¹ Walton, Kendall, ‘Aesthetics—What? Why? and Wherefore?’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65 (2007): 147–161CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Which phenomena count as aesthetic? This question is difficult to answer because there are no widely-accepted objective criteria for delineating different kinds of phenomena. As a working definition, take aesthetic phenomena to be the ones that hold interest for aestheticians and are described in aesthetic vocabulary. This working definition takes its cue from the special sciences: for example, sociological phenomena could be understood as those phenomena that hold interest for sociologists and are described in sociological vocabulary.

³ Weinberg, Jonathan M. and Meskin, Aaron, ‘Puzzling over the Imagination: Philosophical Problems, Architectural Solutions,’ in Nichols, Shaun, ed., The Architecture of the Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 175–202CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 177.

⁴ Currie, Gregory, ‘Genre’, in his Arts and Minds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 43–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ It is possible that a gory decapitation scene in a horror comedy is also scream-worthy. Indeed, if Noël Carroll is correct that there exists an intimate connection between horror and humor, then the gory decapitation scene could well be laughter-worthy because it is scream-worthy. For my purpose, it is enough that a gory decapitation scene would not be laughter-worthy in a straight-up horror film, regardless of whether it would also scream-worthy in a horror comedy film. See Carroll, Noël, ‘Horror and Humor’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 57 (1999): 145–160CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I thank Aaron Meskin for reminding me of the possible connection between horror and humor.

⁶ See Cohen, Ted, ‘Jokes’, in Schaper, Eva, ed., Pleasure, Preference, and Value: Studies in Philosophical Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 120–136Google Scholar.

⁷ See Giovannelli, Alessandro, ‘The Ethical Criticism of Art: A New Mapping of the Territory’, Philosophia, 35 (2007): 117–127CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gilmore, Jonathan, ‘A Functional View of Artistic Evaluation’, Philosophical Studies, 155 (2011): 289–305CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ See Weinberg, Jonathan M., ‘Configuring the Cognitive Imagination’, in Stock, Kathleen and Thomson-Jones, Katherine, eds., New Waves in Aesthetics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 203–223CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nanay, Bence, ‘Imaginative Resistance and Conversational Implicature’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 60 (2010): 586–600CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Shen-yi Liao, On Morals, Fictions, and Genres, PhD thesis, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2011).

⁹ See Carroll, Noël, On Criticism (Oxford: Routledge, 2009)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ See Hazlett, Allan and Uidhir, Christy Mag, ‘Unrealistic Fictions’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 48 (2011): 33–46Google Scholar.

¹¹ See Liao, Shen-yi, ‘Moral Persuasion and the Diversity of Fictions’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 94 (2013): 269–289CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Liao, Shen-yi and Protasi, Sara, ‘The Fictional Character of Pornography’, in Maes, Hans, ed., Pornographic Art and the Aesthetics of Pornography (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 100–118CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² See Robinson, Jenefer M., ‘Style and Significance in Art History and Art Criticism’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 40 (1981): 5–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wollheim, Richard, ‘Pictorial Style: Two Views’, in Lang, Berel, ed., The Concept of Style (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 183–202Google Scholar. Note that Robinson and Wollheim think that only individual style categories, e.g. Picasso's style, are explanatory, but not general style categories, e.g. cubism. I thank Aaron Meskin for the clarification.

¹³ See Hamilton, James R., The Art of Theater (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Walton, Kendall, ‘Categories of Art’, The Philosophical Review, 79 (1970): 334–367CrossRefGoogle Scholar. There are two minor differences. First, I set aside the question of whether a work is art. Second, while Walton is concerned with only perceptually-distinguishable categories, I am including non-perceptually-distinguishable categories also. Alternative conceptions of genre are developed in Currie, op. cit., note 4; Laetz, Brian and Lopes, Dominic McIver, ‘Genre’, in Livingston, Paisley and Plantinga, Carl, eds., The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (Oxford: Routledge, 2008), 152–161Google Scholar; and Abell, Catherine, ‘Comics and Genre’, in Meskin, Aaron and Cook, Roy T., eds., The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), 68–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As far as I can tell, what I say about genre explanations is compatible with these alternative conceptions of genre. I thank two reviewers for pressing me to clarify my usage of the term.

¹⁵ Context plays a role in specifying who the community includes. Which groupings are special for a given community is an empirical matter, and why they are special may require us to look to, say, sociology or literary theory for a non-philosophical explanation.

¹⁶ §4 clarifies the terms ‘individualistic explanations’ and ‘metaphysically fundamental features’.

¹⁷ Currie, op. cit., note 4, 56.

¹⁸ Currie, op. cit., note 4, 56–57.

¹⁹ Claudia La Rocco, ‘Modernism Celebrates Its Incubator’, The New York Times, November 1^st, 2010. Available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/arts/dance/01judson.html.

