Isaijah Shadrach Wins Outstanding Student Paper

The Program Committee for the 82nd ASA Annual Meeting has named Isaijah Shadrach, a doctoral student in philosophy at Harvard University, as winner of the Outstanding Student Essay prize. The prize comes with a $250 prize and a travel grant to present his work at the Meeting. His paper, "Against the Fungibility Objection to Experientialism," will be presented Friday afternoon, October 25 in the Monroe Room. James Shelley, the ASA Vice-President, will present a commentary. The paper was selected from 19 student papers chosen for the program.

The abstract of the paper: 

An experientalist approach to aesthetics is one which takes experience to be the defining, valuable, or otherwise characteristic feature of the aesthetic. Experientialism has recently faced a major objection from James Shelley, the fungibility objection. Briefly, the fungibility objection points to an alleged inconsistency in experientialism, between the claim that aesthetic value is wholly derived from aesthetic experience, and the claim that aesthetic experiences are unique to the artwork which produces them, i.e., are non-fungible. In this paper, I defend a novel form of experientialism which avoids the fungibility objection. Shelley’s objection succeeds for those versions of experientialism which involve a condition of art-aptness for determining aesthetic value. I argue for a view of experientialism which drops all art-aptness conditions. On this view, the fungibility to be rejected is not a relationship between experience and art-object but a relationship between two aspects of experience: intentional content and phenomenal character.

For more information on the meeting: https://aesthetics-online.org/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=1611686