Faculty working in this area share the conviction that questions pertaining to aesthetics lie at the heart of all philosophical inquiry and human existence. Aesthetics is about not only the creation, experiencing, and judging of works of art, but also about everything that gives form, value, and significance to all aspects of human experience. Aesthetics, therefore, is broadly construed as bearing on issues surrounding cognition, meaning, knowledge, truth, and politics. In its broad scope it covers the full range of artistic expression from literature to myth to painting to music to film. Because of our comprehensive understanding of aesthetics as crucial to what makes us human, our courses cover the full range of figures from a wide variety of traditions and orientations. One is thus just as likely to encounter Heidegger as Dewey, Danto as Adorno, Kant as Nietzsche, Aristotle as Collingwood, Plato as Derrida. One course will emphasize recent analytic developments, a second will build to a pragmatist understanding, while a third will employ the lens of critical theory.

Because of current faculty research and interests, recent courses have focused on themes such as the following: embodied aspects of art and aesthetic dimensions of experience, aesthetic cognition, art as a form of social and political criticism, issues pertaining to the aestheticizing of the political, truth and knowledge as related to works of art and to aesthetic experience, aesthetic judgment as a model of all human evaluation, art and emotion.

Selected Courses

Philosophy of the Arts
Philosophy in Literature
Philosophy of Film
Poetry and Myth in Ancient Philosophy
Kant’s Aesthetic Theory
Topics in the Philosophy of Art
Hegel’s Aesthetics
Beauvoir’s Novels
Seminar: Music and Meaning

Faculty

Mark Johnson
John Lysaker
Bonnie Mann
Scott Pratt
Cheyney Ryan
Ted Toadvine
Peter Warnek