PHIL 240 - Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

The course studies the philosophical debate on art both historically and thematically. We will contrast ancient and medieval conceptions of art with our contemporary intuitions about what constitutes originality and creativity. We will discover that the roots of such intuitions are in the 18th century, when aesthetics is born as the study of the reasons that make some sensory experiences distinctly artistic, beautiful or sublime. However, the idea that art may be an autonomous field of human expression is soon called into question by thinkers such as Hegel and Schopenhauer. We shall follow the legacy of their attempt to de-aestheticize art into the 20th century, in the context of both philosophy’s debate on the nature of metropolis and the modernist revolution in all the arts, but especially in architecture. 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, including Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Zaha Hadid, and Peter Eisenman. Ms. Borradori.

Prerequisite: one 100-level course in Philosophy.

Two 75-minute periods.