While humans have long used bags to transport small items with them on their person, handbags as a modern gendered phenomenon did not emerge until the 18th century, with the rise of the French 'reticule'. This was eventually followed up by the emergence, in England, of more expensive and structured leather purses during the 19th century and the first attempt to explain the (gendered) appeal of bags during the same time. In this case, it was Sigmund Freud who argued that bags represent female genitalia and that the use of handbags by women represents a psychosexual enactment of a kind of sexual play. This is, at once, a theory of 1) what bags mean and 2) why women tend to like them. To this day, Freud’s theory remains the dominant account of the aesthetics of bags, both in terms of their value and their meaning. Here, I argue against Freud's answers to both 1 and 2. I also trace the history of both the development of handbags and the public and intellectual discourse around them. The lesson of this history is that while handbags don't mean anything in general, the way that Freud has argued, they can still mean in the same way that other forms of adornment can (and in some uniquely handbag ways). Finally, I also provide a kind of deflationary answer to 2, one which grounds the value of bags in a gender-neutral way and thereby calls us to ask men don’t tend to recognize and take up this value. 

The 'conversation argument' tells us that art interpretation is a conversation between the artist and the audience. If this is right, then non-defective communication requires moderate actual intentionalism as a framework for assigning meanings to works. Here, we argue that if the conversation argument is true, then art interpretation is subject to the same ethical considerations that govern everyday conversations (like those regarding silencing). This is to say that, on actual intentionalism, there are are more or less ethical ways of engaging in art interpretation and practice. This, in turn, may explain weak normative forces in both popular and classical musical practices. The degree to which these obligations are plausible will ultimately weigh on the success of the conservation argument and the attractiveness of moderate actual intentionalism.

In this paper, I argue that dance music raises a number of problems for functionalist accounts of genre. If functionalism about genre is true, then genres are functional kinds which are picked out by particular functions. Likewise, genre membership is achieved for a work when the artist of that work creates the work with the intention that it should fulfill the function that picks out that genre. However, a number of musical genres feature works which aim to fulfill the function of encouraging and enabling dancing, and there is no clean way of sorting dance music into genres according to the artists' functional intentions for that work. This is to say that, in the case of dance music, the function intended by the artist is not necessary or sufficient to diagnosis a work's genre membership. Here, I survey a number of potential responses to this worry, explain why none of them are satisfactory, and survey a handful of conclusions we can draw from this discussion. Most importantly, this means that if we are to endorse functionalist accounts of some genres, then we must be pluralists about the nature of genre. The burden is then on functionalists to say what brings together these various ways of categorizing art and makes them all genres.

A popular view of the self tells us that actions, experiences, and psychological states can be said to belong to the same person insofar as they can be appropriately incorporated into that person’s story of their own life. Some adherents go even further by arguing that this narrative theory not only provides us with an account of the self, but also with an answer to the problem of personhood. That is, in order to be a person (in the rich sense of being both a member of the moral community and also a moral agent unto themselves), an individual must engage in this kind of narrative meaning-making by bringing the experiences and events of their lives into a coherent and intelligible story. Yet, if this is right, then it opens up the possibility that selves and the lives they lead could be evaluated aesthetically as a narrative. Here, I focus on the special narrative role that death can play in fixing the meaning of one’s life. This is the question of what it would mean to have an aesthetically good death. I outline some basic narrative structures one’s death can conform to and their aesthetic dimensions, and argue for the necessity of recognizing aesthetic agency in death. 

In his Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche describes the 'four great mistakes' in the history of philosophy. Chief among these, which receives discussion throughout his corpus, is the 'Parmenidean mistake'. Here Nietzsche argues that philosophy's uptake of Parmenides led it astray. Instead, he tells us, we must return to Heraclitus. Here, I argue for the centrality of a 'fifth great mistake', not in the two different models of philosophical inquiry represented in Parmenides and Heraclitus but in the two models of the philosophical life represented in Aspasia and Plato. Plato, in his lionizing of Socrates, sets up philosophy with a particular problem set involving abstract essences and natural dichotomies (chiefly, of the body and mind and of virtue and earthly desire), and a methodology for solving these problems using individual abstract reflection on general principles. Aspasia, by contrast, offers an analysis which queers this philosophical picture and which presents us with a much more social model of both the good life and the philosophical method. With this picture in mind, we can look at the history of philosophy with fresh eyes, finding a global and long-standing tradition of philosopher-courtesans problematizing the Platonic metaphilosophical assumptions underlying the field (many of whom were directly influenced by Aspasia herself).

