Philosophy Commons^™

Human And Ai Perspectives On Academic Aesthetics, Gioia Laura Iannilli, Ossi Naukkarinen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The purpose of this article is to examine how current AI tools can be used in aesthetics research and teaching. We focus in particular on one theme: how traditional ways of describing the field of aesthetics as a whole could relate to descriptions made with the help of artificial intelligence. Describing the field and its main questions is unavoidable when we teach and research aesthetics; our question is, how can AI be used for that? Starting from a new meta-aesthetic tripartite model of aesthetics that we introduce, we raise a set of questions to pave the way to a more …

Anticipation And Aesthetics After Automation, Tanya Ravn Ag

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper explores generative technology’s ongoing aesthetic evolution through the lens of anticipation. It proposes anticipation as an alternative perspective to automation to understand the implications of generative technology in relation to aesthetic production and evolution. By focusing on anticipation, the discussion shifts from merely considering AI’s impact on aesthetics as instrumental to creative production to examining the anticipative behaviors and affective responses these technologies develop, engage, and cultivate through our interactions with them. Understanding generative technology as anticipatory highlights how deeply human and cultural expectations influence the design, recursive adaptation, and future anticipations of AI systems. Viewing our engagements …

Aesthetics In The Age Of Ai: A Methodological Self-Delineation, Anne Virginia Meindl

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Current debates on AI entering aesthetic practices often take on a normative stance by evaluating the artistic status of AI art. This article seeks to develop a different perspective by referring back to the original descriptive meaning of ‘aisthesis’ and also to the origins of aesthetics as discourse on the senses and art. Introducing a Hegelian understanding of the artistic medium—as formally modeling a certain structure of consciousness rather than just as a neutral means of representation—this article provides a methodological starting point of an aesthetically engaged critique of AI’s implicit subject model. Rather than operating with abstract definitions of …

An Agent Or A Tool? Artificial Intelligence, Heidegger’S Robot And The Ignorant’S Toaster, David Holtgrave

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Be it in art, aesthetics, or anywhere in or beyond academia, artificial intelligence, or AI, often is said to do a lot of stuff formerly done by humans. In this essay, I will argue that this line of thinking is to some extent misleading. On my account, it is still humans that do the same stuff, only by different means. Taking its employment and discussion in the arts as an example, I will set up and discuss what I call the ‘agent view’ of AI and show how, for those cases in which we typically attribute agency to AI, this …

The Mimesis Of Difference: A Deleuzian Study Of Generative Ai In Artistic Production, Jakub Mácha

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This study uses the traditional concept of mimesis, reframed by Deleuze as a repetition of difference, to investigate art created by large language models (LLMs) or generative pretrained transformers (GPTs). The current rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is intensifying the mimetic repetition of the different. An AI system repeats carefully selected elements from its extensive training dataset. Rearranging these elements introduces differences in the mimetic repetition. Since the training dataset is updated over longer time frames, it is analogous to a static Platonic universe. Once AI can update its static elements with each repetition, it will become the true Dionysian …

Is Generative Ai In Aesthetics Really New?: The Visualist Perspective, Michalle Gal

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

The concept of AI in aesthetics is encountering interest as new algorithmic machines now generate visual works alongside philosophical discourse, sparking both enthusiasm and concern. Yet, this idea has deep roots, reflected in longstanding debates within the discipline. These discussions, which are similar to the new ones, have examined issues like the illusion of an image or object’s ontological stability; the nature of function and user control; distinctions between the natural and artificial, authenticity and forgery; the divide between handmade and mass-produced items; the challenges of readymade and indiscernibility in art; and the potential of ekphrasis. As a result, skepticism …

On Deepfakes And Dog Whistles: Thinking Aesthetically About Generative Ai, Maja Bak Herrie

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This article focuses on the aesthetic dimensions of contemporary media created with generative AI, challenging traditional dichotomies of truth and falsehood, real and fake. It draws upon diverse examples including Samsung’s “Space Zoom” images of the moon, AI-driven political imagery, and the randomized aesthetics of Google’s Gemini. Additionally, it examines two artistic projects by Elisa Giardina Papa and Trevor Paglen. The article argues for an aesthetic analysis that goes beyond debates over authenticity, highlighting instead the inherent complexity and weirdness of these digital artifacts by exploring how AI reshapes perceptions of reality. By invoking, among other things, theories of agnotology, …

