Dove e quando

Talk by Thomas Adajian (James Madison University)

ABSTRACT
On one understanding of the ambiguous, possibly terminally unclear term “pluralism,” pluralism about F holds that F is many and not one. Moderate monism about F holds that F is both many and one. Extreme monism holds that F is one and not many.  Outside aesthetics, different versions of pluralism hold, for example, that nothing unifies the many distinct types of truth, logical consequence, goodness, explanation, etc. In aesthetics, different pluralisms hold that nothing unifies different types of beauty, art, artistic value, the aesthetic, and so on. Pluralism about visual beauty holds that there is no common property, visual beauty, predicated of all and only things that are visually beautiful. Visual beauty, according to one prominent aesthetician, is  “not one”: having  “only a superficial unity,” it comes in “fundamentally different” types – artistic beauty, natural beauty, human beauty, etc. What does pluralism imply about the relations between the different types of visual beauty – are they comparable? What does it imply for the possibility of comparisons among and across beauty’s other determinates – sonic beauty, olfactory beauty, etc.? (This is a cousin of the problem of mixed discourse that faces pluralism about truth: how does alethic pluralism evaluate a sentence that contains different truth predicates?) How good are the direct  arguments for pluralism about visual beauty?