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Introduction to the issue Arts, Ontology and Politics. This text gives a survey of the articles included in the special issue Arts, Ontology and Politics and of the challenges that these articles have to deal with in approaching the central them.

This paper shows how the early feminist pedagogical performance artworks of the Mexican artist Mónica Mayer are example of Connective Aesthetics and Conversational Art.

Given the coterie of philosophers focused on everyday aesthetics, it's fascinating that gift reception has heretofore managed to escape their scrutiny. To enact a gift, recipients begin by imagining its use. On this level, gifts serve as a litmus test. In luring us, we're taken out of our normal ways of being to experience a different side of ourselves. Enacting a gift is thus a kind of performance, whose value depends on the donee’s interpretation, just as exhibitions, concerts, staged plays or books are performances of visual art, scores, scripts or texts, whose interpretations demonstrate their aesthetic value. To develop the relationship between enacting gifts and performing artworks, I begin by surveying junctures along the gift-event’s arc: reply, imagination, trust, recognition, transformation and memory. Transformations arising from agonistic gifts strike me as significant because they characterise the way gifts challenge our beliefs, eventually altering our values. That we grow to love gifts, which we originally rejected out of hand, casts doubt on self-knowledge. Enacted gifts handily challenge self-knowledge’s twin features: authority and transparency. As this paper indicates, gift reception helps both to understand ourselves better and to remove the obstacles to what Quassim Cassim calls Substantive Self-Knowledge.

The work of artist Ron Athey has long befuddled the art historical establishment and has mostly remained under the philosophical radar. In this review of Athey’s Acephalous Monster, performed on August 28, 2021, at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater in Los Angeles, I propose a philosophical frame- work for Athey’s radical reinvention of ethical categories like agency, mutuality and communion. I describe the performance and its critical context in order to tease out the aesthetic dimension of this reinvention and the subversive power of reconstituting personhood along lines of collective artistic jubilation and creative survival.


 This paper identifies an aesthetics implicit in Spinoza’s philosophy through the concept of a genesis of the aesthetic. A genesis of the aesthetic indicates that a philosophy of art is not yet fully formed in his work, but can emerge as a consequence or effect of his thought. This theory would evaluate the work of art primarily in its relationship to truth. Following the architectonics of Spinoza’s own thought, this paper constructs a progression – from the imagination, to reason, to intuition – toward a concept of aesthetic practices that aligns itself ever more closely with the freedom, perfection, and affirmation of infinite substance itself. The specific forms of aesthetic reception and production flowing from Spinoza’s ideal of wisdom unite two seemingly disparate paradigms: the aesthetic as essentially affirmative, as a joy in the individual power of every individuated thing, on the one hand; and the cultivation of a critical, ethically informed aesthetics of liberation, one capable of occupying different positions (obedience, autonomy, resistance) with respect to state or sovereign power, on the other hand.

Rather than reading Shaftesbury in anticipation of later forms of disinterestedness, this essay seeks to unpack the larger significance of his aesthetics by tracing his ideas back to their ancient sources. This essay looks to the venerable tradition of world contemplation. It argues that Shaftesbury advances a specifically Stoic model of world contemplation in The Moralists. The text’s principal concern is not with this or that beautiful object but with the whole of which it and the viewer are indivisibly a part; its aim is not so much to account for how we perceive beauty as to foster a characteristically Stoic orientation toward the world, one in which we overcome our egocentric view of things and align ourselves with the natural workings of the world or universe in its entirety. Far from being ‘autonomous’ from the rest of life, the Stoic world contemplation Shaftesbury advocates entails a robust affirmation of existence, clear-eyed gratitude for being part of the universe, whatever the challenges and however fleeting our time in it may be.

To what extent are factors that are extrinsic to the artwork relevant to judgements of artistic value? One might approach this question using traditional philosophical methods, but one can also approach it using empirical methods; that is, by doing experimental philosophical aesthetics. This paper provides an example of the latter approach. We report two empirical studies that examine the significance of three sorts of extrinsic factors for judgements of artistic value: the causal-historical factor of contagion, the ontological factor of uniqueness, and the contextual factor of appreciative environment.
 We explore the context of appreciation by performing studies in a museum as well as the lab. We found that contagion made a difference in both settings. However, uniqueness only made a difference in the lab setting, but not in the museum. This suggests that the context of appreciation may make a difference to judgements of artistic value. Of broader significance, these studies show the value of experimental philosophical aesthetics and the value of doing in situ empirical research on art.


 Gilbert Plumer has recently argued in his (2017) that psychologically rich novels offer the reader an opportunity to draw a transcendental inference: what seems to us believable about the psychology of the characters, can be inferred to be actually true about real human psychology. We propose, first, to disambiguate a key term of art in Plumer’s argument, “believable”. Given that disambiguation, the empirically contingent nature of one of Plumer’s premises comes into view. We raise two main lines of empirically-motivated debunking arguments against that premise, drawing particularly upon the psychological literatures about processing fluency, and the illusion of explanatory depth. We then conclude with some further implications for naturalistic approaches to aesthetics, and the relevance of such debunking arguments.