Daniel Star: Appreciation, inquiry, and deliberation

Tuesday June 17 2025 @11:30 (CET)
Sala B, Edificio de Humanidades, UNED & online

Abstract
Aesthetic appreciation is here understood to be a conscious mental process, with respect to which agents exercise a significant degree of intentional control, that involves attending to objects taken to be worth appreciating aesthetically (both whole objects and their proper parts, movement between the two being important), and experiencing the effects of cognitively and affectively engaging with them. This paper aims to explore similarities and differences between this process and two other mental processes about which more has been written: practical deliberation and epistemic inquiry. Some of the parallels and differences concern the metaphysics of these processes, but some concern the value and role of the processes. One important conclusion reached is that appreciation, unlike the other two processes, is primarily to be valued in itself as a process, rather than merely instrumentally in relation to the value of its outcomes. A key alternative for what might be thought to be of primary value as an outcome here — aesthetic judgment — is considered and rejected.

Bio
Daniel Star is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. He earned his BPhil and DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2007. Following this, he served as a Research Fellow at the Australian National University before relocating to the United States and joining Boston University in 2008. Star is the author of the monograph Knowing Better: Virtue, Deliberation, and Normative Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2015) and has published extensively in leading journals, including Analysis, Ethics, Hypatia, Journal of Moral Philosophy, Jurisprudence, Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Oxford Studies in Metaethics, and Ratio. In addition to his journal contributions, he is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity (OUP, 2018), co-editor of History of Ethics: Essential Readings with Commentary (Wiley, 2019), and an associate editor of the 11-volume International Encyclopedia of Ethics (Wiley, 2021). Currently, he is working on a second monograph, The Ethics of Photography, which is under contract with Oxford University Press.