This essay surveys the main objections to aesthetic hedonism, the view that aesthetic value is reducible to the value of aesthetic pleasure or experience. Hedonism is the dominant view of aesthetic value, but a spate of recent criticisms has drawn its accuracy into question. I introduce some distinctions crucial to the criticisms, before using the bulk of the essay to identify and review six major lines of argument that hedonism's critics have employed against it. Whether or not these arguments suffice to refute hedonism decisively, I argue that its privileged status, as the sole contender in aesthetic value theory, is detrimental to downstream research on aesthetic phenomena. The essay concludes with an overview of current work and promising avenues of inquiry into non-hedonic alternatives.

Much hope is placed on education systems to reduce socioeconomic learning gaps. But in South Africa, uneven functioning of the school system widens learning gaps.This paper analyses education performance using ANA data. Weak calibration and inter-temporal or inter-grade comparability of ANA test scores limit their usefulness for measuring learning gains. However, relative performance provides meaningful information on learning gaps and deficits. A reference group that is roughly on track to achieve the TIMSS average is used to estimate the performance required in each grade to perform at TIMSS’ low international benchmark. By Grade 4, patterns across quintiles of on track performance approximate matric exemption patterns. Viewed differently, academic and labour market prospects may be bleak for children who are no longer on track. Improvement in outcomes requires greater emphasis on the Foundation Phase or earlier, before learning deficits have grown to extreme levels observed by the middle of primary school. This statement is true whether deficits arise from weak early instruction, or simply because a disadvantaged home environment requires early remedial action. The emphasis on the early grades that this analysis of the ANAS suggests to is contrary to the conclusions drawn from the ANA results by policy makers, that weak test scores in Mathematics in Grade 9 require major interventions in that grade.

Nelson Goodman's attempt to analyse the expressiveness of artworks in semantic terms has been widely criticised. In this paper I try to show how the use of an adapted version of his concept of exemplification, as proposed by Mark Textor, can help to alleviate the worst problems with his theory of expression. More particularly I argue that the recognition of an intention, which is central to Textor's account of exemplification, is also fundamental to our understanding of expressiveness in art. Moreover I propose that the recognition of this intention depends on our interpretation of the artwork -an insight Goodman tried to capture with his assertion that our attributions of expressive properties to artworks function metaphorically. The realisation of the context-dependence of our expressive judgements about art and, hence, of the central role interpretation plays in these judgements, I contend, counts in favour of theories of expression like Goodman's that focus on semantic concerns.What do we mean when we apply emotion terms, like "joy" and "sadness", "anguish" and "rapture", to artworks and other lifeless objects? When calling a rendition of a Brahms intermezzo "melancholy" or a Wodehouse novel "jovial", whose feelings, if anyone's, are we describing? There is a rich literature dealing with these questions and in it a wide variety of answers articulated.1 One eminent answer was given by Nelson Goodman in Languages of Art (1968) 2 , but his approach has fallen into disrepute since.Goodman proposes that expression in art amounts to what he calls metaphorical exemplification, where exemplification is a restricted form of inverse denotation, and its metaphorical nature relates to the fact that attributing an emotion to an artwork is an instance of abnormal property ascription. Artworks, Goodman says, express emotions by (a) metaphorically possessing them as properties and (b) symbolising them in the way that samples symbolise (i.e. "exemplify") some of their properties. Goodman's theory has, however, rightly been criticised on both counts. Typically, his critics point out separate problems with his view of metaphor and with his notion of exemplification respectively. The objections in both cases are substantial but, I will argue, perhaps not insurmountable.

On a widely held view in aesthetics, appreciation requires disinterested attention. George Dickie famously criticized a version of this view championed by the aesthetic attitude theorists. I revisit his criticisms and extract an overlooked challenge for accounts that seek to characterize appreciative engagement in terms of distinctive motivation: at minimum, the motivational profile such accounts propose must make a difference to how appreciative episodes unfold over time. I then develop a proposal to meet this challenge by drawing an analogy between how attention is guided in appreciation and how practical action is guided in 'striving play'-a mode of game play recently foregrounded in the philosophy of games. On the resulting account appreciation involves an 'inverted' motivational structure: the appreciating agent's attention is guided by cognitive goals taken up instrumentally, for the sake of the cognitive activity that results from attending under the guidance of those goals.

Social Aesthetics and Moral Judgment: Pleasure, Reflection and Accountability Jennifer A. McMahon (ed.) routledge. pp. xvi + 230 + 8 colour. £92.00 (hbk). Servaas van der Berg