Kenneth Walden
Biographic Data
| ID | 3788930 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kenneth Walden |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kenneth |
| FAMILY NAME | Walden |
| SIGNATURE | WALDEN K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Dartmouth College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5144-4563 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 10 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 11 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Clarissa Dalloway and the Tragedy of Appreciation
There is a tragedy at the heart of human relationships. Each of us merits a demanding form of appreciation, but this appreciation is, both individually and in aggregate, impossible to pay. The existence of this tragedy is, in a certain sense, obvious, but there is a powerful temptation to avoid any recognition of it. What we need is not so much an argument for the existence of the tragedy but something that might help us acknowledge it. Virginia …
Holism about fact and value
This paper argues for confirmational holism about facts and values. This position is similar to one defended by (among others) Hilary Putnam, but the argument is importantly different. Whereas Putnam et al. rely on examples of the putative entanglement of facts and values – a strategy which I suggest is vulnerable to parrying – my argument proceeds at a more general level. I argue that the explanation of action can not be separated from our pract…
Creativity as a higher agency
Can human agency produce things that are genuinely creative and original? Some philosophers are skeptical. Here I argue that the case of creative activity should lead us to reexamine and ultimately expand our conception of agency. When we do this, we see that rather than being incompatible with agency, creativity offers an especially robust form of agency: a form in which agents are responsible not just for token events but for the general patter…
Almost Every Work of Art is a Failure
It is a constitutive aim of a work of art to express a point of view, but points of view are only had by persons. From this it follows that all works of art aspire to personhood. If a work of art ever succeeded in this aspiration, it would have a profound kind of value, but it cannot, and so its value, at least with respect to this aim, can never be other than that of a noble failure
The Poets of Our Lives
This article proposes a role for aesthetic judgment in our practical thought. The role is related to those moments when practical reason seems to give out, when it fails to yield a judgment about what to do in the face of a choice we cannot avoid. I argue that these impasses require agents to create, but that not any creativity will do. For we cannot regard a response to one of these problems as arbitrary or capricious if we want to act on it. We…
Agency and aesthetic identity
Legislating Taste
My aesthetic judgements seem to make claims on you. While some popular accounts of aesthetic normativity say that the force of these claims is third-personal, I argue that it is actually second-personal. This point may sound like a bland technicality, but it points to a novel idea about what aesthetic judgements ultimately are and what they do. It suggests, in particular, that aesthetic judgements are motions in the collective legislation of the …
Morality, Agency, and Other People
C onstitutivists believe that we can derive universally and unconditionally authoritative norms from the conditions of agency. Thus if c is a condition of agency, then you ought to live in conformity with c no matter what your particular ends, projects, or station. Much has been said about the validity of the inference, but that's not my topic here. I want to assume it is valid and talk about what I take to be the highest ambition of constitutivi…
Practical reason not as such
here
Reason unbound
It is an essential part of Kant's conception of regulative principles and ideas that those principles and ideas are in a certain sense indeterminate. The relevant sense of indeterminacy is cashed out in a section in the Antinomies where Kant says that the regress of conditions of experience forms not a “ regressus in infinitum ” but a “ regressus in indefinitum .” The mathematics that Kant appears to rely on in making this distinction turns out t…
The Euthyphro Dilemma
Practical reason not as such
here
The Euthyphro Dilemma
Reason unbound
It is an essential part of Kant's conception of regulative principles and ideas that those principles and ideas are in a certain sense indeterminate. The relevant sense of indeterminacy is cashed out in a section in the Antinomies where Kant says that the regress of conditions of experience forms not a “ regressus in infinitum ” but a “ regressus in indefinitum .” The mathematics that Kant appears to rely on in making this distinction turns out t…
Legislating Taste
My aesthetic judgements seem to make claims on you. While some popular accounts of aesthetic normativity say that the force of these claims is third-personal, I argue that it is actually second-personal. This point may sound like a bland technicality, but it points to a novel idea about what aesthetic judgements ultimately are and what they do. It suggests, in particular, that aesthetic judgements are motions in the collective legislation of the …
The Euthyphro Dilemma
Morality, Agency, and Other People
C onstitutivists believe that we can derive universally and unconditionally authoritative norms from the conditions of agency. Thus if c is a condition of agency, then you ought to live in conformity with c no matter what your particular ends, projects, or station. Much has been said about the validity of the inference, but that's not my topic here. I want to assume it is valid and talk about what I take to be the highest ambition of constitutivi…
Practical reason not as such
here
Reason unbound
It is an essential part of Kant's conception of regulative principles and ideas that those principles and ideas are in a certain sense indeterminate. The relevant sense of indeterminacy is cashed out in a section in the Antinomies where Kant says that the regress of conditions of experience forms not a “ regressus in infinitum ” but a “ regressus in indefinitum .” The mathematics that Kant appears to rely on in making this distinction turns out t…
Agency and aesthetic identity
Legislating Taste
My aesthetic judgements seem to make claims on you. While some popular accounts of aesthetic normativity say that the force of these claims is third-personal, I argue that it is actually second-personal. This point may sound like a bland technicality, but it points to a novel idea about what aesthetic judgements ultimately are and what they do. It suggests, in particular, that aesthetic judgements are motions in the collective legislation of the …
Almost Every Work of Art is a Failure
It is a constitutive aim of a work of art to express a point of view, but points of view are only had by persons. From this it follows that all works of art aspire to personhood. If a work of art ever succeeded in this aspiration, it would have a profound kind of value, but it cannot, and so its value, at least with respect to this aim, can never be other than that of a noble failure
The Poets of Our Lives
This article proposes a role for aesthetic judgment in our practical thought. The role is related to those moments when practical reason seems to give out, when it fails to yield a judgment about what to do in the face of a choice we cannot avoid. I argue that these impasses require agents to create, but that not any creativity will do. For we cannot regard a response to one of these problems as arbitrary or capricious if we want to act on it. We…
Holism about fact and value
This paper argues for confirmational holism about facts and values. This position is similar to one defended by (among others) Hilary Putnam, but the argument is importantly different. Whereas Putnam et al. rely on examples of the putative entanglement of facts and values – a strategy which I suggest is vulnerable to parrying – my argument proceeds at a more general level. I argue that the explanation of action can not be separated from our pract…
Creativity as a higher agency
Can human agency produce things that are genuinely creative and original? Some philosophers are skeptical. Here I argue that the case of creative activity should lead us to reexamine and ultimately expand our conception of agency. When we do this, we see that rather than being incompatible with agency, creativity offers an especially robust form of agency: a form in which agents are responsible not just for token events but for the general patter…
Clarissa Dalloway and the Tragedy of Appreciation
There is a tragedy at the heart of human relationships. Each of us merits a demanding form of appreciation, but this appreciation is, both individually and in aggregate, impossible to pay. The existence of this tragedy is, in a certain sense, obvious, but there is a powerful temptation to avoid any recognition of it. What we need is not so much an argument for the existence of the tragedy but something that might help us acknowledge it. Virginia …
Philosophy (8 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Philosophical Ethics and Theory (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Philosophy and Theoretical Science (4 works) · Sociology (4 works) · Psychology (3 works) · Aesthetics (2 works) · Agency (philosophy) (2 works) · Computer Science (2 works)