DOCSLIB.ORG

The Problematic Perception of Beauty in the Artistic Fieldthe Problematic Perception of Beauty in the Artistic Field Raquel Cascales

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Problematic Perception of Beauty in the Artistic Fieldthe Problematic Perception of Beauty in the Artistic Field Raquel Cascales DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.68945 Provisional chapter Chapter 5 The Problematic Perception of Beauty in the Artistic TheField Problematic Perception of Beauty in the Artistic Field Raquel Cascales RaquelAdditional Cascales information is available at the end of the chapter Additional information is available at the end of the chapter http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.68945 Abstract Scientific discoveries of neuroscience are apparently explaining all the mysteries of the human brain. In particular, great advances have been made in the field of the perception of beauty. However, historical‐philosophical revision, such as the one I carry out in this chapter, can shed light on the limits that this approach can have. To this end, I begin by reviewing the psychologization of beauty that has been carried out by David Hume since the origins of modernity. From this premise, I question the laws of art enunciated by one of the most prominent researches on neuroaesthetics, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, by contrasting his conclusions in the light of the philoso ‐ phy of art of Arthur Danto, who calls into question that the value of what is purely perceptive might be enough to understand art. He also rejects any identification of art with beauty, just as he is contrary to any general statement of the laws of art. With this contraposition, I try to show that the question of beauty in art goes far beyond mere visual perception. Keywords: neuroaesthetics, beauty, philosophy of art, V.S. Ramachandran, A.C. Danto 1. Introduction The excessive specialization of contemporary science usually tends to disregard the contribu‐ tions of other sciences and, in some cases, to obviate the historical and theoretical concepts it works with. Nowadays, as regard to the consideration of the perception of beauty, attention has increasingly focused on neuroscientific studies. Although the findings in this area are providing very interesting results, I consider it important to show the development of the philosophical ideas underlying these approaches. © 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution© 2017 The License Author(s). (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed which under permits the terms unrestricted of the Creative use, distribution, Commons andAttribution reproduction License in any (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), medium, provided the original work is properly which cited. permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 84 Perception of Beauty In this sense, I wish to begin by setting forth some historical issues related to the concept of beauty. In the first place, it should be noted that the perception of beauty underwent a psychological conversion in modernity, especially with the empiricist aesthetics of David Hume. This change resulted in a relativization of the concept of beauty, which neuroaesthet‐ ics is still trying to address at present. Thus, secondly, and for this reason, I will analyze the main contributions of neuroaesthetics and its defense of objectivity, especially developed by V.S. Ramachandran. Finally, I will confront Ramachandran’s position on artistic beauty with that of the philosopher Arthur Danto in order to problematize the question about whether beauty and art can be identified completely. 2. The psychological conversion of the perception of beauty in modernity Aesthetic reflection, the question of beauty, art and its connection with knowledge, has been present since antiquity. This is shown in the thought and the influence by authors such as Plato or Aristotle. However, we must be cautious when attempting to bring to current discus‐ sions the concerns about beauty as found in Dialogues or the Aristotelian description of art as techné, since the problems of present‐day aesthetics have started in the Modern Age, since aesthetics became a discipline of its own. The philosophers of antiquity considered that beauty was a property of the real objects, not only of the artistic ones, and therefore could be known in an objective way. The medieval phi‐ losophers continued to consider that the perception of beauty was objective and, in addition, human beings could discover the creator of such beauty through the contemplation of natural beauty. But all these conceptions changed completely in the modern era. In the first half of the eighteenth century, aesthetics did not escape the influence of the ratio‐ nalist scheme of Wolff and Leibniz and focused on the need to establish a science of perfect sensory knowledge. This is the context in which we find Baumgarten, the initiator of this study as a science. In his work Aesthetica (1750/1758), he gave the name of aesthetics to the philo‐ sophical science that studies beauty and art. Baumgarten conceives aesthetics as the”science of sensible knowledge“[1]. That is to say, it is based on the gnoseological criterion of the per‐ fection in the specific realm of sensibility. But since he considers this capacity to be inferior to the rational, he also believes it has an inferior gnoseological value. Therefore, Baumgarten collects various aesthetic approaches and systematizes sensitive knowledge. With this, he led modern aesthetics to the terrain of subjectivation through the path of empiricism. Empiricism is the fundamental trend in British philosophy since the influence of John Locke. Empiricism is characterized, among other things, as the rejection of the existence of innate ideas and the assertion that all our knowledge necessarily arises from sensible experience, that is, it has its origin in the senses. Within empiricist aesthetics, we find several figures, among which the most prominent is Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury. This author considers that the human being possesses a moral and aesthetic nature that has its organ in feeling. Both