issues ought to have been
addressed, or at least included in any revised edition.
What I have in mind is some discussion of what film
scholars call audience reception studies: the impact
of major developments in cinema, such as silent versus sound film; the rise of experimental film formats,
such as Cinerama, 3-D, and Imax; the impact of the
multiplex; the availability of film on video; and ontological questions raised by the existence of multiple
versions of films in comprehensive DVD editions.
(Disappointingly, Kevin W. Sweeneys article titled
Medium addresses none of these issues.) The entire
realm of video art is omitted, something that might
just have been practical but does mean neglecting
important artists like Shirin Neshat, Bill Viola, Fiona
Tan, and Eija-Lisa Ahtila. While it is true that some
of these artists work solely in video, several have also
often used film, and they all have achieved significant international recognition. Films relationship to
video is becoming ever more entangled as directors
move to recording movies on digital video. The realm
of video games, interactivity, and viewer emotions has
already proved worthy of philosophical exploration
(by Jonathan Frome, among others).
Each chapter in the Philosophy and Film companion volume includes a list of recommended readings,
as well as a select group of further readings (sometimes, but not always, annotated); and each chapter
is also helpfully cross-referenced to related entries.
The entire volume includes a detailed index, invaluable in an encyclopedic collection like this. There
is much more included here than I have been able
to indicate in the allotted space. This book will be
an essential reference for anyone interested in researching or teaching topics in philosophy and film
or in film theory, broadly construed. The books regrettable expense makes it an unlikely choice as a
course text, though I have been informed that we
can expect a more affordable paperback version in
the near future.
CYNTHIA FREELAND
Department of Philosophy
University of Houston
danto, arthur c. Andy Warhol. Yale University
Press, 2009, xix + 162 pp., 8 b&w illus., $24.00
cloth.
I am convinced that in the twenty-first century, the
best books are books one can read quickly in a single

304
narrative sweep and then let swirl in the imagination.
That a book should live quickly in script and long in
the mind would have been an idea of which Andy
Warhol would have approved, since his flattened images refused the long arc and aura of contemplation
that was the insignia of the abstract expressionists
and the priestly class of aesthetic connoisseurs before them. For Warhol, a painting or silk screen was
meant to be looked at with something like the speed
of a brand item scanned by a supermarket shopper, a dollar bill exchanged at the checkout counter
for a magazine flipped through in pursuit of adverts
for the latest shoes. Paintings, like car crashes, bank
robberies, and jolts of the electric chair, should happen fast but produce a lasting effect. Arthur Dantos
book is an elegant, beautifully distilled portrait of
Warhol in all his complexity and can be read on a
flight between Boston and Chicago. It will remain
in the mind far beyond that flight, perhaps for a
lifetime.
Andy Warhol is the distillation of two lifetimes,
a coda for artist and philosopher alike, written by
Danto for his near-indiscernible double, that secret
sharer in whose name Danto has created some of the
finest, most dazzling and innovative aesthetic philosophy of the recent half century. They shared, without
having met, a remarkable half century in the same
city in the same image-driven, item-branded, consumerized America with its flaneur-shoppers, gallery
groupies, and celebrities. The secret sharing is datable
to 1964, the year of Warhols exhibit Brillo Boxes
and Dantos first articulation of its significance in
The Artworld (Journal of Philosophy 61 [1964]:
571584). The year was also the last of Warhols great
years as a transformative painter and visual artist,
the year Jackie O. entered his room of reliquaries
to join Marilyn, Elvis, Americas Most Wanted Men,
and the beloved Campbells Soup Cans. After that
Warhol turned to film, which became his avant-garde
focus, then was nearly assassinated at The Factory, to
reemerge a year later shaken but not stirred, ready
to wear his ready-to-wear suit of painter-to-the-richand-famous armor, ready to misadventure (because
he was too early) in TV, (he would have made a marvelously deadpan reality TV host twenty years later),
before passing on prematurely into the crypt of his
religious icons, joining his chapel of the stars and the
icons. The immortality he achieved during this rock
opera of a life was triple: he was the most talked
about (and remains so), he was the most noticed, and
he produced a body of work that is utterly accessible
while also an incomparable entry into the complex
systems of contemporary life. Indeed, Warhols masterpieces remain as much in circulation as the dollar
bills he painted.
With Warhols Dollar Bills, the themes are of
course art as a commodity, the focus being repe-

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

tition, therefore circulation. Across the work are
beautifully inflected variations within overall uniformity. One thing Dantos book shows is how taking
Warhols work as a whole is revelatory of its individual parts, and the Campbells soup cans tell us a
lot about the dollar bills. With his Campbells, the
variations are those of the product line: Chicken
with Rice for a Monday, Clam Chowder for Wednesday, Tomato Soup for Saturday afternoon. That was
the way I ate them growing up, served steaming by
my mother after an hours sledding on the hill behind our New England house in snow too deep for
a school day, face bright red with cold, parka dripping. The Three Stooges followed, with disappointment when it was Shemp who stood in for Curley
but restored to enthusiasm when in the next half
hour Mr. Ed appeared at his barn door ready with
something to say (and Mr. Ed would never talk unless he had something to say). American products
are branded with intimate familiarity; we love consuming the same trusted and treasured product the
way we love owning our own homes. Warhols dollar
bills are similarly branded: with the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, equally familiar and trusted,
turning America into one big family value. The iconic
status of the presidents brands the bill. Iconic status
is achieved, Warhol taught us, through circulation,
bringing the presidents to your wallet enhances their
iconic status. They in turn bring myth, religion, and a
touch of the sublime to the billfold. Danto is wonderful on Warhol the immigrant, in love with Hollywood
myths, circulated through movie and fan magazine.
He is wonderful on Warhols Horatio Alger ideals,
child of a tough, grimy childhood in insecure American times turned grown-up adult wanting nothing
more than to eat soup and sandwich in Oscars every
day of his life turning again the pages of his magazines, or at least retaining this desire in the form of
insight into American identifications with their icons
and products.
The dollar bill circulates through exchange. As it
circulates, the branding item (the presidents face)
flattens out, roughly in the way a Warhol image of
Marilyn flattens her out. The currency of the image
is paradoxical because the values brought to it are
confirmed through its circulation (Washingtons endlessly repeated story, the childs daily consumption
of Campbells at home), yet circulation also flattens
those values in the brand image. This is why I think
Warhol liked boredom so much: boredom is the effect
of a flattened image that still retains its original font
of identifications, while these are partially hidden by
the image in circulation, as if an image in circulation
were the dark glasses behind which Warhols own
soul lay hidden.
Danto is marvelous on that soul: its religiosity; its mother love; its erotic appetites; its cruelty,

Book Reviews
voyeurism, and unusual mixture of passivity and
control. He brings all that out without big psychological analyses but purely through deftness of life
narration.
But I come back to what is for me the value of the
twists and turns in Dantos well-wrought life story:
that these, taken as a whole, allow revision of the
individual aspects of Warhols creative repertoire.
One way this happens is that Dantos discussion of
Warhols films allows us to read back into the artwork
signs of Warhols voyeurism, his love of watching; the
erotic charge he got from peering out at sleeping men
or men in action from his dark glasses tells us a great
deal about the aesthetic perspective of the visual art,
how he, in effect, transposed that aesthetic position
back to the work of painting, thus remaking it in
a way as vital, and of course also problematical, as
say, French painting and its theatricalized beholder
(Michael Fried). When Warhol turns to film, what
is studied is not the image in circulation but rather
the genealogy of persona from person, the birth, if
you will, of the image. It has long been known that
Warhol does everything he can to accentuate the
qualities of home movie and artifice in his films. His
films are willfully as well as accidentally full of mistakes, scratched up, oddly focused. And their timing
is so totally off as to make this an aesthetic mark and
central theme. A guy sleeps for eight hours and the
camera does not move from its close-range recording
of him. The same happens at further range with the
Empire State Building. Blow jobs are filmed without preparation, a drag queen enters too fast, or too
slow, and always with an admixture of personal style,
grace, and total amateurism. These flourishes of style
actually make Warhol closer to Clement Greenberg
than Jackson Pollock, for Warhol is about the fact of
the film medium more than just about anything else,
although not, of course, as Greenberg might have
fantasized in a formal way, but rather as a totally
transfixing art form inclusive of stars and the erotics
of watching them. It is films ability to prestidigitate
magic that is exposed and applauded by Warhol. The
prestidigitation happens because (and here Danto
turns philosophical for the moment) film is so close
to being indiscernible from ordinary life (the life happening around us in three dimensions) that personbecome-star wrenches the imagination (it is still the
person). This also accounts for the boredom and its
importance as an aesthetic category. Warhol is obsessed with the gap between ordinary life and its
(to use Dantos term) transfiguration on-screen, a
transfiguration as close to ordinary life as the Brillo
Box in the supermarket is to Warhols Brillo Boxes.
When someone jumps around at a party dressed in
drag, everyone takes it as theatrical spectacle and
part of the fun. When that person is filmed doing
the same, it is awkward, weird, unfathomablealso

305
moving. The portal where person becomes transfigured into persona is the screen test, and Danto could
have made more, I think, of Warhols Screen Tests
(19641966). There he films his factory crowd members one after another and with amazingly mixed
results. Some shimmer, others are actively uncomfortable, persons dazzling in life dissipate before the
camera, and, all the while, Warhol watches, cruelly,
passively, with complete directorial authority, thus
simultaneously consuming and producing the screen
test like some Hitchcock character who is both audience and director. In these tests we have the genealogical place of origin of the star, the place where
nature and nurture allow some to pass on into that
chapel, others to collapse back into mere life as failed
images. Here is the place where stardom cannot reduce to celebrity, where Jackie and Marilyn and Elvis
are different from the guy who reads the weather or
the dame who judges Celebrity Chefs. It is the place
where the persona is born from the person. Warhols
role as painter is to capture those persons after they
have become stars, lending them a third life as image
in circulation, flattening them in a kind of cryptography, placing them in his visual crypt. His role as
filmmaker is to capture them in the space between
person and persona, no longer quite the first, not as
yet the second.
Dantos lifelong appropriation of Warhol to philosophy is one of the most fortuitous transfigurations
in the history of aesthetics. In this book, he returns
Warhol to the life he lived apart from the appropriation, to the richness of his adventures in art, film,
and eroticism, to his enthusiasms and fears, friends
and influences. We have Warhol, the one who lived,
not Warhol, the one who gave rise to other peoples
thought. This book is an act of homage: a gift of context back to a life lived in it. The books message is:
Andy, I set you free, not in the form of worship, nor in
the form of insider bragging, nor as monument, nor
even quite as an icon (in spite of the series in which
this book sits), but instead, as a genius, an artist, and
an ordinary person. No one knows Warhols context
of New York, Velvet Underground, Artworld, and
America better than Danto, nor can anyone else rival Dantos fluency in the telling. Andy Warhol is
Dantos gift to us. Combine it with Dantos many
other books in which he appropriates Warhol to modernist philosophy. Then one is left with an exemplary
picture of how art and philosophy should and should
not intersect in postwar America.
DANIEL HERWITZ
Institute for the Humanities
University of Michigan
morreall, john. Comic Relief: A Comprehensive
Philosophy of Humor. Malden, MA: Wiley-

