Simply declaring a subject matter does not confer a field of expertise, its just a name. — Isaac

Since philosophers don't just do that, this is a dead end.

I'm talking about philosophers making theoretical claims in areas where there are competing claims by psychologists, physicists, neuroscientists, linguists, historians, anthropologists etc... In a field, say consciousness, where both a philosopher and a neuroscientist make a claim, who judges who has strayed into whose territory? It clearly can't be either expert (they have competing claims). — Isaac

Ideally, they would not debate but share their respective insights whilst acknowledging the expertise of the other.

But in the matter under debate, there is no 'knowledge' otherwise it would not be up for debate would it? — Isaac

Of course it would be. People debate over matters of knowledge all the time.

philosophy, there is no such agreed upon body of knowledge in the widest sense. Only within specialised fields might you have a similar situation to the physicists, where a considerable body of axioms are agreed by both parties, but these are rarely the debates in which lay people become involved. — Isaac

That's just pretty inaccurate.

but if one of these hypothetical chess experts claims that his expertise on bishops extends to, say, real bishops, we aren't obliged to simply take his word for it — Isaac

That would be an amphiboly....so obviously. That example doesn't therefore pertain to the discussion.

The fact that philosophers disagree on any given subject doesn't mean a layperson can claim to have equal say in the matter.

For example, there is disagreement among quantum scientists about whether the implications lead to a determinist or non-determinist view of quantum behavior. I personally side with the determinists, but realize that I don't know enough to actually participate in the debate or to try and convince a scientist of my view. Most non-philosophers do not show the same humility toward philosophy.

They've simply invented a game, the full impliations of which are quite complex and so understanding them is 'hard and heady'. They still know nothing more about anything outside of chess. — Isaac

Yes, but certainly you would defer to their expertise on all matters chess, or at least recognize that they probably know better than you about the best way to move the rook.

I'm talking about laypersons who specifically won't defer or acknowledge the expertise of the...,yknow, experts on philosophical matters.

I didn't use the word 'philosopher — A Seagull

Not explicitly, but non-philosopher implies some idea of philosopher. ~A can only be understood in terms of A.

Nevertheless, such people might have use for philosophy, perhaps politicians, social workers, teachers and so on. — A Seagull

In theory, every human being in every occupation does. But they neither recognize it usually, nor are interested. See my above comment re:disposition.

What do you mean by "philosophers" and "non-philosophers"? If by philosopher you mean professional or academic philosopher versus the rest of humanity... well, there's a pretty broad range from people who are technically amateurs, but love love love to engage with philosophy to those people who think it's a joke, if they ever think about it at all.

But, on this forum I've noticed that even among people who like philosophy, there are those who think it's dead/a joke/ all just "opinions." Cue eyeroll.

Among people who don't engage philosophy much at all ever... I've personally noticed this funny cognitive dissonance where they want on the one hand to maintain that "oh, all that philosophy stuff is too hard and heady for me!" but then also don't want to think that professional philosophers know anything more than they do or could have more nuanced/educated/researched ideas about all sorts of things (i.e., they also belong in the camp of "it's just everyone's opinion. Cue eyeroll).

With everything going on in the world (and, to be honest, people in my personal circles) right now, I've been fostering some serious pessimism about the abilities of most people to do even basic logic. I'm fairly certain that it's a dispositional disability, as there is nothing about a=a and a=/=~a that is outside the theoretical brain power of any human being of average intelligence.... but then it does pose an interesting question: does being dispositionally unable to do X make you actually unable to do X?

Obviously perception. But it’s language that’s repositioning the work. And it’s a particular language being used in this case. — Brett

I think language captures and conveys elements of perception. Sometimes it may influence perception, but it is not the source thereof.

perception by some about the erotic nature of Gauguin’s work. So now it’s about language again. — Brett

Not sure what you mean, it being about language. But it's a pretty obvious perception.

