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Inês Morais
Reviewing involves significant selection, simplification, and inevitable omission. Reviewing a book with 1134 pages requires (when one finally writes) considerable abstraction from the actual essays, theses, and arguments the book presents. I make mostly general comments, with the recommendation that the Handbook is read and used to inform teaching in these areas. I’ve learnt plenty.
The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness is an excellent, very comprehensive survey and discussion of recent work in the philosophy of consciousness, with contributions from philosophers and neuroscientists, in the major aspects of an area with ramifications at least into epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. I strongly recommend it.
Being for Beauty begins with a few anecdotes involving aesthetic experts, ‘not all gentlemen, not all European, not all “highbrow”’ (p. 26). These set the tone of the book, which aims to be both progressive and alternative to highbrow philosophical aesthetics, occasionally relaxed and entertaining, while engaging mainly with classical, mainstream work in general philosophy. Breadth of interest and the project of covering literature from large neighbouring areas of philosophical discussion—to defend aesthetics—are immediately salient qualities of this book.
Plato famously set the challenge, in the Republic, for poets and lovers of poetry to defend poetry and its contribution for a well-governed society, if poetry is to “return from exile”:
But nevertheless let it be declared that, if the mimetic and dulcet poetry can show any reason for her existence in a well-governed state, we would gladly admit her, since we ourselves are very conscious of her spell. But all the same it would be impious to betray what we believe to be the truth. Is not that so, friend? Do not you yourself feel her magic and especially when Homer is her interpreter?
The problem of beauty is vital to all those concerned with art. Even in an era in which a lot of the art that is produced seems divorced from the notion of beauty, the public and, with the public, common sense, is still sensitive to the beautiful creations of artists.
In 2010 I published in the journal Disputatio a review of Peter Kivy’s book The Performance of Reading (1). The book promised a revisionary account of the activity of reading literature, one that clashes with current common-sense views. It is prudent to listen to common-sense and learn from tradition, but, at times, widespread, even ingrained beliefs are just falsehoods. Entire communities can be, and sometimes are, mistaken, deluded, for instance when they misinterpret the evidence or when they miss or ignore some detail that matters. And often, mistaken views breed more mistaken views, so it is important that philosophy uncovers and corrects mistakes. Kivy’s book aimed at countering what he considered to be an error in common-sense views of literature reading. At the time, I claimed that Kivy’s arguments against common-sense were not compelling enough for us to abandon common-sense. I was wrong.
