James Young

University of Victoria | UVIC · Department of Philosophy

Some writers have objected to cultural appropriation in the arts on the grounds that it violates cultures’ property rights. Recently a paper by Erich Matthes and another by C. Thi Nguyen and Matthew Strohl have argued that cultural appropriation does not violate property rights but that it is nevertheless often objectionable. Matthes argues that cu...

Contrary to what Aviv Reiter argues, Kant was not a formalist about the fine arts.

According to the orthodox view of Kant's philosophy of music, Kant is the founder of musical formalism, the view that music is pure, contentless form, and appreciated as such. On this orthodox view, Kant is an innovator in philosophy of music, though his views are confused and sometimes contradictory. Sometimes, we are told, Kant indicates that mus...

In this paper, the authors explore three philosophical theories of truth and offer a critique of this foundational area of scholarship for nursing. A brief summary of key ideas related to the three substantial philosophical theories of truth—that is, correspondence, pragmatism, and coherence—serves to highlight various convictions and commitments t...

It has long been known that Jean-Baptiste Du Bos (and, in particular, his book Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting) exercised a considerable influence on Hume's essays and, in particular, on the Of the Standard of Taste and Of Tragedy. It has also been noted that some passages in the Treatise bear marks of Du Bos influence. In this essay, w...

Cultural appropriation and the arts.

In at least one respect, classical music is superior to popular music. Classical music (understood as common practice composition) has greater potential for expressiveness and, consequently, has more potential for psychological insight and profundity. The greater potential for expressiveness in classical music is due, in large part, to it greater h...

Paul Oskar Kristeller famously argued that the modern ‘system of the arts’ did not emerge until the mid-eighteenth century, in the work of Charles Batteux. On this view, the modern conception of the fine arts had no parallel in the ancient world, the middle-ages or the modern period prior to Batteux. This paper argues that Kristeller was wrong. The...

Peter Kivy's account of how composers came to be recognized as geniuses has recently come under attack by James O. Young. Kivy has rejected Young's criticisms in toto. This was a mistake. Kivy's views on how composers came to be recognized as geniuses (in the same way that great painters and great poets were recognized as geniuses) are more deeply...

The view that music and literature are inimical has long been associated with musical formalism. This view can be traced as far back as Hanslick.1 More recently, Peter Kivy has given the classic argument for the existence of a “problem of opera.” The problem stems, Kivy believes, from a fundamental difference between the literary and musical elemen...

A bewildering array of accounts of the ontology of musical works is available. Philosophers have held that works of music are sets of performances, abstract, eternal sound-event types, initiated types, compositional action types, compositional action tokens, ideas in a composer’s mind and continuants that perdure. This paper maintains that question...

Peter Kivy argues that Handel was the first composer to be regarded as a genius and that only in the eighteenth century was the philosophical apparatus in place that would enable any composer to be conceived of as a musical genius. According to Kivy, a Longinian conception of genius transformed Handel into a genius. A Platonic conception of genius...

When writing about art, aestheticians tend to focus on the work of art and on the artist who produces it. When they refer to audiences, they typically speak only of the effect that the artwork has on its audience. Aestheticians pay little, if any, attention to the important active role that an audience plays in the workings of a healthy art world....

The central claim of this essay is that many deflationary theories of truth are variants of the correspondence theory of truth. Essential to the correspondence theory of truth is the proposal that objective features of the world are the truthmakers of statements. Many advocates of deflationary theories (including F. P. Ramsay, P. F. Strawson and Pa...

This paper explores the various available forms of relativism concerning aesthetic judgement and contrasts them with aesthetic absolutism. Two important distinctions are drawn. The first is between subjectivism (which relativizes judgements to an individual’s sentiments or feelings) and the relativization of aesthetic judgements to intersubjective...

