tailieunhanh - MORAL PREJUDICE AND AESTHETIC DEFORMITY: REREADING HUME'S "OF THE STANDARD OF TASTE"

Although research in neuroaesthetics has tended to focus on vi- sual art, independent research on music and dance is now begin- ning to make significant contributions to the field. In fact, several presentations at the conference focused on perception of visual motion in dance. This research is based on the neuroscience of body posture and movement perception, which has uncovered two specialized routes for processing human bodies. One of these, which involves areas of the dorsal visual system and the premotor cortex, seems to process bodies in a configural manner, and acti- vate the observers’ own sensoriomotor representations. The other route, which is part of the ventral visual processing stream,. | MICHELLE MASON Moral Prejudice and Aesthetic Deformity Rereading Hume s Of the Standard of Taste Twenty years ago a philosopher reassessing Hume s aesthetics wrote that his essay Of the Standard of Taste had been Twenty years later Hume s essay occupies a prominent place in philosophical aesthetics particularly among philosophers concerned with Hume s suggestion that moral considerations are relevant to the evaluation of Despite the proliferation of philosophers who cite Hume whether as ally or foe in debates over moralism in art criticism however we still lack an adequate account of Hume s own moralist Thus although Hume s essay on taste may no longer be underrated I believe that some problems raised by the essay s endorsement of a moralist aesthetics remain misunderstood. I hope to illuminate Hume s moralist aesthetics by pursuing one such problem. The problem which I call the moral prejudice dilemma arises when one attempts to square an account of the freedom from prejudice that Hume requires of true aesthetic judges with what he says about the relevance of moral considerations to the evaluation of art. I introduce and then attempt to disarm the dilemma by offering an interpretation of Hume s aesthetic point of view and drawing attention to the taxonomy of prejudices by which he justifies the true judge s moralism. The result is a reading of the essay that distinguishes Hume s aesthetic point of view from his moral point of view while defending the plausibility of assigning a moral dimension to aesthetic evaluation. I. THE FREEDOM-FROM-PREJUDICE REQUIREMENT According to Hume a true aesthetic judge as opposed to a pretender is distinguished by meeting five criteria one of which is the ability to preserve his mind free from all prejudice p. 239 .4 The task of unpacking what Hume intends by this requirement is complicated by the fact that he does not everywhere use the term prejudice in a strictly pejorative sense. In an earlier .