the emphasis on empiricism and moral sentimentality will greatly influence Francis Hutcheson and David Hume, especially in the investigation and development of aesthetic”taste.” The Problematic Perception of Beauty in the Artistic Field 85 http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.68945 David Hume (1711–1776) was the empiricist philosopher who would have the greatest impact on the psychologization of beauty. There are several principles that stand out in his empiricist philosophy. In the first place, he affirms that all our ideas come from sensible impressions. In the second place, he makes a critique of the idea of cause that has greatly influenced contem‐ porary theories of science. For Hume, the causal relation means that one phenomenon follows another but not that one is the cause of the other: the only thing we can affirm is that it has always happened this way. On the other hand, he makes a very strong criticism of inductive reasoning. He considers that induction is never complete and thus the foundations of univer‐ sal laws must be established on a principle other than induction. Hence, one of the essential theories of Hume’s philosophy is that our ideas are associated according to principles, which in turn establish links between them. Ideas are naturally con‐ nected according to three laws: resemblance, contiguity and cause‐effect relationship [2]. These three laws of association will have a decisive influence on the psychologization of per‐ ception. Many of the approaches of the later English psychologists will depart from these premises. Before proceeding, it is worth making a pause to check the impact of this understanding of perception on the concept of beauty. To do this, we must turn to the fourth of Hume’s Four Dissertations, published in 1757. In”Of the Standard of Taste” [3], the English philosopher sets forth his consideration of how beauty is perceived. He affirms that beauty is not a quality of the things themselves but only exists in the mind that contemplates them. Beauty is neither a transcendental or innate idea nor a sensory impression that seems to correspond with it. From this point of view, it seems that we can only identify a pleasant feeling, which we can assume that is caused by something beautiful but not that we have known something beauti‐ ful as such. Beauty, then, is defined in relation to the subject since it is a property that lies in the beholder. That is to say, the feeling of pleasure provoked by beauty in the subject is the only thing that justifies our speaking of it. Taste takes place in the conformity between the object and the faculties of the mind. Research on how the feeling of pleasure is produced in the subject leads one to consider that there must be an organ capable of perceiving beauty. Both the organ and its aesthetic sense were called”taste.” The experiences of taste would be immediate and spontaneous and would not be directly related to reason but rather to the realm of sensibil‐ ity. From this point of view, an object is said to be beautiful because certain properties of the object stimulate our sensibility and make us feel its beauty. In this sense, Hume discards the metaphysics of the beautiful but does not invalidate an empirical science of the aesthetic phenomenon. In fact, he believes that there must be rules in the arts that allow us to judge them. These rules cannot be established a priori but can only be established empirically. Thus, Hume states five conditions that are required to be able to make an aesthetic judgment adequately: (1) delicacy of taste; (2) practice of judg‐ ing; (3) assiduous comparison of works; (4) being free of prejudices; and (5) good sense that avoids the influence of prejudices [3]. However, despite all his attempts, Hume fails to establish universality for aesthetic taste using the principles of his philosophy and the rules just mentioned. 86 Perception of Beauty In summary, we can say that the empiricist approach led to the consideration that beauty could only be perceived by the senses, thus reducing it to a matter of mere intellectual plea‐ sure, which in turn provoked a relativistic consideration of beauty.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Adorno, Art, Natural History
    Index of the Contemporary: Adorno, Art, Natural History Ryan Crawford 32 | Evental Aesthetics Index of the Contemporary: Adorno, Art, Natural History Abstract That contemporary art is fundamentally irreducible to modernist art and aesthetics has become a commonplace of contemporary art theory and criticism. In marking this distinction, reference is often made to the obsolescence of once-dominant aesthetic categories and the need for breaking with aesthetic theories traditionally allied with artistic modernism. For many in the field of philosophical aesthetics, this means going beyond the work of Theodor W. Adorno and creating a conceptual discourse more appropriate to the current state of contemporary art. The present paper reconstructs the stakes of this legitimation crisis and sets Adorno’s writings on art and aesthetics in relation to some of the most significant debates in recent art criticism. In the process, it demonstrates that many of the most pressing problems in contemporary art are integral to Adorno’s aesthetic theory and that it is precisely at those points where his thought is today regarded as most problematic that it is often most instructive. Through a sustained examination of art’s essential relation to what Adorno calls “natural-history,” the problems of contemporary art and aesthetics are then situated within the wider context of art’s relationship to a history of domination. Keywords Adorno Modernism Aesthetics Contemporary Art Natural History Volume 7 Number 2 (2018) | 33 Ryan Crawford “You create a new shudder” [Vous créez un frisson nouveau], Victor Hugo wrote Baudelaire upon receiving the poems the latter had recently dedicated to him.1 Though grateful for the gift, and appreciative of what he called Baudelaire’s “noble mind and generous heart,” Hugo could hardly countenance the “horrifying morality” Les Fleurs du mal grafted onto the older man’s art.2 For in those poems, the crowd, the very subject Hugo had first “opened ..
