Why do we value music? Many people report that listening to music is one of life's most rewarding activities. In Critique of Pure Music, James O. Young seeks to explain why this is so. Formalists tell us that music is appreciated as pure, contentless form. On this view, listeners receive pleasure, or a pleasurable "musical" emotion, when they explore the abstract patterns found in music. Music, formalists believe, does not arouse ordinary emotions such as joy, melancholy or fear, nor can it represent emotion or provide psychological insight. Young holds that formalists are wrong on all...

The question of whether aesthetic judgements are simply statements about subjective preferences or whether they have some non-subjective basis is one of the most important questions of aesthetics, and, indeed, of philosophy. In recent years, philosophers of language have discussed aesthetic judgements, but have assumed that aesthetic judgements are similar to judgements that employ predicates of personal taste such as 'tasty' and 'delicious.' A speaker's judgement that an item of food is tasty is a report about the speaker's subjective response to that item of food. If aesthetic judgements...

Jean-Baptiste Du Bos’ Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting, first published in French in 1719, is one of the seminal works of modern aesthetics. Du Bos rejected the seventeenth-century view that works of art are assessed by reason. Instead, he believed, audience members have sentiments in response to artworks. Their sentiments are fainter versions of those they would feel in response to actually seeing what the work of art imitates. Du Bos was influenced by John Locke’s empiricism and, in turn, had a major impact on virtually every major eighteenth-century contributor to philosophy...