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The British Journal of Aesthetics 2005 45(4):412-425; doi:10.1093/aesthj/ayi051
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© British Society of Aesthetics 2005

The Aesthetic Peculiarity of Multifunctional Artefacts

Rafael De Clercq

Rafael De Clercq, University of Leuven, Institute of Philosophy, Parijsstraat 72B, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium

Email: rafael.declercq{at}hiw.kuleuven.ac.be

Echoing a distinction made by David Wiggins in his discussion of the relation of identity, this paper investigates whether aesthetic adjectives such as ‘beautiful’ are sortal-relative or merely sortal-dependent. The hypothesis guiding the paper is that aesthetic adjectives, though probably sortal-dependent in general, are sortal-relative only when used to characterize multifunctional artefacts. This means that multifunctional artefacts should be unique in allowing the following situation to occur: for some object x there are sortals K and K' such that x is a beautiful K and also a K', but not a beautiful K'. Examples of multifunctional artefacts show that this is indeed a possibility. However, that multifunctional artefacts are unique in this respect will be demonstrated by a more principled argument, taking into account the nature of functions on the one hand, and the nature of artefact-classification on the other hand.


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