306
Blackwell, 2009, xii + 187 pp., 8 b&w illus., $39.95
cloth.
John Morrealls contributions to the scholarship on
laughter and humor are well known and well respected. His early books, in particular Taking Laughter Seriously (SUNY, 1983) and The Philosophy of
Laughter and Humor (SUNY, 1987), are indispensible for those of us interested in the field of humor
studies. His later book Comedy, Tragedy and Religion
(SUNY, 1999) presents an original and creative interpretation of Eastern and Western religions in terms of
how they reflect both comic and tragic perspectives.
His newest book, Comic Relief: A Comprehensive
Philosophy of Humor, synthesizes many of the insights from these previous works, promising to offer
a comprehensive theory of humor that bridges academic disciplines by drawing on ideas from fields as
diverse as psychology, biology, aesthetics, ethics, and
religion. For a book of only 145 pages (not counting
the notes and bibliography), this is a very ambitious
goal, and in aspiring toward this goal, Morrealls latest investigation does indeed accomplish some interesting things. The formulation of a truly comprehensive philosophy of humor is not, however, among
these accomplishments.
In both style and content, Comic Relief seems
aimed at a popular audience. This is in some ways
a strength and in some ways a weakness. On the one
hand, the book is clear and straightforward, offering a
simple overview of some of the important issues and
topics relevant to humor studies. Morreall devotes
chapters to (1) the traditional theories of humor, (2)
the psychology of humor, (3) the evolution of humor,
(4) the aesthetics of humor, (5) the negative ethics of
humor, (6) the positive ethics of humor, (7) philosophy and comedy, and (8) comic wisdom. For someone
seeking a very general account of the ways that laughter and humor are related to philosophy, psychology,
biology, art, ethics, and religion, Morrealls book offers some good insights and makes some important
points. On the other hand, those seeking an in-depth
and nuanced philosophical investigation into the very
difficult details of humor and laughter will be disappointed. Morrealls approach is sometimes just too
simple and too clear-cut. In this book he often seems
more interested in advocating the feel-good effects
of laughter than he is in wrestling with the very intricate and downright puzzling complexities of this
subject matter.
The first chapter of Comic Relief is devoted to a
very brief, but helpful, overview of three traditional
philosophical approaches to humor: superiority theories, incongruity theories, and relief theories. Morreall quickly rejects all of these theories as inadequate,
claiming that none of them offers a truly comprehensive explanation of laughter or humor and that,

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

furthermore, none of these theories does justice to
the positive value of laughter and humor for human
life. Superiority theories treat humor as antisocial,
incongruity theories treat humor as irrational, and
relief theories are based on outdated and discredited
ideas about physiology. In all of these cases, then,
in addition to their failure to explain comprehensively laughter and humor, Moreall claims that these
theories denigrate the humorous experience by characterizing it as something negative, animalistic, and
retrograde.
Morrealls rejection of these theories is carried out
very quickly and with too little attention to philosophical detail. For instance, he dispenses with the
superiority theories of Plato, Thomas Hobbes, HenriLouis Bergson, and Roger Scruton by citing a single
psychology experiment carried out in 1993. With this
he concludes that feelings of superiority are neither
necessary nor sufficient for amusement and thus that
superiority accounts are faulty (p. 9). It would be
good to see more evidence, more argumentation, and
more care from Morreall in addressing the true complexities of this important category of theories, but he
rushes through this section of the chapter too swiftly.
In the process, the insights of notable thinkers such
as Plato are distorted. Citing a few passages from Republic, Morreall concludes that Plato detests laughter
altogether. This is, in fact, an exaggeration. A careful
reading of Republic and other works suggests that
Plato does not condemn all laughter, but merely immoderate and excessive laughter, which provokes
a violent reaction (p. 4). If you have ever encountered the sort of person who is never serious, Platos
point probably makes sense to you. People lacking in seriousness are just as annoying (and sometimes just as dangerous) as those who are always
serious. Throughout Comic Relief , Morreall either
downplays or ignores this particular insight and thus
tends to overstate the virtues of humor.
The theorist that Morreall devotes the most space
to refuting is Freud, who is treated in the section dealing with relief theories. Morrealls discussion here
is more detailed and sophisticated than his treatment
of Plato, but once again, Morreall is rash in his dismissal of this important thinker. His tidy refutation of
Freuds very elaborate theory ultimately amounts to
the claim that it is based on an outdated hydraulic
theory of the mind (p. 23), and that Freuds speculations on laughter and humor are unverifiable
(p. 21). This conclusion, as was the case with his
wholesale dismissal of Plato, comes across as hasty.
It is true that much of the material from this first
chapter of Comic Relief is given more extensive coverage in the first four chapters of Morrealls earlier book Taking Laughter Seriously. Nonetheless, it
would be worthwhile, after a gap of twenty-seven
years, to revisit and rethink the arguments and the

Book Reviews
evidence rather than simply reiterating old conclusions that readers of this current work may not have
encountered before.
Morealls own theory of laughter and humor is
a variant of the incongruity theory, and after dismissing previous articulations of this perspective as
incomplete in chapter one, he goes on in the second
chapter, The Psychology of Humor, to build his
own theory of laughter as a play signal. This is one
of the strongest and most fascinating portions of the
book. It is here that Morreall distinguishes amusement from emotion, arguing that whereas standard
emotions like hatred and fear are prompted by beliefs
that motivate us to take adaptive action, amusement
is idle (p. 31) insofar as it does not originate in beliefs about the world that induce us to act. When we
are amused, we become disengaged from the incongruities of the world, viewing them from something
akin to the aesthetic perspective. We switch from a
serious to an unserious outlook, and thus experience
what Morreall terms a cognitive shift. In making
this shift, we enter a play mode, which allows us
to regard things as unthreatening. Because humor
encourages us to see things as nonthreatening, from
this perspective there is no motivation to engage in a
fight-or-flight response. Instead, we allow ourselves
to linger with phenomena and enjoy their presence.
The vocalizations and the bodily movements that accompany laughter, furthermore, literally incapacitate
our bodies, and signal to others in our social group
that there is nothing to fear. Laughter is a play signal, and as such it tells those in the vicinity that all
is well.
Morrealls own account is very intriguing. His theory helps to make sense of why it is that in humor
there is a tendency toward laughter, why laughter
is infectious, and why it feels empowering to take
on a humorous perspective. With humor, we elevate
ourselves above the usual dangers of the world in order to view them as opportunities for pleasure and
play. This last point helps to explain why superiority
theorists, like Plato and Aristotle, have interpreted
laughter as something aggressive. Morreall suggests
that the first instances of humor and laughter originated in our ancestors as a way of distinguishing between mock aggression and real aggression. Among
the great apes and among human children, we see
laughter occurring in the course of activities like tickling, play-biting, and other forms of pseudo-hostility
(p. 41). In chapter three, Morreall speculates that
over the course of human evolution, our ability to
engage in humorous cognitive shifts may have developed out of our need to tell the difference between play-fighting and real danger. Moreover, as
the mental sophistication of humans has evolved,
so has our ability to experience not only perceptual
but also conceptual cognitive shifts. Modern humans
need to be able to distinguish between threatening

307
and nonthreatening concepts just as our ancestors
needed to distinguish between threatening and nonthreatening perceptions. In modern society, our play
is expressed not only physically, but also in terms
of ideas, and when we play with ideas, we develop
our powers of rationality. This, according to Morreall, is one of the main reasons why humor is so
valuable.
Morrealls theory is very interesting, and in many
ways it is also very plausible. However, I am afraid
that it is no more comprehensive than are any of
the other traditional theories that he so quickly criticizes and dispenses with at the start of his book. For
one thing, Morreall, as you will recall, rejects superiority theories as not supplying us with either necessary or sufficient conditions for laughter or humor
(p. 7). However, later in the course of formulating his
own theory, which he admits can explain only most
laughter and humor, Morreall asserts, A search for
necessary and sufficient conditions would be futile
(p. 64). This is an inconsistency. If Morreall is not
going to hold his own theory to a standard, then he
should not hold other theories to that standard either. I would also point out, in a similar vein, that
while Morreall dismisses Freuds theory as unverifiable, his own very intriguing speculation concerning
the evolution of humor as a play signal is, likewise,
unverifiable.
While Morreall does devote chapter five of his
book to a discussion of the negative ethics of humor, in particular its potential role in fostering irresponsibility, blocking compassion, and promoting prejudice, he seems much more interested in
arguing that humor is a positive and valuable capacity used by progressive and forward-thinking people in order to foster, as he claims in chapter six,
open-mindedness, creative thinking, and critical thinking (pp. 112113). In fact, Morreall seems
overwhelmingly concerned with linking the power of
humor to liberal or left-wing political attitudes and to
those ways of thinking that he considers most enlightened, civilized, and consistent with democracy. The
vast majority of examples he draws on in order to illustrate the operations of humor come from cartoonists, publications, and commentators who were or are
critical of the right-wing or conservative government
policies. Thus he cites the work of Gary Trudeau,
Mort Sahl, and George Carlin, as well as publications critical of George Bush and Ronald Reagan.
He also devotes a large portion of chapter seven to
discussing anti-Nazi humor from World War II. Conspicuous in its absence is a discussion of people such
as P. J. ORourke, Rush Limbaugh, or Anne Coulter,
who also use humor, but in the service of conservative agendas. I suspect that Morreall just does not
find these people funny.
The strangest chapter in this book is chapter four,
which focuses on the aesthetics of humor. In this

308
section, Morreall argues not only that comedy is better than tragedy, but also that it is a form of art
more well suited to the survival of the species than
is tragedy. His argument is premised on the claim
that tragedy promotes mental rigidity, individualism,
sexism, and militarism while comedy promotes rationality, creativity, feminism, and concern for the
group. The values promoted in tragedy, claims Morreall, helped keep ancient societies going, but are
now dangerous to the human race (p. 78). I find
this perplexing. First of all, the ancient Greeks tore
themselves apart with warfare. I am not sure why
Morreall thinks that the values of mental rigidity,
individualism, sexism, and militarism were beneficial to the ancient Greeks, who no longer exist because of their warlike tendencies, when he claims that
these same values are dangerous for us today because
they promote warfare. Second, comedies were performed in ancient Greece alongside tragedies, and
in fact it appears that many people then, as today,
preferred the comedies to the tragedies. So were the
values promoted by these comedies detrimental to
ancient Greek society? Third, if tragedy is now obsolete, and if the values it fosters are dangerous to
the survival of the species (p. 81), then why does
it still exist and prosper? And is it not at least arguable that many contemporary, popular comedies
promote the same rigid, sexist, and militaristic values
that Morreall claims are unique to tragedy? I have
in mind movies and TV shows like An American
Carol (David Zucker, 2008), Tropic Thunder (Ben

