Aesthetics

What is beautiful? What is sublime? What makes a work of art good? What are artworks for? This course will address these and other questions with a focus on Western art and its evaluation by European thinkers from antiquity to more recent times. We will begin with Plato’s discussions of art in the Ion and The Republic and we will turn next to Aristotle’s defense of art in the Poetics. The course will go on to discuss writings on aesthetics by thinkers such as Aquinas, Vasari, and Bellori. We will then devote considerable attention to eighteenth-century contributions to the history of aesthetics and art criticism, as it was in this period that the term “aesthetics” was first coined and that the “philosophy of art” was invented. Many of the most influential and difficult notions in modern aesthetics, such as genius and originality, developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We will analyze the writings of Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Edmund Burke, Hegel, and others. This course is appropriate for graduate students in art history, visual art, history, philosophy, music, English, and other humanities departments.