I'd look at C. S. Peirce.

...and once you've finished laughing, look elsewhere.

Now, now, now... Didn't Peirce believe that he was part of the philosophical lineage going back to Aristotle?

Any such trope would have been entirely accidental.

To put a point of discussion my first interest have been Aristotle, Plato, and some contemporary philosophers that have tried to discuss the liaisons between ethics and aesthetics.

But most of them, look for a religious morality that I'm not interested.

So there are a few questions:

1 - Can it be a ethic in aesthetic without the notion of moral (religious)?

2 - If art as an autonomy what is the goal of an ethic?

3 - Should new contemporary art (as Stelarc and Orlan) be analyzed by this point of view?

DS

Bill - we rarely forgive our past loves.

I liked Peirce's pragmatism until I discovered Quine's - and I liked Quine's until I discovered my own (this is unfair. My thinking is very largely neo-Quinean - but my semiotics remains idebted to Peirce).

Peirce was a semiotician-logician rather than a philosopher-logician. His contribution to philosophy is very backward-looking.

DH: "Peirce was a semiotician-logician rather than a philosopher-logician. His contribution to philosophy is very bacward-looking."

Each to his own.

Peirce spent some effort on the catagorization of the sciences. He came to believe that there were three normative sciences, Esthetics, Logic and Ethics. One might think of them in terms of their respective objects... being, truth and goodness.

http://agora.phi.gvsu.edu/kap/CSP_Bibliography/CSP_norm_bib.pdf

Exactly. Very antique.

In context my comments were appropriate. David Santos had made a direct reference to Aristotle. Peirce, for better or worse, fits the bill. As for his being 'backward,' I can only say that there are things that never change.

In any event, I would challenge you to find references to satisfy David's inquiry. So far you have not done so. 'Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.'

The relation between ethics and aesthetics would be a question of showing that a "good" action is invaribaly "beautiful", and that a "beautiful" action is invariably "good". If (and it's a big "if") one could show such correlation, the next question would be whether one is dependent on the other (or can be reduced to the other), or whther both could be reduced to some other (notably, to the "true"). The whole point of deontic logics is to attempt a reductio from the "good" to the "true"; I must admit that I don't even know whether there are "aesthetic logics" (though the formal structure would be simple enough - starting with the modal system *K*, one waives T so that it doesn't follow that that □[p] → p)

Keats, of course, would hold that all that is beautiful is true and that all that is true is beautiful...

I can't give you references of course, but a growing number of people are looking at feelings from a different perspective lately. The new perspective is that feelings such as Beauty and Truth are actually Metacognitive Parametric Comments on our experience.

Beauty might be about exemplars, or the ability of the brain to pick a specific example of a particular element on which to judge all others, while Truth, may be about confirmation of existing knowledge on a subject.

The two have completely different objects, but can come together when a particular confirmation of existing knowledge is also a good exemplar of that knowledge.

What about John Dewey (Art as Experience)? I don't know too much about Dewey and his pragmatism, but to me it seems like ethics and aesthetics were some of his main issues.

Hi David,

I agree with Overcamp and applaud his patience with Hirst. 

As for proof of Peirce’s assertion that logic depends on ethics and ethics depends on esthetics, I provide one genuine example in scientific inquiry where the outcome is not certain.  Specifically, I would ask you to examine the reasons and sequence given behind why phi spiral and not M51 (esthetic judgment for C); and why premises of FEM model and not premises of Netlogo (ethical judgment for A) in “Promoting convergence: the phi spiral in abduction of mouse corneal behaviors”.

The paper is technical for obvious reasons.  However, I have been writing in different places to introduce the general public to this modern example, which instantiates the unity in the many themes important to Peirce, such as esthetics/ethics/logic, the place of summum bonum in process of thought, logic of vagueness, etc….

https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_the_best_example_of_Peircean_abduction

Guessing at Peirce’s Guess at the Riddle

http://www.meetup.com/The-Chicago-Philosophy-Meetup/events/226011892/