    [Show full text]
  • The Idea of Mimesis: Semblance, Play, and Critique in the Works of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W
    DePaul University Via Sapientiae College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences 8-2012 The idea of mimesis: Semblance, play, and critique in the works of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno Joseph Weiss DePaul University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd Recommended Citation Weiss, Joseph, "The idea of mimesis: Semblance, play, and critique in the works of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno" (2012). College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations. 125. https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd/125 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at Via Sapientiae. It has been accepted for inclusion in College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Via Sapientiae. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Idea of Mimesis: Semblance, Play, and Critique in the Works of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy October, 2011 By Joseph Weiss Department of Philosophy College of Liberal Arts and Sciences DePaul University Chicago, Illinois 2 ABSTRACT Joseph Weiss Title: The Idea of Mimesis: Semblance, Play and Critique in the Works of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno Critical Theory demands that its forms of critique express resistance to the socially necessary illusions of a given historical period. Yet theorists have seldom discussed just how much it is the case that, for Walter Benjamin and Theodor W.
    [Show full text]
  • Retrieving Kant's Aesthetics for Art Theory After
    8 Retrieving Kant’s Aesthetics for Art Theory After Greenberg Some Remarks on Arthur C. Danto and Thierry de Duve Diarmuid Costello The Fate of Aesthetics in Contemporary Art Theory In art theory since the early 1980s the discourse of aesthetics has been notable by its absence. Th is suggests that the majority of art theorists believe that the historical or conceptual limits of aesthetic theory have been breached by the internal development of art after modernism. But why would art theorists believe this? I n a n s w e r t o t h i s q u e s t i o n I s u g g e s t — I t a k e i t n o n c o n t r o v e r s i a l l y — t h a t the widespread marginalization of aesthetics in postmodern art theory may be attributed to the success of the art critic and theorist Clement Greenberg. In co- opting the discourse of (particularly Kantian) aesthetics to underwrite modernist theory, Greenberg mediated the art world’s sub- sequent rejection of both aesthetics in general and Immanuel Kant’s aes- thetics in par tic u lar. But one need only refl ect on the centrality for postmodern theory of anti- aesthetic fi gures like Marcel Duchamp or of movements (such as surrealism), marginalized in Greenberg’s account of “the best modern art,” to see that for all their antipathy to Greenberg, many postmodernist art theorists continue to operate with a broadly Greenbergian view of aesthetics—which is why, of course, they are forced to reject it.
