Dr Chris Woodard (University of Nottingham)
Subjective well-being
9 September 2015

Well-being subjectivists aim to explain the nature of one central kind of value—well-being—entirely in terms of psychological states of valuing. This paper explores the attractions of well-being subjectivism, how best to develop it, and some of its implications. One conclusion is that subjectivism is compatible with the claim that subjects can be deeply mistaken about what is good for them, and that being prudent is very difficult.

Dr Stacie Friend (Birkbeck, University of London)
Reality in Fiction

The concept of ‘truth in fiction’ prompts two questions: (i) What does it mean to say that something (e.g., a proposition) is fictionally true? (ii) How are the fictional truths determined? In answer to (i) I defend a version of the claim that fictional truth should be understood in terms of prescriptions to imagine. However, my focus in this talk is on (ii). I argue that the starting point for determining fictional truth is the assumption that fictional stories invite us to imagine about the real world. In consequence, we assume that whatever really obtains also obtains in the fictional world, so long as it is consistent with other fictional truths. I defend this claim against objections and contrast it with alternative approaches.

Dr Renee Conroy (University of Cambridge)
Recent Ruins: Romanticism Reconsidered
6 May 2015

American political satirist P. J. O’Rourke observes, “Detroit’s industrial ruins are picturesque, like crumbling Rome in an 18th century etching”. I argue that O’Rourke’s claim should be taken literally: the crumbling pockets of urban decay that famously dot major cities in America’s so-called “rust belt” belong to the aesthetic category ‘ruins’. While sites of recent urban devastation have a distinctive aesthetic character, they are nonetheless of an appreciative piece with those iconic structures from ancient times we relish in virtue of their incompleteness and their capacity to incite sustained reflection on things past.

The body of literature in this corner of aesthetics remains unfortunately small, but one shared thesis emerges clearly from extant work in this area, viz., that age-value is central to our aesthetic regard for ruins. Hence, according to the traditional model, sites of contemporary ruination in places like Detroit, Michigan do not count as genuine ruins. They are, at best, ruins in a metaphorical or analogical sense. By considering carefully Carolyn Korsmeyer’s account of ruins as objects of aesthetic regard (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Fall 2014), I argue that philosophers of art have overlooked an important appreciative category – that of “recent ruins” – and that this category can be subsumed under traditional theories of ruin appreciation.