Please join us for a lecture by Associate Professor C. Thi Nguyen entitled:

The (Extremely Social, Very Pluralistic) Engagement Account of Aesthetic Value

Here are some data-points about aesthetic life. First, we often avoid simply accepting aesthetic judgments based on the testimony of experts. Second, we often avoid using scientific methods — evidence-gathering, categorization, generalization, and inference to come to conclusions. Instead, we tend to arrive at our judgments through personal encounters with specific objects. Some have tried to explain these data-points as the results of the metaphysics of aesthetic properties, or aesthetic perception. I claim, instead, that they are best understood as social norms: norms that tell us to avoid testimony and avoid scientific inference. And the best explanation of our adoption of these norms is that they function to plunge us into a particular kind of engagement: an autonomous, sensuous, and particularist kind of perception and cognition.