ART 472 Advanced Seminar in Aesthetics

This course introduces the topics that have been most influential in contemporary aesthetics over the last half century or so. We shall cover the themes that belong to the core of the discipline, such as the identification of art, ontology, aesthetic experience, interpretation, artistic and aesthetic value, the relation between art and knowledge, and the nature of fiction and imagination. In addition to these themes, we shall study the recent work on environmental aesthetics and the aesthetics of everyday life as well. A lot of attention has also been paid during the last few decades to the aesthetic issues involved in specific art forms, such as painting, photography, film, literature, and even popular art form such as comics. We shall study the texts by philosophers working within a particular tradition, the so-called analytic tradition. This is now a dominant methodology within philosophy, including the philosophical aesthetics. The work in this tradition is characterized by aiming at a relatively high level of rigor, precision and clarity. Hopefully we can learn to achieve some of these qualities in our own thinking and writing about art and aesthetics.