Intersections of Value

<em>Intersections of Value</em> investigates the universal human need for aesthetic experience. It examines three appreciative contexts where aesthetic value plays a central role: art nature and the everyday. However no important appreciative context or practice is completely centered on a single value. Hence the book explores the way the aesthetic interacts with moral cognitive and functional values in these contexts. The account of aesthetic appreciation is complemented by analyses of the cognitive and ethical value of art the connection between environmental ethics and aesthetics and the degree to which the aesthetic value of everyday artefacts derives from their basic practical functions. Robert Stecker devotes special attention to art as an appreciative context because it is an especially rich arena where different values interact. There is an important connection between artistic value and aesthetic value but it is a mistake to reduce the former to the latter. Rather artistic value should be seen as complex and pluralistic composed not only of aesthetic but also ethical cognitive and art-historical values.<br>