ELV NOTE: The following is an analysis of why critics and critical standards are necessary/desirable when applying a qualitative analysis to any object being judged — be it art, music or even food.

It was written by our #2 son as part of his master’s program in Philosophy at UNM (Go Lobos!), and uses lots of big words like “explication” and “sine qua non,” but our staff found it fascinating, nonetheless.

As restaurants criticism was still 50 years away when David Hume wrote his original essay, this analysis must be read with that in mind, but can easily be applied to food writing/criticism as well. it may be heavy sledding at times, but will give you something to chew on (and chew on and chew on), whilst ELV is traveling for the next ten days.

Critical Standards:

Hume and the Judgment of Taste

By Hugh Alexander Curtas (The Official Number Two Son of ELV)

The proceeding analysis will perform two roles with regard to David Hume’s 1757 essay “Of the Standard of Taste.” First, an explication of Hume’s notion of the “true critic” will be undertaken in order to pinpoint the role this important ideal plays in his overall theory. Second, I will argue that Hume’s conception of the true critic is a robust standard for artistic judgment that, in lieu of some minor alterations, should remain a regulative ideal for all aesthetic encounters.

The true critic is essential to Hume’s overall theory concerning a standard of taste because the true critic is himself the standard. Or, more precisely, it is the “joint verdict” of such true critics that “is the true standard of taste and beauty.”[1] Leaving aside, for the moment, the problem concerning whether or not such a critical consensus could actually exist, we must identify the ideal critic’s constitutive qualities.

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