is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia, Canada, funded by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, working on issues of aesthetic value and normativity. He completed his PhD at the University of Tokyo in March 2024 where he focused on the categories of art and their role in art criticism.
Research keywords: aesthetic value; art criticism; categories of art; genre and style.
📮 gmail: senkiyohiro
RESEARCH
The inquiry into the aesthetic is at the core of the discipline of aesthetics. What are aesthetic value, experience, judgment, and attitude, rather than value, experience, judgment, and attitude in general? How do they differ from and overlap with ethical, economic, and practical values and experiences? Can aesthetic value be explained in terms of an item giving pleasure?
We perceive, interpret, and evaluate works of art. Criticism can be understood as the act of communicating various judgments in art appreciation. What is the purpose and nature of criticism? How do the categories of artworks (genre, form, style, media, etc.) affect criticism? Can the correct meaning and value of a work of art be determined? To what extent/how involved is the artist's intention?
Pictures (paintings, photographs, sketches, prints and so on) depict something, and we can access that something by looking at the design on the surface of pictures. The way pictures have their contents seems to be different from that of language. What makes it possible for pictures to depict something?
Are there any crucial differences between the different depictive media (painting, sketching, photography, graphs) ? Unlike handmade pictures such as paintings, photographic images, which are produced through a mechanical process, seem to have distinct character. According to Kendall Walton, photographs are transparent and you can literally see the object just like mirrors, telescopes, or glasses. According to Roger Scruton, photographic images, which only causally capture the appearance of things, cannot be artistic representations. How far/To what extent are these discourses on photography valid?
Analytic aesthetics is a branch of analytic philosophy and is the predominant aesthetic study in the English-speaking world today, whose root is the works of Monroe Beardsley, Frank Sibley, George Dickie, and others who discussed the philosophy of criticism, the definition of art, the aesthetic, and so on in the 1950s and 1960s. The school is characterized by clear argumentation and refinement through mutual criticism.