IntroductionIs ‘subject appropriation’ a misnomer?Subject appropriation and misrepresentationCultural Appropriation and AssimilationHarm and Accurate RepresentationPrivacyAuthenticity and Subject AppropriationEnvoyConclusion References

The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation undertakes a comprehensive and systematic investigation of the moral and aesthetic questions that arise from the practice of cultural appropriation. Explores cultural appropriation in a wide variety of contexts, among them the arts and archaeology, museums, and religion. Questions whether cultural appropriation...

Now, for the first time, a philosopher undertakes a systematic investigation of the moral and aesthetic issues to which cultural appropriation gives rise. Cultural appropriation is a pervasive feature of the contemporary world (the Parthenon Marbles remain in London; white musicians from Bix Beiderbeck to Eric Clapton have appropriated musical styl...

abstract In a number of contexts one comes across the suggestion that cultures are collective owners of cultural property, such as particularly significant works of art. Indigenous peoples are often held to be collective owners of cultural property, but they are not the only ones. Icelandic culture is said to have a claim on the Flatejarbók and Gre...

I characterise a relativist account of truth as one according to which the truth value of a sentence can vary without its meaning changing. Relativism is to be contrasted with absolutism, which states that the truth values of sentences cannot change, so long as their meanings remain constant. I argue that absolutism follows from the realist account...

It is often suggested that artists from one culture (outsiders) cannot successfully employ styles, stories, motifs and other artistic content developed in the context of another culture. I call this suggestion the aesthetic handicap thesis and argue against it. Cultural appropriation can result in works of high aesthetic value.

The question of who ought to own the artefacts archaeologists find has generated a vast literature. Lawyers, archaeologists, anthropologists, museum curators, aboriginal rights activists and others have written extensively on the question of who has a right to archaeological finds. This literature has been part of the larger literature concerned wi...

Several prominent philosophers of music, including Lydia Goehr and Peter Kivy, maintain that the experience of music changed drastically in about 1800. According to the great divide hypothesis, prior to 1800 audiences often scarcely attended to music. At other times, music was appreciated as part of social, civic, or religious ceremonies. After the...

Several prominent philosophers of music, including Lydia Goehr and Peter Kivy, maintain that the experience of music changed drastically in about 1800. According to the great divide hypothesis, prior to 1800 audiences often scarcely attended to music. At other times, music was appreciated as part of social, civic, or religious ceremonies. After the...

Almost all of us would agree that the experience of art is deeply rewarding. Why this is the case remains a puzzle; nor does it explain why many of us find works of art much more important than other sources of pleasure. Art and Knowledge argues that the experience of art is so rewarding because it can be an important source of knowledge about ours...

The correspondence theory of truth holds that each true sentence corresponds to a discrete fact. Donald Davidson and others have argued (using an argument that has come to be known as the slingshot) that this theory is mistaken, since all true sentences correspond to the same “Great Fact.” The argument is designed to show that by substituting logic...

Semantic Challenges to Realism: Dummett and PutnamGardinerMark QuentinToronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000, x + 267 pp., $85.00 - Volume 41 Issue 2 - James O. Young

In his 1836 lectures to the Royal Institute, the great landscape painter John Constable stated that ‘Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature.’ Landscape, he went on to say, should ‘be considered a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments.’1 Constable makes two claims in this...

L'A. defend au nom de la liberte artistique et de l'aspect personnel des valeurs esthetiques et ethiques, la legitimite morale et esthetique du phenomene d'appropriation de la voix qui consiste en l'appropriation, voire le vol, d'experiences ou de vecus des membres d'une subculture par les membres d'une culture majoritaire pour en faire une oeuvre...

The World We Found: The Limits of Ontological TalkSacksMarkLa Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989, x + 198 p. - Volume 31 Issue 1 - James O. Young

Some members of the Vienna Circle argued for a coherence theory of truth. Their coherentism is immune to standard objections. Most versions of coherentism are unable to show why a sentence cannot be true even though it fails to cohere with a system of beliefs. That is, it seems that truth may transcend what we can be warranted in believing. If so,...