The two most influential accounts of virtue ethics come from Aristotle and Kongzi (Confucius) respectively. While they differ in the details of their metaphysics and in their ethical conclusions, the two visions also share a great deal in common. Most prominently, both Aristotle and Kongzi seem to adopt forms of essentialism. In both cases, what it means to live the good life is, in no small part, fixed by rigid and defined social and biological roles. In contrast, contemporary queer theory often seeks to undermine essentialism. This opens up the question of whether we can have a non-essentialist virtue ethics, and what it would look like. Here, I argue that Aztec moral theory offers one possibility for a queer virtue ethics and I trace an outline of such a view. The results of this being that the non-essentialist and dynamic nature of Aztec metaphysics, along with its emphasis on reification through performativity, are quite compatible with the philosophical ambitions of queer theory.

Cisgendered heterosexuality ('cishet' sexuality) is often characterized by an assumed straight romantic and sexual culture. This scheme takes monogamy, straight temporality, and the network of dualities which Natalie Wynn refers to as 'default heterosexual sadomasochism' as necessary and natural. This structure is then used as the reference against which queer romantic and sexual life can be cast as 'deviant' or other. Here, I argue that cishet ideology is reified by a kind of sexual sedimentation common to oppression, in which the dominant class externalizes deviance from these norms and thereby construct notions of 'propriety' and 'deviance', with racialized, classist, homophobic, and transphobic consequences. If this is right, then we can imagine a non-ideological, non-essentialist, queer heterosexuality, which runs counter to these consequences. 

Recent scholarship looking at NASCAR fan culture ascribes to it reactionary southern political and social attitudes, including support for white supremacy, patriarchy. This primarily through the lens of the 'lost cause' myth concerning the American Civil War. In literary terms, this puts the sport in line with the 'plantation tradition' of southern romanticism (e.g., Sons and Fathers, In Ole Virgina, Gone with the Wind, etc.). Here, I argue that NASCAR is best understood and appreciated by thinking of it as southern gothic sport, making it the sporting equivalent of the literary tradition including William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Sartoris or Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find". Here, the abjectification of the grotesque and the banal are central to the sport, along with the themes of class division, the decline of aristocratic families, and the lingering effects and ghosts of the south's violent racial past. This picture complicates the sport's relationship to the region's racial history and to the position of women within southern society.

The seeming continuity between the 19th century German Monist League and German Freethinkers League raises the question of how to conceptualize the differences between the various scientifically minded forms of monism in the period, whether in Germany or in Britain. Some, like T.H. Huxley and John Tyndall, seem to adopt a form of 'practical materialism', where others (e.g., Herbert Spencer, Constance Naden, Wilhelm Bolsche, etc.) appear to mean something deeper and more substantive with their materialism. Yet, a third group (e.g., Annie Besant, Henry Lewes, etc.) takes a middle position between the two, committing to more substantive monistic metaphysics than the more positivistic 'practical materialists' but also falling short of saying whether materialism is the best way of thinking about the single substance underlying reality. Here, I surey these positions and argue that while these various camps share a larger metaphilosophical orientation, the fundamental disagreement between them is over what constitutes 'metaphysics enough'. Respectively, the three camps differ with regards to whether they think ethics is socially and historically contingent and subjective (the expressivism of the positivists), or whether a universal moral theory could be grounded naturalistically (materialism) or non-naturalistically (noncommittal monism) and this influences their metaphysical commitments. 

While clothing and, to a lesser extend, tattoos, dominate the aesthetic literature on adornment, we also adorn our bodies in other ways. Makeup and cosmetics are frequent topics of philosophical inquiry, especially in feminist philosophy, but aesthetic discussions of these more often draw on the personal beauty literature than that of adornment. What seems to have so far evaded significant attention from philosophers is the adornment of nails. Here, I am thinking of nail polish and nail extensions in particular. While nails can analyzed as an aesthetic object (such as in the beauty of a nail design or of 3D nail art), and they can also appreciated in terms of the shared aesthetic experiences they make possible (getting one's nails done with a friend), I argue that there is a deeper function that nail extensions play in our aesthetic lives. Here, nail extensions introduce voluntary obstacles within our workaday lives, making a game of our mundane everyday tasks. The consequence of this striving is that it reshapes our agency and attention. Those who wear long nail extensions compel themselves to be present and attentive to the designed and experiential aspects of our shared social world, but above and beyond this, the gendered component of nails extensions means that they can serve to equalize the demands of who is asked to attention to who's needs, and who is permitted to rely on others.