    [Show full text]
  • Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception∗
    From: Pierre Bordieu The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature ©1984, Columbia University Press Part III: The Pure Gaze: Essays on Art, Chapter 8 Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception∗ PIERRE BOURDIEU 1 Any art perception involves a conscious or unconscious deciphering operation. 1.1 An act of deciphering unrecognized as such, immediate and adequate ‘comprehension’, is possible and effective only in the special case in which the cultural code which makes the act of deciphering possible is immediately and completely mastered by the observer (in the form of cultivated ability or inclination) and merges with the cultural code which has rendered the work perceived possible. Erwin Panofsky observes that in Rogier van der Weyden’s painting The Three Magi we immediately perceive the representation of an apparition’ that of a child in whom we recognize ‘the Infant Jesus’. How do we know that this is an apparition? The halo of golden rays surrounding the child would not in itself be sufficient proof, because it is also found in representations of the nativity in which the Infant Jesus is ‘real’. We come to this conclusion because the child is hovering in mid-air without visible support, and we do so although the representation would scarcely have been different had the child been sitting on a pillow (as in the case of the model which Rogier van der Weyden probably used). But one can think of hundreds of pictures in which human beings, animals or inanimate objects appear to be hovering in mid-air, contrary to the law of gravity, yet without giving the impression of being apparitions.
    [Show full text]
  • The New Role of Theory in Aesthetics
    RECOGNITION AND RECONCILIATION: THE NEW ROLE OF THEORY IN AESTHETICS by Kristin Amber Hrehor A thesis submitted to the Department of Philosophy In conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada (September, 2007) Copyright © Kristin Amber Hrehor, 2007 Abstract George Dickie’s institutional theory of art has been subject to extensive debate over the past 30 years. It has been both revered and deplored, garnering such attention for the seemingly controversial way in which Dickie answers the question, “What is art?” In Dickie’s view, an object derives its existence as a work of art in the context of the informal institution of the “artworld,” a concept which was borrowed from Arthur Danto’s earlier work on the theoretical context surrounding works of art. Whether one finds the idea appealing or appalling, it is one that quite simply cannot be ignored, since the empirical validity of the institutional structure of art and the sorts of problems it can cause, especially in our particular time, are so remarkably clear. Another significant feature of Dickie’s institutional theory is that it provides a definition of art, a problem that philosophers of art have attempted to solve for the past few centuries. Dickie’s theory inclines one to dismiss other candidates for definitions as implausible, such as those put forth by R.G. Collingwood and Leo Tolstoy, since, as Dickie insists, an acceptable definition of art must be able to account for the many different kinds of practices that are all referred to as “art.” Both Collingwood and Tolstoy advance restricted conceptions of art that are meant to confine the use of the term “art” to a specific kind of creative activity.
    [Show full text]
  • Hearing Danto Out: a Critique of the “End of Art” Thesis Through Music
    HEARING DANTO OUT: A CRITIQUE OF THE “END OF ART” THESIS THROUGH MUSIC by Kenneth David Allan Hall A thesis submitted to the Department of Philosophy In conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada (September, 2014) Copyright ©Kenneth David Allan Hall, 2014 Abstract Arthur Danto’s “end of art” thesis contends that art followed a progressive historical narrative from about 1300 until 1964 AD, when Danto realized that Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes demonstrates that an artwork can look like anything without thereby losing its status as art. I critique Danto’s revelation that an artwork can look like anything by showing how what Danto really and quite rightly means is that an art object can now look like anything. Making the art object/artwork distinction clear shows how Danto axiomatically excludes important perceptible qualities of artworks from his scope of perception which might provide outlets to the future changes to the definition of art, and thus the continuation of art history. I work up to this criticism by first addressing an apparent blind spot in Danto’s oeuvre: while Danto depicts the history of art as progressing and culminating within the realm of the visual arts, he is explicit that its implications apply to all artforms. It is a prima facie interesting question whether music can rightly be subsumed under Danto’s grand claims, since Danto’s history of art centers upon painting’s representational properties, which I argue that music lacks. Despite these differences however, music was, like painting, drawn into a Modernist search for its own essence that resulted in John Cage’s 4’33”, a piece which showed that music could sound like anything just as much as visual artworks could look like anything.
