Description
This course will explore the philosophical foundations of aesthetic theory. The dominant figure in modern aesthetics, as in most branches of modern philosophy, is Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Thus we will begin the semester by becoming familiar with the first half of Kant?s Critique of Judgment. Kant can be read as the founder of aesthetic formalism, and much aesthetic debate in the twentieth century revolves around the dispute between formalism (the notion that the artwork should be considered apart from its social, political, biographical and environmental context) and anti-formalism (the notion that the artwork cannot be separated from its context). We will read authors from both sides of this divide, and will consider the possibility that both are mistaken.