Stiller, 2008), Borat (Larry Charles, 2006), Bruno

(Larry Charles, 2009), Team America: World Police
(Trey Parker, 2004), American Pie (Paul Weitz, 1999),
South Park, and Family Guy. My suspicion is that
Morreall is just being overzealous in this chapter and
lapsing into the role of humor advocate. In any case,
the content of this chapter does reflect Morrealls
ongoing tendency to amplify what he considers to be
the positive, and to downplay what he considers to
be the negative, aspects of laughter and humor.
The final two chapters of Comic Relief address
the relationships between comedy and philosophy
and comedy and wisdom. Morrealls insights in these
chapters are apt, yet very brief and deserving of further elaboration. I agree with most of his conclusions
in these sections; in particular with his main point
that the humorous point of view is, in many ways,
very similar to the point of view aspired toward by
philosophers in their love of wisdom. Both philosophers and comedians engage in conversations, reflect
on experiences, and raise questions about those experiences. They both emotionally detach themselves
from the objects of reflection and try to understand
things from a variety of perspectives. They think critically, sometimes transgress against authority, and
engage in thought experiments. All of this is unob-

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

jectionable. Morreall, however, goes on to exempt
later existentialist philosophers from all of this.
Highlighting Sartre and Camus, he accuses them of
being anachronistic in their egocentric romanticism (p. 132), which he sees as more tragic than
comic. This criticism tells us more about Morreall
than it does about existentialism, however. While
it is true that neither Sartre nor Camus advocated
comedy and amusement at the expense of tragedy
and despair, neither did they advocate tragedy and
despair at the expense of comedy and amusement.
Their real position was that human experience is
both tragic and comic. As Sartres lifelong partner
Simone de Beauvoir wrote, human existence is ambiguous. To deny one aspect of human experience
at the expense of another is to falsify what it means
to be human. De Beauvoir and the other existentialists actually agree with Morreall that there are people
who are overserious, but they also recognize, along
with Plato, that there are also people who are not serious enough. Those who lack any degree of seriousness are buffoons, and that is certainly not a virtuous
characteristic.
Comic Relief is an enjoyable and interesting book.
It is good to see John Morreall offer a new synthesis
of some of his thoughts as he attempts to build up
a unique and comprehensive theory of humor. For
those interested in a broad overview of some of the
major issues and themes that are involved in the field
of humor studies, this book is a clear and accessible
introduction. For those who are interested in closely
scrutinizing the many puzzles and complexities that
continue to be a part of this field, however, Comic
Relief will seem a bit too clear-cut. In his eagerness
to recommend humor as the most superior of perspectives, Morreall too quickly and too neatly sweeps
aside many of the messy conundrums related to the
phenomena of laughter, comedy, and humor.
JOHN MARMYSZ
Department of English
College of Marin
smith, barry c., ed. Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine. Oxford University Press, 2007, xvii
+ 222 pp., $15.95 paper.
Pour yourself a glass of wine. Pour one for a friend,
too. May I suggest something from Ridge? Perhaps their Lyttonsville Zinfandel. Or the Geyserville.
Taste the wine. Swirl it around the glass a bit and taste
it again. We all know that the grape lubricates philosophical discourse, but you may not yet have thought
of it as a subject for philosophy. With Questions of
Taste, Barry Smith aims to introduce you to some of
the philosophical issues that wine raises. So let your
glass of wine sit while you attend to your experience.

Book Reviews
Describe the wine. You may find yourself using words such as pepper, cherry, blackberry,
black currants, bitter, chewy, earthy, forward,
smooth, oak, and so on. Do you use the same words
as your friend? If not, is at most one of you correct?
Or could it be that even though you disagree, you
both are correct? After all, this is taste we are discussing and of taste there is no dispudandum. Is taste
not completely subjective, completely in ones mind?
Surely there is no actual cherry in the wine. So what
would it mean to say that you are right when you use
the metaphor cherry, and your friend is wrong when
she denies that there is cherry in the wine?
Questions of subjectivity immediately arise in discussions of wine, both in naive discussions and in the
more sophisticated discussions included in this volume of essays. Several issues fall under the heading
of subjectivity. First: is taste subjective? Is there a fact
of the matter when it comes to taste? The question
is not whether what one likes is subjective. I hope
that it is obvious that that fact is subjective, a fact
about an individual subject, a fact that can change as

we move from subject to subject. That I enjoy Cotes

du Rhone
is a subjective claim, one which has no

authority to insist that you too must enjoy Cotes

du

Rhone.
As Smith points out in his contribution to this
collection, wine experts often counsel the rest of us
that taste is individual, that no one can tell you not
to like one wine or to like another. But what of my

claim to taste black cherries in this particular Cotes

du Rhone?
Does this claim have the authority to demand that you too taste black cherries in this wine?
Smith goes on to argue that even though what we like
and dislike may be individual, we are tasting something in the wine. Thus that I taste black cherries in
the wine is a consequence of what is in the wine, and
you ought to taste those black cherries as well.
What, then, is it in the wine that the description
picks out? Does the wine really contain black cherries? If so, that would be a surprise to winemakers,
who most definitely do not add strange fruit to their
wine. (Unlike Humes imagined scenario, the leather
flavor one might find in a wine is not the result of
actual leather that somehow made its way into the
cask.) Could the flavor be due to the presence of
some of the same chemical components as those that
give black cherries their flavor? Or perhaps the experience of black cherries is in the taster, that only
those with particular receptors, lined up in a particular way, will taste black cherries. If so, we might imagine that someone with a different physiology might

not taste black cherries in this particular Cotes

du

Rhone.
Jamie Goode, a biochemist and wine writer,
would endorse this conclusion, although he might
suggest that we need not go so far as to imagine different physiologies. Goode makes the case for something like subjectivity even in the description of the

309
wine. According to Goode, when a critic (any taster)
judges a wine, he or she forms a complex representation contributed to in part by the wine itself, but in
part by what the critic brings to the wine. There is the
smell and taste of the wine, of course (affected, as is
well known, by other tastes and smells recently on the
critics palate), but also the way the wine looks, the
way it feels in the mouth, and even the critics memories. There are the infamous studies which show that
blindfolded critics were unable to distinguish red and
white wines. But none of us would think for a minute
that red and white wines have similar tastes. This
strongly suggests that the way the wine looks affects
the way it tastes. But if memory affects the taste as
well, then, as no two people have the same memories,
for no two people will the wine taste the same.
While Goode appeals to results from science in
support of the idea that the object of our judgment is
not the wine itself, but rather is a complex representation created by the interaction of the taster with
the wine, Ophelia Deroy, a philosopher of science,
comes to a similar conclusion from a different starting point. She denies that everything that we taste
in a wine can be explained by the wines chemical
composition. Taste, she says, is a global property that
resists analysis. It emerges from the chemical composition of the wine, but is not captured by a chemical
analysis of the wine. There is room, she suggests, for
both the objective analysis provided by science and
the subjective impressions of taste.
Clearly, subjectivity of taste is a vexed issue. Not
only do several of the essays take subjectivity to be
their focus, but many of the others touch on the issue,
and, as we have seen, they do not agree on what conclusion to draw. (One of the many strengths of this
collection is that it does not feel the need to agree
on a conclusion.) One way to look past issues of subjectivity is to look at the language used to describe
the wine. If there is no actual cherry in the wine, then
the description of the taste as containing cherry is a
metaphor. What are we to make of the metaphor?
Should we search for truth conditions grounding the
metaphors that we use to describe wines? Or should
those metaphors be considered kin to the ones one
finds in poetry: perhaps evaluation in search of truth
conditions will lose the feeling that the metaphor is
designed to create? Complicating these questions is
that while certain metaphors (those that claim that
a particular flavor is in the wine) seem grounded in
the wine and in the interaction between the wine
and the taste receptors, other metaphors (that the
wine is forward or balanced) seem completely
abstract. Roger Scruton argues that in fact all of our
descriptions of wine are ungrounded because they
are about tastes (nonrepresentational perceptions,
he argues), while Adrienne Lehrer, a linguist who
studies the language of wine, argues that even these

310
abstract metaphors have a basis in the language of
perception. That would make the metaphors we use
to describe wine grounded in qualities perceived in
the wine.
Of course, if you are an expert wine taster, then
you need no introduction to these metaphors. You are
already familiar with this vocabulary and with how to
use it. But with the concept of expertise comes several
questions as well. Think about the development of
your expertise. When you started tasting wine, you
might have tasted a fruity alcohol. Now instead of
a generalized fruit, you taste cherries, oak, pepper,
and so on. As you have developed expertise, the way
you perceive the wine you drink has changed. But
what exactly has changed? Did you have the same
experience then as you do now, only you interpret
it differently? Or with your increased knowledge did
the experience change as well? Perhaps you think the
answer is obvious: knowledge does not change ones
sensory apparatus. The perception is constant; ones
ability to reflect on that perception, perhaps even to
derive pleasure from it, is what changes. If that is
what you think, then you will agree with Kent Bach,
who argues that position here. But, just as obviously,
as Barry Smith puts it, your experience affects what
you taste. This is hard. Maybe some more wine will
clear things up.
You may be thinking that while, on the one hand,
these are interesting questions, on the other, they are
not particularly novel questions. Perhaps you have
never considered these questions with respect to wine
before, but there is nothing revelatory in the news
that aesthetics raises issues of subjectivity. Consider,
however, that it is wine that is raising these issues. Can
wine be a work of art? (If so, what is the, as it were,
unit of work here: the bottle, the glass, the vintage?)
Of course, wine is not perceived in the same way that
we perceive paradigm works of art: we see paintings
and sculptures, we hear music, we read literature. In
each of these cases, the work is stable, allowing us to
return to it again and again. We might change, but
the work does not. Even music, which is temporal,
remains unchanged as we return to it (for example,
through recordings). Tastes are not stable in that way.
How something tastes depends on what else one has
been tasting. Moreover, the taste of wine depends on
its age. One can return to a painting to study it more
closely, refer to the canvas in order to clearly answer
a question. But the wine one returns to is different
from the wine one left earlier. For reasons such as
these, Paul Draper, the chief winemaker at Ridge
Vineyards, argues that wine is a performance, much
like a musical performance. It ends. It is not immortal like a work of art. Tim Crane suggests that wine
is an aesthetic object, something we can appreciate
aesthetically, but not an art object. Whereas Roger
Scruton argues that because taste is a nonrepresenta-

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

tional perception, wine cannot be even an aesthetic
object. Perhaps wine is not unusual in raising questions of subjectivity, but some of those questions are
particular to wine.
Now let us return to the wine you are drinking. It
has been sitting for a good while now. Swirl it around
the glass and taste it again. Does the same description
apply this time as did last time? I bet not. Wine does
not merely age in the bottle; when wine is aerated
some evaporation takes place. With minimal aeration, undesirable compounds (for example, sulfur)
can dissipate, leaving more intense fruit flavor and altering the way one perceives the wine. (Too much aeration [for example, leaving the wine open for many
hours] and the wine will oxidize. In lay terms, it will
start to turn.) So your wine, having aerated for half
an hour, probably smells and tastes different than it
did when you started. Plus, if you have been drinking
(that is, swallowing) the wine as you were tasting it,
then your perceptual faculties may have been altered
as well. (In fact, Scruton takes intoxication itself to be
a subject for philosophical study.) This is more grist
for worries about both subjectivity and the nature of
wine as an aesthetic object. What other aesthetic objects change as we experience them? And what other
aesthetic objects so radically change our experience
of them?
By now you have probably finished the bottle.
As a consequence you may be inclined to think that
not only does wine raise several interesting aesthetic
questions (and questions about aesthetics) as well as
more general philosophical questions, but also that
it is fun to think about these questions in the context of wine. More fun in the process than is much
philosophy. Perhaps, like me, you will be inspired by
Questions of Taste to try to figure out how you can
teach a class on wine and philosophy. Interesting issues in aesthetics are raised by wine, and as Questions
of Taste makes clear, there are good arguments for
various positions on these issues. At the very least
I recommend that you grab a bottle or two, get together with some friends, read the book, and have a
well-lubricated discussion.
ERIC SAIDEL
Department of Philosophy
The George Washington University
rush, fred. On Architecture. New York: Routledge,
2009, 178 pp., 16 b&w illus., $105.00 cloth, $21.95
paper.
A good deal of Fred Rushs On Architecture seems
to read like a script for the 1981 Louis Malle film, My
Dinner with Andre: conversational, flowing, moving
from one architectural point to another, sometimes
lingering, other times getting barely a mention. Rush