    [Show full text]
  • Rethinking Plato's Theory of Art: Aesthetics and the Timaeus
    Rethinking Plato’s Theory of Art: Aesthetics and the Timaeus Omid Tofighian Introduction The Timaeus presents a fascinating account of the cosmos. It includes a creation myth that introduces the figure known as the ‘Demiurge’, who, despite the fact that he is the cause of the sensible world, is reverently attributed with reason, and whose creation – the cosmos – is actually beautiful and good. In this dialogue Plato offers his readers a panorama of the universe. But just what are his intentions for this? Is his approach a precursor to the methods of natural science,1 or does the Timaeus fall under the category of theology? This paper will discuss Plato’s cosmological treatise and certain consequences that can be drawn, that is, how the methods used to analyse the origins and structure of the universe reveal a more existential attitude towards aesthetics. In the Timaeus Plato explores the complexities of mimesis and entertains the possibility that imitation could actually exhibit ideal qualities. These considerations have repercussions for the status of the material world in Plato’s cosmology, but they may also be extended to rethink his theory of art. I wish to analyse a number of salient themes in the Timaeus such as ontology, mythic symbols and the use of rhetoric. I will demonstrate how Plato’s view towards these themes in the Timaeus can be extrapolated to reassess his aesthetics. My critical analysis will provoke the question – ‘What evaluation of art would Plato have offered in accordance with the positions explicated in the Timaeus?’ Upon investigating a number of dialogues, searching specifically for references to art or representation, I realised that certain views I had thought to be exclusive to the Timaeus, or other late dialogues, also featured in works as early as the Ion.
    [Show full text]
  • Lydia Goehr Is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University
    Lydia Goehr is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. In 2009/2010 she received a Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award, in 2007/8 The Graduate Student Advisory Council (GSAC)'s Faculty Mentoring Award (FMA), and in 2005, a Columbia University Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. She is the author of The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (1992; second edition with a new essay, 2007, with translations in Greek, Chinese, part Japanese, Italian, French, Spanish), The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy [essays on Richard Wagner] (1998; translation in French), Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory [essays on Adorno and Danto] (2008), and co-editor with Daniel Herwitz of The Don Giovanni Moment: Essays on the legacy of an Opera (2006). She has written many articles on the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Arthur Danto (see ACADEMIA.EDU for publications). Her current book is titled Red Sea - Red Square: Picturing Freedom - Liberating Wit. She is co-editor with Jonathan Gilmore of Handbook on Arthur C. Danto, contracted with Wiley-Blackwell. She is a recipient of Mellon, Getty, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and in 1997 was the Visiting Ernest Bloch Professor in the Music Department at U. California, Berkeley, where she gave a series of lectures on Richard Wagner. She has been a Trustee of the American Society for Aesthetics and is a member of the New York Institute of the Humanities. In 2012, she was awarded the H. Colin Slim Award by the American Musicological Society for an article on Wagner's Die Meistersinger.
    [Show full text]
  • Kant, Art, and Art History
    Kant, Art, and Art History Moments of Discipline mark a. cheetham University of Toronto published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom cambridge university press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, uk 40 West 20th Street, New York, ny 10011-4211, usa 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, vic 3166, Australia Ruiz de Alarcon ´ 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org Mark A. Cheetham 2001 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2001 Printed in the United States of America Typeface Concorde 9.75/13 pt. System MagnaType [ag] A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Cheetham, Mark A. (Mark Arthur), 1954– Kant, Art, and Art History: moments of discipline / Mark A. Cheetham. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-521-80018-8 1. Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804–Contributions in aesthetics. 2. Aesthetics, Modern. 3. Art–Philosophy. I. Title. b2799.A4 c48 2001 111′.85′092–dc21 00-063029 isbn 0 521 80018 8 hardback Contents Acknowledgments page ix 1 Introduction: Bo(a)rders 1 Why (Not) Kant? 7 Moments and Places of Discipline 11 Plasmatics 24 2 Place and Time: Kant in Rome, c. 1800 38 Kant in Rome 41 The Concurrency of Reception 45 The Politics of Beauty 52 3 The Genealogy of Authority: Kant and Art’s History in the Twentieth Century 67 “Immanent Meaning” and the Historicity of Art: 68 Panofsky and Kant Kant and Cubism Revisited 78 Clement Greenberg’s Strategic Formalism 87 4 The Sublime Is Now (Again): French Theory / International Art 101 Derrida’s Sublime 103 The Sublime Is Now (Again) 114 Scapes 124 The Limits of Pointing 130 Intimations of a Countersublime 136 vii contents 5 Kant’s Skull: Portraits and the Image of Philosophy, c.
