The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

Kant set the terms of modern aesthetics. In his hands, the field became centered on the study of aesthetic judgment, in particular, judgments of the beautiful and the sublime. But if it’s plausible to think that each era’s aesthetic judgments take on more particularized forms, what might the defining aesthetic categories of our age be? This is Sianne Ngai’s question in her new book, “Our Aesthetic Categories,” reviewed by Rebecca Ariel Porte at LARB. Her tripartite answer: the zany, the cute and — most interesting — the interesting.

Ngai contends that these three concepts best articulate our relationship to beauty in the 21st century, both within and without the museum. The zany is an “aesthetic of action, ” Porte writes about Ngai’s theory. “It is one in which labor and play are confused so that it’s hard to tell whether we ought to react to a display of zaniness with humor or concern.” (Lucy of “I Love Lucy” turns out to be the quintessence of zaniness). The cute, in Nagai’s words, is “the aestheticization of powerlessness”; hence its strong links to the childish and to historical notions of feminine weakness. Finally, there is the category of the interesting: it is the positive aesthetic judgment we make of something we lack the understanding or conceptual equipment to describe any more precisely. It “begins with a feeling — inquisitiveness, curiosity, wonder — falling somewhere between an affect and a desire,” Ngai says. Duchamp’s urinal is interesting in this sense. And in fact much contemporary art seems aimed at being interesting rather than beautiful.

A Country of Two Tales: By means of narrative nonfiction, Siddhartha Deb’s “The Beautiful and the Damned” and Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” vivify India’s social troubles, in particular, the abject poverty that still afflicts much of the citizenry. Deb’s book is a loose collection of essays detailing his travels in the nation, narrated in the first person. The technique, of course, is now common in long-form journalism. Boo’s, though, is more radical: her reportage is formally identical to a novel written in the third-person omniscient, with thoughts and feelings imputed to the characters. (She explains in the afterword that these psychological ascriptions were made on the basis of fastidious research of her subjects.)

Martha Nussbaum, reviewing the books for the The Times Literary supplement, questions whether Deb’s and Boo’s journalistic techniques, unsupplemented by more traditional economic and historical analysis, can illuminate the “the New India” in a way that give readers not only a heart-stirring account of the country’s social problems — they succeed admirably in that — but a full-blooded one, the sort necessary in identifying the most promising means of amelioration.

The Varieties of Evil: How to think about evil? Claire Carlisle outlines the options at The Guardian. One is that it can’t be thought about at all, properly speaking. The early Wittgenstein may have held this view, and our common language has expressions that lend the notion credence, like “unthinkable evil.” But suppose we can productively think about evil. Where might we search for the conceptual tools to do so? Carlisle thinks Christian theology is amply supplied, and is one of our best resources, offering as it does a taxonomy of evils: moral evil (human wrongdoing), natural evil (calamitous earthly events, like earthquakes and tsunamis), and “metaphysical evil” (our predicament as human beings, to be mortal and to have limited powers of knowledge), among others. And indeed out modern conception of rights, of the natural good (or evil) in human beings, and many other concepts relating to evil trace back to theological concerns. Interestingly, Carlisle suggests that even atheists often construct their positive moral visions out of elements scavenged from (or else negatively defined against) Christian theodicy — Camus and Nietzsche, to take two.

Also:

Bookforum reviews Zizek’s latest, “Less than Nothing.”

A video of a roundtable discussion about time, at Three Quarks Daily.

3AM Magazine interviews Jerry Fodor.

A post about our lay and scientific intuitions about innateness, at Experimental Philosophy.

In the New York Review, Freeman Dyson’s take on Jim Holt’s “Why Does the World Exist?”

Finally, the philosophy of Black Sabbath.