The issue features five scholarly articles, written by Michela Bariselli, Kalle Puolakka, Adrian Bruhns and Tilmann Köppe, Šárka Lojdová, and Giacomo Croci, as well as a critical note by Tomáš Hlobil. The journal Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics is published by Helsinki University Press in cooperation with the Department of Aesthetics at CU FA.
In “Incongruity, Vagueness, and Pertinence: A Defence of Noël Carroll’s Incongruity Theory of Humour,” Michela Bariselli offers a nuanced defense of Noel Carroll’s theory of humour. To address criticism of vagueness, she introduces the condition that the elements creating the incongruity must belong to the same context. Her careful argumentation is enriched by a diverse range of examples, including those drawn from the works of Samuel Beckett, among others.
In “Experiencing Experiences with Literature,” Kalle Puolakka explores how literature can provide readers with knowledge of what it feels like to experience something. He revisits one of the earliest formulations of the experiential knowledge hypothesis in Dorothy Walsh’s Literature and Knowledge (1969), expanding her framework with Deweyan insights. Puolakka applies the framework to his analysis of the stylistic and literary techniques in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), which anchor the novel’s capacity to convey the protagonists’ experiences to the reader.
Narrative techniques that allow readers to share a character’s experience are also addressed in Adrian Bruhns and Tilmann Köppe’s “Internal Focalization and Seeing through a Character’s Eyes.” The authors focus on parts of literary narratives that invite readers to see the fictional world from a character’s perspective. By distinguishing several types of imagination, they seek to ground ‘internal focalization’ in the faculty of non-propositional perspective-taking.
“Can Art Change the World?,” Šárka Lojdová asks in her paper that explores the political dimension of Arthur C. Danto’s philosophy of art. Building on Lydia Goehr’s argument in Red Sea–Red Square–Red Thread (2022, reviewed in Estetika 2/2022), Lojdová focuses on Danto’s account of a pluralistic artworld and his belief that pluralism in arts could serve as a precursor to political changes that will influence society that, like the post-historical artworld, would be free from oppressive narratives.
Giacomo Croci also examines art’s social and political potential in “The Aesthetic Intelligibility of Artefacts: Schelling’s Concept of Art in the System of Transcendental Idealism.” Through a careful reading of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), Croci re-evaluates art’s negative role in relation to practical intelligibility. He argues that, in Schelling’s practical philosophy, art’s enigmatic nature does not oppose intelligibility but instead reveals the human world as something susceptible to transformation.
In 2015, Estetika published the first English translation of Bernard Bolzano’s essay “On the Concept of the Beautiful“ (1843), subsequently included in the recently released Bolzano’s Essays on Beauty and the Arts (2023), edited and prefaced by Dominic McIver Lopes. In his critical note “On Some Pitfalls of the English Edition and Translation of Bolzano’s Aesthetic Treatises,” Tomáš Hlobil from the Department of Aesthetics at CU FA addresses Lopes’s interpretation of Bolzano’s aesthetics, criticizing it for its lack of historical contextualization. Hlobil also carefully analyzes the challenges involved in translating Bolzano’s highly technical vocabulary into English.
João Lemos serves as guest editor for Estetika’s special issue on Kant and Art, scheduled for publication in Fall of 2025. Submissions for this issue are due by 15 October 2024.
Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics is published by Helsinki University Press on behalf of CU FA. It is an open-access journal following triple-anonymous peer review process. The journal publishes research articles that engage with the diverse and rich traditions of aesthetics in Europe and beyond.
