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Rob van Gerwen

Utrecht University, Philosophy, Faculty Member

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Papers by Rob van Gerwen

Aesthetic normativity and suitable prompting

DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), Dec 1, 2020

In this Editor's column I apply some of the insights I got from Richard Wollheim over the years, ... more In this Editor's column I apply some of the insights I got from Richard Wollheim over the years, and from a recent Teams-chat with students in my class. Most notably: the role of suitable prompting in aesthetic normativity. In a sense, these insights help me understand this remark from Wittgenstein: 'The existence of the experimental method makes us think we have the means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem and method pass one another by.' (Philosophical Investigations, 232e.

Paul Crowther , Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism . Reviewed by

Philosophy in review, 1993

... Paul Crowther, Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism Reviewed by. Rob V. Gerwen. Bookmark and... more

January 2010 Theme : Ethics Projects in the Making

Rob van Gerwen (Utrecht): Immoral Art. An Afterword to "Ethical Autonomism". Ethical au... more Rob van Gerwen (Utrecht): Immoral Art. An Afterword to "Ethical Autonomism". Ethical autonomism is the thesis that art practice is an autonomous practice, which means that as a whole it is exempted from moral assessment. We may condemn what we see depicted in a work, but that does not mean we can morally condemn the picture itself. I expand on the autonomy of art, explaining that 1. it is the demand within art practice that its audiences take up an artistic attitude, which consists in this that they require the audience to think and feel about what they are confronted with in the name of art, without, however, acting accordingly. (Thus we see murder, but do not try to interfere). 2. It is morally significant that art practice demand this attitude of human beings. (Why don't we have an art practice that educates us to do the morally right when we feel we should?) 3. Because it is morally significant, art practice has to give something in return: artistic merit. One basi...

One Imagination or Many? Or None?

Imagination and Art: Explorations in Contemporary Theory, 2020

How many imaginations do we have? This question makes sense once you consider the candidates. Ass... more How many imaginations do we have? This question makes sense once you consider the candidates. Associations, for instance, come up without a clear perceptual clue; imagery pops up whilst we read a novel; and while watching a film we process weird lapses between disparate images pasted together, sometimes by inferring what happened between the shots, sometimes we fill in the emotional aspect of the events. Many examples are connected to the various art forms, and seem to share that they are not built from what we see or hear before us. Should we distinguish different sorts of imagination or are they all just acts of one imagination? Is imagination a receptive or a spontaneous mode of thinking? And what is its connection with perception? Some imaginations are connected to the perceived by thought, others by mere causation.

A Punctum Scene in Shoah

Springer eBooks, 2023

Grounding Ethics in Aesthetics

DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), Sep 1, 2021

In this Editor's column I suggest a more modern aesthetics, in order to fill in some of the promi... more

Reversed Essentialism

DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), Dec 1, 2017

Treating exceptional cases as marks of an essence is as bad as essentialism. I suggest we underst... more

A Punctum Scene in Shoah

Springer eBooks, 2023

Reanimation and Copyright. Rob Scholte’s Work. Part II

DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), Dec 1, 2017

A viable way to defend the rights of later picture makes to use and change the works of their pre... more A viable way to defend the rights of later picture makes to use and change the works of their predecessors is by reference to the artistic merit of the later works. Rob Scholte intentionally infringes on copyright law by making new works, and it is the artistic merit of his work that should give him that liberty.

One Imagination or Many? Or None?

Imagination and Art. Explorations in Contemporary Theory, Jul 9, 2020

How many imaginations do we have? This question makes sense once you consider the candidates. Ass... more How many imaginations do we have? This question makes sense once you consider the candidates. Associations, for instance, come up without a clear perceptual clue; imagery pops up whilst we read a novel; and while watching a film we process weird lapses between disparate images pasted together, sometimes by inferring what happened between the shots, sometimes we fill in the emotional aspect of the events. Many examples are connected to the various art forms, and seem to share that they are not built from what we see or hear before us. Should we distinguish different sorts of imagination or are they all just acts of one imagination? Is imagination a receptive or a spontaneous mode of thinking? And what is its connection with perception? Some imaginations are connected to the perceived by thought, others by mere causation.