So in some way I feel that we have to look at art as anthropology — Brett

I think anthropology gains much from looking at art, and that artists are helped in their making of art by being good anthropologists. But I don't think art is anthropology.

Interesting to note that Hillary still thinks she's running or has a say in the election.

I hope Sanders and Warren team up, or Warren and Booker would be good... I'm pretty sure the DNC will push for more representation in the form of a male/female combo, ideally with some color thrown in. I guess that means Sanders might run with Harris.

I've loved seeing Gabbard and Wang in the race. They've brought up issues no one else has the guts to mention. I also can't wait to see Gabbard win her lawsuit against Hillary.

Biden needs to go far far away from this campaign.

aesthetic manner i.e. the process of art must contain some element of beauty. For instance there may be an ugly idea, say racism, that can be a subject of art but it must be expressed aesthetically if it is ever to be a work of art. We can't have an ugly subject of art expressed non-aesthetically (in an ugly way) — TheMadFool

Aesthetics encompasses more than just beauty. It also covers ugly even repulsive things. It describes the entire spectrum of these kinds of.... I guess another descriptive term could be "perceptual emotions."

I wonder what Nabokov would've thought of his work - Lolita - if it had a hand in a surge of pedophilia in its audience? — TheMadFool

So, if I recall correctly, he suggested that anyone who actually found the first half of his novel titillating was just exposing a corruption already existent in their own psyche's. His book was meant to make the horror of pedophilia more apparent by the juxtaposition of beauty and immorality--which is supported by the fact that the protagonist is a sniveling, whining, unsympathetic dude even without the molestation part. I think the fascinating thing to see culturally is that the book is known for the pedophilia parts, at which we are horrified, but the whole "he's also a murderer" aspect is just kinda forgotten.

What would aesthetics transcending beauty look like? Are you saying there can be disgustingly ugly art too? — TheMadFool

Yes.

Do I like it? Not really. But some people like punk rock too, and I'm not sure why anyone would subject themselves to that screaming either.

I doubt people will be willing to grant such liberty to artists to make a display of abject immorality; in other words, art must maintain some moral dimension and that would mean, by my account of how the highest beauty is morality, that art has to be about beauty. — TheMadFool

It's currently under debate whether Gauguin should be celebrated/displayed anywhere, because (contrary to the Lolita example) he was actually erotically displaying underage girls that he apparently molested/raped in real life....

I would challenge anybody to suggest an art work that would stand up to all that this thread contains — Pop

Well, it's no Hamlet, but you're right that philosophical dialogue has a lot of the merits of art, specifically plays.

On a side note, dialogue as a form for philosophical books is on the up-and-coming once more. A step in the right direction, if you ask me.

Realism in art comes to my mind. Great art is a manifestation of courage and it takes the greatest courage to present reality as it is. — Wittgenstein

Yes, I agree that courage to say something interesting and important would be a quality of great art.
But not all art is great. Some of it (most?) ranges from good to passable to ugh. :rofl:

are many painters but not all of them are artists, as there are many dancers but not all of them are artists. Great artists also create work that is instantly recognisable as being from that artist, the work and their name become synonymous with each other. — Brett

Again, I agree with your burgeoning definition of "great art and artists" here. But bad art is still art.

The definition of "art" is a pretty low bar and pretty lenient. But as to what art is "great".... well, let's just say I have pretty strict and high standards for that.

I guess my suspicion is that people expand or restrict the definition of art too much because they think along with that word comes some kind of quality judgement. But I think "art" is just a fairly neutral category.

Surely the act of saying something is art is the alteration. — Punshhh

I know what you mean, but I'm not sure it suffices. I don't have an answer as to how much an artist has to actually manipulate things in the world in order to transform them into art... At least, no more than I could tell you how many grains of sand it takes to make a pile. But it seems to me just like we know that 1 sandgrain does not count but a thousand do, that a sunflower pointed at is not art, but Van Gogh's Sunflowers is.

