Research On Noel Carroll’s Aesthetic Thought

Noel Carroll is one of important contemporary American empirical aestheticians and art theorists. His research covers a broad range of topics including aesthetic experience, beauty, appreciation of nature, differentiating art from non-art, emotional reaction to artworks, the relation between art and ethics, narrative, mass art, philosophy of criticism, artistic horror, the conversion between the feeling of horror and that of comic, jokes, suspense, popular novels, and so on. Taking advantage of various methods, he analyses with meticulousness, studies with subtlety, and pursues certainty, objectivity and constructive theories. He proposes original views on many of the aforementioned topics.However, he is not studied and valued enough by domestic researchers. We lack comprehensive introduction and appraisal about his whole thought and original ideas. Carroll absorbs analytic philosophy and pragmatism. He participates into the conversation of analytical aesthetics, criticizes and integrates analytical aesthetics and aesthetics before on the one hand, and adopts pragmatic attitude towards the object of study to study on the other hand. Many scholars have not recognized the existence logic, particularity, or his unique contribution to aesthetics.This mission is just the objective of this paper. It aims at a comparatively comprehensive introduction of Noel Carroll’s aesthetic thought, which comprises his philosophical foundation, aesthetic thought and art theories, thus to find out his unique value and contribution, and to form evaluation to him.Through studying his aesthetic thought and the historical context it exists in, the paper discovers that Carroll represents the tendency to initiate constructive aesthetic research progresses by critically succeeding analytic aesthetics and absorbing multiple resources on base of pragmatism. He adopts the research strategy from bottom up, starts from basic aesthetic and artistic experiences, and attains new answer to existing questions, or abstracts new questions from experiences and studies them theoretically.He embodies the rich achievement with thin philosophical commitment in new philosophical environment as well as the spirit to pursue constructiveness, assurance, objectivity, and knowledge. He concerns various problems in perspective of pragmatism. However, he fails to go beyond the phenomenon and the experience level, or the descriptive and interpretive approaches, which is demonstrated by his theory of aesthetic experience, art theories, and philosophy of criticism except for some abstractions at certain levels. As a positive aesthetician to conduct experience researches, his endeavors are very valuable. His academic research results facilitate the progress of the knowledge in aesthetics. He has made special contribution to aesthetics by many of his original ideas.