Three Problematic Aspects of Analytical Aesthetics

I There are certain aspects of analytical aesthetics that, over the years, I have increasingly come to see as problematic: its insufficient concern for relevant empirical facts, its tendency to objectivize concepts, and its tendency to believe in the existence of privileged perspectives on the world. In this paper, I will illustrate and discuss these features, drawing my examples from three publications by prominent exponents of analytical aesthetics: Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen’s Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective (1994), Jerrold Levinson’s “Extending Art Historically” (1993), and Noël Carroll’s “Art and Human Nature” (2004). Although I will comment on some of the theses explicitly advocated in the three contributions – which are all concerned with the concepts of literature or of art – my main focus will be on what they do not mention, on what I consider to be some of their blind spots. My claim that the three alleged weaknesses are frequently to be found in analytical aesthetics cannot really be substantiated within the confines of a single article. I will, however, be more than satisfied if I am able to convince some analytical aestheticians that these three features are in fact problematic. That, rather than the question of how widespread they are, is probably the really contentious issue.