Visual Art and the Rhythm of Experience

The concept of rhythm is frequently used by art historians, critics, and philosophers as a way of describing central features of visual art. Since rhythm is generally considered to be a temporal phenomenon associated with music, it is far from clear how visual art, composed of fixed lines, figures, and color, can be associated with rhythmicity. Linked to a temporal ordering or structure in music, the notion of rhythm in visual art leads to a claim that the aesthetic aspect of a painting does not consist in, or emerge from, its spatial structures, but rather its temporal ordering of the visual field. Recently this account of rhythm in visual art has been criticized by philosopher Jason Gaiger, who argues that visual art does not comprise movement and therefore cannot be associated with a temporal rhythm. Through a discussion of temporality and rhythm in Edmund Husserl, Erwin Straus, and Henri Maldiney, this article maintains that rhythmicity is a central aspect of experiences with visual art. It is shown that the phenomenological account of rhythm in the experience of visual art is fundamentally linked to a different notion of time.     

Is Conceptual Analysis Needed for the Reduction of Qualitative States?

In this paper I discuss the claim (advanced in various ways by Joseph Levine, Frank Jackson and David Chalmers) that the successful reduction of qualitative to physical states requires some sort of intelligible connection between our qualitative and physical concepts, which in turn requires a conceptual analysis of our qualitative concepts in causal-functional terms. While I defend this claim against some of its recent critics, I ultimately dispute it, and propose a different way to get the requisite intelligible connection between qualitative and physical concepts.     

Virtue Epistemology: No New Cures

One version of virtue epistemology defines knowledge as belief whose truth arises from, or is explained by, the motives that produced it. This version is also intended to solve the Gettier problem, by shielding properly caused beliefs from double accidents. Unfortunately, there is no notion of "explains" or "arises from" which explains in the intended sense the truth of true beliefs.     

Assertion, Practical Reason, and Pragmatic Theories of Knowledge

Defenders of pragmatic theories of knowledge (such as contextualism and sensitive invariantism) argue that these theories, unlike those that invoke a single standard for knowledge, comport with the intuitively compelling thesis that knowledge is the norm of assertion and practical reason. In this paper, I dispute this thesis, and argue that, therefore, the prospects for both "high standard" and "low standard" invariantist theories are better than the pragmatists contend. I also provide a limited defense of the "high standard" approach, and contend that if one abandons the thesis that knowledge is the norm of assertion and practical reason, the most serious arguments against it lose their force.