Music and sonic art Previous chapters examined the three principal ways in which philosophers have tried to explain the value we attach to art. The most successful of them – aesthetic cognitivism – is to be preferred in part because it can accommodate a wider range of valuations, and explain more satisfactorily both the cultural status generally attributed to art as well as the discriminations we make between the serious and the light in art. Philosophy, however, is a critical discipline and cannot take conventional evaluations simply as given. Even the most widely held opinion can turn out to be faulty in some way once it is subjected to philosophical criticism, and this applies to beliefs about art as much as to moral and religious beliefs. So while established beliefs have much greater weight than mere personal opinions, there has to be a dialectical exchange between them and the critical principles of philosophical thought. Sometimes, as we will see in Chapter 10, philosophy raises very substantial doubts about things that are taken for granted.
Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 13:41:32 +0000
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