Aesthetic Theory

4 credits · Graduate

Aesthetics is crucial to most of the humanities disciplines. This seminar studies the historical development as well as the key concerns of aesthetic theory from its eighteenth-century beginnings to the present day. The focus is on the classical age of aesthetics from Baumgarten to Nietzsche. We’ll first read the foundational texts by Kant, Schiller, the Romantics, and Hegel, among others. We then turn to the ramifications of, and challenges to, the theoretical positions developed in the classical age, exploring the scientific, sociological, and media-theoretical discourse of aesthetics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as the interventions of major philosophers such as Heidegger and Adorno.