Recent academic and critical writing has sought to explore the implications of the decline of youth subcultures and rhe rise of 'aesthetics'. These 'aesthetics' are generally thought of as self-contained aesthetic styles which individuals can pick up, use, and discard with relatively little social commitment, and which can be applied to visual media, fashion, interior design, and more. While some have lamented the loss of subcultures and the unique social aesthetic practices they enable, others have argued that the decline of subcultures allows for youth social circles to not be narrowly or shallowly defined by aesthetics. Here, I argue that the critics of subcultures misunderstand their nature in thinking that they are defined on the narrow basis of aesthetic sensibilities. While subcultures do allow for communities to form and engage socially in aesthetic practices, causation can also run the opposite way. In this case, subcultures are the aesthetic lives of communities gathered together around deeply held common values. Rather than forming a community on the basis of artistic preferences, subculture participants often form communities on the basis of shared values and their aesthetic practices emerge out of and buttress their valuing together. If this is right, then subculture critics are wrong to think that the decline of subcultures will lead to less shallow friendships. In fact, without the accompanying social aesthetic practices, value-based communities are less likely to persist over time. These issues are explored primarily through various punk and metal subcultures.

While there is widespread disagreement on the nature of aesthetic value (whether it is an objective feature of objects or a subjective fact about private experience), there is an equally widespread assumption underlying the debate itself. That is, the question of the 'nature of aesthetic value' is one of what kind of property aesthetic value is of what kind of thing. Hedonists reduce aesthetic value to private subjective pleasure and communitarians reduce aesthetic value to shared pleasures within practices. By contrast, many scholars now argue that aesthetic value is an objective and nonreducible property of objects. This final position has come to be known as the 'Auburn view'. Here, by contrast, I articulate the view from Houston. According to the Houston view, value is not a property at all, but a status: a structure of answerability constituted within discursive practices of giving and asking for reasons. Here, normative force does not arise from attitudes or properties, but from commitment and entitlement relations. According to the Houston View, what makes something aesthetically good or bad is not that it adheres to or violates an objective fact, but whether it can hold up when others question it using the shared standards of the group.

A common story about the development of analytic philosophy in the English-speaking world tells us that late 19th and early 20th century philosophy in Britian was dominated by Hegelian idealists, and this was overturned by the introduction of logical positivism from the German-spekaing world, thus kickstarting analytic philosophy. In the views of analytic philosophy's supporters, this shift represented the introduction of a rigorous methodology which was compatible with but distinct from the natural sciences. Here, I endeavor to problematize this story. While the early 20th century did see a rise in idealism in Britian, Hegelians were not the exclusive or even necessarily dominant force. Looking, especially, at the Victorian period, the truth is much messier. There are a number of rival systems (e.g., naturalistic positivism, aestheticism, utilitarian phenomenalism, and both materialistic and non-natural monism) active in this time period, many of which were logically and scientifically rigorous. Instead, what the system of the Vienna circle represented for British analytic philosophers was a rigorous methodology to support the waning 'common sense' tradition, allowing it to compete more fully alongside these alternative frameworks. The motivation for and consequence of preserving and systematizing common sense philosophy (an evolution that would eventually take the shape of 'ordinary language' philosophy) was the avoidance of the more radical political and social implications of the alternatives. Accoridng to this picture, English-language analytic philosophy emerged to serve an essentially conservative social function, ideological work which explains its contemporary social and political valence.

The term "actual play" refers to a recording of the playing of a tabletop roleplaying game. These may be in audio or video format, they may be edited or not, they may involve trained actors or not, and they may be livestreamed or not. These recordings are then released and consumed by audiences as media. on one level, the aesthetics of actual plays are the aesthetics of tabletop roleplaying games and, on another, they are the aesthetics of film and television. However, actual plays and the appreciative practices which engage with them are not clearly exhausted by any extant aesthetic analysis. Here, I argue that actual plays, as an improvised artform, are characterized by a kind of 'interpersonal residue' which can be appreciated aesthetically as well. This residue provides us with metatextual access to the relationships between performers as they appreciate one another as peers within a craft, but also often as friends. Actual plays, thus, give us access to the aesthetic appreciation of comradery and of friendship.