Research

My current research focuses on analytic aesthetics and metaphilosophy. 

My interests in aesthetics is grounded in the study of certain art forms, mainly film. I then became interested in empirical approaches to aesthetics, mainly psychology and neuroscience. 

I also work on the art/craft distinction and I am slowly learning about the philosophy of technology. 
I started thinking about metaphilosophy when encountering the intuitions debate and the practice of experimental philosophy. I studied the application of X-Phi to the field of aesthetics and from there explored other methodological projects such as conceptual engineering. 

Nowadays I am particularly interested in the methodology of 'social' philosophy, such as social ontology, social epistemology and social aesthetics. For instance, I am currently working on 

 Work in progress

These are some papers I am currently working on. If you would like me to send you a draft, get in touch!

  • Peer Disagreement and Aesthetic Peerhood

    With Quentin Pharr 

    This paper sits at the intersection of aesthetics and social epistemology. More specifically, it explores one aspect of the interpersonal dimension of aesthetic judgements - namely, aesthetic disagreement - and how we might or should respond to others who disagree with us on aesthetic matters and who also happen to be our aesthetic peers. Taking cues from the social epistemological literature, it develops several conceptions of aesthetic peerhood which depend upon conceptions of cognitive and affective peerhood. It highlights one conception of affective peerhood which relies upon aesthetic empathy, and presents another which relies upon a realistic metaphysics of aesthetic properties. It then explores two avenues of thought about what might follow from aesthetic peer disagreement when different metaphysics of aesthetic properties are assumed.   

  • Aesthetic Experience: Going Beyond the Direct Encounter

    In this paper, I identify and question a common presumption in philosophical aesthetics, according to which aesthetic experience can only occur when we are face-to-face with certain objects. To do so, I point to an empirical model in psychology which shows that, although aesthetic experience does occur during a direct encounter with an object, it extends before and after the encounter. I then suggest two things. First, that the empirical model presented might necessitate a shift in the framework aestheticians have so far endorsed to investigate aesthetic experience. And second, that other aesthetic theories related to aesthetic experience might also need to be updated to conform with the new investigative framework. 

  • Hume and the Psychology of Aesthetic Experience

    This paper makes both a historical point and a philosophical point. The historical point concerns our interpretation of Hume’s criteria for the judgement of his ideal judges. In ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, Hume claims that beauty is entirely mind-dependent. He famously spells out five characteristics an appreciator of art must have to be an ideal judge and set the standard of taste: ‘strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice’. I interpret Hume’s standard of taste as an outline for a psychological faculty of taste, i.e. a faculty of experiencing and appreciating certain objects aesthetically, and show that his criteria point to certain psychological processes in play during an aesthetic experience. I then describe what this faculty looks like for Hume: roughly, an interaction of cognitive and affective processes, supervening on other faculties such as perception, reasoning, imagination and introspection. The philosophical point concerns our understanding of aesthetic experience in relation to Hume’s faculty. I show that there are psychological models in the contemporary literature that can elucidate Hume’s picture of aesthetic experience. In particular, I look at Leder et al.’s model of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgements, but I also point to other complementary models. I conclude with a methodological point on the relevance of psychology for our philosophical treatment of aesthetic experience. I believe that currently, our best hope as philosophers to gain some kind global understanding of aesthetic experience is to assimilate the theories available in the psychology literature, or at least to interact with them. The fact that, under my interpretation, Hume was already attempting a theory of aesthetic experience in psychological terms should convince us that this is an enterprise of philosophical interest.



PhD thesis

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Remember the Medium! 
Film, Medium Specificity, and Response-Dependence
  • Abstract

    Medium specificity is a theory, or rather a cluster of arguments, in aesthetics that rests on the idea that media are the physical material that makes up artworks, and that this material contains specific and unique features capable of 1) differentiating media from one another, and 2) determining the aesthetic potential and goals of each medium. As such, medium specificity is essential for aestheticians interested in matters of aesthetic ontology and value. However, as Noël Carroll has vehemently and convincingly argued, the theory of medium specificity is inherently flawed and its many applications in art history ill-motivated. Famously, he concluded that we should ‘forget the medium’ entirely. In this thesis, I reject his conclusion and argue that reconstructing a theory of medium specificity, while taking Carroll’s objections into account, is possible. To do so, I offer a reconceptualization of the main theoretical components of medium specificity and ground this new theory in empirical research. I first redefine the medium not as the physical material that makes up artworks but as sets of practices – not the material itself but how one uses the material. I then show that what makes media specific and unique is not certain physical features, but the human responses, which can be empirically investigated, to the combination of practices that constitute media. This relation is one of response-dependence, albeit of a novel kind, which I develop by appealing to social metaphysics. The resulting theory is more complex but also much more flexible and fine-grained than the original and provides insight into a variety of current aesthetic theories.