The new issue of Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics has just been published and is freely accessible at estetikajournal.org.
The journal is published twice a year by Helsinki University Press in cooperation with the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. It follows a triple-anonymous peer-review process and operates as a Diamond Open Access journal. Estetika is indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection (AHCI), Scopus, and other databases. According to the 2025 SCImago Journal Rank, it ranks Q1 in Literature and Literary Theory and in Visual Arts and Performing Arts, and Q2 in Philosophy.
The new issue (Vol. 63, No. 2) contains five research articles and one symposium.
It opens with Fabian Finkendey, Tilmann Köppe, and Edgar Onea’s “The Desire Paradox of Suspense,” a phenomenological analysis of the reading experience of suspense as a state marked by conflicting desires. In “The Perils of Purism: The Case of the Ghent Altarpiece,” Rafael De Clercq uses the example of the Ghent Altarpiece’s recently restored lamb to show the perils of the purist approach, and proposes an alternative that would focus on restoring a work’s intended appearance rather than solely its material authenticity. In “On Particularity in Painting,” Andrew Inkpin asks what makes a painting particular. He contrasts painting’s fine-grained complex traces — shaped by the painter’s body, materials, and a dialogical process of making — with the simple traces of mechanically produced images such as photographs. With this piece, Inkpin indirectly continues his article “The Nonconceptual Content of Paintings,” which he published in Estetika in 2011.
Two further articles contribute to the history of aesthetic ideas. In “The Neutralization of Ugliness and the Birth of Art: Revisiting the Neglected Aesthetic Chapter of Adorno’s Critique of the Aufklärung,” Adoulou N. Bitang offers an aesthetic analysis of Adorno’s critique of the Enlightenment. In “From Myth to Mechanism: Brentano’s Naturalistic Deconstruction of Artistic Creation,” Ying Lan returns to Brentano’s theory of artistic genius.
The issue closes with the symposium “Exploring the Geography of Taste,” a close examination of the argument and implications of the landmark book The Geography of Taste (OUP, 2024). Its co-authors — Dominic McIver Lopes, Samantha Matherne, Mohan Matthen, and Bence Nanay — respond in the symposium to essays written for Estetika by Murray Smith, James Harold, and Paloma Atencia-Linares.
We wish all our readers a rewarding and thought-provoking read!
Contact: Tereza Hadravová (Managing Editor), tereza.hadravova@ff.cuni.cz