© British Society of Aesthetics 2008
Humean Critics, Imaginative Fluency, and Emotional Responsiveness: A Follow-Up to Stephanie Ross
Paul Guyer, Department of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania, Claudia Cohen Hall, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304, USA. Email: pguyer{at}phil.upenn.edu
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Abstract |
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In ‘Humean Critics: Real or Ideal?’ (BJA 48 (2008): 20-28), Stephanie Ross argues that four of Hume's five criteria for qualified critics in "Of the Standard of Taste’, namely practise, comparison, freedom from prejudice, and good sense, should be understood as conditions for improving the basic constituent of taste, namely delicacy of perception, in real critics whose judgments can be canonical or guiding for the rest of us, but that delicacy of perception needs to be supplemented by what she calls imaginative fluency and emotional responsiveness to provide a fuller conception of the basic constituents of taste. I support Ross's approach by showing that Hume's immediate successors in Scottish aesthetics Alexander Gerard and James Beattie understood his conception of the qualifications of good critics and supplemented his conception of the basic constituents of taste in precisely the same way that Ross does.