Jon Robson, "Aesthetic Testimony: An Optimistic Approach" (Oxford UP, 2022)
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What is the purpose of the episode and who is the guest?
Hi everyone, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder of the New Books Network and I'm also a historian. I used to be a history professor and I love maps, so I'm especially happy to tell you that this episode is sponsored by What's Your Map, which was the winner of the Best Education Podcast at the 2025 British Podcast Awards. What's Your Map is hosted by historian and prize-winning author Professor Jerry Broughton. In each episode, he invites a guest to share a map close to their heart and unfurl the ideas, inspirations, and stories behind it. I can tell you I've listened and it's fascinating. The podcast is in its sixth series and is enjoyed by audiences around the globe. You can explore all the maps in the podcast online.
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Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co-host of the channel, along with Robert Talese, Sarah Tyson, and Malcolm Keating. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with John Robson, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. His new book, Aesthetic Testimony and Optimistic Approach, is just out from Oxford University Press. A lot of what we claim to know, we learn from other people's testimony. They tell us, and in many ordinary contexts, that is enough to gain knowledge.
But for many philosophers, aesthetics is different. Facts about aesthetic properties, such as Shakespeare's Hamlet being a tragedy or Picasso's Vertica being anti-war, can't be transmitted by testimony and can only be learned through first-person experience. In his new book, Robson argues that aesthetic testimony should be treated on a par with testimony in other domains. Our deference to others in aesthetic matters is about the same as it is in other areas of knowledge. He also defends a view called contextualist optimism, in which we can gain aesthetic knowledge through testimony, and that just as with testimony in other domains, whether we do depends on the context in which the aesthetic judgments are transmitted.
Let's turn to the interview. Hello, John Robson. Welcome to New Books and Philosophy. Hi, Carrie. Great to be here. I'm really excited to be talking about your book, Aesthetic Testimony and Optimistic Approach. And it's true, the book is full of optimism about something that people have had a lot of pessimism about. So before we get to the content of the book, tell us a bit about yourself and how you became a philosopher and how you came to write this
book. Great, yeah. So I think, I mean, we like going to philosophy because I went to an open day at the University of Leeds where I studied and a friend of mine was interested in philosophy and dragged me along to their little sort of talk on that and I got really into What was being said. I started reading philosophy and stuff. So yeah, it was quite an odd instruction. And then a lot of my early philosophy career and my PhD, for example, focused a lot on metaphysics. But after that, I moved into issues in philosophy of art. I did some work on philosophy of video games with Aaron Meskin. And then, yeah, going to the topic of... I think particularly because it's one of those things that happens to a lot of philosophers where you read a lot of things where people are saying something that doesn't quite sit right with you.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the purpose of the episode and who is the guest?
0:00–22:55
2
How does Jon Robson describe his academic background and shift to philosophy of art?
22:55–33:26
3
What is aesthetic testimony and why do many philosophers view it pessimistically?
33:26–48:46
4
How do pessimists argue that aesthetic facts cannot be transmitted by testimony?
48:46–57:22
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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