PHI 471 Seminar in Aesthetics - From Enlightenment to Postmodernism

Traditionally a domain of philosophy, the study of aesthetics initially encompassed judgments about beauty and form, then evolved into a study of the nature of aesthetic judgments, and then widened further into a series of subcategories ranging from questions of art and ethics, art and history, art and psychology, art and perception, art and ontology, art and politics, art and society, and art and gender. In this seminar we will be exploring aesthetic theory from Kant to the present moment. In the first part of the term we will survey the history of German philosophical aesthetics from Kant through Heidegger, and its conjunction with both the Frankfurt School & French thinkers like Georges Bataille & Maurice Blanchot in the 1930s & 40s; in the second part of the term, we will explore many of the key postwar thinkers who have written on aesthetics, including Merleau-Ponty, Greenberg, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan (via Zizek), Deleuze & Guattari, Luhmann, and many others