The Disenfranchisement of Philosophical Aesthetics

Is there a Real Nexus Between Ethics and Aesthetics?

“…Downie and Charon have been particularly active promoters of the ethical value of the arts. It would seem, from the volume of writing about this theme, that there is a conscious or unconscious interest in re-aestheticising ethics, and perhaps re-ethicising aesthetics (Forsey 2003;Cunliffe 2001).…”

“…Jane Forsey has examined the history of aesthetics (Forsey 2003), and traced its rise within philosophy to the status of an autonomous and significant focus for thought and exploration, and its fall to a peripheral interest, registered only in the outer of three circles in the map of philosophy set out in the Appendix to the Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Honderich 1995, 927), where it sits along with philosophies of education and of mathematics. Moral philosophy, by contrast, is placed in the second circle, next to the central domains of metaphysics, epistemology and logic.…”