2008 Handbooks

What is beauty? What is art? Can art provide us with a kind of knowledge, and what sort of knowledge would that be? Can art transform our experience of the world? What is the role of art in contemporary society?

Aesthetics inquires into the nature of art and the significance of aesthetic experience for our understanding of the world. In this course we begin with the core aesthetic problems of beauty and pleasure, and examine the question of whether taste is merely subjective or in some sense objective. We then look at the idea that art is a way in which a culture expresses its understanding of nature, reality and the self. We also consider the controversial idea, famously articulated by Hegel, that art in modernity has "reached its end". Finally we turn to more recent debates in aesthetic theory looking at what the relationship between art and philosophy should be, and whether art can provide alternative ways of defining knowledge and experience in modernity. These philosophical theories will be examined in conjunction with a discussion of contemporary artists and art works in a variety of media from painting and photography to cinema and the digital arts.