Book Reviews
calls what he does here interesting and complicated
. . . snapshots (p. 149) to get one to think about
architecture. This turns out to be a very good thing
and, at times, quite fascinating. The result is a serious
book that is, at the same time, entertaining and outon-a-limb critical. Selective as it is, what interests
Fred Rush will most likely interest his readers.
Much to his credit, Rush does not attempt a definitional analysis of architecture, nor does he, in
this short book, try to be everywhere architecturally.
There is barely an apology for the obvious omissions.
What he does offer is an approach (one approach)
to architecture, a way it should be, or anyway is,
perceived but how it is a necessity in understanding certain buildings or types of buildings. Theorists,
he thinks, should take into account this experiential framework, as should architects. This mode of
reception theory is phenomenological, a` la Maurice
Merleau-Pontys later writings, and it is discussed in
the first non-conversational third of the book, Bodies and Architectural Space, detailing what of phenomenology Rush applies to architecture and what
this approach opposes. The primary theoretical opponent here is formalism and its corresponding ocularity, where there is an element of unrealistic freeze
frames as sets of experiences of architectural works.
Not coextensive with modernism, formalism neglects
an architecture whose audience is embedded in its
form of life.
In foregrounding phenomenology as a way of
coming to architecture, Rush emphasizes the subtle merging of perceiver and perceived, a nondualist embodied consciousness, receptive and active.
From a pre-objective point of view, on the level
of awareness, there is no experiential distinction between subject and object, so in that sense at least,
the mind and world are not entirely separate. Rush,
in utilizing Merleau-Ponty, notes how the lived body
is continuously perceiving in what has been called
the flesh that can perceive. Along with kinaesthesia, the impact of movement on ones perceptual
array, and synaesthesia, where sensory modalities
are conjoined, Rush emphasizes the haptic experience where there is a merging of vision, smell, and
the like with touching. Rush sees this phenomenological haptic element as connected to the notion
that all space is topological. Hence we have a certain connection with the experience of architecture
(architecture especially) as an object of embodied experience. Intimate to this is the idea of extended embodiness, or prosthesis, the experience of touching
something exterior that, at the same time, seems like
touching oneself (a musician with her instrument, for
example).
The architect Steven Holl has written explicitly
about the influence of Merleau-Ponty on his work,
and Rush credits him with successfully raising a phe-

311
nomenological architecture to a dramatic level. He
says, Holls work in Kansas City is the present-day
summa of architecture built in light of phenomenological ideas concerning spatial embodiment (p. 47).
Rush is referring to Holls Bloch Addition to the
Nelson-Atkins Museum (2004), which is especially
sensitive to the haptic experience and to the plays
of light and shadow, surface textures, and the affordance of changing perspectives as one moves through
its ramps and galleries. One of the points of Holls
architecture is the transformation of its inhabitants
toward an increased attentiveness to their embodied
experience. Holl thinks of the five linked structures
of the addition that also connect to the existing Beaux
Arts Building as lenses. One of the major features of
the Bloch Addition is the use of light in the exterior walls, which are sandblasted double-paned glass
(Holl calls them vision glass), containing within the
panels a complex lighting system that makes them a
powerful aesthetic factor, a scene of luminescence at
night.
Frank Lloyd Wrights Guggenheim, too, is cited
for its phenomenological experience, familiar to anyone moving along its circular ramps. That museum
raises the discussion of aggressive art museums, ones
overwhelming their own purpose of displaying art:
the showcase, so to speak, outdoing the shown.
It may well be that Rush is unaware of how much
he privileges art museums in this book. In addition
to the Holl project and Wrights New York Guggenheim, Frank Gehrys Guggenheim in Bilbao, and
I. M. Peis glass pyramid at the Louvre, with mentions of Daniel Liebeskinds extensions to museums
in Berlin and Toronto, Madrids Prado, and Giorgio
Vasaris Uffizi in Florence appear throughout. Not
that there is anything wrong with that. In fact, it is no
accident that museums appeal to the phenomenological approach since typically, auditors wander from
space to space unchained to a desk or plopped up
on a coach, without quotidian purpose, the passage
from one space to another like the temporality experienced in music.
Rush offers a different phenomenological analysis of the procedural architecture of Arakawa +
Gins Site of Reversible Destiny (1995), Yoro, Japan,
where the perceiver is forced by the architecture
into nonstandard, sometimes disorienting spaces, so
that normalcy is subverted, and radically new ways
of experiencing space result. Built, but meant as
speculative or hypotheses, the architecture intends
that perceivers create their own space, extending their basic modes of experience. (Rush should
have explained that Arakawa and Madeline Gins
are founders of the Architectural Body Research
Foundation, calling their work together an Architecture Against Death, hence the reversible destiny
notion.)

312
The remaining two-thirds of On Architecture are
entitled Architecture and Other Arts and Buildings, Buildings, and More Buildings, and are what I
am calling conversational. Having a section comparing architecture to other arts is a fine idea and pays
dividends in the provocations Rush brings to the fore.
For example, Rush offers fascinating interpretations
of the roles of architecture in films like Alfred Hitchcocks Rear Window (1954) and North by Northwest
(1959) and Wim Wenders Wings of Desire (1987),
the latter, for example, utilizing the library, specifically the Berlin State Library, as a way of exploring
a host of philosophical issues about the mortal and
immortal, as a place of silence and isolation and as a
repository of memory (and forgetting).
Robert Turrells work with and about time and
light is typical of the architecturally related examples
brought to our attention by Rush. Turrells amazing Roden Crater in Arizonas Painted Desert is the
found architecture of an extinct volcano, where
Turrell suggests we appreciate the mixing of two temporal forms of light (the desert daylight and the distant light of stars) in the dark spaces of the craters
structure. Rush quickly draws analogies with Turrells
work to Zuni ideas of time and light, the musical practice of the Drukpa Kagyu sect of Tibetan Buddhism,
Zoroaster, and the organization of Roman cities. In
this book, Rush has some broad strokes.
There is an extended discussion of the meaning
of Schellings famous remark that architecture is
frozen music. In the end, Rush interprets the analogy by looking at the historical context in which it
was penned, but, eager to include the temporality of
music and the embodied experience of dance, Rush
is suggesting a dynamic rather than static characterization of architecture.
Gordon Matta-Clark does building-cuts by sawing through houses already scheduled for demolition.
He cuts into and through walls and floors, allowing
for views of houses that were not previously accessible while preventing views that were previously
usual. Clearly architectural, the work is also sculptural, if one had to call it something else. Rush does
not quite buy the interpretations of Matta-Clarks architectural revisions by critics Rosalind Krauss and
Michael Fried, seeing the work rather as phenomenological, and he claims, more optimistically, that the
work is a kind of last rite celebration of a buildings
life, just before its demise. Of course, the experience
of these buildings may be powerful but derivative,
imaginary and indirect, since nearly all embodied
spectators experience only their documentations, of
which Rush is aware. But on that matter, it may be
tough for Rush to establish the phenomenological
aspect of the work when viewing photographs.
The final section of On Architecture is concerned
with architecture in the context of site-specificity,

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

the physical and human context in which buildings
are designed, and here Rush emphasizes architectural multiples as the framework becomes town and
urban planning. Rush critiques utopian schemes, such
as those of Wright and Le Corbusier, the vernacular Florida communities of Celebration and Seascape
(Peter Weir appropriately chose Seascape as the set
for the film The Truman Show [1998]), and planners
such as Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. In part, his
concern is to show the connection between context
sensitivity in architecture and ethics. The ethics relevant to his site-specificity are akin to philosophers
like Aristotle, Alasdair MacIntyre, Theodor Adorno,
Charles Taylor, and Bernard Williams, where ethical
judgment is a skill, and the concern is with character traits and motivations tied to situations. Rush has
the good sense to worry about cost of living in many
of these urban schemes and how that consideration
often leads to single-class societies for those who can
afford to live there. The resulting numbing effect of
uniformity is a formula for failure in Seascape and
Celebration, for example. Rush advocates something
like a once-upon-a-time Greenwich Village in Manhattan, a mixed-use neighborhood where residential,
industrial, and commercial life coexisted, a place in
which Jane Jacobs lived and loved. What Rush forgets is how much small towns, as opposed to suburbs,
are often like New York neighborhoods and often
contain many of the elements he finds desirable.
There are, in On Architecture, little pieces that one
is not likely to find elsewhere (except perhaps Page
Six of the New York Post). For example: Le Corbusier was an anti-Semite and a Vichy functionary
during World War II (p. 126) (we do know his 1925
Plan Voisin was a plan to level major sections of Paris,
including the old Jewish neighborhood and the historical Marais) or the story of how Jackson Pollock,
the sometimes lover of Peggy Guggenheim, cut
down an initially finished painting to fit a space in
the Guggenheim apartment or how Wright initially
wanted to paint the Guggenheims exterior pink, a
connection with vernacular Art Deco.
Another thing just nice about On Architecture is
how Rush takes the whole thing personally and how
many a sentence will begin with a first-person account such as I live on West Washington Street in
South Bend, Indiana, in the section of the city that
was, at its industrial height, the most well-heeled (p.
137)this by way of introducing the fact that one of
Wrights Prairie Houses was just down the block.
On Architecture is very much a set of diverse selections of aesthetic topics even if his main thrust is
an attempt to show how architects and other artists
manifest phenomenological characteristics in their
work. Rush is unafraid of raising challenging or controversial issues, and On Architecture runs through
many of them. Rush has captured something unique