Duchamp's position was that an object need only be recontextualized, by for example, putting it in a gallery. Roger Scruton suggested even most photography may not count because there is not enough creating happening in the production of a photograph. The knee-jerk reaction to Scruton may be that of dismissal, but I recall his arguments being pretty darn convincing....

Just pointing can make an otherwise ordinary object art. That sounds pretty creative to me. Anything can be viewed aesthetically. — praxis

Anything can be viewed aesthetically, true. But not all that is aesthetic is art. The object or performance or whatever in question must in some way be changed by the artist in order to move it from the category of "aesthetic object" to "art object." It's not "creative" in the basic sense of the world to merely notice.

I think, again, the bar doesn't need to be raised very high. Photography is not much more than pointing and capturing the vision of a scene. The creative choices come in with how the artist chooses to frame the scene, what lighting, angle, perspective, etc. Of course, then the scene is still not the art object--the picture of the scene is.

Artemis tried to point out that aesthetics can transcend beauty, or rather, our conventional sense of it. — praxis

Yes. Aesthetics includes other things, even repulsion or disgust.

Another example: Jazz artists use tension and release in the form of dissonance (not pretty) and harmony (pretty) in their music all the time to create amazing aesthetic dynamics.

of art, but in an art world in which in theory, anything was art provided an artist said it was Art. — Punshhh

Well, my only slight alteration would be that the artist can't just point and call something art. S/he has to engage in some act of creation.

To then say moral goodness is like shackles, holding artists back from revealing beauty in its most magnificent form, is to make a grave mistake - like a person who seeks warmth but turns away from the sun, into the shadows. — TheMadFool

Yes, I agree with that. Lolita is a great example of how beauty and morality don't go hand in hand all the time. Some people have unfairly criticized the novel for valorizing immorality, but because they don't understand the difference for art. Nabokov even said that the whole point was to capture aesthetic engagement and moral revulsion at the same time.

So, from this perspective, how are we to know if the famous bust of Nefertiti is really a work of art? — jgill

I think something like the Nefertiti statue is more obvious than others. Sure, we can only infer intentions, but it seems like a case we can be fairly confident about intentionality. Although one could come up with other theories about its creation, none I can think of are as probable.

It's entirely possible that we may at times misapply the term art, or that we may not always know if something is art. I don't think that's a good counterargument to the definition itself. Like there is nothing apparently wrong with the definition of a cat just because some people might think foxes are kinds of cats.

It helps when we do away with the need to "know with 100% certainty" and accept the fallibalistic realist position that "fairly confident" is the maximum anyone can be about most things in this world.

This is a tangent, but I see the demands for certainty over and over on this forum and elsewhere... I think it probably comes from a really naive understanding and application of science, where we think the answer has to be known with certainty to be true. But most of the time, even,in science (!) we're working with a theory which is just "to the best of our knowledge/understanding," and which is better or more plausible than any other theory.

All this is just to say, I think once you try to demand absolute certainty, you're asking the wrong questions.

I said other because strictly speaking philosophy covers three categories: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. But that covers a vast, if not all-encompassing territory....

Thing is, that most things that philosophy may not be seeking to answer itself are needed for philosophers to know in order to answer other actually philosophical questions.

Bottomline, art is about beauty. What is beauty? I haven't the faintest idea. — TheMadFool

I think the term "aesthetically engaging" is more useful for defining art. There is art that is meant to engage many, even contradictory aesthetic impulses. Like that one with a Jesus statue on a cross in a jar of urine. Or Nabokov's novel Lolita.

You are free to find this to much to go along with, I am further along the spectrum than this, the end where far more can be considered for artistic merit. — Punshhh

I'm open to other intelligent beings creating art and kinds of proto-art. But we should be clear that being "artistic" as in, having art-like qualities, is different from, though overlapping category with "art."

So, if I had thought,"I'm going to do art" the first time and did exactly the same procedure, that first image would have been art? This is a tad more complicated than putting a brush to canvas. In my case the "brush" has a "mind" of its own. — jgill

Right. It's like the difference between accidentally pressing the button on your camera (complicated machine!) and choosing to do so. The camera may be doing much of the "work" (i.e., showing a "mind" of its own), but you're the primary mover.

