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The course surveys philosophical approaches to the nature of beauty, art, and creativity. Students will be exposed to classic writings from important thinkers in both western and eastern traditions. Thinkers may include (but are not limited to) Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Kant, Confucius, Zhuangzi, etc.
This book selects twenty-seven essays, presenting a substantial portion of the aesthetics of their authors, with minor abridgments. It begins with several selections from Plato and Aristotle. Platonistic thought on art and beauty is further exemplified in excerpts from Plotinus's Enneads, from Augustine's De Ordine and De Musica, and from Marsilio Ficino's Commentary on Plato's Symposium. The Shaftesbury selections reveal some of the primary influences upon Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. Selections from Schopen-hauer, Nietzsche, Croce, and Dewey fill out some of the main strains of modern philosophical reflections upon art. Finally Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art," from his Holzwege, is presented in a new translation.
This book is a philosophical investigation of the sense of taste. Beginning with the Greek thinkers who classified taste as an inferior, bodily sense, the book then proceeds to trace the parallels between notions of aesthetic and gustatory taste that were explored in the formation of modern aesthetic theories. The book presents scientific views of how taste actually works and identifies multiple components of taste experiences, and looks at the different meanings food and drink convey in art and literature as well as in ordinary human life and proposes an approach to the aesthetic value of taste that recognizes the representational and expressive roles of food.
This is a collection of Susan Sontag’ essays between 1962 and 1965. It includes the groundbreaking essays "Notes on Camp" and "Against Interpretation," as well as her impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Levi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thought. What value these essays may possess, the extent to which they are more than just case studies of evolving sensibility, rests on the interestingness of the problems raised. An American intellectual and writer best known for her essays on modern culture, Sontag’s essays are characterized by a serious philosophical approach to various aspects and personalities of modern culture.
This book, by Arthur C. Danto, challenges the popular interpretation that art is an indefinable concept, instead bringing to light the properties that constitute universal meaning. Danto argues that despite varied approaches, a work of art is always defined by two essential criteria: meaning and embodiment, as well as one additional criterion contributed by the viewer: interpretation. Danto crafts his argument beginning with Plato’s definition of art in The Republic, and continuing through the progress of art as a series of discoveries, including such innovations as perspective, chiaroscuro, and physiognomy. Danto concludes with a fascinating discussion of Andy Warhol’s famous shipping cartons.
This book provides an overview on the history and present of aesthetic theory. It contains a comprehensive survey of the field of aesthetics, with selections drawn from ancient, medieval, renaissance, modern, and contemporary sources. It provides a radically new perspective on the genesis and development of aesthetic theory by including an expanded section on early modern aesthetics. The book likewise pays special attention to the interdisciplinary nature of aesthetics, reconstructing some of the dialogues in literary theory and art criticism that gave rise to philosophy's more systematic efforts. It introduces contemporary debates by including a number of thinkers not yet anthologized.
This book illuminates the social pretentions of the middle classes in the modern world, focusing on the tastes and preferences of the French bourgeoisie. First published in 1979, the book is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind. Bourdieu demonstrates that our different aesthetic choices are all distinctions - that is, choices made in opposition to those made by other classes. He argues that the social world functions simultaneously as a system of power relations and as a symbolic system in which minute distinctions of taste become the basis for social judgement.
