Sonia Sedivy
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Campus:
UTSC,Email Address:
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Biography:
- BA (Psychology), University of Toronto
- PhD, University of Pittsburgh
Prof. Sedivy received her Honours BA in Psychology from the University of Toronto and her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. Her primary research and teaching interests are in aesthetics and philosophy of visual perception, as well as in philosophy of mind more broadly.
In aesthetics, her work addresses the cross-cultural and historical diversity of beauty and aesthetic properties with a particular focus on visual art and gardens. Her aim is to show the large and significant role of the aesthetic in human life by explaining the diversity of aesthetic properties and the distinctive nature of aesthetic value. In philosophy of perception, her research argues that perception in a flexible, adaptive capacity. She is working on the nature of perceptual learning and skill to show that animals (including ourselves) have distinctively perceptual understanding of things in their surroundings. Her work brings these themes and issues in aesthetics and philosophy of perception together. It is rooted historically in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Immanuel Kant.
For more information visit Sonia Sedivy’s personal website.
Main Research Interests:
Philosophy of Perception, Aesthetics, WittgensteinOther Research Interests:
Philosophy of MindPublications:
Books
- Art, Representation, and Make-Believe: Essays on the Philosophy of Kendall L. Walton, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2021).
- Beauty and the End of Art: Wittgenstein, Plurality, and Perception (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).
Selected Recent Articles
- “In or Out of Tune? Kant and Contemporary Views in Aesthetics,” in Disputatio, Special Issue: Kant and Analytic Philosophy. Forthcoming 2025.
- “Aesthetic Properties,” in Routledge Handbook of Properties, Anthony Fischer and Anna-Sofia Maurin, eds. (Routledge, 2023).
- “Danto and Wittgenstein: History and Essence,” in A Companion to Arthur C. Danto, Jonathan Gilmore and Lydia Goehr, eds. (Wiley Blackwell, 2022).
- “John Carvalho’s Thinking with Images: An Enactivist Aesthetics,” Contemporary Aesthetics Symposium 20 (2022).
- “Introduction: The Reach of Make-Believe,” in Art, Representation, and Make-Believe: Essays on the Philosophy of Kendall L. Walton, edited by Sonia Sedivy, 1-22 (Routledge, 2021).
- “The Puzzle of Make-Believe about Pictures: Can One Imagine a Perception to Be Different?” In Art, Representation, and Make-Believe: Essays on the Philosophy Kendall L. Walton, Sonia Sedivy ed. (Routledge, 2021).
- “Disjunctivism and Realism: Not Naïve but Conceptual,” in New Issues in Epistemological Disjunctivism, Casey Doyle, Joseph Milburn, Duncan Pritchard, eds. (Routledge, 2019).
- “Aesthetic Properties, History and Perception,” British Journal of Aesthetics: Art, History and Perception (Special Issue) 58 (4): 345-62. doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayy039 (2018).
- “Art from a Wittgensteinian Perspective: Constitutive Norms in Context” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 72 (1): 67-82. (2014).
For more on Prof. Sedivy’s publications, visit PhilPapers.
Visit some of Prof. Sedivy’s publications on the Philosophy Faculty Bookshelf.