The Knowledge of Art: Aesthetics and Epistemology
Description
Do artworks—architecture, painting, literature, and so on—provide a distinctive way of knowing the world? Does art shed light on human practices that philosophy or science do not or cannot? And if so, how should this peculiarly artistic knowledge be characterized? What would it mean to know art’s knowledge, or to translate this knowledge into a non-artistic idiom? When critics encounter art must they approach it with a distinct hermeneutic, one that is geared to the unique nature of the art object and one that would be misapplied to other, non-artistic cultural or natural objects? Is aesthetic judgment a version of theoretical judgment? Practical judgment? Or does it have a unique structure?
Taking these rather abstract questions as a starting point, this seminar invites historically and philosophically informed reflections on the relationship between art and knowledge. Here are some possible questions to be considered:
- Is the question of art’s knowledge answerable with reference to art in general? Or will the answer differ depending on which of the arts is being considered?
- What is the relationship between our knowledge of art and its history? Can we know art as such, or does art itself, and our knowledge of it, change through time? Must we situate our knowledge of art in historical context or can we make more general claims about the nature of art?
- Is the relationship of art to knowledge equivalent to the relationship of aesthetics to epistemology?
- Does the attempt to answer the question of art’s relationship to knowledge depend on one’s first answering the question of what art essentially is—“embodied meaning,” for example, or “mere form,” or “irreducible particularity”?
- Is the question of art’s knowledge a question that can only be answered with reference to great art?
- If art’s knowledge differs from the sort of knowledge at stake in other areas—for example, the knowledge supplied by art criticism—how does one move from the one to the other?
- Does the form of art’s knowledge make art especially useful for, or susceptible to, critique? Likewise, does knowing art make it possible for us to engage in forms of critique we would otherwise neglect?
Because a number of scholars have already been invited to participate in the panel, please email [email protected] before submitting a proposal.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Seth Perlow is an associate professor of English at Georgetown University. He is the author of The Poem Electric: Technology and the American Lyric and editor of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons: The Corrected Centennial Edition. His essays on poetry and technology have appeared in the Washington Post, LARB, Public Books, and elsewhere. His next book, The Digital Hand: Electronics and Literary Manuscripts, is under contract with Stanford University Press.
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Robert S. Lehman is Associate Professor of English at Boston College and Co-Chair of the Mahindra Humanities Center’s Seminar in Dialectical Thinking at Harvard University. His research, teaching, and publications focus on the relationship between art and philosophy, particularly in the period of literary modernism.
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Thayer Anderson is a graduate student in the English department at Princeton University.
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Audrey Wasser is Associate Professor of French in the Department of French, Italian, and Classical Studies at Miami University, Ohio. She is the author of The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form (Fordham 2016), and the co-editor, with Warren Montag, of Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production (Northwestern 2022). She has published articles on Proust, Beckett, Deleuze, and Spinoza, and is currently at work on a book on literary judgment.
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Ben Roth teaches philosophy at Emerson College. Among many other places, his academic writing has been published by the European Journal of Philosophy and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, his fiction by Santa Monica Review and North Dakota Quarterly, and his criticism by AGNI and North American Review.
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Jess Keiser is an Associate Professor of English at Tufts.
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I am professor of English at Yale University. I specialize in British and European romanticism with a particular interest in the intersections and divergences between philosophy and literature. I am the author of Isolated Cases: The Anxieties of Autonomy from Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cornell, 2004), Romantic Intimacy (Stanford, 2013) and The Aesthetic Commonplace: Wordsworth, Eliot, Wittgenstein and the Language of Every Day (Oxford, 2022).
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Alex King is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC. She works on issues in ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of art.
Papers
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Joshua Gang is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also affiliate faculty in Philosophy. He works at the intersections among modern British and Irish literature, the history of criticism, and analytic philosophy (especially moral philosophy and philosophy of mind). His book Behaviorism, Consciousness, and the Literary Mind was published by Johns Hopkins in 2021 and his work has appeared in journals such as Critical Inquiry, ELH, PMLA, and Novel.
Speaker Bio
Jonah Siegel is Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers. His books include Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After (2020), and Overlooking Damage: Art, Display, and Loss in Times of Crisis (2022). Articles include “In the Age of Artpocalypse: Beauty and Damage on TV.” (2023), and “Killmonger in the Museum: Fantasy, History, Restitution” (Raritan. Spring 2023). He is working on a book on the destruction of art objects in popular culture.
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Samara Michaelson is a graduate student in the English Department at Duke University. She is interested in the intersection of philosophy and aesthetics, with a special fascination for ordinary language philosophy, postmodern dance, and the tragicomic.
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Samantha Matherne is a Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. She works on Aesthetics.