Prompting Aesthetic Ideologies Of Generative Text-To-Image Ai, Lotte Philipsen

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In generative AI, text-to-image prompting has gained popularity, which calls for image theoretical attention. This article evokes critical image theory, developed by Norman Bryson and W. J. Thomas Mitchell in the 1980s and 1990s, which offers important, relevant nuances when analyzing contemporary AI image-tools. By investigating specific cases of text-to-image AI through this theoretical filter, the article demonstrates how certain aesthetic ideologies—especially perceptualism, the idea of natural images, and splitting and hierarchization of text and image—govern generative AI.

Beauty And The Bit: Ai-Driven Philosophical Aesthetics, Stefano De Giorgis, Aldo Gangemi

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper presents a novel computational framework for formalizing and analyzing philosophical aesthetics discourse through the integration of knowledge representation techniques and large language models (LLMs). The framework introduces a structure based on four elements combining source texts, core ontology, knowledge graphs, and interpretative mappings to systematically capture both explicit content and implicit semantic relationships in aesthetics texts. Through a case study analyzing works by Dewey, Danto, and Sibley, we demonstrate how this approach enables the systematic reverse engineering of aesthetic analytical methods while maintaining semantic stability and interpretative clarity. The framework leverages human expert annotation alongside LLM capabilities to …

Appraiset: Discussions On A New Art Dataset, Thomas Şerban Von Davier, Max Van Kleek, Nigel Shadbolt Frs, Freng, Fbcs

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

Artificial intelligence (AI) applications in the arts have gained significant attention, particularly with the advent of generative AI. Researchers have explored AI’s capability to create art autonomously or in collaboration with artists, and AI’s role in curating, classifying, and applying aesthetic metrics to artwork. However, the opaque nature of proprietary algorithms used in these applications presents challenges for understanding AI’s influence on aesthetics. To address this, open-source data and code are essential for investigating how AI can develop its own aesthetic language. This paper introduces AppraiSet, an open art dataset containing evaluative metadata designed to support the field of …

Data Mining And Ai Visualization Of Key Terms From U.S. Supreme Court Cases From 1789 To 2022, Kory Blose, Heidi Biggs, Robbie Fraleigh, Luke Meeken, Eduardo Navas

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

In this paper, we take on the question of the potential risks of AI in aesthetics: What kind of risks does AI pose? To engage with this question, we focus on how generative AI models’ results consist of decontextualized content that does not always correspond with its historical context. From this standpoint, bias and misinterpretation pose major challenges in academic aesthetics because AI can be used both as a tool to make research more specific and precise and also for quick results that avoid in-depth research and on the surface may appear decisive and accurate. We set out to expose …

Directional Poetics: An Interview With Ed Simon On Pittsburgh, Appalachia, And The Memories Of Geography, Ed Simon, Scott C. Mcdaniel

Critical Humanities

An Interview with Ed Simon

Fire In The Hole: Appalachia’S Elemental Narrative In Harlan County, Usa And King Coal, Somak Mukherjee

Critical Humanities

In Elaine McMillion Sheldon’s documentary King Coal (2023) coal is being referred to as a matter that is “not dirty or clean, but elemental.” The acclaimed film centers on the complex histories and cultures of coal in Central Appalachia, based on the perspective of Sheldon, a coal miner’s daughter, and a West Virginia native. The elemental nature of coal is explored in the film by situating coal less as a resource and more as a mythic foundation for the community's cultural history. This article puts King Coal in conversation with Barbara Kopple's seminal Harlan County, USA (1976) which narrates the …

Appalachian Archipelagos: "Writing From Measureless Location” In C.S. Giscombe’S Geopoetics, Jay Butler

Critical Humanities

This essay begins with a speculative gesture: what if we read Appalachia not as a bounded, landlocked region, but as an archipelago—where coherence lies not in contiguity, but in multiplicity and geopoetic drift? Drawing on the poetry of C.S. Giscombe, which spans the Caribbean to Appalachia and unsettles geographic conventions by inhabiting “measureless location” – not as a metaphor but as a method, materially grounded yet elusively meaningful – and guided by R.A. Judy’s Sentient Flesh and its theory and practice of para-semiosis and poiesis-in-black, this essay follows Giscombe’s pragmatic and prismatic geopoetics as it upends dominant frameworks of …

