CFP Special Issue of Disputatio on New Directions in Virtue Aesthetics

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Date(s): 01. July
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• Call for Papers

Call for Papers

Special Issue of Disputatio on New Directions in Virtue Aesthetics

editors: David Collins (Churchill College, Cambridge) and Vitor Guerreiro (University of Porto)

‘Virtue aesthetics’ arose as a sub-field in philosophy of art during the early 2000s, inspired by twentieth-century virtue-based approaches in ethics and epistemology. Although the foundational principles of this sub-field were never fully developed, a small but steady stream of work on ‘aesthetic virtues’ has continued to be done since. Much of this recent work has been limited to discussions of certain skills or capacities (e.g., ‘creativity’) as aesthetic virtues, and of certain dispositions or attitudes (e.g., ‘snobbery’) as aesthetic vices. It is our contention that this recent work, rather than being an advancement of the field of virtue aesthetics, has amounted to a dead end. For a virtue-based approach in aesthetics to be justified, we contend, it needs to offer more than what existent theories of artistic value offer, giving more than simply a new vocabulary and set of concepts with which to make familiar and uncontroversial points.

This special issue aims to advance thinking about art in relation to virtue by (i) focusing on the basic framework and principles that a virtue-based approach to normativity and value in aesthetics might take, (ii) investigating connections between the aesthetic theories of historical philosophers and the ideas of virtue found in their ethical theories, (iii) examining virtue-based and aretaic-focused models of normativity in ethics and epistemology, and how these might apply to artistic value, and (iv) exploring the application of such an approach to questions in aesthetics that go beyond asking whether some particular trait or skill is ‘a virtue.’

We invite papers on virtue aesthetics that are broadly in line with the approach described above, with an especial interest in papers that do one or more of the following:

·      outline a theory of virtue aesthetics modelled after an existent variety of virtue ethics (e.g., Aristotelian, Confucian, Humean, Schillerian, Nietzschean, etc.) and/or look at how a particular thinker’s aesthetics could profitably be understood through the lens of their ethics and ideas of virtue or character;

·      show how a virtue-based approach can help to shed new light on questions of artistic value (i.e., what makes a work good or bad qua art), the value(s) of art (e.g., cognitive, political, etc.), criteria for the successful appreciation, evaluation, or interpretation of artworks (e.g., what makes an interpretation or evaluative judgment better than another), the relations between artistic value and moral value or cognitive value, etc.;

·      consider how ‘responsibilist’ rather than ‘reliabilist’ approaches in virtue epistemology might apply in aesthetics, or how aesthetic virtues that are plausibly also intellectual virtues relate to other non-aesthetic intellectual or epistemic virtues;

·      examine the place of practical wisdom (or phronesis) in a virtue-based understanding of the creation and appreciation of art;

·      explore the nature of ‘aretaic value’ as distinct from instrumental, intrinsic, and inherent types of value, and the implications of art’s value being aretaic.

Complete first drafts of papers are to be submitted by 1 July 2025, and should be anonymized for peer review, being accompanied by a cover letter including the author’s name and contact information and the title of the paper, along with a brief (200 words max.) abstract. Revised final drafts will be due by 30 September 2025. Papers should be approximately 8,000 words in length. When submitting, authors should select ‘Special Issue Article.’

Paper submissions are done through Disputatio’s Editorial Manager Platform:

https://www2.cloud.editorialmanager.com/disputatio/default2.aspx