Ideas for Aesthetics Syllabus

A. Extracts from Philosophical Texts: 8

B. Art History: Chapters from The Story of Art:
 Chapters 1-5: From Pre-historic to Flowering of Greek Art.
 Chapters 10-13/14: From Christian to Renaissance Art
 Chapters: ???? Mirror Nature Post-Renaissance
 Chapters: 26-27 Modernism and Postmodernism
C. Art Appreciation/Criticism: Learning to Look

Look up Kearney ed book…

Short Intro…?
Find that Aesthetics syllabus I did out!!!

This introduces the Philosophy of Art by progressing through a chronological reading of

excerpts from canonical texts from Plato to Postmodernism, occasioning the opportunity to
address classical problematics from what art is to whether in postmodernity it is a thing of the
past. To supplementing these readings, approaches drawn from an art historical perspective
familiarizing students with the major periods of art, and an art critical perspective refining an
aesthetic sensibility or gaze, so as ot inform discussion of the problematics and paradoxes

Week 1.
Aesthetics, Philosophy of Art (Artistic Periods), Art History, Art Criticism: The Many Modes of
Approach

Approaches
Aesthetics, Philosophy of Art, Problematics of Aesthetics and Art:
 Historical Development: Plato, Aristotle… Formalisation of discipline: Wolff, Kant,
Hegel).
 Plato: at what point does art become pernicious? (Plato: eikastic/phantastic
imagination)
 What is art? Beauty? Taste? (Kant)
 Is the perfect Artwork a perfect Representation of an Original? (Plato, Aristotle)
 Subjectivity/Objectivity: The Classical Problem of Beauty, and Representation?
  Is the image/picture ‘out there’ or in the mind: the phenomenology of picture-
consciousness (Husserl)
 History of the Concept of Art, and related concepts: representation, image. Is Religious
Representation pre-Art?
 The Forms of Art: is Painting as an art ‘more art’ than Poetry Is poetry language?
(Aristotle, Hegel).
 Is Art historical in essence? (Hegel)
 From whence the Artistic Impulse? (Nietzsche)
 Art as Religious Representation; Art as a thing of the Past? (Hegel, From Romantic
Christian to Renaissance art)
 Art Now: can we write poetry after Auschwitz? (Adorno)
 Art and Postmodern Representation: The Triumph of Art and Plato’s Nightmare or Art’s
defilement?
 What is the being of a work of art? (Heidegger)
 Art investigating Art’s essence: Postmodern Art as Philosophical Reflexion (Danto)

Art History: Familiarising ourselves with bodies of work from diverse traditions, cultures. Art as
a function of art-historical and historical periods.
Gombrich, The Story of Art

Art Criticism/Appreciation: Learning to Look … Chapters…

What from Philosophical theories of Imagination?

Philosophical Aesthetics Readings:

Classical Aesthetics

1.Plato – Republic. Mimesis.

 Eikastic/Phantastic Imagination (Sallis on the Allegory)
 Derrida, Dissemination: Extracts from ‘La double Séance’

2. Aristotle’s Poetics.
 The Concept of Mimesis.
 Is Dramatic Poetry Art?


Nineteenth Century German Aesthetics

3. Kant… Taste and Judgement.

 - Derrida ‘Economimesis’
- End of Beauty
- Cazeaux: Ch 1. Extracts from ‘Analytic of Aesthetic Judgement’ (Critique of Judgment)

4. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Historicising an Unfolding of Beauty. The End of Art/Art as Beauty.

‘Introduction to Aesthetics’
- Cazeaux: Ch 2 Extracts from Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art
 ‘Death of Art’ – Caseaux: Ch 11 The Death or Decline of Art, Gianni Vattimo
 Danto

5. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, Walter Kaufmann (trans.), New
York: Vintage, 1967 (1872).
- Cazeaux: Ch 3: On Truth and Lie on an Extra-Moral Sense
- Extracts from The Birth of Tragedy

Phenomenology and Aesthetics

6. Husserl: The Phenomenology of Picture-Consciousness. Extracts

 Sokolowski - Images, Signs, Symbols
 Logical Investigations, Investigation V; Lectures on Phantasy, Picture-Consciousness and
Memory
• John Barnet Brough, ‘Art and Artworld: Some Idea for a Husserlian Aesthetic’, 25-46 General
Circulation - B3279.H94 E34

7. Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in Poetry, Language, Thought.

- Shapiro.
- Cazeaux: Ch 4 The Origin of the Work of Art

8. Adorno
- Cazeaux: Ch 10 Aesthetics and Hermeneutics

Modernism

9. Benjamin
- Caseaux: Ch 20 The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age

10. Greenberg: Modernist Aesthetics.

 ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’
 ‘Modernist Art’
16. Häbermas
 Caseaux: Ch 16: Modernity versus Postmodernity

17. Derrida
 Caseaux Ch26: The Pareregon

Pico della Mirandolo

Wolff
Adorno
Schelling… later texts…
Coleridge…?

Danto..???

Adorno…?

Bernstein – German Idealist Aesthetics

Postmodernism.

Artworks, and the History of Art.

Willet, Jean – Videos.

The Story of Art.