Jennifer McMahon, professor emerita of philosophy on the College of Adelaide, died this previous June.
Professor McMahon was identified for her work in aesthetics, Kant, and as she put it, “creativeness, ethical notion and the acculturation of enjoyment to culturally particular objects.” You may be taught extra about her writings here.
The next obituary is by Professor McMahon’s niece, Kylie Kerr (Melbourne), with the assistance of McMahon’s husband, Brendan Ryan.
Professor Jennifer (Jenny) A. McMahon
(1956-2023)
Jenny was born in Melbourne, Australia on the 14th of March 1956.
Following undergraduate research in Advantageous Arts and postgraduate research in Schooling, Jenny started her profession as a visible artist, trainer, and artwork critic. Throughout the early to mid-Nineteen Eighties, she exhibited in varied solo and group exhibitions in Melbourne galleries and studied on the Institute of Artwork and Restoration in Florence on an Italian Authorities Scholarship.
Jenny’s profession as a visible artist and artwork trainer served as a springboard for her later philosophical work. After finishing a grasp’s diploma on the College of Melbourne on “The Chance of Objectivity in Aesthetic Analysis in The Visible Arts, she commenced her PhD on the Australian Nationwide College (ANU) in 1992 on “Aesthetics, Cognition and Creativity”, in search of to develop (what she termed on the time) ‘an interactive principle of magnificence’.
After finishing her PhD, Jenny took up a put up as lecturer on the College of Canberra in 1996, earlier than transferring to the College of Adelaide at the start of 2002. Throughout this era, Jenny printed a sequence of groundbreaking, interdisciplinary articles, and her seminal ebook, Aesthetics and Materials Magnificence: Aesthetics Naturalized, (Routledge, 2007). Drawing upon up to date theories of thoughts from philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science, Jenny argued that magnificence is grounded in indeterminate but systematic ideas of notion and cognition and superior a brand new and unique aesthetic principle she termed “important aesthetic realism”.
Undoubtedly, Jenny’s pioneering early work was instrumental in naturalizing aesthetics, and in flip, that improvement was a catalyst for a significant shift in desirous about many subjects in aesthetics and philosophy of artwork. Within the Introduction to his ebook, How Footage Full Us (Stanford College Press, 2016), Paul Crowther identified ‘Jennifer A. McMahon’s glorious Aesthetics and Materials Magnificence (2007) develops an account of the final relation between artwork and sweetness that is just one of some to mix mental rigor with eager acuity in discussing specific artworks’.
Regardless of a number of lengthy battles with breast most cancers, Jenny continued to construct a robust worldwide popularity for pathfinding analysis in philosophy and interdisciplinary scholarship, most notably in aesthetics, philosophy of artwork, Kant research, and meta-ethics. Consequently, she rose to develop into the primary feminine Professor of Philosophy within the College of Adelaide’s 149 years historical past, and the primary within the state of South Australia. At varied instances throughout her profession, Jenny was a Visiting Fellow on the College of Houston, College of Maryland, Rutgers College, the ANU and the College of Melbourne.
Jenny’s second ebook, Artwork and Ethics in a Materials World: Kant’s Pragmatist Legacy (Routledge 2014) additionally broke new floor in ongoing debates in regards to the moral dimensions of artwork, and its function inside and between numerous communities and societies. Drawing once more upon Kant and his legacy in pragmatist theories of that means and language, Jenny argued that aesthetic reflective judgment cultivates a capability exercised by ethical judgment, which is conducive to group, and performs a pivotal function within the evolution of language, that means and data. As Cynthia Freeland feedback in a Tribute to Jenny within the subsequent difficulty of the American Society for Aesthetics (ASA) E-newsletter, Artwork and Ethics in a Materials World is an bold and demanding ebook which makes ‘a really important contribution to aesthetics’.
Between 2016 and 2019, Jenny led an Australian and worldwide crew of researchers and artists on a big, revolutionary Australian Analysis Council (ARC) funded Discovery Challenge, which additionally acquired robust assist from the ASA and the American Philosophical Affiliation (APA). This mission resulted in quite a few interdisciplinary analysis outputs together with three main publications edited by Jenny: the inaugural difficulty of the Australasian Philosophical Evaluate (March 2017) on “The Pleasure of Artwork”, Social Aesthetics and Ethical Judgment (Routledge 2018), and a Focus difficulty of the extremely regarded Curator: The Museum Journal (2019) on “The Historic Quarrel Between Artwork and Philosophy in Modern Visible Artwork Exhibitions”.
Social Aesthetics and Ethical Judgment, a group of stimulating essays by main students, units forth a brand new understanding of aesthetic-moral judgment organised round three key ideas: pleasure, reflection, and accountability. Its overarching theme is that artwork isn’t merely illustration or expression like some other type; critically, it has the capability to advertise a shared ethical understanding and helps us to interact in meaning-making.
Lately, Jenny contributed to main philosophy and literature reference books and on-line analysis sources together with The Palgrave Kant Handbook (2017), The Oxford Bibliographies On-line: Philosophy (2019), The Oxford Analysis Encyclopedia of Literature (2020), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Principle (2022), The Routledge Handbook of Liberal Naturalism (2022), Bloomsbury Modern Aesthetics On-line (2022), and The Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Friedrich Schiller (2023).
In abstract, Jenny made a big contribution to the self-discipline of philosophy and influenced philosophers and artists world wide. A group of her chosen essays, spanning some three many years of labor, shall be printed in 2025.
From 2014 to 2017, Jenny served the broader philosophy group as Govt Secretary of the Australasian Affiliation of Philosophy (AAP) and was a robust, efficient advocate for the pursuits and development of girls and postgraduate college students within the occupation. Together with a number of different previous workplace holders of the Affiliation, Jenny was honoured on the AAP’s current Centenary Convention in Melbourne.
In 2018 Jenny additionally served on the Australian Analysis Council’s Excellence in Analysis for Australia (ERA) Analysis – the triennial analysis evaluation of all of the nation’s larger training establishments – as a Member of its Humanities and Inventive Arts Panel.
In June 2019, Jenny was identified with an aggressive Triple Unfavourable breast most cancers. A number of surgical procedures, protracted chemotherapy and radiotherapy therapy adopted. She retired from the College of Adelaide in April 2022, and was instantly appointed Emerita Professor of Philosophy. Jenny confronted mounting well being challenges over the past 12 months of her life, and after a brave battle with an incurable metastatic most cancers, she handed away peacefully in Adelaide on 5th June 2023, aged 67 years.
Jenny is survived by her husband, Brendan Ryan and their son, Lachlan McMahon Ryan, in addition to six of her sisters and brothers, and plenty of nieces and nephews. She shall be fondly remembered, sorely missed, and all the time beloved by all who knew her nicely.
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Professor McMahon’s obituary was printed in each The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald newspapers’ digital editions on July thirteenth, 2023.
Submitted by Dr Kylie Trask-Kerr (Professor McMahon’s niece) and written with the assistance of Brendan Ryan (Professor McMahon’s husband)