Book Reviews
among the arts about architecture: that living is moving about its spaces, and that to know this is to transform ourselves as we relate to architecture. Cover
to cover, this is a smart book and a very good read.
On Architecture is part of the Routledge Thinking in
Action series.
DAVID GOLDBLATT
Philosophy Department
Denison University
shusterman, richard, and adele tomlin, eds. Aesthetic Experience. New York: Routledge, 2008, x +
196 pp., $115.00 cloth.
This collection is a follow-up venture to a 2003 British
Society of Aestheticssponsored London conference, The Value of Aesthetic Experience, which
included Richard Shusterman as a keynote speaker.
Work by none of the conference presenters besides
Shusterman, most of them graduate students, appears
here, though, and instead the conference theme is
taken up by well-known analytic aestheticians (Mal Carroll, Gary Iseminger, Carolyn
com Budd, Noel
Korsmeyer, and Alex Neill), a Nietzsche scholar
and specialist in philosophy of the emotions (Kathleen Higgins), and a number of philosophers based
in continental Europe (Jean-Pierre Cometti, Paul
Crowther, Christoph Menke, and Martin Seel) who,
with the exception of Crowther, will probably be unknown to most readers of this journal. The conference was conceived and organized by Adele Tomlin,
now an independent scholar pursuing Buddhist studies in India and Nepal, a fact I mention for more than
mere curiositys sake: the editors main purpose in
gathering these essays together is to build a persuasive case against the more familiar and more widely
accepted conceptions of aesthetic experience (which
they believe are too exclusive with regard to legitimate candidate objects for aesthetic attention) in
favor of conceptions allowing into the aesthetic fold
nonart objects of many sorts in an effort to show
what the discipline of aesthetics might be able to offer if done with an eye toward connections between
particular kinds of aesthetic experience and human
welfare. It is worth making clear at the outset, though,
that Tomlin would not put the point as I have, that is,
in terms of welfare. A Buddhist thinker, she prefers
to speak of particularly worthy human ends in such
terms as these: the joyful state of the true nature of
mind (p. 11), realization of the true nature of oneself (p. 2), and the development of gnostic vision
(p. 2). Lest such abstruse and potentially off-putting
formulations from the books introduction sour ones
taste for much of the good stuff the book contains,
I have put the point in terms that one less inclined
to the congeries of Buddhist thought and talk will

313
be able to appreciate. But this is no bait and switch,
as none of the chapters includes such talk. I am no
fan of it and yet found much of the volume an eminently worthwhile contribution to ongoing research
into the plusses and minuses of kinds of conception
of aesthetic experience, and Tomlin herself at one
point cuts through these sorts of vagary by referring instead to such ends in terms of the profound
and transformative experiences . . . which ultimately
make life valuable and joyful (p. 11).
The eleven contributors essays are separated into
three sections: Experience and the Nature of the
Aesthetic, The Value and Scope of Aesthetic Experience, and Aesthetic Experience, Artists, and
Philosophies of Art. Given the breadth of this set of
topics, some vast differences in kinds of issue taken
up by the various contributors, and the rich complexity of argument many of the essays offer, I will not
attempt the impossible by trying to offer a comprehensive account of each chapter. Doing so would not,
anyway, go far to show the books value, which by my
lights is its proffering, rather than putting forward
a convincing case for, the conjecture that aestheticians would do well for themselves and their discipline were they to take seriously connections between something like a moral imperative to search
out what might be liberally called aesthetic experience at large and enhanced human well-being. I will
focus on laying out the editors general strategy for
their attempt to make that case, mention the main
point of each of the books chapters so that it might
be understood how that point is intended by them to
contribute to the making of that case, and include an
assessment of their efforts and a few ideas of a way
forward for those who might want to take up where
the volume leaves off.
Essays in Part I are intended to support the claim
that the search for a necessary and sufficient condition definition of aesthetic experience is probably
best thought futile. Essays in Part II are intended to
support the claim that the outcome of Part I ought
not be thought a legitimate source of frustration or
sense of loss, but can instead be thought an invitation to reassess the world of everyday objects and
events, perhaps in the light of an incipient and more
liberal notion of aesthetic experience than has yet
appeared, with an eye not toward the logical tidiness
of a definition but toward the welfare-enhancing nature of particular modes of perception and cognition
on the one hand and the fittingness of objects for
such modes on the other. Essays in Part III form a
hodgepodge, with two essays intended to further undermine what the editors consider to be a misguided
preoccupation with the fashioning of overly exclusive
conceptions of aesthetic experience (though here the
contributors focus their discussion of aesthetic experience in terms of art objects) and one particularly
intriguing essay by Alex Neill clarifying the content

314
and assessing the worth of Schopenhauers conception of aesthetic experience. The choice of concluding
the volume with an essay on Schopenhauers conception no doubt gives some idea of the direction that
Tomlin would like to see future research on aesthetic
experience take.
Part I begins with Budds Aesthetic Essence, in
which he argues against both Kendall Waltons and
Jerrold Levinsons theories of aesthetic experience.
These are well known, so I will not recount them here,
though it is worth mentioning the thrust and potential drawbacks of his criticism. Against Walton, he
claims that [i]t seems clear that for pleasurable admiration of somethings value to constitute aesthetic
pleasure, the value must be aesthetic value and the
pleasure non-propositional (p. 22). Unfortunately,
though, Budd provides little if any compelling reason for believing (and in fact appears simply to assume) that aesthetic pleasure must be nonpropositional. Given that the core of Waltons account is the
notion of, roughly, taking pleasure in somethings being worthy of admiration, which is a notion including
the concept of pleasure as an intentional-attitudinal
state, Budd does little more here than beg the question against Walton. Against Levinson, Budd claims
that Levinsons requirement that one reflect on the
relation between a things nonaesthetic and aesthetic
properties is too strong, in that one can have aesthetic
experiences of things without such reflection. But the
strongest reason Budd offers for believing such experiences ought legitimately be thought aesthetic ones
is the weak reason that we seem to be left with few
options as to ways to label them if not as aesthetic
ones. In fairness to Budd, I should say that he does
admit that Levinsons requirement might be thought
a plausible part of an account of the full aesthetic
appreciation of something.
I have said more about Budds chapter than I
will say about others because the two defects I have
pointed out above are illustrative of what I take to be
lessons that might be learned from reading this volume that might benefit those who would put together
another to similar ends. First, an antihedonist theme
runs throughout much of the book, though little effort has been made by those embracing it to explore
modern, propositional accounts of pleasure, which
are some of the most promising contenders available
and which some believe Mill himself would have been
drawn to were he alive today to more fully work out
his conception of qualitative hedonism. Even a small
effort in that direction might have cut through much
of the hoopla appearing here against limitations imposed by a supposed overreliance on the concept of
pleasure, which is such a potentially useful one for
a project intended to widen the scope of the discipline of aesthetics to cover more than merely art
objects. Second, an enduring source of confusion lies

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

in theorists failure to make evident the normative
content of their proposed definitions. In this regard,
Levinson need not be criticized so much for offering an account of aesthetic experience that fails to
capture the sorts of nonreflective experiences that
Budd and others would deem aesthetic as for failing
to make clear that he believes (if he does) that such
experiences are, for some good reason, not worth being called aesthetic ones. One such reason might be
that, with respect to opportunities for the exercise of
our capacities for cognition of and degree of quality
of emotive response to the perceptual properties of
things, such experiences fail to sufficiently exercise
those capacities, so that opportunities for enhanced
welfare in terms of worthwhile experience are relinquished through oversight.
In The Aesthetic: From Experience to Art,
Crowther argues for an account of aesthetic experience along lines similar to those I have suggested
above. He begins not from most peoples response
to candidate aesthetic objects but from an understanding of [t]he worlds . . . phenomenal richness
[as] correlated with the depth and richness of our
own cognitive capacities and affective receptiveness
(p. 39). Iseminger, in Experiential Theories of Aesthetic Value, continues work on his well-known aesthetic experience-based theory of art by devoting the
chapter to answering objections to that theory. In the
last chapter of Part I, The Dialectic of Aesthetics:
A New Strife between Philosophy and Art, Menke
analyzes what he believes to be the cause of the discipline of aesthetics being regarded as the least important of the main branches of philosophy, namely,
aestheticians defending their terrain by focusing almost exclusively on art objects. According to Menke,
aestheticians would be better off with a Baumgartenstyle understanding of their discipline as being centrally a means for the critique of culture via reflection
on the arts.
Part II begins with Richard Shustermans essay
Aesthetic Experience: From Analysis to Eros, revised and reprinted from a 2006 issue of this journal.
He argues for what he calls transformational theories of aesthetic experience and against more familiar demarcational theories that work to classify
already established modes of experiencing aesthetically, he argues for the importance of the place of the
notion of affect in an account of aesthetic experience,
and he concludes by defending sexual experience as a
kind of experience that ought legitimately be thought
aesthetic. In On the Scope of Aesthetic Experience, Martin Seel makes his normative commitment
clear by claiming that [i]t will benefit a discerning
concept of aesthetic experience if it is understood not
as the superordinate concept for aesthetic reactions
of all kinds but as a term for an intensification of aesthetic perception (p. 98). By aesthetic perception,

Book Reviews
Seel means attentiveness to the appearing of what
is appearing (p. 99). That will strike some as sounding mystically arcane and unfortunately reminiscent
of Heidegger-ease, but his point probably ought to
be well taken that lingering with the appearing of
things and situations . . . is no small achievement for
beings who in their thinking . . . reach expansively
into space and time (and, in so doing, can easily get
lost in the past or future) (p. 99). In one of the collections most well-conceived and executed essays,
Taste, Food and the Limits of Pleasure, Carolyn
Korsmeyer continues work she began in her 1999
book Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy
by arguing for the inclusion of food into the set of legitimate objects of aesthetic experience. Her Humeinspired account of the appropriate experience of
tasting food as involving both pleasure, discrimination, and judgment makes a convincing case for such
inclusion, though I find less plausible the claim she
works harder to render convincing, namely, that an
even stronger case might be made for that inclusion
on the basis of the notion of foods representing and
so being expressive of meanings. I find it less plausible
because, unlike foods intrinsic properties giving rise
to its extrinsic and response-dependent taste properties, foods representing properties seem much more
weakly related to any of its intrinsic properties.
Carrolls Aesthetic ExPart III begins with Noel
perience, Art and Artists, in which he continues
and rehearses some of the features of his familiar
attack on the concept of aesthetic experience. In
Between Being and Doing: Aesthetics at the Crossroads, Jean-Pierre Cometti argues that the meaning
of artwork is best understood not in terms of intrinsic features with the capacity to yield aesthetic experience, but along the lines of Wittgensteins conception of meaning-as-use. Neills Schopenhauer and
the Foundations of Aesthetic Experience concludes
the volume. Neill makes better sense of Schopenhauers account of aesthetic experience than I have
seen done elsewhere, the work of some Schopenhauer experts included.
I have saved for last and omitted from my earlier
description of essays appearing in Part II Kathleen
Higginss chapter seven, Refined Emotion in Aesthetic Experience: A Cross-Cultural Comparison.
This is the high point of the collection. Without reference to such extravagances as the Buddhist metaphysics of oneness of all things and the supposed illusion of subjectobject dualism that inform some of
the writing in the volume, without recourse to Continental mannerisms of the sort that readers may find
unpalatable in the selections by Seel and Menke, and
without falling afoul of either some uninformed criticism of the concept of pleasure or the temptation to
hide normative content under the guise of the purely
descriptive definition, Higgins persuasively argues,