“Here’S To The Long Haul: Dark Green Religion And Planetary Thinking In Appalachian Environmental Movements”, Joseph Witt

Critical Humanities

Environmental humanities scholars have worked to develop alternative frameworks for understanding and relating to Earth’s systems in the hope of reforming the exploitative and extractive practices and attitudes characteristic of the Anthropocene. For example, Dipesh Chakrabarty argued that addressing climate change necessitated appreciating the entanglements between global (human) and planetary (Earth systems) scales. While Chakrabarty noted that ancient and Indigenous cultures may have retained approaches necessary for this work, he was skeptical of the ability of modern secular intellectual traditions focused on global justice perspectives to ultimately facilitate a planetary non-anthropocentric ethic. However, by only briefly engaging with themes of …

Planetary [] Appalachia: Editor’S Introduction, Scott C. Mcdaniel

Critical Humanities

Editor's Introduction to Volume 4 Issue 1

We Need A Belmont Report For Ai, Kevin Patton

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The Belmont Report has a place of great importance in American biomedical research ethics. This paper argues that a similar kind of report, and the legal infrastructure that birthed it, is needed in the United States if we are to preempt a great many of the potential issues that are on the horizon with artificial intelligence (AI). What makes the Belmont Report so important is not just that it established a new basis for how medical professionals ought to treat their patients and experiment participants; it did so with the force of law. Establishing an equivalent legal framework for AI …

The Scylla And Charybdis Of Paternalism And Moral Complicity, J.L.A. Donohue

Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations

In some circumstances avoiding complicity seems to require acting paternalistically, while avoiding paternalism seems to require moral complicity in another's wrongful projects. In order to solve the conflict we will need to investigate the concepts of paternalism and moral complicity and, more importantly, our moral interest in them in the first place. Why do the wrongs of paternalism and moral complicity matter to us? And what does this tell us about what it means to set out to treat others well, where that includes both respecting their agency and helping them to act rightly? I will suggest that adopting a …

La España De José Martí, Laura A. Hernández

Homage to Alexander von Humboldt: Travels to and from Spain Throughout the Centuries / Homenaje a Alexander von Humboldt: Viajes hacia y desde España de todos los siglos

Después de sufrir en Cuba una terrible condena a trabajos forzados, acusado de atentar contra la corona española, José Martí consigue que le sea concedido el destierro a España. Llega a Cádiz cuando inicia el año de 1871, y España se encuentra bajo el breve reinado de Amadeo de Saboya, quien ha sustituido a Isabel II después de ser obligada a abdicar, pero que será derrocado en 1873 por un gobierno republicano. Martí dejará España a fines de 1874 para reencontrase con su familia en México, cuando los borbones han recuperado el poder y preparan el ascenso al trono de …

Transcendental Arguments In Reid? A Reply To Mccraw, Peter Baumann

Philosophy Faculty Works

Benjamin W. McCraw’s article “A Reidian Transcendental Argument Against Skepticism” (2025) constitutes an original and thought-provoking contribution both to Reid scholarship and to the discussion of epistemic skepticism.[1] In the following I will make a few remarks about it, focusing on the discussion of skepticism. I start with a brief historical remark on Reid and Kant (§ 1) before I explain the anti-skeptical argument in some detail (§ 2). A discussion of the premises of the argument follows (§ 3). I add some remarks about the social aspect of McCraw’s anti-skeptical stance (§ 4). I finish with another set of …

Does Non-Idealism Entail Particularism?, John Lawless

Faculty Publications - Philosophy

No abstract provided.

"Inspiring Empathy": A Descriptive Review Of A Musical Composition, Garo Saraydarian

Educational Studies Dissertations

This study explored the experiences of college professors using an assessment approach, descriptive review, to assess undergraduate music compositions. College professors, and educators in general, often debate best practices around assessing student work. A literature review showed a debate amongst music educators over approaches to assessing student compositions, with rubrics being especially controversial. Descriptive review uses collective discussion and a series of non-judgmental exercises that aim for participants to become more intimate with a student and their work. As an assessment technique that had been used to look at student artwork, albeit at the elementary grade level, descriptive review has …

Artificial Intelligence In Ethics And Society, Amy B. Cyphert, Sally Brown

Artificial Intelligence Exhibit

This section explores the ethical dilemmas, social impacts, bias and fairness of AI use.

