PHIL 240 - Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

At the onset of modernity art was regarded by philosophers as a well demarcated field of philosophical investigation and named “aesthetics”. In the age of Kant, aesthetics is born as the study of the reasons that make some sensory experiences distinctly artistic, beautiful or sublime. In the 19th century, with Hegel and Schopenhauer, the meaning of the work of art is not to be found autonomously from the facts of life, but rather in their midst. We shall follow this attempt to de-aestheticize art in the context of both architecture’s modernist revolution and philosophy’s debate on the nature of metropolis. To this extent we shall examine projects by Walter Gropius and Mies Van der Rohe, and read texts by Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Martin Heidegger. In the last portion of the course, we shall explore the most radical dismantling of the aesthetic edifice in the work of artists and theorists in linguistics, philosophy, and architecture, including Luigi Ontani, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Peter Eisenman. Ms. Borradori.

Two 75-minute periods.