We have to make that distinction or else you have no way to distinguish art from bird's nests and sunflowers and sunsets.

So, non-art the first "accidental" time, but art afterwards? — jgill

Yes.

And I will look tomorrow when I'm home on a laptop :smile:

We differentiate first, then we search for the basis upon which we differentiated. And so we know what is art prior to having a definition. Thus thinking that the business of understanding is the business of formulating and then living by definitions is a profound mistake. — Bartricks

I don't think it's a one way street like that. We have a definition of a cat, and we've decided on the basis of what cats are on a definition of them, but we've also come to understand that perhaps things we'd want to otherwise classify as cats are not in fact cats. Like foxes seem feline, but are not.

So, the idea that it is essential to something qualifying as art that it report something about its creator's conscious states seems false. Some art may qualify in that way, but it doesn't seem to be either a necessary or sufficient condition. — Bartricks

How else to differentiate between art and a sunflower or bird's nest?

Google isn't being helpful: can you give me a link or reference to how we know Gainsborough disliked his own art?

I have not looked yet, but from your description of it being a computer program with the unintended byproduct being aesthetically pleasing, I would say it was originally not art, just aesthetically pleasing math, but that anything you create now with the program with the intent that it should be aesthetically pleasing would qualify as art.

But he did not intend to engage them aesthetically. Plus why are you so sure about that? — Bartricks

Well, unless he was obtuse somehow, it seems to me that he understood why his making paintings was making himself money, and so it seems to me he must've understood he was engaging others aesthetically.

If he was not intending any aesthetics, then it's not art and the aesthetic engagement the viewer has with his work is just that. It differs not at all from the aesthetic engagement a viewer has of a real sunset then in that regard.

But again, it's doubtful to me that he was that obtuse...

What if my intention is purely to make money - I couldn't care less if the work is aesthetically engaging, I just know that people like my drawings and are willing to pay me large sums of money for them?

Take Gainsborough. That was the case with him. He hated painting portraits - he didn't like them and wanted to paint landscapes - but he knew others really liked his portraits and that he could bang them out quite easily, so that's why he did them. But a Gainsborough portrait is clearly a work of art. — Bartricks

He whether he liked his own art or not, he understood that they aesthetically engage others.

What if Rembrandt just imagines a work of art, but doesn't paint it on anything? Is the imaginary painting a work of art? Surely not. — Bartricks

Another thought here: the idea of a publicly accessible medium implies that people other than the artist must at some point have had at least the possibility of accessing the art (though it may or may not have been accessed), which entails some sort of manifestation in the world outside of Rembrandt's imagination.

Intentions have content - so an intention to do what? If it is 'to make a work of art' then it is circular in the same way as 'a dog is something that thinks like a dog' would be. — Bartricks

Intention to create something that is aesthetically engaging in some way.

suitably technically demanding' as a necessary condition, for some work is not technically demanding yet seems nevertheless to be art. — Bartricks

I have not abandoned it. I'm pointing out that suitably technically demanding doesn't mean the same as highly technically skilled. It must meet some basic minimum of technicality, but for something to simply count as art, it need not be more than the skillset of a preschooler.

If that's correct, then we do not need a definition and can appeal directly to rational appearances instead — Bartricks

What is the content of the rational appearances to which we are appealing? That's what a definition tries to capture. You're right that we often intuit the definition, but that doesn't negate the existence of a definition.

So it is circular - you've referred to the concept under analysis. The word 'art' needs to be removed, otherwise the definition is circular — Bartricks

No, I don't think that makes it circular. It's not like saying a dog is a dog. I've added the stipulation that it has to be intended.

Much art doesn't require much technical ability at all to create. — Bartricks

No it doesn't. Just needs to use shape and color in a manner to communicate some thought or feeling. Again, you can get more strict about good vs bad art.