²⁰ Lange, Marc, ‘Who's Afraid of Ceteris-Paribus Laws? Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Them’, Erkenntnis, 57 (2002): 407–423CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 412.

²¹ I borrow this generalization and the apparent exceptions from Lance, Mark and Little, Margaret Olivia, ‘Defeasibility and the Normative Grasp of Context’, Erkenntnis, 61 (2004): 435–455CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² Ordinary language synonyms of ceteris paribus include – among many others – ‘in the absence of disturbing factors’, ‘defeasibly’, ‘in the standard condition’, ‘as a rule’, and ‘subject to provisos’. For other ordinary language synonyms of ceteris paribus, see Lange, op. cit., note 20, and Lance and Little, op. cit., note 21.

²³ Lange, op. cit., note 20, 409.

²⁴ See Lange, op. cit., note 20, and citations therein; contra Earman, John and Roberts, John, ‘Ceteris Paribus, There is No Problem of Provisos’, Synthese, 118 (1999): 439–478CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is unclear how substantial their disagreement is. Earman and Roberts think that the existence of a ceteris paribus clause functions as an indicator of a ‘near-law’ – a work in progress – rather than a genuine law. However, they are also perfectly willing to grant that the near-laws play an important role in the actual practices of the special sciences, and fulfill many of the roles that genuine laws do in fundamental physics, such as supporting counterfactuals and grounding explanations.

²⁵ The difficulties with distinguishing non-accidental or law-like generalizations from others are well known. Different accounts of cp-laws give different conditions for separating law-like ceteris paribus generalizations from accidental ceteris paribus generalizations. For a survey, see Reutlinger, Alexander, Schurz, Gerhard, and Hüttemann, Andreas, ‘Ceteris paribus Laws’, In Zalta, Edward N., ed., Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University, Spring 2011 edition)Google Scholar.

²⁶ Lange, op. cit., note 20, 412. Lange cites John Stuart Mill as an early proponent for the aim-dependence of ceteris paribus clauses. Other contemporary developments of cp-laws similarly make room for their aim-dependence; see, for example, Cohen, Jonathan and Callender, Craig, ‘A Better Best System Account of Lawhood’, Philosophical Studies, 145 (2009): 1–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ Philosophers do not unanimously agree on what it means to say that a range of possible scenarios is narrower than another range of possible scenarios. Given that all ranges are likely to contain an infinite number of scenarios, we cannot compare the size of ranges simply by counting. While wholly contained in is not an uncontroversial definition of narrower than, it is the most clear and workable definition available. At any rate, this is the sense of ‘narrower than’ that I will use throughout this article.

²⁸ I borrow this example, though for a different purpose, from Jackson, Frank and Pettit, Philip, ‘In Defense of Explanatory Ecumenicalism’, Economics and Philosophy, 8 (1992): 1–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ I thank Aaron Meskin for pressing this objection.

³⁰ The terminology is somewhat obscure. The phrase ‘individualistic explanation’ comes from methodological individualism in the social sciences. According to methodological individualism, since individuals' preferences and actions are metaphysically prior to, say, groups’ preferences and actions, because the former constitute the latter, lower-level explanations of social or economic phenomena that cite individuals’ preferences and actions are uniformly preferable to higher-level explanations of social of economic phenomena that cite groups' preferences and actions.

³¹ Potochnik, Angela, ‘Explanatory Independence and Epistemic Interdependence: A Case Study of the Optimality Approach’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 61 (2010): 213–233CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Levels of Explanation Reconceived’, Philosophy of Science, 77 (2010): 59–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Jackson and Pettit, op. cit., note 28, develop a different version of explanatory pluralism, on which explanations at different levels are valuable because they exhibit different explanatory virtues that are preferable for different interests and aims. While lower-level explanations exhibit the virtue of specificity, higher-level explanations exhibit the virtue of generality. However, Potochnik persuasively argues that Jackson and Pettit's account is problematic because it mistakenly assumes that the properties cited in higher-level explanations standardly supervene on just the properties cited in lower-level explanations.

³² Potochnik, ‘Levels of Explanation Reconceived’, 64.

³³ Potochnik, op. cit., note 32, 63; my emphasis.

³⁴ Theoretically, there can be a lower-level explanation that captures every single dependence relationship. Such an explanation would indeed be explanatorily fundamental, but it would also be much more detailed – specifying, say, various modal relationships – than any lower-level explanation that has actually been given. To be precise, then, my claim is that no actual lower-level explanation – aesthetic or otherwise – is explanatorily fundamental. I thank Lina Jansson for discussion on this point.

³⁵ Currie, op. cit., note 4, 56.

³⁶ Walton, op. cit., note 14.

³⁷ Currie, op. cit., note 4, 57; my emphasis.