Readings
Unit 1: The Meno problem
We begin the course with a reading of Plato’s Meno, and with two ends in view. One is to begin to get a mature sense of the nature and challenge of reading. The other is to get a sense of the sorts of questions that philosophy asks.
Week 1: Plato’s Meno
The Meno* introduces a problem that is one of the central challenges of education: how to get from ignorance to knowledge. The articulation of that problem is simultaneously a description of the nature of experience, of its structure and limitations. In addition to an offering an opportunity to reflect on this fundamental issue, a Platonic dialogue will serve as an occasion to reflect on the difficulties of reading and interpretation.*
| Reading | Read | Original |
|---|---|---|
| Plato, Meno | 871–886 |
Week 2: Plato’s Meno (cont’d) and Republic
This week we complete our reading of Meno* and catch a glimpse at the theory of art from Plato’s Republic.*
| Reading | Read | Original |
|---|---|---|
| Plato, Republic X | 277–291 |
Unit 2: Philosophy and the ordinary
Aesthetics and the philosophy of art are often taken to be the same field. I think we should rather see aesthetics as encompassing experience more broadly, as a theory of a particular sort of experience, but one not confined to the world of art. With that more general notion in view, during these weeks we’ll ask about how the aesthetic can be found in everyday experience.
Week 3: Experience and the aesthetic
Together, Dewey and Irvin question whether aesthetic experience is consigned to extraordinary instances (say, the experience of art) and not rather discoverable in the everyday and the ordinary.
| Reading | Read | Original |
|---|---|---|
| Dewey, “Having An Experience” | 35–46 | |
| Irvin, “The Pervasiveness of the Aesthetic in Ordinary Experience” | 29–40 |
Week 4: Bodies, surfaces, and order
If aesthetic experience and judgment are not just about art, but attach more generally to the domain of ordinary life, then things like the way we dress, the way we keep our living spaces, and so on, may be seen to matter in ways we might not generally notice.
| Reading | Read | Original |
|---|---|---|
| Simmel, Fashion | 541–550 | |
| Hanson, “Dressing Down Dressing Up” | all | |
| Saito, “‘Clean’, ‘Dirty’, ‘Neat’, ‘Messy’, ‘Organized’, ‘Disorganized’” | 149–164, 169–173 | |
| Saito, Everyday Aesthetics | optional — 43–53 |
Week 5: Catch-up week
| Reading | Read | Original |
|---|---|---|
| Telfer, Food for Thought | 41–47 |
Unit 3: Taste and judgment
Most people, and most especially about what matters to them, hold two views that cannot both be true: that taste (a judgment about what is beautiful, for example) is entirely subjective and personal; but that taste is something that can be argued for, that is, that you or I can be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in our assessments of what is or isn’t beautiful, for example. In this unit we consider this tension from a variety of perspectives.
Week 6: Taste, judgment, subjectivity, and universality
A pair of influential readings on the question whether and how our individual tastes can serve as a basis for making claims about taste or beauty universally.
| Reading | Read | Original |
|---|---|---|
| Hume, “The Standard Of Taste” | all | |
| Kant, Critique Of Judgment | all |
Week 7: Challenging the aesthetic orthodoxy
Two more recent works challenging some of the operative suppositions of classical aesthetics and philosophy of art.
| Reading | Read | Original |
|---|---|---|
| Bourdieu, “The Aesthetic Disposition” | all | |
| Ngai, “Our Aesthetic Categories” | all |
Week 8: Catch-up week
Unit 4: Art, theory, and context
What makes art “art” (or “Art”)? I think this question, for us, is least useful as such (as a question about art) and more useful as a question about the nature of institutions (the pregnantly titled “art world” being our exemplar) and their relationship to experience.
Week 9: What makes something art?
Art and the theory of art have been unusually intimate bedfellows for at least the last two centuries. In this week we consider two readings that look for answers to questions about the nature of art that situate it in its institutional and theoretical context, but that question whether these relations are definitive or exhaustive.
| Reading | Read | Original |
|---|---|---|
| Danto, “The Artworld” | all | |
| Weitz, “The Role Of Theory in Aesthetics” | all |
Week 10: Context
In rather different ways, our readings this week suggest that our understanding and appreciation of art is shaped in large part by the context in which we receive it—by its historical place and by the classificatory tools we use to make sense of it.
| Reading | Read | Original |
|---|---|---|
| Walton, “Categories Of Art” | all | |
| Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” | all |
Unit 5: Meaning and interpretation
Works of art seem to mean* something, but it’s often difficult to say where that meaning comes from: The artist herself, the audience, the context in which it is produced and received, and other constituents of art all seem to have some claim. In this unit we wonder whether one of these has an authoritative claim to the meaning of works of art.*
Week 11: Intentionalism and its opposite
Intentionalism is the view that the author’s intention in making a work is a definitive or crucial ingredient in making sense of the work’s meaning. It has gotten such a bad rap over the last century that it is almost hard not to root for it. At the same time, the rejection of intentionalism constitutes one of the interesting ways in which ‘theory’ conflicts with (in my coarse empirical assessment) ‘average intuitions’ about meaning. In any event, we consider here two prominent voices questioning intentionalism, and at the same time opening up strange new ways of thinking about the meaning of art (or about putatively intentional objects in general).
| Reading | Read | Original |
|---|---|---|
| Wimsatt-Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy” | all | |
| Livingston, “Intentionalism in Aesthetics” | all | |
| Barthes, “The Death of the Author” | optional |
Week 12: Seeing and interpreting
Berger draws attention to the fact that seeing—mere experience, say—is always shaped by knowledge and convention. In his view, our perceptions are always shaped by interpretive stances. Sontag, on the other hand, questions whether interpretation has a distorting effect on our capacity for perceiving works of art. Together, our authors pose the question whether it is possible, and how, to encounter a work without immediately interpreting it.
| Reading | Read | Original |
|---|---|---|
| Berger, Ways Of Seeing | all | |
| Sontag, “Against Interpretation” | all |
Unit 6: Fiction and the emotions
One of the standing, strange questions about art, which exposes something odd about the nature of the emotions: The characters of fiction aren’t real, the events aren’t happening—and yet we feel* and react to fiction as if the characters and events were real. How is this possible?*
Week 13: Feeling and fiction
Unlike his teacher Plato, Aristotle seems not to think that art’s capacity to move us is inherently problematic. His Poetics* offers an early attempt at articulating the mechanics of aesthetic experience, the ability of art to arouse pity, fear, and other emotions in us. Radford turns this familiar fact of aesthetic experience into a paradox.*
| Reading | Read | Original |
|---|---|---|
| Aristotle, Poetics | 4-7, 8-11, 18-22 | |
| Radford, “How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?” | all |
Week 14: Make-believe and make-up week
Walton argues that the seeming paradox of fiction is instead an instance of structured play. We’ll use the decreased work load this week to get caught up.
| Reading | Read | Original |
|---|---|---|
| Walton, “Fearing Fictions” | all |