What if Rembrandt just imagines a work of art, but doesn't paint it on anything? Is the imaginary painting a work of art? Surely not. — Bartricks

I guess there would be an assumption that it must be manifest in the world somehow at some point, no matter how briefly.

Also, he was almost entirely self-taught and was never a great draughtsperson. His technique is not educated or sophisticated - it is very original and distinctive, but it is not very sophisticated and not the product of a formal education. — Bartricks

Self-educated =/= uneducated. But the point is that apparently he did use techniques of color application and perspective that were sophisticated and sometimes innovative (though the latter is not a condition of art).

what about a van Gogh? They're not particularly technically demanding, yet they're works of art — Bartricks

Oh, and Van Gogh was one of those who "learned the rules to break them" types. I think that some of his work looks a little childish, but apparently his technique was educated and sophisticated.

We just use contemporary archaeologists and either see, or imagine, how they might classify what we're looking at if they dug it up. — Bartricks

But again, on what basis do they decide this?

Intentional refers only to the objective that it was my intention to create art. Other intentions are not excluded and it is very possible that one can misidentify art, as has happened in the past when people have thought the fire extinguisher in an art gallery was part of the exhibit.

Suitably technically demanding is a pretty low bar. You can get stricter about it when distinguishing good from bad art, but as long as shapes and colors are employed in some manner through which we can ascertain some kind of communication, that's all that is necessary.

And the audience of an art piece can be an audience of one: the artist. It can be more, but not less than that.

As a hypothetical I think there might be some worth to such a test, but I might stipulate that the hypothetical archeologist needs to be of a certain mindset and cultural background. An archeologist who comes, say, from a culture in which art does not exist or only exists in certain forms may not be able to appreciate other culture's art without that being a demerit on the found art per se.

But it also poses an epistemological dilemma: how can we ascertain what such an archeologist would say of our art? It seems that then we get back to square one, in which we have to forumalte some objective criteria for distinguishing art.

The archaeological test seems to exclude any kind of ephemeral or performance art that has not been captured by some durable medium.

Art = The suitably technical, creative, and intentional embodiment of aesthetically engaging thought or emotion in any publicly accessible medium.

There are five necessary and jointly sufficient conditions:

1. The activity is intentional
2. The activity is suitably technically demanding
3. The activity is suitably creative
4. The product exists in a publicly accessible medium
5. The product primarily embodies aesthetically engaging thought or emotion (or some combination of the two).

When killing precisely counts as a murder is a whole different can of worms. I'm just pointing out that murder is predefined as being wrong.

You might think it is often falsely applied, or you might even say it is an empty category, or that you don't know when/ how we can know to apply it. But all that doesn't change the definition of murder, which is a wrongful killing.

I can rephrase it: murder is by definition a wrongful killing. You can only quibble over which, if any, killings constitute murder.

Murder is defined as an "unjustified killing." Self-defense, etc. don't count as murder, just killings, homicides, or manslaughter. Whether the wrongness of murder is set in stone therefore is missing the point: it's by definition wrong. You can only quibble over which killings might constitute murder, i.e., a wrongful killing.

As to the OP, I think it makes sense that one wrong doesn't justify more wrongs or being wronger. It only seems odd to suggest a person might be willing to do something so wrong as murder but then have qualms about compounding that wrong. In other words, the logic is sound, but the application seems rather limited.

Since your validity is not determined by what other people think, best not to pay attention to naysayers. Us women have had to deal with people questioning our validity for millennia, whether trans or cis. Easier said than done, but that's all you can do. The Serenity Prayer got that right.

My question is, if you change so much about yourself down to the chromosomes to another sex, are you really you after all that? Or have you become a different person? How much can you change about a person before they are someone new?

And, I don't think making your body match your mind is a thing, because I don't ascribe to mind/body dualism. Seems to me that especially changing chromosomes and hormones would result in changes of brain chemistry/structure and therefore of personality.