315
via clearly articulated and discussed examples from
Japanese and Indian aesthetic theories, for the following: Western aestheticians have in the main misconceived the notion of aesthetic experience in that
the most well-known Western conceptions simply do
not capture types of perceptual experience, and disallow types of candidate object, which are capable
of yielding emotive responses that are so obviously
of potentially high welfare-enhancing value to those
prepared for them that a theorys failure in this regard can only appear as a serious deficit.
CHRISTOPHER STEVENS
Department of Philosophy
University of Maryland, College Park
forte, bruno. The Portal of Beauty: Towards a Theology of Aesthetics. Trans. by David Glenday and
Paul McPartlan. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008, viii + 121 pp., $30.00 paper.
Talk of beauty appears chameleon-like, changing
concepts and terms as writers of different intellectual color shade the discussion with their own concepts and vocabulary. For example, syncretic author
Ronald Moore in Natural Beauty (Broadview Press,
2007) (reviewed by Dan Vaillancourt in this journal [66: 2008]) describes beauty experiences as emphatic, positive sensory experiences (p. 37). Two
centuries before Moore, transcendental idealist Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Judgment (1790) had
placed the locus of beauty not in the senses but in the
mind as the free play of understanding and imagination. Christian writers like Bruno Forte also color the
talk of beauty with their own concepts and terms.
Talk of beauty among Christian thinkers (before
the reformation forced Christians into Catholic and
Protestant camps) requires a long deep breath, its
history reaching back more than 1,600 years with Augustine and then unfolding forward for about a thousand years with luminaries such as Pseudo-Dionysius,
Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas. Despite their
differences, these thinkers advance views of beauty
whose family type can only be characterized as transcendental, understood in at least two ways. On the
one hand, beauty is transcendence itself, a way of
conceiving and talking about God, if only analogically, as Aquinas does in the Summa Theologica
(Benziger Brothers, 1947) when he says, [B]eauty
has a likeness to the property of the Son [of God]
(vol. 1, p. 201). On the other hand, beauty appears
as a characteristic of beings without exhausting itself in them; at the same time it points beyond them
to its source, Beauty. This kind of floating quality of
beauty that inheres in objects without being captured
by them was described by medievalists and their commentators as a transcendental, the second way of

316
conceiving beauty as transcendental. In this tradition, beauty has its own objective ontological status,
more akin to a Platonic Form than to the mental experience Kant describes or the sensory experience
Moore advances. Thus, beauty in the Christian tradition names something divine, perceptually real, and
objective.
Enter into this tradition Bruno Forte with his little gem, The Portal of Beauty: Towards a Theology
of Aesthetics. Forte not only walks in the Christian
tradition, but he also happens to be one of its representatives as the Roman Catholic Archbishop of
Chieti-Vasto in central Italy (on the Adriatic Sea)
and one of its defenders as a member of the Vaticans International Theological Commission. Moreover, his thirty books have elevated him as probably
the most famous Italian theologian in Italy. But his
reputation is growing in the United States, too, with
the translation into English of nine works, five of
them translated in the past five years. The Portal of
Beauty will bring him to the attention of many more
English readers and, hopefully, trigger some switches
in their minds related to Christian aesthetics.
The Portal of Beauty appeared originally in Italian
in 1999, and then David Glenday and Paul McPartlan
translated it into a smooth and jargon-free English.
Brevity and readability notwithstanding, the text carries some serious scholarly weight with 235 footnotes,
many of them citing the works of the books six major thinkers with whom Forte dialogues. In each of
the first six chapters, Forte calls one witness at a time
and interrogates him relative to the books thesis on
beauty: beauty happens when the Whole offers itself
in the fragment or, phrased differently, the limitless inhabit[s] what is little (p. vii). Forte here is
leaning on beauty as a transcendental quality of objects, the second way of conceiving beauty as transcendental. His witnesses are Augustine, Aquinas,
Sren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Hans Urs
von Balthasar, and Pavel N. Evdokimov, all of them
speaking through their major works. In the next two
chapters, before the conclusion, Forte explores the
significance of his beauty thesis for two art forms, music and cinema. These two chapters explore in more
detail ideas he presented at conferences, his views on
music at the 1998 Conference of the St. Cecelia Association and on cinema at the 1997 World Symposium
on Cinema and the Sacred. Both the art form and witness chapters benefit from ample primary source material, not only from the major witnesses and Christian canon but also from the continental tradition,
especially G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, and
Theodor Adorno. Readers should expect the text to
exercise their gray matter in a rewarding intellectual
encounter.
Perhaps the argument Forte develops in the Dostoevsky chapter will make the point. He opens the

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

chapter with the same Dostoevsky line (Beauty will
save the world) that has spurred commentary from
many intellectuals, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn
in his 1972 written Nobel Lecture, Pope John Paul
II at the conclusion of his 1999 Letter to Artists,
and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict
XVI) in his 2002 message, The Feeling of Things,
the Contemplation of Beauty, among others. But
Forte quotes the line not from the mouth of The
Idiots Prince Myshkin, who articulates it numerous
times, but from the lips of the young nihilist Ippolit:
Is it true, Prince, that you said once that beauty
would save the world? . . . What sort of beauty will
save the world? (p. 43). Forte chooses Dostoevsky
and this passage from The Idiot because Ippolit, who
is near death, is asking the only important question
about beauty in a world riddled with evil and suffering. What kind of beauty can provide, as Forte says,
redemption from evil, salvation . . . over death
(p. 43)? The answer lies in a tragic beauty. Dmitri
in The Brothers Karamazov (Vintage, 1991) says,
Here the devil is struggling with God, and the battlefield is the human heart (p. 108). Sometimes
the devil wins out, and the heart despairs at the
lack of beauty in the world; the heart embraces nihilism. Other times, the heart chooses the example of
the crucified Christ, that death, as Forte explains,
[that] is the death of death (p. 47). This choice, still
embedded in suffering, grasps the heart of the matter:
beauty, mysterious and tragic in the fragment, points
to the Whole. This is the kind of beauty that will save
the world. Fortes argument in this and the other
chapters tunnels its way through primary source material as if digging patiently and methodically into the
side of a mountain, and then, suddenly, there is a brilliant light on the other side, an illuminating insight
on beauty.
However, on the surface, the book may appear disjointed, with each chapter introducing a new thinker
(or art form) with a novel set of concerns and vocabulary. But Fortes methodology betrays a strength.
He places himself in the midst of different theological systems and art forms, then works them until he
discovers new understandings of beauty, often fresh
insights on the books thesis on beauty, the Whole
in the fragment. For example, besides Dostoevskys
tragic beauty, Forte develops in Balthasar the significance of seeing the form of Christ in creation. He
says, The perception of this form . . . is the certain
space in which the glory of beauty can shine out
(p. 63). Here the Whole in the fragment appears as
a form suffused with divine and rapturous glory. In
Evdokimov, Forte explores a metaphysics of light
and the place of the icon in transmitting that light.
Of course, light functions in this context as a symbol, referring to the light of divine, original creation,
which allows us human beings to see original truth

Book Reviews
and beauty (p. 68). More than permitting the sight
of beauty, this fundamental light transforms the human being into a thirst for beauty (p. 70), which
the icon slakes as the fragment that gives a home
to the divine Advent (p. 74). In cinema, to present
a final example, Forte marries icon and story, icon
in the sense that screen images can pack symbolic
power to evoke that which is beyond in the forms
of that which is close to us (p. 106), and story as the
medium par excellence which Christians have traditionally chosen to explore and to communicate their
faith. Thus, the images and stories of cinema become
the fragments through which the Whole presents itself. These brief examples demonstrate the strength
of Fortes methodology. Each chapter may begin with
a different set of concerns and terms, but it ends
with a powerful insight on the books Whole-in-thefragment theme. It is an effective strategy, though
infrequently seen in the world of aesthetics scholarly
research and publication.
For all its strengths, the book still displays a few
weaknesses. It is blind, containing no index. It is
also without a bibliography, though the determined
and patient reader can search the footnotes to find
further readings. Additionally, the introduction (all
too brief at 600 words) raises more questions for readers than it answers. Why did Forte choose these six
thinkers from a pool of perhaps hundreds? Why did
he select music and cinema instead of poetry, architecture, sculpture, or drama, to name a few art forms
among dozens? In another curiosity, the introduction
promises a rereading of beauty in poetry, but, except for two poems in the conclusion (nine lines from
the 2,538-line The Christ of Velasquez by Miguel
de Unamuno and Cant Espiritual by Joan Maragall), the book fails to deliver on the promise. These
weaknesses notwithstanding, Fortes little book still
sounds a strong note.
Throughout the world, 1.5 billion Christians
(Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox) yearn
for a brief, professional work on the transcendental
nature of beauty, the view of beauty in their tradition. The Portal of Beauty will go a long way toward
satisfying them.
DAN VAILLANCOURT
Department of Philosophy
Loyola University Chicago
bicknell, jeanette. Why Music Moves Us. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, xviii + 165
pp., $37.00 cloth.
Bicknells book seeks to explain how it is that some
music seems responsible for producing strong emotional responses (or feelings of the sublime) in some
listeners. However, to answer this, Bicknell claims

317
that we must first seek to understand why any music
would produce emotional responses in listeners at all.
After all, music is just mere sound that has no representational power. So, why is it that abstract sound
would ever produce emotional responses in any listeners? Bicknells suggestion is that an explanation
of our emotional responses to music requires an explanation of the social character of music. Her book
is wonderfully rich in detail, highly insightful, and a
welcome addition to the debate over the nature of
our emotional responses to music.
Bicknell seeks evidence for her view within the
cognitive sciences; however, she wishes to avoid reductivist accounts, such as a view she calls the pharmaceutical model, which holds that music is like a
drug, acting as a mere stimulus that induces strong
emotional responses in some listeners. Bicknells objection to this view demonstrates a commitment to
there being a strong link between listening with understanding and the listeners emotional response. I
am not convinced that this link is as strong as Bicknell suggests, or that such a link would rule out the
pharmaceutical model, so it would be helpful to examine this point in more detail. Bicknells objection
to the pharmaceutical model is that music is something that we listen to with understanding. Thus, it
cannot be reduced to the status of a mere drug, as
we do not simply react to acoustical stimuli passively.
Rather, cognition (loosely defined) plays a role in
our appreciation. Bicknell accepts Peter Kivys claim
that if music were a mere stimulus, a listeners level
of musical knowledge would have no effect on her
pleasure in listening to music (p. 81), which clearly
ones level of musical knowledge often does. According to Bicknell, Music is treated as something to be
understood, not as a stimulus which automatically
causes a response. Listeners who fail to recognize
the Phrygian mode, or who do not grasp the association between the mode and Dionysian worship, will
be not affected (p. 84).
As sympathetic as I am to this position, Bicknells objection seems weak: while it is certainly true
that we often do (or at least aim to) listen to music with understanding, it seems plausible to me that
someone could enjoy a particularly strong emotional
response to some music without understanding it.
(Additionally, it also seems plausible to me that
someone could listen with great understanding and
yet feel no emotional response: my years at a music
conservatory would provide evidence of this!) Bicknell discusses cases where listeners report experiencing a trance-like state when listening to some music, which she counts as among the kinds of strong
emotional responses that her account is intended to
explain. Are we decidedly convinced that experiencing this trance-like state requires the listener to listen with understanding? Certainly, we would need

318
to be clear about what it means to listen with understanding, but I interpret Bicknell here to simply
mean that one listens knowledgeably with regard to
the standards of musical performance for a particular
culture, and that such knowledgeable listening comes
in degrees.
Bicknells objection seems to be based on the claim
that music does not passively affect us because we listen with understanding (that is, we can listen knowledgeably) and that this understanding can improve
our enjoyment and emotional response to the music.
The second part of this conjunction is surely correct;
informed listening often does improve ones pleasure and emotional response to a piece of music.
But for Bicknells objection against the pharmaceutical model to hold, what needs to be demonstrated
is that we may enjoy a strong emotional response
only when we listen with understanding, that enjoying a strong emotional response is really dependent
on listening with understanding. What seems more
likely is that some people enjoy strong emotional
responses though they may not listen with understanding: imagine a listener who is not well versed
in jazz and yet is quite moved on some occasion by
(for example) the pensiveness of Coltranes Central
Park West (1964). It strikes me as a genuine possibility that a listener may be strongly moved by the
music even if she were unable to recognize that piece
at a later time. Think about film scores: cinematic
music may strongly contribute to ones emotional response to a film even when that music is heard only
once and would be unrecognizable from the many
other similar-sounding film scores. My disagreement
with Bicknell is that there are clearly also some listeners who seem not to listen with understanding (or
with very little), and yet this does not bar them from
enjoying strong emotional responses. Additionally,
there are other listeners whose knowledgeable and
analytic listening seems to inhibit their enjoying a
strong emotional response (for example, the dispassionate conservatory student). Both of these cases
would suggest (to me at least) that strong emotional
responses are sometimes quite divorced from listening with understanding, in which case, we cannot be
certain that some listeners do not simply respond to
music passively, as a mere drug-like stimulus, and yet
still enjoy strong emotional responses. While it seems
true that understanding often does play some role in
a listeners emotional response, I do not think this
is sufficient to set aside the pharmaceutical model
entirely.
Returning to the main claim in Bicknells book,
why should we think that the general phenomenon
of emotionally responding to music is due to the social aspects of music? This claim would seem to conflict with the many private and yet emotionally powerful experiences one may have with music. More

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

specifically, how should we interpret Bicknells usage of social? One interpretation, which Bicknell
makes explicit on page 93, would be that social
is contrasted with natural rather than with private. On this interpretation, I take Bicknells central claim to be that our emotional responses to music
are a product of some social hardwiringthat is, that
we are hardwired to respond with emotion to certain social behaviors, and where music is involved in
those social behaviors, we have thereby developed
associations between music and that emotion. That
Bicknell contrasts social with natural rather than
with private is not apparent throughout the book,
as much of the discussion seems more focused on
the communal activity of musical practiceBicknell
often contrasts social with personal and individual. Additionally, one could justify weaker interpretations of social throughout the book as well.
A weaker interpretation of social might hold that
music is social in the same way that language is social: words do not have meaning independently of
their usage by a community of language users, and,
analogously, sounds are not musical sounds independently of the usage of those kinds of sounds by a
community of users. This interpretation is also supported by Bicknells text: All societies place limits on
music-making, such that certain sounds are accepted
as musical while others are excluded. . . . The range
of variety present in the worlds musical cultures is
considerably narrower than the scope of imaginable
sound patterns (p. 90). This weaker interpretation
seems uncontroversial; however, the difficulty here
is that it is not obvious how musics being social in
this way could offer any explanation of why we respond to music emotionally. As such, I will focus on
the stronger interpretation.
Accepting this interpretation (that music is a social rather than natural phenomenon), how would
this help explain our emotional responses to music?
The bulk of the work for Bicknells account is found
in chapter six, and the argument she weaves together
from her sources is quite intriguing. While Bicknell
offers many pertinent observations of the social character of music, I will focus on one that seems most
promising. Oxytocin is a chemical that acts as a neurotransmitter when released in the brain. This chemical
is released during sexual stimulation in both men and
women and is released in women during breastfeeding and childbirth. Studies have shown strong links
between the presence of oxytocin in the brain and social behaviors such as pair bonding in many species
of mammals. In particular, studies of certain animals
show greater activity of social behavior when those
animals are injected with oxytocin. While no studies have yet shown any link between music listening
and the release of oxytocin in humans, Bicknell cites
a study by Jaak Panksepp in which domestic chicks

Book Reviews
have been observed to be soothed by listening to
music. The chicks separation cries are reduced when
listening to music, and such behavior is explained
by the presence of oxytocin. So, Panksepp suggests
that music may also induce the release of oxytocin in
chicks (pp. 104106).
While this suggestion is quite interesting and certainly does indicate the need for cognitive scientists
to explore this further, I worry that, even if a direct link between the release of oxytocin and music listening were to be demonstrated, this discovery
would still not offer an explanation of why we respond to music with emotion. So, there are some
commonalities at the neurochemical level between
our emotional responses to social behaviors and our
emotional responses to music. What this would show,
at least, is that our emotional responses to music are
dependent upon the same neurological functions as
our social behaviors, but we would still want an explanation of why that particular chemical is released
during music listening. What is it about music that
stimulates the release of that chemical in particular?
This worry aside, Bicknells book offers much insightful and thought-provoking analysis that incorporates
much interesting evidence from the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and music history. Her book would
be of great interest to philosophers and psychologists
researching emotional responses to music and would
likely make an excellent book for advanced courses
in the philosophy of music.
CHRISTOPHER BARTEL
Department of Philosophy and Religion
Appalachian State University
walden, scott, ed. Photography and Philosophy: Essays on the Pencil of Nature. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2008, xii + 325 pp., $79.95 cloth.
Putting together a collection of new essays is difficult. If contributors are given free rein to write on
anything relating to a specific topic, the result is usually more a reflection of their independent interests
than a coherent collection of essays. If the editor
tries to ensure coherence by dictating the topics to be
addressed by individual authors, their contributions
usually end up being more like encyclopedia entries
than original essays. One of the most attractive features of Scott Waldens collection, Photography and
Philosophy: Essays on the Pencil of Nature, is that
it successfully avoids both of these pitfalls. Walden
does this by structuring the volume around a series of
responses to two influential, previously published essays in the philosophy of photography, both of which
are reprinted in the volume. The resulting collection
has the feel of an extended conversation on a variety of related topics by a community of philosophers

319
who are intimately familiar with one anothers work.
The overarching theme of their conversation is the
philosophical significance of the mechanical nature
of photography.
The two previously published essays that anchor
Waldens volume are Kendall Waltons Transparent Pictures and Roger Scrutons Photography and
Representation. (There is also a previously published piece by Arthur Danto, but it is not part of
the main conversation of the book.) Waltons and
Scrutons essays partake in the tradition of provoking
philosophical discussion and debate by saying something that no one could really believe (or, at least,
something that one might think no one could really
believe). Walton, for instance, argues that looking at
photographs is akin to looking through telescopes
into the past. He claims that we literally see through
photographs into the past and thereby come into direct contact with the actual states of affairs that they
depict. This capacity of photographs gives them special epistemic status, because we are literally seeing
something that once happened. In order to explain
this capacity of photographs, Walton introduces an
abstract characterization of what it is for a representation to be mechanically produced. On his account,
a photograph is mechanically produced insofar as the
content of the photograph is independent of the content of the photographers own beliefs about what the
photograph depicts. Scrutons argument starts from
a similar claim, that photographs are mechanically
produced insofar as they are representations that
do not express their makers thoughts about what
they are representing. Scruton takes this possibility
of photography to imply that the only aesthetic interest we can take in photographs is with regard to
the aesthetic properties of the states of affairs that
they depict. Once again, the idea is that we literally
see through photographs to the actual states of affairs they depict. On both Waltons and Scrutons accounts, photographs are like telescopes or windows;
in this sense, they are not really representations at
all. Scruton takes this to imply that photography, as
such, cannot be an art form, because it cannot itself
be used to represent or express an artists thoughts
or feelings.
As you might imagine, many of the new essays
written for this volume take issue with Waltons and
Scrutons provocative claims. Cynthia Freeland offers an alternative explanation for the sense of direct contact that photographs sometimes provide:
she argues that this is not because of photographys
special epistemic status, but because photographs
participate in the long tradition of making and using portraits in an attempt to maintain contact with
the dead. It is unclear whether this implies that if
one is skeptical about pre-photographic attempts to
use portraits to maintain contact with the dead, one

320
should be similarly skeptical of the sense of direct
contact that photographic portraits sometimes provide, or whether the mechanical nature of photography somehow allows it to succeed at doing something that previous forms of portraiture attempted
but failed to do. Aaron Meskin and Jonathan Cohen critique the claim that we literally see through
photographs on the grounds that photographs only
provide us with information about how objects look,
not where they are spatially located. Does this imply
that we would not see through a sufficiently complicated periscope if it prevented us from spatially locating objects around multiple corners? Like Freeland,
they propose to explain the sense of direct contact
in photography in terms of psychological facts about
the viewers of photographs, rather than in terms of
any sort of special epistemic status of photographs
themselves.
Scott Waldens own contribution attempts to refine Waltons account of the special epistemic status
of photographs. Although he grants that the mechanical nature of photography is no guarantee that the
beliefs we form from looking at them are true, he
nonetheless thinks that a suitably refined account
of the mechanical process of making photographs
justifies thinking of them as an epistemically privileged sort of representation. I will return to this
idea, which runs throughout the volume, at the end of
my review. Barbara Savendoff explores some of the
ways in which photographers are able to exploit the
documentary authority of photography for artistic
ends.
The two pieces that most directly engage with
Scrutons essay are by David Davies and Patrick
Maynard. They both argue against Scrutons claim
that our only aesthetic interest in photographs is in
the aesthetic properties of the states of affairs that
they depict, on the grounds that the composition of
photographic images involves a considerable amount
of input from photographers. Maynards essay, in particular, introduces and discusses a number of useful
concepts for understanding the successful composition of photographs (for example, negative space, dynamics, and rhythm). Both essays emphasize the ways
in which certain forms of photography are valued
precisely because photographers do not have complete control over the actual layout of the states of
affairs in the world that their photographs depict. As
Maynard puts this point, [s]uccessful fishers are not
criticized for not having placed the fish on their hooks
or in their nets (p. 207).
The remaining new essays in the volume, by Dominick McIver Lopes, Kendall Walton (his second es Carroll, and Gregory Currie,
say in the volume), Noel
do not directly engage with the previously published
essays by Walton and Scruton but rather discuss related issues, especially with regard to aesthetic issues

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

concerning the similarities and differences between
photography and film. As I noted above, however,
the overarching theme of this volume concerns the
philosophical significance of the mechanical nature
of photography. Several of the writers follow Walton
in thinking that there is a deep difference between
mechanically produced photographs and handmade
images, and that we can explain this difference in
terms of the way in which the content of photographs
is independent of the content of photographers beliefs about what their photographs depict. I myself am
skeptical about such an explanation for two reasons.
First, this cannot be the right way to formulate a distinction between photographs and handmade images,
since it is possible to create handmade images that
equally well bypass the beliefs of their makers about
what they depict. Tracing the outline shapes of the
objects seen through a window will produce a handmade image that nonetheless bypasses its makers
beliefs about the objects depicted. Second, and more
importantly, the possibility of such handmade images
undermines Waltons explanation for thinking that
photographs put us in direct contact with the states
of affairs they depict, since we do not experience such
handmade images as putting us in direct contact with
what they depict. In short, if there is any substance
to the idea that photographs put us in direct contact
with what they depict, it must be because of something other than their mechanical nature (at least,
as according to the abstract characterization of this
mechanical nature that Walton introduces).
As a whole, Waldens collection is a valuable addition to the philosophical literature on photography.
It is well organized and contains a sustained discussion of many of the more provocative claims that
philosophers have made about photography. It is still
an open question whether any of these claims are
true, but rather than simply dwelling upon the banal truths that we all already agree upon, it is a lot
more interesting to start, as Walden does, with the
moments when philosophers are led to say things
that are almost impossible to believe and work from
there.
ZED ADAMS
Department of Philosophy
New School for Social Research
gaiger, jason. Aesthetics and Painting. London: Continuum, 2008, viii + 179 pp., $105.00 cloth, $24.95
paper.
Thomas Kuhns Kantian dictum that philosophy of
science without history of science is empty allows
for a natural extension to the philosophy of art. Jason Gaigers excellent contribution to the Continuum
Aesthetics series demonstrates that philosophical

