The very idea of seriousness

Hansen, N. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5074-1075 and Adams, Z. (2026) The very idea of seriousness. European Journal of Philosophy. ISSN 1468-0378 (In Press)

Abstract/Summary

What norms govern aesthetic conversations? In Hansen and Adams (2024), we argue for a norm we call, following Stanley Cavell, “the hope of agreement”, along with a requirement of “seriousness”, the “discipline of accounting for one’s judgments”. Nick Riggle criticizes the hope of agreement and the requirement of seriousness and defends a norm of “community” in which aesthetic conversations involve “discretionary valuing” in a “mutually supportive way”. In this essay, we elaborate on the importance of seriousness as a constitutive norm for aesthetic conversations. We argue that conversations can satisfy Riggle’s community norm without being aesthetic conversations, and that his rejection of seriousness leads him to miss what is distinctive about aesthetic conversation. A fundamental problem with Riggle’s “communitarian” theory of aesthetic value and norms governing aesthetic conversations is that it is in fact much more individualistic than conversations governed by the hope of agreement and seriousness. We propose that the kind of community involved in aesthetic conversations is better understood as a democratic experiment.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/id/eprint/128778
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Humanities > Philosophy
Publisher	Wiley-Blackwell
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