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Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (review)

for the physiological and behavioral responses one has to it. Robinson’s favored view is that some “basic emotion systems” are the vehicles for generating the appraisals that generate the various patterns of physiological and behavioral responses. Yet, it is not clear that any explanatory power of the account would be lost if there were only the emotion systems generating patterns of physiological and behavioral responses without positing the existence of a separate stage of the process, that is, the making of a pre-cognitive appraisal. Second, I question how much is genuinely, as in the title, deeper than reason, as far as emotional responses to the arts are concerned. It seems to be only the pre-cognitive appraisals that provide “quick and dirty” responses to a situation; only these are necessarily “partial and partisan” (p. 145). So even if pre-cognitive appraisals “do not discriminate between real and imagined scenarios” (p. 145), the full emotion process, with its continual cognitive monitoring and reassessment, does. Thus, Robinson grants that, “strictly speaking,” Colin Radford is right when he claims that readers’ emotional responses to fictional characters are irrational precisely because they are fictional (p. 146), which is hardly the conclusion one expects, given the book’s title. This brief discussion does not due justice to the richness of Deeper Than Reason, for example, which relates the analysis of emotions to numerous important issues in the philosophy of the arts, including, among others, the creation and interpretation of works of art, the importance of positing fictional narrators in literature, and the potential and limits of formalist theories of art. It is also rich with examples of artworks that reveal Robinson’s knowledge and love of the arts, and whose detailed exposition makes the views expressed here especially compelling.