The editors of the journal Debates in Aesthetics are pleased to invite submissions for our next Special Issue on the topic of beauty and taste (Vol. 19.2).

Beauty and taste are central concepts within aesthetics. There has been an upsurge of interest in returning to both concepts and considering how they feature in not just our engagements with the arts, but also in our aesthetic appreciation of everyday artifacts and activities, natural and built environments, bodies, moral character, and intellectual pursuits (Mothersill, 1984; Scarry, 1999; Nehamas, 2007; Parsons and Carlson, 2008; Scruton, 2009; Lopes, 2018; Riggle, 2022). However, even with increasing interest, concerns continue to surface regarding the relationships between judgements of beauty and other kinds of aesthetic judgements, whether pursuing beauty should have any privileged role in the development of taste in our aesthetic lives, and how exactly beauty interacts with pursuing goodness, knowledge, and justice.

This special issue aims to advance our contemporary understanding of the concepts of beauty and taste. We have welcomed Dr Panos Paris (Cardiff University) to contribute a target article, ‘Which Beauty? What Taste? Reflections on the Importance of the Philosophy of Beauty and Taste’. We are inviting short articles of two kinds. First, we invite articles that respond directly to the arguments raised in Dr Paris’s article. Second, we also invite articles that relate more broadly to the topics of beauty and taste.

All submissions must be short essays of no longer than 3,500 words (excluding footnotes and bibliography) and should be emailed to editor@debatesinaesthetics.org.

Deadline for Submission: 29th April 2024

Debates in Aesthetics is pleased to announce that we are teaming up with Philosophy and Photography Lab to organize a pop-up discussion on the target article for our forthcoming special issue devoted to the Philosophy of Photography, “Music, Visualisation and the Multi-stage Account of Photography”  by Dawn Wilson. The workshop is scheduled to be held online on the 27th of January. More details to be posted soon!

We are pleased to announce that Kiyohiro Sen is the winner of the 2022 Debates in Aesthetics Essay prize. Sen’s essay ‘An Institutional Theory of Art Categories’ will be published in our upcoming issue, soon to be available on our website. The British Society of Aesthetics generously awards the winning essay £250.

The Debates in Aesthetics Prize (formerly the Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics Prize) is awarded to the best paper by a postgraduate student or early career academic. For this award all papers from our last two published issues were taken into consideration. The papers were judged by the current, and previous, editors of the journal. The next prize will be awarded to the best paper in our forthcoming special and general issues, more information about which will be shared soon.

The previous winner of the prize was Harry Drummond, for the paper ‘Architectural Value and the Artistic Value of Architecture’ (Published in Vol 17 No 1, read it here).

In the paper, Sen draws on Francesco Guala’s characterisation of institutions as rules-in-equilibrium to provide a new institutional theory of categories, noting that Walton’s arguments do not provide necessary or sufficient conditions for category membership, nor is it clear how Walton’s categories originate. Sen suggests we should focus on the question of how the correct appreciative behaviours related to a category are established. Sen’s institutional explanation develops from Guala’s concept of “correlated equilibrium”, where no one in an institution would be better off by deviating alone, based on external signals observed by those involved.

Sen then assumes that (1) each critic “has an incentive to categorise an artwork in a way that depends one’s understanding of the work”, and (2) each critic has an incentive to choose the same categorisation as others “because working together to criticise a work based on a particular category helps discover meanings and values that one would not notice on their own”. Coordination, then, can be easily achieved with a new work. For those works that require pioneering ways of appreciation, new categories must be created. To describe the origin of a category, Sen proposes two phases: the ‘institutionalising phase’, wherein critics “attempt various appreciative behaviours and the ‘institutionalised phase’ wherein a certain “strategy is established as the correct appreciative behaviour for the artwork”. By conceiving the correct categories as institutional outputs, Sen proposes that we can account for the stability of categories in addition to the possibilities and difficulties of critical innovation.

Kiyohiro Sen is a PhD student at the University of Tokyo. He primarily focuses on the philosophy of art, criticism, depiction, film, and popular culture. He is currently working on the categories of art and their roles in appreciation. He also writes as a critic of popular culture.

The editors of Debates in Aesthetics are delighted to introduce their new co-editor, Harry Drummond. Harry completed his BA and MA at Durham University, before moving to the University of Liverpool to undertake his PhD under the supervision of Vid Simoniti. He is currently researching how enactivism can inform our understanding of aesthetic experience, focussing particularly on the role of social cognition. He’ll be a visiting researcher at the University of Memphis in the fall, and published his first article with Debates in Aesthetics in 2021.

