Aesthetics

This course builds on the core curricula that students have studied in Year 1 and 2, where they were introduced to understanding and interpreting different art works and music. It examines the nature and value of aesthetic experiences and works of art.

The course is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on important historical figures in philosophy from antiquity to the early twentieth century who have written about art and aesthetics, including Plato's banishment of dramatic poetry from his ideal republic, Kant's account of pure judgments of taste, and Collingwood's theory of art as expression. The second part of the course focuses on some key contemporary debates in aesthetics and philosophy of art, such as how the meaning of a literary work relates to its author's intentions, the interaction between moral and aesthetic value in art, and the nature of the emotions we apparently feel for fictional entities.

The lectures and seminars offer a presentation and discussion of how aesthetic sensibility provides meaning and how different theoretical approaches contribute to our interpretation of aesthetic phenomena.

The course explores the intimate relations between art, subjectivity, and society, in particular as found in phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, and critical theory. Simultaneously, the course is concerned with concrete works of art and aesthetic practices and will examine how film, literature, painting, installations, and even commercials form and reflect our self-understanding. Students will have the opportunity to engage with these concepts and ideas and come up with their own creative project as a result of theoretical inquiry into the field.