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CONFERÊNCIA
Abstract
Consider four possible views of F: F is many and not one (pluralism); F is one and not many (monism); F is both one and many (moderate monism or moderate pluralism); F is neither many nor one (anti-realism or nihilism). F can take many values – goodness, truth, pleasure, and many more. The focus here is on the aesthetic: Is beauty one or many? Is visual beauty one or many? Is artistic value one or many? Are they unities or merely heaps?
Views that plump for the many over the one have recently been defended by some prominent aestheticians. Jerrold Levinson states that “visual beauty is irreducibly multiple … the types thereof are essentially different and not reducible or assimilable to one another… [there are] at least six fundamentally different properties of visual beauty,” of “radically different sorts." In short, “beauty has only a superficial unity….beauty is not one.” Dominic Lopes holds that “there is no characteristically artistic value… artistic value is the aggregate of pictorial value, musical value, and other such values; it need not be their common denominator… There is no ‘substantive unity’ to the values realized by works in the different arts. Artistic value is a disjunction of the values that works have as members of specific art kinds.” If views, like these, that emphasize the many over the one, are superior to views that do not privilege the many over the one, then that it may be because (a) their views are explanatorily superior to alternatives that do not privilege the many over the one, or (b) the arguments for them are strong. Is either of these the case?