We are pleased to announce that Harry Drummond is the winner of the 2021 Debates in Aesthetics Essay prize. Drummond’s essay ‘Architectural Value and the Artistic Value of Architecture’ was published in our latest issue and is available on our website; read it here. The British Society of Aesthetics generously awards the winning essay £250.

In the essay, Drummond seeks to demarcate architectural value from artistic value. He motivates the necessity of this project by showing that, within philosophical discussion of architecture as an artform, architectural value and artistic value are often referred to interchangeably with no explicit differentiation between them. Nevertheless, a convergence between these two values is seldom supported or argued for overtly, so Drummond refers to the assumption of their equivalence as the implicit claim. Drummond argues against this implicit claim with the goal of showing that architectural value has an independent significance that extends beyond what is attributed to architecture by virtue of its classification as a subgenre of the arts. In doing so, Drummond presents an important advance in conceptual refinement in thinking about the arts.

Harry Drummond is currently an AHRC NWCDTP funded PhD student, cross-institutionally supervised by Dr. Vid Simoniti (University of Liverpool) and Dr. Cain Todd (Lancaster University). His research focuses on interpersonal aesthetics and the possibility of shared aesthetic experiences, with a focus on relational and participatory art.

The Debates in Aesthetics Prize (formerly the Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics Prize) is awarded to the best paper by a postgraduate student or early career academic. For this award all papers from our last two published issues were taken into consideration. The papers were judged by the current, and previous, editors of the journal. The next prize will be awarded to the best paper in our forthcoming special and general issues, more information about which will be shared soon.

The previous winner of the prize was Yorick Berta, for the paper ‘Sensory Augmentation and the Tactile Sublime’ (Published in Vol 15 No 1, read it here).

The editors of Debates in Aesthetics are delighted to introduce their new co-editor, Sarah Kiernan. Sarah completed her MA on Kantian aesthetics at the University of Auckland before coming to Birkbeck, University of London where she is currently completing her PhD on Hegel’s aesthetic philosophy and modern art. We thank our outgoing editor Eleen M. Deprez for her hard work, and wish her all the best for the future.

We are pleased to announce that Yorick Berta is the winner of the 2020 Debates in Aesthetics Essay prize. Berta’s essay “Sensory Augmentation and the Tactile Sublime” was published in our latest issue and is available on our website; read it here. In his article Berta presents an insightful and highly original argument about the possibilities of technologically enhanced experiences. The British Society of Aesthetics generously awards the winning essay £250.

In the essay Berta explores a range of devices that transform or “augment” our sensory perception. An example he discusses is Moon Ribas’ Seismic Sense: a sensor worn by the artist that vibrates when an earthquake occurs somewhere in the world. This device, Berta says, not only notifies or alerts the artist of an earthquake happening, but gives rise to an affective experience (one of feeling “close”, “connected”, or even “being there”). Seismic Sense, and the other devices Berta discusses, illustrate that our brain can adapt to new sensory stimuli. In the final section of his article Berta pushes further and argues that devices like Seismic Sense can facilitate aesthetic experiences of the sublime.

Yorick Berta is an independent scholar and writer based in Vienna. He is starting a PhD project this autumn at the University of Arts and Industrial Design Linz. Berta will be looking at the use of organic and decaying materials in the art of the 60s, for example in movements like Fluxus or Land Art or in the oeuvre of artists like Dieter Roth, Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Rauschenberg. Exhibited inside the white cube, artworks made out of chocolate, yeast, or cheese enter a highly ambiguous relationship with their institutional frame, posing questions regarding the attribution of value to art, the distinction of art and life and the legitimacy of conservation endeavours. In his research Berta will frame these artworks as a form of non-human agency entering the Western art system.

The Debates in Aesthetics Prize (formerly the Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics Prize) is awarded to best paper by a postgraduate student or early career academic. For this award all papers from our last published issue were taken into consideration. The papers were judged by members of the editorial board, the editors, and previous editors of the journal. The next prize will be awarded to the best paper in our next general issue, for which we are currently inviting submissions (deadline 31 July 2020), see the call for papers here.

The previous winner of the prize was Lewis Coyne, for the paper ‘Heidegger and the problem of the Sublime’ (Published in Vol 10 No 1, read it here).