The Impact Of Adverse Childhood Experiences And Living With Hiv On Cardiovascular Health And Cardiometabolic Disorders In An African Population: An Analysis Of The Indepth Community In Rural South Africa, Samuel Gavi

Theses and Dissertations

Background: Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) have been shown to be associated with cardiometabolic disorders (CMDs) and poor CVH; however, in Africa, this has not been well studied. Cardiovascular health (CVH) is an important measure of risk for cardiovascular diseases (CVD) developed by the American Heart Association (AHA). With the increasing prevalence of CVD in Africa, CVH is a potential upstream prevention approach. Africa also has the highest prevalence of HIV, and an increasing prevalence of comorbidities associated with it. Various mechanisms have been investigated to explain the relationship between CVD and chronic HIV infection. This study explores the potential relationship …

Not Staying Regular?, Joshua Thong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Consider the following claims: 1. Rational credences are real-valued. 2. A rational agent is more confident in than in just in case appropriate set-theoretic relations between the relevant events and/or appropriate inequalities between her numerical credences, whether conditional or not, hold. 3. If a rational agent’s conditional credence in, given, is greater than her conditional credence in, given, then she is more confident in than in. 4. There are two distinct and particular ways of ordering the events in a lottery over the naturals, for each of which there exists a rational agent whose comparative confidence ordering corresponds to that …

The Miseducation Of Model Minorities: The Gospel Of ‘Schoolvation’ And The Myth Of The Schooled Society, Justin Kh Tse

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

The ‘model minority’, the phenomenon of some ‘minority’ communities (or some members within them) achieving social and economic advancement despite encountering the difficulties of assimilating into a mainstream society, is often described as a myth, especially as one of the central problematics in Asian American studies. Usually, the modern use of the word myth is pejorative: the model minority in this sense refers to a false empirical description of some minorities and should be quantitatively disaggregated and qualitatively debunked. In this article, I want to explore the model minority as another kind of myth, in the classical sense of mythos, …

Plato’S Moral Realism By Lloyd Gerson (Review), Brennan Mcdavid

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

A review of Plato’s Moral Realism by Lloyd Gerson.

The Political Philosophy Of Habitude: Conservatism Analytically Explained, Kyle S. Hodge

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Conservatism is both undertheorized and poorly understood in philosophical political theory; all extant theories have proven deficient. They either conflate what is contingently associated with conservatism with its essence, draw mistaken generalizations from apparently conservative behavior, or else are explanatorily incomplete.

To avoid these deficiencies, I develop a rigorous, theory-neutral groundwork for evaluating theories of conservatism. This groundwork utilizes both traditional methods of analytic philosophy and, for the first time in the field, historiometry. Philosophical analysis determines the formal requirements of a successful explanation while empirical, historiometric data determines the most salient conservative exemplars whom any such theory must explain. …

Living Heritage, Resilience And Ethically Informed Infrastructures In Malawi, Martha B. Lerski, Frank Puluputu Mwale

Publications and Research

Rooted in a rural community’s needs, this paper explores how historically, and ethically informed infrastructures can support community engagement towards identification, documentation, and dissemination of local, traditional, and indigenous knowledge relating to climate change. The paper examines climate adaptation and sustainability issues through the lenses of community organizing and Library & Information Science best practices. It draws on a growing body of literature identifying a role for expanded epistemological and subject discipline perspectives. While the impacts of climate on material culture are increasingly recognized, intangible, and biocultural heritage have not received as much attention. Living heritage traditions and knowledge systems …

A More Robust Ethics: The Weakness And Theistic Dependence Of Godless Normative Realism, Micah Andrew Pycraft

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This dissertation is centered on the metaethics and moral ontology of Erik Wielenberg. The central task of the dissertation is to examine Wielenberg’s metaethical view termed “Godless Normative Realism” and ascertain the ontological implications therein. I contend that Wielenberg’s moral ontology ultimately fails to establish moral realism and aspects of his metaethics are better explained by the existence of God rather than his non-existence.

Chapter One presents Erik Wielenberg’s metaethics within the background of the historical progression of moral ontology and contemporary approaches to moral realism. Tracing from ancient foundations of theistic moral realism I show how moral antirealism grew …