PHIL 825 Aesthetics and Phenomenology
The term "aesthetica" was first used in its modern sense by Baumgarten in 1735, while the notion of "phenomenologia" was then introduced by Oetinger in 1736. This course will scrutinize the close roots of these two disciplines. The aim is both to present a survey of the development of aesthetics throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and to examine general topics in the phenomenology of aesthetics in the twentieth. We are interested in examining the respects in which phenomenology and aesthetics were conceived as alternatives to Enlightenment thought, how different philosophers have understood the relation between truth and beauty, and what is the distinctive character of aesthetic experience. The syllabus will include selections from Baumgarten, Shaftesbury, Hume, Herder, Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Nietzsche, Ingarden, Heidegger, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty.