AESTHETICS

I am interested in the metaphysics of art and in German aesthetic traditions. I have written on the aesthetics of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Arthur Schopenhauer. I am currently at work on a book titled, Dürer’s Thistle and the Gates of Hell: A Philosophical Study of the Religion, Art, and Aesthetics of Albrecht Dürer. My preliminary research on this topic has been supported by a generous Term Fellowship from the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies at The Pennsylvania State University, which has enabled me to study Dürer’s masterpieces in Munich, Prague, and at the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain. I have also published on Joseph Margolis’s metaphysics of culture, Bernard Bosanquet’s concept of difficult beauty, on the logic of fiction, and I have written most recently on Nelson Goodman’s analysis of style, and on the phenomenology of abstract painting.

Listed here are publications specifically about aesthetics:

BOOKS

Ontology(Acumen Books, McGill-Queen's University Press / Central Problems of Philosophy Series, 2002) (xv + 348 pp.).

The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (McGill-Queen's University Press), in preparation.

EDITED BOOKS

Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

"Intention, Meaning, and Substance in the Phenomenology of Abstract Painting", The British Journal of Aesthetics, 46, 2006, 38-58.

"Adevar si fictiune in critica lui David Lewis asupra semanticii meinongiene", (Romanian translation of "Truth and Fiction in David Lewis's Critique of Meinongian Semantics", 2001, below), Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations, 5, 2006, 55-86.

"Truth and Fiction in David Lewis's Critique of Meinongian Semantics", Metaphysica: International Journal for Ontology and Metaphysics", 2, 2001, 73-106.

"Goodman on the Concept of Style", The British Journal of Aesthetics, 40, 2000, 452-466.

"The Devil's Dilemma in Flaubert's Saint Antony", The Heythrop Journal: A Quarterly Review of Philosophy and Theology, 39, 1998, 140-147.

"Untitled", Philosophy and Literature, 19, 1995, 102-105.

"Hume's Aesthetic Psychology of Distance, Greatness and the Sublime", The British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 3, 1995, 89-112.

"The Type-Token Distinction in Margolis's Aesthetics", The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 52, 1994, 299-307.

"Schopenhauer on the Antipathy of Aesthetic Genius and the Charming", History of European Ideas, 18, 1994, 373-385.

"Aesthetics and Natural Law in Newton's Methodology", Journal of the History of Ideas, 51, 1990, 659-666.

"Knowledge and Aesthetic Appreciation", Art & Academe, 2, 1989, 29-41.

"Margolis on Emergence and Embodiment", The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 44, 1986, 257-261.

"Emergence et incorporation selon Margolis", Philosophiques, 13, 1986, 53-63 (French translation).

"Bosanquet's Concept of Difficult Beauty", The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 63, 1984, 79-87.

"Roland Barthes on the Aesthetics of Photography", The Journal of the Theory and Criticism of the Visual Arts, 1, 1982, 17-32 (in Roland Barthes, edited by Mike Gane and Nicholas Gane (London: Sage Publications Ltd., 2004), Sage Masters of Modern Social Thought Series, 3 vols., Part Ten: Themes (III) Phtography / Camera Lucida / La Chambre Claire, 225-239).

"Satan Lord of Darkness in South Park Cosmology", South Park and Philosophy: You Know, I Learned Something Today, edited by Robert Arp (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 250-262.

"Animadversions on the Logic of Fiction and Reform of Modal Logic", Mistakes of Reason: Proceedings of a Conference in Honour of John Woods, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 49-63.

"Wittgensteins 'Tractatus' und die Logik der Fiktion", Wittgenstein und die Literatur, edited by John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer, translated by Martin Suhr (Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp Verlag, 2006), 448-467 (original English version published by Routledge, 2004 below).

"Idealism: Schopenhauer, Schiller and Schelling", The Routledge Companion to Aethestics, second edition, edited by Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes (London: Routledge, 2005), 83-95.

"Wittgenstein's Tractatus and the Logic of Fiction", Wittgenstein and Philosophy of Literature, edited by John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer (London: Routledge, 2004), 305-317.

"David Lewis on Meinongian Logic of Fiction", Proceedings of Writing the Austrian Traditions: Relations Between Philosophy and Literature edited by Wolfgang Huemer and Marc-Oliver Schuster (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Wirth-Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies, University of Alberta, 2003), 101-119.

"Margolis and the Metaphysics of Culture", Interpretation, Relativism, and the Metaphysics of Culture: Themes in the Philosophy of Joseph Margolis, edited by Michael Krausz and Richard Shusterman (Amherst: Humanity Books (Prometheus), 1999), 225-261.

"Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von", Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 4 vols., edited by Michael Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), vol. 2, 311-315.

"Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Appearance and Will in the Philosophy of Art", in Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts, edited by Dale Jacquette (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1-36.

"Art, Expression, Perception and Intentionality", Art and Expression, edited by Michael H. Mitias and Ananta Sukla (Westport: Greenwood Press).

"Thirst for Authenticity: An Aesthetics of the Brewer's Art", Beer and Philosophy, edited by Steven D. Hales (Blackwell Publishing).

REVIEWS

"Wagner, Philosophy, and the Apotheosis of Nineteenth-Century Opera" [Review of Bryan Magee, Wagner and Philosophy], Wagner, 22, 2001, 59-62.

Review of Colin McGinn, Shakespeare's Philosophy, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.