John Medley Building, University of Melbourne, Parkville, 7.00 pm
please meet at 6.55 as we will enter building as one group.
class will be taken by Justin Clemens
The End of Beauty, Taste and Judgement
These days, it seems that nobody really knows what they’re doing in the realm of philosophical aesthetics. As a result, we get automatic repetitions that don’t realise they’re repetitions: a ‘back to basics’ approach (‘it just has to be beautiful/skilful/ethical’); pseudo-scientific approaches that allegedly support a new ‘world art history’ (‘we all know from evolutionary biology that all humans share a creative instinct’); interpretative marginalia (‘what does that small yucky mark at the lower right of the canvas really mean?’); etc. I want to discuss how these pseudo-solutions emerge as the consequence of a failure of modern philosophical aesthetics — particularly as bequeathed European modernity in the form of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement — and return to Kant’s positions to see what else they might have to tell us today. This means talking again about ‘beauty,’ ‘taste,’ ‘form,’ ‘pleasure,’ and ‘the sublime.’ Seriously.
These days, it seems that nobody really knows what they’re doing in the realm of philosophical aesthetics. As a result, we get automatic repetitions that don’t realise they’re repetitions: a ‘back to basics’ approach (‘it just has to be beautiful/skilful/ethical’); pseudo-scientific approaches that allegedly support a new ‘world art history’ (‘we all know from evolutionary biology that all humans share a creative instinct’); interpretative marginalia (‘what does that small yucky mark at the lower right of the canvas really mean?’); etc. I want to discuss how these pseudo-solutions emerge as the consequence of a failure of modern philosophical aesthetics — particularly as bequeathed European modernity in the form of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement — and return to Kant’s positions to see what else they might have to tell us today. This means talking again about ‘beauty,’ ‘taste,’ ‘form,’ ‘pleasure,’ and ‘the sublime.’ Seriously.
Prescribed reading: Kant's Critique of Judgement – First Part. Critique of Aesthetic Judgement.
available here http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/kant/immanuel/k16j/