    [Show full text]
  • Kant Expressive Theory Music
    Kant’s Expressive Theory of Music Samantha Matherne Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (2014, pre-print) Abstract: Several prominent philosophers of art (e.g., Kivy, Dahlhaus, Schueller) have worried whether Kant has a coherent theory of music on account of two perceived tensions in his view. First, there appears to be a conflict between his formalist and expressive commitments. Second (and even worse), Kant defends seemingly contradictory claims about music being beautiful and merely agreeable, i.e., not beautiful. Against these critics, I show that Kant has a consistent view of music that reconciles these tensions. I argue that, for Kant, music can be experienced as either agreeable or beautiful depending upon the attitude we take towards it. Though we might be tempted to think he argues that we experience music as agreeable when we attend to its expressive qualities and as beautiful when we attend to its formal properties, I demonstrate that he actually claims that we are able to judge music as beautiful only if we are sensitive to the expression of emotion through musical form. With this revised understanding of Kant’s theory of music in place, I conclude by sketching a Kantian solution to a central problem in the philosophy of music: given that music is not sentient, how can it express emotion? §1. Introduction As philosophers like Peter Kivy and Stephen Davies have emphasized, one of the central issues in the philosophy of music is the problem of expression.1 Frequently when we hear a piece of instrumental music, we describe it as expressing an emotion, e.g., Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ symphony sounds triumphant or Chopin’s Étude in E Major (Op.
    [Show full text]
  • Final Thesis
    A DEFENSE OF AESTHETIC ANTIESSENTIALISM: MORRIS WEITZ AND THE POSSIBLITY OF DEFINING ‘ART’ _____________________________ A Thesis Presented to The Honors Tutorial College Ohio University _____________________________ In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Art History _____________________________ By Jordan Mills Pleasant June, 2010 ii This thesis has been approved by The Honors Tutorial College and the Department of Philosophy ___________________________ Dr. Arthur Zucker Chair, Department of Philosophy Thesis Advisor ___________________________ Dr. Scott Carson Honors Tutorial College, Director of Studies Philosophy ___________________________ Jeremy Webster Dean, Honors Tutorial College iii This thesis has been approved by The Honors Tutorial College and the Department of Art History ___________________________ Dr. Jennie Klein Chair, Department of Art History Thesis Advisor ___________________________ Dr. Jennie Klein Honors Tutorial College, Director of Studies Art History ___________________________ Jeremy Webster Dean, Honors Tutorial College iv Dedicated to Professor Arthur Zucker, without whom this work would have been impossible. v Table Of Contents Thesis Approval Pages Page ii Introduction: A Brief History of the Role of Definitions in Art Page 1 Chapter I: Morris Weitz’s “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics” Page 8 Chapter II: Lewis K. Zerby’s “A Reconsideration of the Role of the Theory in Aesthetics. A Reply to Morris Weitz”
    [Show full text]
  • Religion and the Arts in America
    Religion and the Arts in America CAMILLE PAGLIA At this moment in America, religion and pol- itics are at a flash point. Conservative Christians deplore the left-wing bias of the mainstream media and the saturation of popular culture by sex and violence and are promoting strate- gies such as faith-based home-schooling to protect children from the chaotic moral relativism of a secular society. Liberals in turn condemn the meddling by Christian fundamentalists in politics, notably in regard to abortion and gay civil rights or the Mideast, where biblical assumptions, it is claimed, have shaped us policy. There is vicious mutual recrimination, with believers caricatured as paranoid, apocalyptic crusaders who view America’s global mission as divinely inspired, while lib- erals are portrayed as narcissistic hedonists and godless elit- ists, relics of the unpatriotic, permissive 1960s. A primary arena for the conservative-liberal wars has been the arts. While leading conservative voices defend the tradi- tional Anglo-American literary canon, which has been under challenge and in flux for forty years, American conservatives on the whole, outside of the New Criterion magazine, have shown little interest in the arts, except to promulgate a didac- tic theory of art as moral improvement that was discarded with the Victorian era at the birth of modernism. Liberals, on the other hand, have been too content with the high visibility of the arts in metropolitan centers, which comprise only a fraction of America. Furthermore, liberals have been compla- cent about the viability of secular humanism as a sustaining A lecture delivered on 6 February 2007 as the 2007 Cornerstone Arts Lecture at Colorado College.
    [Show full text]