„Aesthetics: Feeling, Image, and Imagination” – invitation for the seminar
Department of Philosophy of Culture (IF UW) and the coordinator of Warsaw International Studies in Philosophy invite for the seminar
Aesthetics: Feeling, Image, and Imagination
The seminar will be conducted by
Prof. Randall Auxier and Eli Kramer
(Southern Illinois University Carbondale)
Description:
Our „feeling” of the world (aesthesis) is the basis of our knowledge of it. Where there is no feeling, there could be no knowledge of the sort humans value, whether scientific, social, or historical. Yet, we not only feel the world, we feel „ourselves,” our bodily processes, our orientation in space and time. We also feel ourselves feeling the world in reflexive and virtual times and spaces formed in memory and projected into the sensory manifold as possibilities for action, as purpose, and anticipation. The feelings of the world and of ourselves are „images,” and the feeling of feeling is the encounter of the power of imagination with the image. Aesthetics is the study of those aspects of feeling which are on their way to thinking. It is the study of the creation, character, and function of images. The study of art and of the beautiful is commonly associated with aesthetics due to assumption that the intensity of our feeling reaches a maximum in experiences of art. That assumption is warranted by thousands of years of human experience. Yet, the question of the pleasing, the exuberant, the agreeable, the disgusting, the ugly, and other conditions of feeling, is only one part of aesthetics. The underlying issue is the intensity of the image as felt and what follows from it for experience.
Selected Readings:
- I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
- I. Kant, Critique of Judgment
- F. Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man
- S. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
- S. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection
- E.A. Poe, Complete Works
- R.H. Lotze, Outlines of Aesthetics
- H. Bergson, Laughter
- H. Bergson, Matter and Memory
- S. Langer, Feeling and Form
- S. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key
- S. Langer, Problems of Art
- A. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace
Randall Auxier is a Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University. Among his research interests are philosophy of culture (including popular culture), aesthetics, process philosophy and theology, post-Kantian continental philosophy, pragmatism. His publications include: Time, Will and Purpose: Living Ideas from the Philosophy of Josiah Royce (Chicago, Open Court, 2013), The Quantum of Explanation: Whitehead’s Radical Empiricism (with Gary L. Herstin) (Routledge 2017) and numerous articles on Vico, Bergson, Cassirer, Langer, Whitehead.
Time: 17.04 – 08.06.2018
Terms:
every Tuesday 5pm – 8pm (the Old BUW, room 205)
every Friday 5pm – 8 pm (Institute of Philosophy, room 209)
Note: on 25th of May the seminar-meeting will take place in room 4 (Institute of Philosophy, ground floor).
Number of hours: 60
Credit allocation: 6 ECTS
Contact: dr Przemysław Bursztyka (pbursztyka@uw.edu.pl)
More information and the full description are available at:
https://usosweb.uw.edu.pl/kontroler.php?_action=katalog2/przedmioty/pokazPrzedmiot&kod=3501-AFII17-S
All interested (not only students) are welcome.