Reanimation and Copyright. Rob Scholte’s Work. Part II

Aesthetic Investigations

A viable way to defend the rights of later picture makes to use and change the works of their pre... more A viable way to defend the rights of later picture makes to use and change the works of their predecessors is by reference to the artistic merit of the later works. Rob Scholte intentionally infringes on copyright law by making new works, and it is the artistic merit of his work that should give him that liberty.

Another Outcry for Artistic Relevance

Aesthetic Investigations

Grounding Ethics in Aesthetics

Aesthetic Investigations

In this Editor’s column I suggest a more modern aesthetics, in order to fill in some of the promi... more

Research as Scrutiny. Our most demanding issues are aesthetic issues

Aesthetic Investigations

Certain art theorists think of what artists do as artistic research. But research is fact- and th... more Certain art theorists think of what artists do as artistic research. But research is fact- and theory-driven, whereas when a film is being made what directors do is scrutinise what they see happening before their eyes. This scrutiny is guided by aesthetic judgement, individual style, and subjective intuition. It makes good sense to investigate the research that went on before a work was made, and to look at the theoretical implications of that work. But the most important work to be done is our paying attention to the scrutiny that went on during the work's actual creation. The importance and meaning of art are in the artist's scrutiny.

David Hume and Immanuel Kant on The Paradox of Taste

Art and Human Interaction

In this Editor's column I discuss certain fruits and limits of applying the notion of 'pe... more In this Editor's column I discuss certain fruits and limits of applying the notion of 'performance' to works of art. Art works can be viewed as perfor- mances, the public furnishing of works' final form. Concerts can be viewed as performances of a work scored by someone else, the composer, but not all arts are double in this sense. Moreover, art can be viewed as mirroring the psychological, phenomenological and rhetorical aspects of human interaction, which exemplify the way people scrutinise moral situations. Not all performances are artistic, let alone art.

Art and the Vulnerability of Subjectivity (From the Editor)

We may compare art with science, but must not understand it as science. In my view, modern scienc... more We may compare art with science, but must not understand it as science. In my view, modern science brought subjectivity into trouble, whereas art itself has the subjective as its main motivating force. For one, narrative arts tell stories, and are acclaimed for conveying the subjective aspect of events. Artistic creativity aims at regulating the appreciative experience. Lastly, to assess a work's artistic merit is to look for the artist's achievement, which involves looking for the way they realised their intentions with their audiences. It is thus that one wants to say that art is concerned with the subjective, and that one wants to distinguish it sharply from how sciences treat their subject matters: aiming for quantification and universalisation, applying objectivist methodologies, and conveying the thought that all knowledge hangs together---and that it be objectivist.

What They See is What We Get in Film: Reality Tells the Fiction

Robert Bresson's cinematography allows him to show the affordances that things and situations... more Robert Bresson's cinematography allows him to show the affordances that things and situations have for characters in a film. By intimating these affordances, Bresson authentically presents the affordances as well as the characters. The fact that Bresson views and conceives of his `actors' as models, rather than as malleable actors, illustrates, again, an effort to authentically film real persons in real situations. Recognising people authentically is done in real-life through a reciprocal gaze, which is not automatically available to the camera's lens, an apparatus that does not look back at one. Perhaps, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's approach fits this effort better: not a writing with sounds and images, but an intuitive use of homeliness.

Aesthetic normativity and suitable prompting

This Editor's column summarises some of the insights I got from Richard Wollheim over the yea... more This Editor's column summarises some of the insights I got from Richard Wollheim over the years, and from a recent Teams-chat with students in my class. Most notably: the role of suitable prompting in aesthetic normativity. In a sense, these insights help me understand this remark from Wittgenstein: `The existence of the experimental method makes us think we have the means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem and method pass one another by.' (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 232e).

Fiction as Universal Truth

Perhaps, a work of fiction's truth is the unfaltering manner in which its details guide the s... more Perhaps, a work of fiction's truth is the unfaltering manner in which its details guide the spectator, reader or listener to the coherent whole of the work, and never disappoint their experience, or at least never for long. This view requires us to hold back the inclination to think of truth as short for the correspondence of some representation to something beyond itself, which is the normal way to view truth in real life, in journalism and in science. A work that is true to itself may be said to generate a particularist type of universal knowledge, like Aristotle characterised poetry at the expense of history in his Poetics.