Book Reviews
reflection upon painting is greatly invigorated by being brought into dialogue not merely with historical examples but also with the theoretical reflections of art historians and critics on the objects of
their study. While, unsurprisingly, philosophers like
Richard Wollheim and Nelson Goodman figure large
in Gaigers discussion, they share the stage with Leon

Battista Alberti, E. M. Gombrich, Heinrich Wolfflin,

and Clement Greenberg. The significance accorded
to the nature of depiction in contemporary philosophical debate is respected, but the issues gain in
philosophical depth and detail when viewed through
the lenses of such writers. And, while clearly fulfilling his mandate to provide a stimulating and engaging overview of the field, Gaiger also presents
a sustained and compelling argument for the need to
think about painting in a way that does justice to the
phenomenology of pictorial experience and that reconciles perspectives often brought unhelpfully into
conflict in the cut and thrust of professional philosophical debate.
Gaiger operates with a broad conception of painting as the purposive marking of a surface through direct bodily movement to create a visual image (p. 9).
Painting is thereby characterized as a kind of doing,
of which paintings are the product. Such a conception
includes mosaics and perhaps also photography, although consideration of the latter is wisely excluded
on the grounds that it raises different philosophical issues. We are cautioned against taking this broad conception of painting as a definition, since it would include instructional illustrations and exclude Damien
Hirsts spin-paintings. But, while Gaiger never returns to this point, his later claim that paintings demand an attention that explores the interrelations
between figuration and configuration suggests how
the broad conception might be amended to deal with
such cases. Instructional manuals do not demand
such attention, and neither do spin-paintings, given
their manner of generation, which calls into question
whether, as artworks, they are rightly conceived of as
paintings.
Gaiger imposes two constraints on an adequate
theory of painting. First, it must take proper account
of the complex relations that obtain between the
marks that make up the surface of a painting (surface) and what those marks are taken to stand for
or represent (subject). It is not enough to grant
that representational content is only one aspect of
painting as an art, and that equal importance needs
to be given to internal or configurational properties, including properties of form and design (p. 3).
It is also necessary to bring out how the figurative
and configurative dimensions of paintings mutually
sustain one another. Second, it must respect the demand that paintings be understood and appreciated
in their historical settings without subscribing to a

321
strong historicism that sees an inevitability in the
development of painting.
The opening chapters focus on the nature of pictorial representation. The interplay between surface
and subject is first explored in chapter two as a tension, in Albertis conception of painting, between two
goals he ascribes to the painter: to reproduce the appearances of things and to construct a pictorial manifold wherein the depicted figures are so composed
that the affective content of the narrative is communicated to the audience. This interplay reemerges
in chapter three in the claim that looking at something as a picture involves an awareness of it both as
a marked surface and as a representation of something, if only of depth. The challenge is to determine
how these two modes of awareness are related in our
experience of paintings and how pictorial depiction
is to be understood in light of this.
Two accounts of depiction are explored. In chapter
three, Gaiger critically examines Gombrichs perceptualist account, according to which artists learn,
through experimentation, to use the medium to mobilize in viewers the same kinds of psychological capacities that are engaged in ordinary seeing. Gombrichs illusion theory of depiction denies that the
viewer can simultaneously be aware of both the illusory subject and the canvas as a marked surface.
Gaiger objects that this fails to do justice both to
the phenomenology of pictorial experience and to
our proper interest and pleasure in the way artists
use media for representational purposes. Wollheims
doctrine of twofoldness is offered as a corrective to
Gombrichs view. In response to the charge (for example, from Lopes and Jerrold Levinson) that Wollheims account conflates pictorial experience in general with the distinctive kind of interest that we take
in artistic depictions, Gaiger counters that twofoldness is a nonempirical condition on the possibility of
seeing a picture as a picture.
In chapter four, Gaiger turns to the symbolbased approach to depiction, which, in its extreme
conventionalist form, denies that there are any
perceptual and psychological constraints on pictorial representation. He argues that Goodmans denotational account of depiction is not, as some
maintain, conventionalist in this sense. Rather,
Goodmans account of the syntactic and semantic
differences between linguistic and pictorial symbols,
and of the dense and replete nature of the latter,
accords an essential role to perceptual experience
in the understanding of pictures, and also illuminates
how the representational and configurational aspects
of pictorial awareness interact. Two points might be
noted here, however. First, given Gaigers definition
of conventionalism, Goodmans status as a conventionalist depends upon whether the role accorded to
perception in the understanding of pictorial symbols

322
constrains the representational contents of the symbol systems to which they belong. Second, it is important to bear in mind Goodmans distinction between pictorial representation, which is essentially
denotation, and pictorial representation-as, which is
a matter of exemplification. While Goodman seems
to have a purely conventionalist understanding of the
former, it is in respect of the latter that the density
and repleteness of pictorial symbol systems might
come into play as constraints on the representational
content of pictures.
In chapter five, Gaiger turns to the role that configurational properties of paintings play in pictorial
experience, approaching these issues via the notion
of style. The salient question is whether we can provide a general account of pictorial style that will allow us to compare pictures independently of their
content. He notes Wollheims distinction between
individual style, which can play a generative role
in artistic making and thereby contribute to the explanatory understanding of pictures, and general
style, which purportedly plays a purely classificatory role relative to the interests of the classifier. He
responds that general stylistic features can play an
explanatory role insofar as we see them as selections
from certain options that define the conditions under which picturing is possible. These options, which
underlie both individual and general styles, provide us with a logic of depiction. This is explored

in terms of the dichotomies employed by Wolfflin

to distinguish High Renaissance and Baroque painting. Shorn of the teleological role ascribed to them

by Wolfflin,
such distinctions as linearpainterly
and openclosed can be seen as marking notional
limits on a scale of pictorial possibilities. For example, the linearpainterly distinction pertains to the
transitional relationships between the marks on a picture surface. However, Gaiger resists the suggestion,
which he finds in contemporary German Bildtheorie, that we hereby identify atemporal transcendental conditions of the possibility of painting. Rather,

as Wolfflin
maintained, the possibilities for a painter
are always historically constrained.
In the final chapter, Gaiger examines the role that
formalist concerns have played in the development
of modernist painting. He argues that, while an ahistorical formalism cannot be sustained, Greenbergs
sophisticated formalism not only takes account of the
creative tension between the painted surface and the
representation of depth but also rightly takes this to
be a motivating factor in much post-Impressionist
painting. This shows how twofoldness can be extended to purely abstract art. Greenbergs later attempts to insert modernism into a continuous narrative is rejected as a form of strong historicism that
falsifies the history of painting through its exclusions
and that stands refuted by postmodernist art. Gaiger

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

concludes by looking at the prospects for a return to
figurative painting, taking as an example the fruitful
dialogue between painting and photography in the
work of Gerhard Richter.
As I hope is clear, the brevity of Gaigers book (143
pages plus notes) belies the richness of its analysis.
Insightful recourse to art-historical and art-critical
perspectives is complemented by skillful use of examples and full-color plates that assist in putting
across technical distinctions in the text. Moreover,
even notoriously tricky ideas (Goodmans theory of
notation, for example) are made accessible to the
uninitiated reader. Using figures like Alberti, Gom
brich, Wolfflin,
and Greenberg to illuminate issues
in play in contemporary philosophical debates about
the visual arts works very well, even if it means that
figures in these debates (Wollheim and Goodman
aside) enter only in the role of commentators. A puzzling omission, however, is Michael Baxandall, who
fails to earn a single mention, even though his insights into the ways in which internalist and externalist considerations come together in the historical explanation of pictures resonate strongly with
Gaigers own take on these matters.
While this book serves as an excellent introduction to the philosophy of painting, it also takes stands
on a number of contested issues and will merit critical consideration. For example, Gaiger charges Wollheim with giving the artists intentions too decisive
a role in the appreciation of her paintings. First, he
objects that Wollheims doctrine of the spectator in
the picture wrongly accords to the artist the power
to determine what is correctly seen in her picture
and thus what her picture represents. While we must
take into account the historically situated nature of
the painting, this allows for correct but unintended
readings. Second, he denies that only individual style,
which has psychological reality, can play an explanatory role in our understanding of pictures, arguing, as
noted above, that the logic of depiction reveals general stylistic possibilities that illuminate the works of
individual artists. While I am sympathetic to both of
these points, I think they need further nuancing. First,
we need to ask whether the artists intentions play a
role in determining how the picture is to be looked
at, or the conditions under which it is to be looked
at, even if they do not determine what is rightly seen
in the picture when it is so viewed. Gaigers remarks
elsewhere suggest he would agree with this point.
Second, one must ask whether the explanatory role
accorded by Gaiger to elements not included in individual style requires the psychological reality, for the
artist, of the range of historically available options in
the logic of depictions from which her picture can
be seen as a selection.
A more serious concern relates to Gaigers defense of Wollheims claim that twofoldness is a

Book Reviews
necessary condition for seeing something as a picture. This, as noted, is intended to counter the charge
that twofoldness is a condition of picturing only for
artistic pictures and that we have pictorial experience, explicable in perceptualist terms, in all kinds of
nonartistic contexts. Twofoldness is then at best a requirement for the aesthetic appreciation of a picture.
We noted Gaigers response that, without twofoldness, one cannot see a picture as a picture: only where
the viewer exercises the capacity of representational
seeing (of seeing something in the surface of the picture) can the viewer see it as a picture rather than
as a mere design or an illusory subject. One wonders whether the issue here is substantial or merely
verbal, however. For clearly I cannot see P as a picture of x unless I am aware of P as a picture, in
the sense that I believe it to be a picture. And this
belief will normally be grounded in certain aspects
of my perceptual awareness of what I am looking at.
But it does not seem to be necessary that I see x in
P in the Wollheimian sense: I need not be aware of

323
how specific features of the surface of P serve as a
medium whereby x is represented. That it is x that
I see pictured in P can then be explained in perceptualist terms. What is distinctive of artworks is, as I
suggested earlier, that they require that one attend to
the interplay between surface and subject. But pictorial experience in general, it seems, requires only
a general awareness that one is looking at a picture,
not representational seeing in Wollheims sense.
As Gaiger notes in his conclusion, the end of
painting has been announced many times since the
invention of photography. But, while the visual arts
may be one of the poorer relations in recent analytic
aesthetics, there is no need to fear the end of the
philosophy of painting as long as there are books like
this to guide the uninitiated and stimulate the more
seasoned reader.
DAVID DAVIES

Department of Philosophy
McGill University