Do birds disagree? The place of aesthetic value in advocacy for the humanities
July 2022
| Chapter
| The Question of the Aesthetic
Helen Small’s response essay draws together the principal argumentative strands of this volume, identifying some important differences in contributors’ understanding of aesthetic value: what it is, and how we come to agree and disagree over it. The chapter presses particularly on the strengths and limitations of efforts to defend aesthetic value by appealing to biological understanding of evolved animal behavior, drawing attention to some (culturally pervasive) disagreements about what constitutes artistic and critical “agency.” The chapter considers areas of ongoing critical endeavor to provide better accounts of how aesthetic values are mediated through language, and thereby become part of our collective thinking about politics. Finally, it details a specific claim for the public value of the Humanities based on their special concern with recognizing and debating aesthetic value—to be added to the range of claims assisting public advocacy.
Kazuo Ishiguro, disagreement, Immanuel Kant, Richard Prum, posthumanism, evolutionary biology, Humanities, agency, naturalistic arguments, artificial intelligence, advocacy