Edward Bullough (1880-1934) was not primarily a philosopher; and he was also not a psychologist, though he published several papers in the area around the same time as this one. For most of his career, he was a teacher of literature (in several different languages) at Cambridge University, and he eventually held the chair in Italian there.

The handout includes the bulk of Bullough’s article; if you are curious about the rest, you can find it in the text-browser on the course Moodle site.

• The key idea in the article is the “psychical distance” mentioned in the title. Bullough generally refers to this simply as “Distance,” but the label “aesthetic distance” is now often used for his idea and related ones. Although his basic presentation of the idea occurs in section I of the paper, things that he says as he applies the idea in later parts of the paper can be helpful.

• The second most important idea is that of the “antinomy of Distance” that is one of the key topics of section II. This is important not least because it qualifies the analogy with distance in an ordinary sense: what Bullough speaks of is not something that can be described in terms of a simple ordering of greater and lesser distance.

• The “anti-realism” of art that Bullough discusses in subsection of 4 of section II is worth thinking about not only as an application of the idea of Distance but also as a topic on which Bullough might be compared to Clive Bell, who we will discuss on Friday.

• The first two subsections of section III provide opportunities for comparison with others. Although Kant isn’t mentioned in the first, the distinction between the beautiful and the merely agreeable that Bullough discusses there surely derives from him. (“Agreeable” is one way translating the German word rendered as “pleasant” in the translation of Kant that you read.)

• The second of these subsections includes an explicit discussion of Croce. As you read what Bullough says about “expression,” ask yourself whether he means by it what Croce does and ask also whether he has understood what Croce says about it correctly.

• The concluding subsection 4 makes clear both how central Bullough takes the concept of Distance to be to aesthetics and how misleading the term “distance” might be as a label for it. In particular, notice Bullough’s reference to it as a quality inherent in the “intensely personal” relation people have with art.